BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT REASON for my interest in Nelson Mandela, an African leader whose achievements command the widest respect, and whose leadership arguably mirrors the best of South Africa's moral effort, is that his was a style which, if I may adapt the formulation used in Power, politics and culture, could not ‘be truly separated from the historical situation that either enabled or produced it’. Much has been said and written of Mandela's legend, which bespeaks largely of his spectacular individual displays. But it would be lacking in seriousness in the study of Mandela not to see him as a leader whose style was moulded by historical experience. Mandela's leadership style was a style which was adamantly tied to its ‘Republican’ moment, a style which was routinely constituted within a specific discourse about South African society (namely, an avant-garde discourse), which burst spectacularly on the post-apartheid scene – May 1994 – to seize the high moral ground: it was always keen to contribute critical input of its own on questions of ‘citizenship’, ‘national belonging,’ and ‘national culture’. One can say more generally that South African history after May 1994 was read with attention to Mandela's style – his leadership style was institutionalised in a ‘Republican’ society to carry the weight of national expectation. Mandela's legend was obsessively, if not frighteningly, filled with his ‘Republicans’ values of national reconciliation, national unity, and colour-blindness. Hence, there was always a sense in which his charisma represented us all – for many, his moral style embodied an integrationist tendency (it raised shades of his ‘Republicans’ brightest days).

My other original impetus for studying the Mandela ‘phenomenon’ is that his legend provided the most vivid illustration of what I call, for lack of a better term, an ‘introverted’ style of leadership. My personal view of Mandela – and this is a more important issue – is that he lacked what the German historian, Theodore Hamerow, would call a vital ‘political creed’.