AFRAIL Nelson Mandela turns his back on the bright lights of the cities and returns to his birthplace in rural Transkei to celebrate his 90th birthday today.
Mr Mandela, the man who spearheaded South Africa's transition from apartheid to all-race democracy, clearly intends to signal that he is taking another step away from the world stage.
He is seeking relative quiet in Qunu, his boyhood village home,
from the torrents of adulation and from the pressures imposed by all those vying to get a slice of him. Although he officially retired from public life in 2004, his assistant of 14 years, Zelda la Grange, said his personal charity, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, receives some 4,000 applications a month for appearances or for interviews.
"For a 90-year-old and someone who is supposed to be retired, that is way too much," said Ms la Grange, a white Afrikaner who has been almost as close to Mr Mandela as his wife since he asked the then 23-year-old to work with him when he became state president in 1994. "Hopefully, after his birthday celebrations, we may be in a position to ensure at last that all his time is spent only on the things he chooses to do."
It is only possible to guess what will be going through his mind, but he will surely be remembering how he could so easily have died nearly half a century ago at the end of a hangman's noose.
The state prosecutor at the treason trial of Mandela, then the leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation], the armed wing of the banned African National Congress, demanded the death penalty.
Mr Mandela responded from the dock: "I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."
Judge Quartus de Wet said that, on a technicality, he had decided not to impose the supreme penalty and instead sentenced the then 45-year-old Mr Mandela to life imprisonment.
Mr Mandela will surely also be contemplating the possibility that his successor as state president, Thabo Mbeki, has come near to destroying the legacy bequeathed him. Mr Mbeki's presidency is being widely denigrated as a disaster, with many commentators debating the possible "Zimbabwe-isation" of South Africa beneath headlines like "Fears we could slide like Zim."
Except for today, the fact is that the euphoria of the five-year period in which Mr Mandela ruled has evaporated. Many South Africans, especially the better educated, are leaving for other countries while others are looking at ways to quit.
"I am compelled to utter something I never in my wildest imagination thought I would say," said Mondli Makhanya, editor of the Sunday Times, South Africa's best-selling quality weekend newspaper. "I am afraid of the (ruling] African National Congress. Afraid of what it could do to our republic. One has to say that we are rolling down a very rocky slope."
South Africa, nine years after Mr Mandela stepped down, is beset by so many crises on so many fronts that they add up to a "perfect storm".
Apart from the disintegration of Mr Mbeki's presidency, perhaps the most ominous development is the encouragement being given by ANC leader Jacob Zuma to his allies to attack the most important institutions of state. Mr Zuma is tipped to be the next state president.
However, Mr Zuma, who in 2006 was tried for rape but acquitted, now faces trial for fraud, corruption and tax evasion in connection with South Africa's controversial multi-billion-pound arms deal with British Aerospace and other European Union companies.
He has been trying every possible manoeuvre to get the case dismissed or delayed until he takes supreme power next May. The main target of attack is the Constitutional Court, the finest achievement of the Mandela era.
The 12 judges of the Constitutional Court are superior to parliament in so far as they can pronounce on whether laws passed by parliament conform to the constitution.
In a reversion to some of the ANC's darkest Stalinist days in exile, Mr Zuma's two main "attack dogs", Julius Malema, the ANC Youth League President (a position Mandela held in the 1940s], and Zwelinzima Vavi, the general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, have labelled the Constitutional Court judges "counter-revolutionaries".
Mr Malema and Mr Vavi have also both warned they and Mr Zuma's supporters are "ready to kill" if the FBI-style National Prosecuting Authority insists on going ahead with their patron's corruption trial.
Zimbabwe's slide into chaos and impoverishment began with Robert Mugabe's assault on the judiciary at the turn of the century when the president's militiamen invaded the highest courts.
Mr Makhanya asked rhetorically whether it is really worth destroying Mandela's South Africa for Mr Zuma? "The answer, it seems, is yes," he said.
"The ruling party will destroy the country for Zuma. There are some in the party who will stop at nothing in their quest to get their man into the Union Buildings (the State Presidency in Pretoria]. Institutions that were painstakingly built by the people of this country, led in the main by the ANC itself, will be pummelled if they stand in the way."
Meanwhile, the reputation of Mr Mbeki, now the lamest of lame ducks, goes from bad to worse.
This week, after opposing sanctions against Mr Mugabe alongside China and Russia in the United Nations Security Council, his latest negotiating initiative in his eight years of "quiet diplomacy" with Zimbabwe fell apart. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai refused to join talks about talks while Mr Mbeki remains the sole mediator.
In one of many damning judgments on the fading Mbeki era, the president of the South African Institute of Race Relations, Professor Sipho Seepe, said his ten years in power will be remembered "for the (electricity] blackouts, Aids denialism, abuse of power, nondelivery (of essential services], corruption, erosion of the rule of law, the abuse of the state South African Broadcasting Corporation, growing inequalities, cronyism, the (shady] arms deal and political arrogance. (Under Mr Mbeki] we lost the vision of a democratic and non-racial society."
True hero, but human frailties that make him greater stillNELSON Mandela achieved the status of hero in an era, spanning the late 20th century and the early years of the 21st, starved of true heroes.
His imprisonment for three decades, directly arising from his resistance to racial apartheid, was vindicated and capped by personal triumph when he led South Africa to full democracy in 1994 and he was elected state president.
Mr Mandela achieved a cult status of almost mythic proportions, comparable to the Pope, Pele and a reincarnated Elvis Presley rolled into one. He became a symbol of hope for human relations and reconciliation worldwide. But the fact that he also had real human frailties made him a greater man than was grasped by those who believed only the legend and could not see through the fog of adulation. His first two marriages failed, but he seemed to achieve happiness when, at the age of 80, he married again.
While he has been hailed for his apparent remarkable absence of bitterness after being freed from prison, Mr Mandela himself has said there are a thousand things he was bitter about. But he said he knew more than anything else that he had to project the exact opposite emotion and preach a philosophy of "forget the past."
While building trust between black, white and all the varied ethnic groups in South Africa, Mr Mandela had to suffer the unbearable pain of having been cuckolded by his second wife, Winnie. Having stood by her during her infamous trial for the kidnap and assault of the murdered child activist Stompie Moeketsi, Mr Mandela sued for divorce, telling the judge: "I was the loneliest man during the period I stayed with her. If the entire universe persuaded me to reconcile I would not. I am determined to get rid of this marriage."
His parting of the ways with Winnie gave way to the flourishing of his relationship and marriage to Graça Machel, widow of the former Mozambican president Samora Machel.
Mr Mandela these days spends much of his time at Mrs Machel's white marble home next to the Indian Ocean in Mozambique, relaxing completely and reading widely. Talking about their marriage, she said: "When I met him he was very lonely. At the end of the day, after the public meetings, he would go home and he would be alone." She said their relationship gave the companionship both of them deeply desired.
