Michael Morris

Leon – whose deft political sense enabled him to balance a high and genuine regard for Mandela with a conviction he had to be stood up to as the leader of a not-alwaysdemocratically minded governing party – captured this dual aspect of Nelson Mandela’s persona in his book of a few years ago, Opposite Mandela – Encounters with South Africa’s Icon.

Paranoid

Leon’s reflections arose from considering Mandela’s part at the turning-point ANC conference at Mafikeng in 1997, an occasion when Madiba led the charge against the media and his government’s political opponents and lent his considerable moral weight to the ruling party’s shift towards a deliberately racist outlook on socio-economic transformation.

The great leader’s performance, Leon reminds us, was decried by The Daily Telegraph as a “depressingly paranoid tirade” and, by The Observer, as a “profoundly depressing assault”.