Nelson Mandela turns 95 today. The whole world knows about his perilous state of health and so I thought I am not going to write anything about that, but rather how lucky we are to have a man like him in our country, who urged peace and forgiveness at a time when many others would have had it differently. It is not very easy, especially for those who are younger than let us say 35 or so, to appreciate the South Africa we used to live in. If you look around you in whatever office you are sitting, in the old South Africa three out of every four people around you would have been supporting the National Party and voting for apartheid. Of course, you will not even find one out of a hundred people admitting that now, but the fact of the matter is if you are white, that most of your parents supported apartheid and the National Party.

That is a reflection of the very sick and sad society that we had and for liberal white people, who were most definitely in the minority before 1990 and largely English speaking at the time, the release of Nelson Mandela was a huge and positive step for the country and so it turned out to be. I was brought up quite differently to a majority of white people at that time – when I turned 13 my mother gave me a book by Chief Albert Luthuli called “Let my people go”. Strangely enough, the book was not banned, because he was the President of the ANC when the ANC was banned and at that time Nelson Mandela was only the leader of the Youth League. It was certainly a book that blew my mind at that time to realise what a disgusting country I was living in, in terms of our racial politics and laws.

I cannot say that I was ever involved in very much – in a way I was too young. Probably my only claim to fame is having the special Security Police visit my mother, when I was at Wits University, because I had taken part in protests against detention without trial (most people also though that was ok before 1994). I cannot say I ever “met” Nelson Mandela in person, although that is probably true about a lot of people who appear in photos with him, but at a cricket game at the Wanderers many years ago, when he was the State President, I managed to shake his hand over the fence and I just remember what huge hands he had – far bigger than mine and probably befitting a man who had done lots of boxing.

We have been truly blessed in South Africa to have such a wonderful man and I think without him there is little doubt that most of the country would have been up in flames – which is after all what all the foreign media who arrived in South Africa in 1994 to broadcast back to the world were waiting for - and who was sadly disappointed with the incredibly peaceful elections.