So what, exactly, is it that makes Nelson Mandela so special?
Apart from the fact that he emerged from 27 years in apartheid prisons bearing so little malice. And that he insisted on “reconciliation” being central to a truth commission in order to heal wounds caused by years of bitter racial hatred.
And that 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.
And that 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 there was more, much more.
This was no ordinary politician. 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.”
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.
The “tea with Betsie” meeting took place at her home in a whites-only enclave known as Orania in Northern Cape in August 1995. Mrs. Verwoerd, then 94 and very frail, afterwards said little apart from the fact she was happy the president had visited her.
Her granddaughter, Elizabeth, was less welcoming, reportedly stating that she wished rather that he had been “president of a neighbouring country.”
Mandela was gracious and generous, saying the way he had been received in Orania “was as if I was in Soweto,” the sprawling black township outside Johannesburg where he is regarded as a hero.
Months earlier, 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. l