Gracious and Tough, Mandela Was Fun to Cover The thing about Nelson Mandela was that he made the rest of us want to be almost as noble as he. Imprisoned for 27 years, the anti-apartheid leader who had declared at his 1964 trial that he was willing to die for his beliefs in human dignity and racial equality emerged from that experience not filled with hatred, but courtly, magnanimous, humble and good-humored. His very demeanor served as the rebuttal to all those who peddled fear and foretold disaster and bloodshed should black South Africans get the vote and take power in Pretoria. It is easy to forget what a seething cauldron South Africa had become by the early 1990s as part of its white minority struggled to hang on to the three centuries of privilege made possible by apartheid. I remember it vividly while covering the country's democratic transition as AP's southern Africa bureau chief in Johannesburg in the mid-1990s. Khaki-clad farmers with pistols at their side were setting off bombs and pledging never to submit to majority rule. The townships with their shantytown poverty were ablaze with guns and violence as ANC activists and backers of the government-encouraged and Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party fought with terrifying ferocity. In Guguletu, outside Cape Town, a young American Fulbright scholar Amy Biehl was chased down and killed by a mob of youths shouting racial taunts of "Kill the farmer." An anti-apartheid Communist leader, Chris Hani, was gunned down and killed by a right-wing Polish immigrant. The nation felt like a tinderbox, a stage set for a bloodbath. But what Mandela ushered into history instead was his profound regard for the rights of all South Africans to claim a share of the national patrimony. It was a point he boldly made on almost every public occasion, whether to householders in the white and affluent Johannesburg suburb of Houghton or on a stage thrown up at a dilapidated football stadium crammed to the rafters with township dwellers clamoring for economic justice. Through tedious and patient negotiations over several years after his release from prison, the framework was set for the country's first all-race elections in April 1994, even though almost until the last minute it was not clear that all the conflicting parties would participate. When the day finally dawned cold and clear, South Africans saw themselves as the rainbow nation they really were. More than 22 million people voted, their lines snaking over the verdant green hills, and it was evident to the majority that they were now, at last, full citizens in the land of their birth. Part of the privilege of being around Nelson Mandela in those days was to see the undiluted joy he spread whenever he entered a township or a small settlement in one of the dusty impoverished homelands set up by apartheid governments to separate black from white South Africans.