He transcended race barriers to become an exemplar of human generosity of spirit. His towering personality made possible the peaceful transfer of power in South Africa from white minority to black majority rule.
If he was less effective as president of his country than he had been as the symbol of resistance to apartheid, he demonstrated statesmanship unmatched in Africa.
He inspired love as much as respect, and became regarded by hundreds of millions of people as a secular saint.
More was asked of him, and sometimes claimed for him, than any mortal man could deliver. But the world has been a fractionally better place, because Nelson Mandela lived in it.
He was born into African aristocracy, a descendant of kings of the Thembu people, in Transkeiin 1918.
His father had four wives, among whom his mother ranked third.
He was the first of his family to attend school, and it was his teacher who gave him the English name Nelson in place of his given name, Rolihlahla.
At 19, he attended Fort Hare University, where he soon became involved in student politics - or rather, in organising a boycott of them.
Rejecting a marriage arranged for him by his tribal elders, he became briefly a mine guard, then was articled to a Johannesburg law firm.
He began living in the Alexandra black township, and started law studies at Witwatersrand University, where he met fellow students and future political activists Ruth First, Joe Slovo and Harry Schwarz.
The Afrikaner-dominated National Party attained power in South Africa's 1948 election.
Thereafter, its government set about transforming the country’s longstanding policy of racial segregation into an ironclad, legally-based system of repression.
In the early 1950s, Mandela became deeply involved in radical resistance to apartheid, while he and fellow-activist Oliver Tambo ran a law firm, offering cheap advice to township residents.
It is hard for a modern generation to conceive what life was like for black South Africans under apartheid.
They were denied not merely votes but the most basic human rights. Park benches, buses, beaches - every public facility - were rigidly segregated, marked by signs: 'Whites Only'.
Sexual relations between the races were criminalised. Personal residence and movement were permitted only by licence, the hated 'pass laws'.
The police, institutionally brutal, treated blacks - and especially blacks with political aspirations - with contempt and often sadism.
Dissent was savagely suppressed. Events came to a head in March 1961, when police opened fire on a peaceful protest in the Johannesburg township of Sharpeville, killing 69 people.
A few brave whites sought to tell the world of the crimes being inflicted daily upon an entire society.
Alan Paton wrote a hugely influential novel, Cry The Beloved Country, which became a best-seller.
The priest Trevor Huddleston published a moving account of black life, Naught For Your Comfort, which highlighted the conditions the black community were forced to endure.
The wonderful Helen Suzman, a Capetown independent MP, held aloft a lone liberal banner in South Africa’s parliament.
But such voices seemed mere pebbles amid the unyielding rock of Afrikaner repression. So, too, did Nelson Mandela and his comrades of what became the African National Congress (ANC).
Mandela was initially an admirer of India’s Mahatma Gandhi, committed to non-violent resistance. Yet in 1956, he and 150 others were arrested and charged with treason.
The marathon trial which followed continued until 1961, when all the defendants were acquitted.
The experience changed Mandela.
He became convinced that the whites would never surrender power by peaceful means. He became leader of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe - 'Spear of the Nation'.
In August 1962, after 17 months living on the run from the police, he was arrested following a tip-off by the American CIA.
In the dock at his trial, he conducted himself with a dignity and courage which impressed even his enemies.
He concluded his defence with a now-famous statement: 'During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African people. 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 to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.'
On conviction, he and his fellow defendants escaped the gallows, but were sentenced to life imprisonment.
He spent the next 27 years behind bars, 18 of them on the notorious Robben Island, near Cape Town.
He toiled in a lime quarry, and for years was allowed only one visitor and one letter every six months. Even these small concessions were subjected to malicious delay and censorship by his jailers.
Yet, in an extraordinary fashion, in his cell and silenced, Mandela became a global symbol of his people’s plight.
Occasional foreign visitors permitted to visit him emerged to tell of a superbly gracious, humorous, thoughtful figure, who never wavered in his convictions, devoted his life to self-education and planning for a political future.
In 1985, apartheid president P.W.Botha offered Mandela freedom, if he would renounce armed struggle.
South Africa faced international sanctions and increasing economic difficulties. It was becoming plain that Mandela the captive represented a force in the world as powerful as the whites' edifice of tyranny.
Mandela dismissed Botha’s offer, saying: 'What freedom am I being offered while the organisation of the people remains banned? Only free men can negotiate. A prisoner cannot enter into contracts.'
Four years later, his patient defiance was at last rewarded. President FW de Klerk announced the lifting of the ban on the ANC.
On February 11, 1990, Mandela walked free into Cape Town, amid scenes of euphoric rejoicing not only among black South Africans, but across the world.
In a superb speech, he declared his hope that a negotiated settlement would soon bring to an end the conditions which made armed struggle against apartheid necessary.
So it proved.
Tension and violence mounted in the months and years that followed, as Mandela negotiated with de Klerk for a new political dispensation.
But on 17 April 1994, South Africa’s first election was held under universal suffrage. The prisoner of Robben Island became president with an overwhelming mandate. Apartheid, white minority power, became history.
The great revelation in the years of Mandela’s rise to power was of the man himself. He had been invisible for almost 30 years. No one knew what manner of leader would emerge from behind the prison wall.
Would he prove a raging revolutionary, an embittered demagogue bent on revenge against his white oppressors?
Africa’s freedom from colonial rule has been compromised and often rendered a mockery by many black tyrants, indeed monsters.
Nelson Mandela commanded a prestige that conferred upon him power over the richest society in the continent such as no other African leader had known, to use or abuse as he chose.
What emerged seemed to many white South Africans, and to the watching world, almost miraculous.
Mandela demonstrated a combination of strength and modesty, authority and moderation, extraordinary in any man, least of all one who had suffered so much for so long.
He preached a gospel of social reconciliation and economic prudence. His measured stewardship awed watching nations.
His rhetoric was extraordinary in its strength, sense, and decency. When he began to travel as president, he enthralled national leaders and their peoples wherever he went.
He emerged as the foremost spokesman of the Third World, the face of Africa. His dominance of his own country’s politics was absolute from his accession to the presidency until his retirement from office in 1999.
Yet Mandela had his plentiful share of sorrows even after his release from prison and taking power.
Only one daughter survived from his first marriage, which ended in divorce in 1957.
Another daughter died as a baby, one son was killed in a car crash, and the other died of AIDS. He married his second wife Winnie, Johnannesburg’s first black social worker, in 1958.
During his imprisonment, she became famous and powerful as the voice of her absent husband. But following his liberation, her avarice and thuggery brought shame upon the ANC, and grief and embarrassment to her husband.
They were divorced in 1996. Two years later, on his 80th birthday, he married Graca Michael, widow of the former president of Mozambique.
As president, Mandela triumphed as a symbol of national reconciliation between South Africa’s races. His government displayed adopted economic policies which preserved white confidence, and allowed the country’s wealth to grow.
But he failed to control his satraps.
Under his regime, the ANC leadership became a byword for corruption, as it remains to this day. After generations in which black politicians were denied a share of the cake, they set about seizing spoils with the same ruthlessness which prevails throughout the continent.
The menace of AIDS was allowed to spread unchecked, worsening when Mandela surrendered power to his former deputy, Thabo Mbeki, who denied medication and even AIDS education to his people.
Although Mandela made plain his distaste for neighbouring Zimbabwe’s tyrant Robert Mugabe, he could not bring himself to break openly with a fellow freedom-fighter.
South Africa alone possessed power and stature to depose Mugabe. Neither Mandela nor Mbeki would act.
Mandela presided with extraordinary success over the transfer of political power to South Africa’s black majority.
However, he failed - unsurprisingly, given the magnitude of the task - to begin to fulfil their aspirations for jobs, education, a share of white riches.
In today’s South Africa, a teeming multitude of impoverished and increasingly desperate people say, 'votes are very fine, but who owns the cars and big houses and swimming pools?'.
Crime has soared. Official corruption has become institutionalised.
The potential for unrest, even instability, is very real. Some of this, at least, must be attributed to Mandela’s failure to secure a legacy. He showed himself a weak executive ruler, failing to deploy his unique influence and indeed power as he might have done.
But to say this is probably to ask too much of any mortal man, whose achievement was anyway remarkable.
For generations, the world feared that white South Africa would relinquish power only amid torrents of blood.
Though the country has indeed seen some shocking violence, it was Nelson Mandela’s personal triumph that a cataclysm was averted.
He set an example of forgiveness and statesmanship which has been an inspiration to mankind, recognised in a host of global honours and accolades of which the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize was foremost.
To the end of his life, he remained one of the planet’s most admired inhabitants, commemorated by statues in a hundred countries, most notably in London’s Parliament Square.
He accomplished the transition from reluctant revolutionary to statesman with grace, wit and charm.
He showed the world that Africa can produce greatness.
If the continent could breed even a handful of other leaders possessed of a fraction of his nobility of spirit, it might gain remission from the sentence of misery to which it seems condemned.
