Not until shortly before his release did South Africans see what had become of him

Not until shortly before his release did South Africans see what had become of him. The boxer was now an old man, thinner and grey-haired, but still upright: above all, he radiated dignity and authority. For fearful white South Africans who still pictured him as some kind of scowling revolutionary, it must have come as a pleasant shock.The tale of how Nelson Mandela’s calm refusal to yield won the admiration not only of his fellow prisoners, but eventually of his captors, from the warders on Robben Island to the last white president, FW de Klerk, has been told many times. What is less often pointed out is that his removal insulated him from the betrayals and sometimes bloody struggles within the ANC that are the lot of any exiled resistance movement. It enabled him to emerge as the untainted hope of the nation – a role that sometimes denies his humanity.For Madiba is a man of plenty of contradictions. His experiences have led him to prize loyalty above all, which helps to explain why, despite his commitment to democracy, he clings to the friendship of old dictators such as Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi. He remembers that they supported the ANC when Margaret Thatcher was calling him a terrorist.

And like them, he can espouse musty socialist rhetoric, though, when talking of “the masses”, they would not mention the clergy along with the workers and peasants, as he did. It is a reminder that the Christian religion played a large part in the South African struggle (and, arguably, exerted some constraint on the behaviour of the government being struggled against).Despite his and the ANC’s long association with communism, Mr Mandela ran a resolutely market-oriented administration, and so does Mr Mbeki. South Africa under the ANC is more open to the tides of global competition than it was under the previous government, which went in for a surprising degree of state socialism, albeit for the benefit of whites only. Many of those state-owned enterprises have been privatised since South Africa’s first free election, held in 1994.All this has made the correction of South Africa’s still-yawning inequalities of wealth much slower than the masses might have been led to expect.

The 1950s Freedom Charter, to which the ANC remained committed in theory when it took power, envisaged wholesale nationalisation and redistribution, however disastrous such a policy would have been in practice. Madiba persuaded South Africa’s poorest to be patient – with his own example before them, how could they do otherwise? It is a much more difficult task, however, for his successor.This should not be seen as diminishing Nelson Mandela’s great achievement. It is simply to point out that his transition from a prison cell to the office of the President, the first to be freely elected in his nation’s history, was not the end of a fairy tale in which South Africa lived happily ever after. And he does not want to be seen as a man whose triumphs are all in the past; he remains fiercely engaged, making up for lost time.Madiba’s 85th birthday is being celebrated so lavishly because we want to honour him while we still can. It is clear enough now what an example he is to the world, but not until he is gone will we be able to measure his immensity.