“Given that it was a very racially separated area that I grew up in, genes have no colour so at that level, there is no way that you can tell whether this individual is yellow, green or purple, it was always an out, even I think out of the situation at the time or the area that I grew up in had perpetuated the idea of racism and allowed me to move away from that sort of mind set about such things at an early age.”

"Moving forward it is something that can definitely be changed. It’s going to take a long time though. We’re now a few years into democracy and there are still some remnants of – you could call it Apartheid but it’s really now different struggles that the youth are faced with. It’s not so much fighting the system, its fighting other issues like unemployment and lack of education and the likes so it’s definitely something can be change over time."

“Education affords the daughter of a peasant to become a doctor, the son of a mineworker to become a mine manager, and like he said, the son of a farm worker to become president of a nation. So it is not what you are given but what you do with it. So those are some of the few things I can take away from his life and through the scholarship become little Mandela’s in our own rights”

“The leadership of the individual is… the ability of him to pull a group of very spirited individuals during the times of Mkontho we Sizwe for example who wanted to overturn Apartheid by all means possible and by going to all extents necessary and ensuring we come out of a very bad time in our history and not go into a civil war, which most of the world probably anticipated, I mean lots of people who perhaps would have become president after such a bad time in South Africa would have wanted to effect immediate change, like the white people were bad for this country, they introduced a lot of bad policies that subjugated black individuals. But he went for a more subtle approach. I mean some of his cabinet members in 1994 were from the old regime itself.”

Was Mandela too conciliatory?

Ahmed Kathrada is an old colleague of Mandela’s and was jailed alongside him.

Ahmed kathrada, Former Political Activist, said,“There were our former enemy, there were the rival organizations. But the main thing was our former oppressors. So the first period was reconciliation. And that was Madiba’s presidency. The five years he spent a lot of his time on reconciliation. Forgiveness and reconciliation. Of course it was not accepted by everybody but he became the public face of that aspect.”

“I think he had superhuman qualities of being able to suck it up and work out the best way of doing something knowing that he would have to absorb some kind of indignity and go against some principled but continuously militant comrades, all of that. I think he had an incredible ability to see the big picture.”Said Zapiro.

Zapiro’s pictures chronicled all of Mandela’s presidency.

Those years included some magnificent triumphs, not only of the personal kind for Mandela but also for the nation … including on the sports field.

Mandela continued to be feted around the world and at home continued to pull everyone together behind the ideal of nationhood.