But there is one man who is distinctively singular, a sprightly old man in his colourful shirt and dark glasses, reaching out to Soweto slum-dwellers now, to the Spice Girls then, to his erstwhile tormentors a moment later.

But he doesn't have to reach out to history. He is the author of a defining chapter of liberation in the history of resistance. As his authorised biographer says, ``he has become a universal hero for the twentieth century.In a time of vote counters, spin doctors and focus groups, he conjures up an earlier age of liberators, war leaders and revolutionaries. To conservative traditionalists he evokes memories of great men who personified their own country; to the liberal left, battered bylost causes, he brings new hope that `righteous crusade can still prevail.'' Nelson Mandela: the last action hero of the twentieth century.

President Mandela is waving goodbye to South Africa. A historic retreat in which merge the themes of struggle and sacrifice, hate and forgiveness, power and responsibility, truth and reconciliation. This century's most famous prisoner is today leaving office as the world's tallest president.

For 27 years from the notorious 1963 Rivonia trial, Mandela remained the prisoner of an ideology that divided humanity in black and white. As the dispossessed resident of Robben Island, Mandela, immortalised in faded photographs, symbolised the trampled passion of freedom. His isolation, his loneliness, his sacrificial determination, gave the anti-apartheid struggle of the African National Congress an internationally recognisable human face.

It was the resonant symbolism of Mandela that neutralised the occasional brutal expressions of ANC's freedom agenda. As the revolution ofLenin ended with the sabotage of Gorbachev, in South Africa too, D.F. Malan's institution of hate got its rebel in F.W. de Klerk. The prisoner was freed, apartheid was buried, and in the first multi-racial elections, Nelson Mandela was elected president.

It was a smooth transition from prisonerhood to presidentship. As president too, Mandela defied the script of liberation's day after. The paradox of liberation was vindicated by the history of this century: the romance of the revolution turning into the horror of power; the liberator as dictator.

Mandela was not only a Moses who reached the Promised Land. He ruled the land like a Gandhi in power, of course a dapper Gandhi. There was no revenge, no politics of retribution, only a pardonable Orwellian parody: the Truth Commission. And the liberated, multi-racial South Africa is still not a happy place where everybody is equal, where violence has no colour. But Mandela has become larger than his country. This gregarious old man, this ex-boxer, has managedeverything, including his personal life, with dignity and joy. For once `legendary' is not hyperbole. As Andre Brink writes, ``Mandela has achieved the impossible. It's up to Thabo Mbeki (the would-be president) to address the possible.''