What makes Mandela so special?

He emerged from 27 years in apartheid prisons bearing so little malice. He insisted on “reconciliation” being central to a truth commission in order to heal wounds caused by years of bitter racial hatred.

He donned a Springbok jersey and took to the field during the 1995 rugby World Cup final in a bold bid to unite the nation behind the mainly-white South African team.
He stepped down after just one term as president, unlike too many world leaders who, once given a whiff of power, cling to it until it destroys them or they destroy the nation they are leading.

These are some of the anti-apartheid icon’s better known qualities.
But for journalists, lucky enough to track his remarkable career from the day he walked out of prison in 1990, through the years of transition to the first all-race elections and the presidency in 1994, and on until the day in 1999 that he bowed out - far too quickly for many - of the political arena, there was more, much more.
This was no ordinary politician.

Covering the “Mandela story” was a life-enhancing experience. He humbled us all into trying to be better human beings and, more especially, to embrace reconciliation at a time when all South Africans, black and white, were still bearing the scars of apartheid.

Take the time when - during a very tense political campaign rally in Alexandra township on the edge of Johannesburg, when anti-white sentiment was whipping through the crowd after yet another massacre of black people reportedly by a white “third force” - Mandela stopped mid-speech and fixed his attention on a white woman standing somewhere towards the back.
“That woman over there,” he said with a broad smile, “saved my life. She nursed me back to health when I had TB.”

He called her on stage and embraced her warmly, recounting how in 1988 while in Cape Town’s Pollsmoor prison he had contracted tuberculosis and was admitted to hospital where he had been under her professional nursing care.

The mood in the crowd changed. Large roars of approval drowned out the snarled demands for revenge.

And there was a time when, as South African president, Mandela was hosting a meeting of the Southern African Development Community, a regional economic grouping.All the key presidents and prime ministers from across the region were there.

They had to come up with a united response to yet another crisis somewhere in Africa. Journalists had been waiting since morning for the press conference. An agitated radio reporter had to dash off mid-afternoon to pick up her son from school, praying that the press conference would not take place while she was away.

She got back just in time and the boy was sitting at her side when the leaders walked in, Mandela in his trademark ‘Madiba shirt’ and the others in formal suits.
Mandela saw the boy and without hesitating, walked straight up to him, shook his hand and said, “Ah hello there. How nice of you to take time out from your busy schedule to be with us today.”

The boy beamed, so did his mother. The journalists were spellbound while the African leaders looked on in bemusement.
This became the pattern. We watched in awe as Mandela time and again stepped easily into the role of senior world statesman, and we watched humbled when his own fragile humanity was exposed.

During divorce proceedings, he confided publicly that the woman he loved so deeply, Winnie, had not spent a single night with him since his release from prison.
An activist, Strini Moodley, who served time on Robben Island, tells how Mandela kept a photograph of Winnie in his cell. Moodley asked to borrow the picture so he could do a sketch. Mandela told him, “You can have her during the day, but at night she comes back to me.”

Getting elected
on April 27, 1994, journalists gathered at a school outside Durban where Mandela was to cast his ballot in the country’s first all-race election.
We all thought: “Is this really happening? Is Mandela really voting? Is apartheid really ending?”

Yes it was. Mandela made a brief speech stressing the dawning of “a new South Africa where all South Africans are equal”.

Then he dropped his ballot into the box and, literally glowing in the early morning sunlight, smiled long and happily. It was the kind of smile that you know is not put on for the cameras.

The kind that wells up from the very depths of the soul. In Mandela’s case, a very rare soul indeed.

Amazing facts about Nelson Mandela

CARED ABOUT JOURNALISTS
On the campaign trail, Mandela never failed in the morning to ask journalists how they had slept and whether they had managed to get some breakfast. He came to know many reporters and photographers by name, stopping often to speak to them and adding without fail: “How very nice to see you again.”

LOVE FOR RECONCILIATION
One of the many defining moments of his relentless efforts to reconcile deeply divided communities came when he visited Betsie Verwoerd, widow of the architect of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, who had effectively put Mandela in jail.