articulate, over the course of nearly four decades, the ultimate aims, methods, and
guiding principles of the struggle for democracy in South Africa. This capacity is
convincingly displayed in the pre-1965 writings collected in No Easy Walk to Freedom,
and it is taken to perfection in Long Walk to Freedom. He gave these struggles a clear
story line which emphasized the realization of latent common interests rather than victory
for one side and defeat for the other. Another type of leader might have used the same
events and experiences to tell a very different story with a very different message.
Mandela was also able to show in rich detail how this struggle looked from the
perspective of an individual who found himself dedicating his life to the struggle, and
sacrificing most forms of ordinary happiness, without ever having made a conscious
decision to do so (Mandela 1994, 83). In speaking about his own individual struggles, he
insisted “that I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because
of extraordinary circumstances” (493). Whether Mandela was “ordinary” may be
debated, but there is no question that events conspired to place him in “extraordinary
circumstances” and that he felt the weight of this responsibility.
In 1990 when Mandela was released from prison, the world seemed to be
blissfully proceeding toward “happy endings” for many long-festering conflicts, not just
in South Africa but in Eastern Europe with the fall of communism and in Latin America
with the demise of several brutal dictatorships. Thus at the time it may have seemed that
Mandela achieved what he did simply by riding the wave of history. But some of the rosy
hopes of that era soon became ghastly nightmares (as in the former Yugoslavia). The
same or worse could easily have transpired in South Africa. And if there is any global
“wave of history” at present it seems to be rushing in precisely the opposite direction
from the optimism so many of us felt in 1990. In retrospect, then, Mandela’s (and South
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Convention