Nelson Mandela: A world statesman who made time for everyone

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/07/nelson-mandela-time-world-statesman

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Although I never met Nelson Mandela before his long imprisonment, I came to know him well in my capacity as a journalist, and indeed as a friend, during the 23 years following his release. Perhaps that is why my very first one-on-one meeting with him remains the most impressionable in my memory. For what I knew of him during those long years of incarceration was his reputation as the militant freedom fighter, the young Turk of the African National Congress's Youth League, who had played a key role in launching the resistance movement's first major defiance campaign in the 1950s, then gone on to lead its decision to turn to armed resistance and found its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation, in the 1960s.

Yet the man I met at his Soweto home just two days after his release from the Victor Verster prison near Cape Town in February 1990 was a wise and thoughtful statesman ready to negotiate peace and reconciliation with his people's oppressors and tormentors.

He was still tough and determined. That I was to appreciate later, during the four years of intense negotiations with the apartheid regime that followed. But here, at this first meeting, the man I met in his poky little matchbox house on Soweto's Vilakazi Street was a curious blend of simplicity and stateliness. He had declined to take up residence in the grand mansion his then wife, Winnie, had built, using the royalties from successful books about the two of them. He insisted on returning to the house he had occupied with her when they were young activists.

He was casually dressed in slacks and a pullover, but he had a regal bearing, tall and straight though surprisingly thin given that he had been a heavyweight boxer in his youth. I had been squeezed through a dense crowd packed around the house, then hauled over the garden wall, after he had heard I was in the crowd and sent for me to offer some warm words about my work as a journalist. They were simple words, offered without flattery, but they left me glowing.

The gesture was typical, and that is what struck me so forcefully – then and in all the years that followed. All through that first week of a schedule so pressured as to be nightmarish, I had seen Mandela pause to make these little gestures of recognition to people below the rank of the major activists whose modest contributions to the anti-apartheid struggle he had observed and noted on some inner personal honours list. It was part of his charisma – the omniscient leader who acknowledged the least of his flock.

He led me into what passed as a sitting room in the cramped little three-roomed abode, where he invited me to sit next to him on a little two-seater settee. He began talking about how important reporting of what was happening in the country had been in sustaining his morale and that of his fellow political prisoners during their long years of incarceration.

But as we began talking, a child put his head around the door and whispered the names of people who had called to see him.

"Please excuse me for a moment," Mandela murmured to me, "these are important visitors."

Two elderly gentlemen entered, bowing to him and holding out their hands in gestures of humility. They began speaking in isiXhosa, Mandela's tribal language, which I happened to understand. I learned that they were elders from his home village of Qunu, in what was then still the nominally independent Transkei "homeland" under the apartheid programme's bantustan policy.

The conversation that followed was fascinating in its minutiae of village news, and the close attention Mandela paid to it. His questioning of the elders was equally detailed: who had married whom, and had so-and-so had a baby yet? It was a catch-up on village news over the lost years that absorbed Mandela's total attention for at least half hour before he bade the elders farewell and returned to the settee to resume his conversation with me.

For this man, who would soon be meeting with the Queen, with Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Helmut Kohl, who was on his way to being acclaimed as one of history's iconic figures, news of the everyday lives of the little people of his village was of inestimable importance. The great national issues that confronted him, the huge crowds outside waiting for his leadership, all had to be put aside for a moment to give them a proper hearing.

It struck me then and has done ever since that this was the true measure of his greatness.

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