The “old man” was angry. His lips were pursed, his head held high, his Olympian gaze stony. When Nelson Mandela finally started speaking, his words were even more clipped than usual. This was not an irrational fury. Rather, it was the admonitory wrath of a headmaster. It was infused with the empathy of one who appreciated all too well the rage of his audience, yet knew that if South Africa was somehow to emerge intact from the ravages of apartheid it had to be tamed.

It was August 1993. Three and a half blood-soaked years had passed since that diamond-bright afternoon when Mandela was released after 27 years in prison under apartheid. The first all-race elections set for the following April seemed impossibly distant against the backdrop of threats of secession from the white Afrikaner right and daily bloodshed in the townships. Before Mandela, in a ramshackle stadium in one of Johannesburg’s desolate townships, thousands of “comrades” rattled makeshift weapons and bayed for revenge. Scores had died in the previous few days in street battles against a rival party. Yet the silver-haired septuagenarian gave no ground.


“If you have no discipline, you are not freedom fighters and we do not want you in our organisation,” he said in his distinctive reedy tones. “I am your leader. If you don’t want me, tell me to go and rest. As long as I am your leader I will tell you where you are wrong.” He stared, they muttered, shuffled their feet – and backed down.
For long years Mandela had been a shadowy symbol of hope, known only from his fiery record in the 1950s and 1960s, his inspirational speech from the dock when on trial for his life and a grainy picture of him in the exercise yard on Robben Island prison in Cape Town’s Table Bay. As the day of his release in February 1990 had drawn near, some confidants worried he might disappoint.
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