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For Mandela, consensus must be its own reward, for he does not always get his way. During his imprisonment on Robben Island, he wanted to stage a strike to force the warders to address prisoners with the honorific "Mr." But he was always turned down by his comrades. Last year he urged the A.N.C. to reduce the voting age to 14, but his colleagues refused. Once he has lost, he publicly speaks in favor of the position he opposed. "I sometimes come to the National Executive Committee with an idea and they overrule me," he recently observed. "And I obey them, even when they are wrong," he added with a smile. "That is democracy."
Mandela has always taken the long view, and sometimes this gives him victories in battles that were started decades ago. After the government began to implement its Bantustan policies in the 1960s and '70s, a plan to relegate all blacks to poor, quasi-independent tribal homelands, Mandela urged the . A.N.C. to make peace with the black leaders of these enclaves whom many in the movement scorned as traitors. The A.N.C. shied away from this policy, but he kept arguing his case. In the past three years, however, the A.N.C. has brought these leaders into its embrace.
His style derives from a hard-won discipline. Oliver Tambo, his former law partner and the longtime leader of the A.N.C. in exile who died last year, once described the youthful Mandela as "passionate, emotional, sensitive, quickly stung to bitterness and retaliation by insult and patronage." Who can discern those characteristics in the controlled Nelson Mandela of today? He now prizes rationality, logic, compromise, and distrusts sentiment. Prison steeled him, and over the decades he came to see emotion not as an ally but as a demon to be shunned. How was the man who emerged from prison different from the one who went in? His reply: "I came out mature." It is not simply that he harbors little bitterness in his heart; he knows that bitterness will not move him an inch closer to his goal.
If there has been a consistent criticism of Mandela over the years, it is that he is too willing to see the good in people. If this is a flaw, it is one he accepts because it grows out of his great strength, his generosity of heart toward his enemies. He defends himself by noting that thinking too well of people sometimes makes them behave better than they otherwise would. He believes in the essential goodness of the human heart, even though he has spent a lifetime suffering the wounds of heartless authorities.
At home, Mandela will take out his well-thumbed Filofax, find a number, and telephone a colleague to discuss an issue. However, he is not a man who is mired in details. Although Mandela did not even see a television until the 1970s, he understands the importance of mass-media images, and will make gestures of large symbolic content, as when he grasped De Klerk's hand at the end of their recent debate and said he would be proud to work with his opponent -- a man he has publicly labeled untrustworthy. He is gracious, amiable, gentlemanly, ever the host, always the subtle master of the situation.