In a bitterly divided South Africa, Mandela won the love of almost all his compatriots; in a sceptical age, he became perhaps the only genuinely global hero.
Mandela understood that apartheid, which scarred South Africa for the first 75 years of his life, would not be laid low by guerrilla war, revolution or popular uprising. At various times, he favoured all of these; but in the loneliness of his Robben Island prison cell, he came to see that apartheid was an expression of the weakness and insecurity of white South Africans in general and of Afrikaners in particular.
Mandela realised that fear, rather than implacable racism, lay behind their opposition to black majority rule. The key to ridding South Africa of the wicked absurdity of racial segregation was, he concluded, to persuade whites that democracy was in their interests as much as the black majority, and to show that they would be safe without apartheid.
