THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

William Shakespeare once said: ‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.’

I knew a man who was born great, lived great and died in greatness. His name, Nelson Mandela. Let me tell you about the day I met him... There was a famous garden party at Tuynhuys, President F.W. de Klerk’s presidential residence in Cape Town. It was early in the year 1990. Nelson Mandela had been released from prison and all the banned, exiled leaders of the African National Congress had returned from Europe. The cabinet of the South African government were there to meet the people who were going to take their jobs.

Veteran journalists from all the world’s biggest news media were there, too.

I was also there. I was just a junior clerk in the State President’s office. I wore my best Yves St Laurent suit; dressed as dapper as I could. But I was a ‘nobody’’. Or so I thought…

I watched Mandela from a distance. Everybody swarmed around him. The man of the moment. He had sharp eyes. The eyes of the heart. Eyes which saw me, the unimportant one. The wallflower.

Suddenly, he excused himself from his illustrious audience. He got up and walked straight to me. He greeted me in my own language, Afrikaans. The language of the people who put him in jail, for 27 years. He talked to me, like I was someone special. He made me feel like someone special. I told him I’m the wallflower. We laughed and laughed. Like equals.

A few years later, at his inauguration as state president of a new South Africa, he saw me again. He smiled and waved, with that wide, warm smile and said: ‘Aha- the wallflower!’