‘It is awe-inspiring to meet him’ the great science Nobel Laureate David Baltimore wrote of Nelson Mandela, as he is ‘one of the world’s few unalloyed heroes’. I had taken Baltimore to meet Madiba as the third speaker in the annual Nelson Mandela Science Lecture, a joint project of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Africa Genome Education Institute. His lecture was on the subject of viruses and it is one of the most lucid accounts on the subject.

Baltimore explained to Madiba that, in addition to giving the lecture, he was in South Africa to attend a meeting of the recipients of Bill Gates’ grand challenge grants, big money to develop what is known as a gene therapy approach to AIDS. We spoke some about HIV but, Baltimore records, Madiba surprisingly to him ‘had no comments on the present Government’s policies.’

Mandela’s silence was not because he had no view on the issue. Rather, it was prompted by the greatest of political, professional and personal regret. He believes that he should have done more when he was President to develop proper HIV/AIDS policies. It was a deeply personal issue too. Mandela had lost his son Makgatho Lewanika Mandela to AIDS on 6 January 2005, aged 54.

Mandela took the lead in a context of national silence by publicly disclosing that his son died due to Aids-related factors. He personally showed how to break the stigma that surrounds the disease in the country. Makgatho was Madiba’s last surviving son as the younger Thembekile died in 1969 while he was imprisoned on Robben Island. Heartless political authorities would not temporarily release him to bury his son.

Early in 1999 Mamphela Ramphele in her typically far-reaching manner put together a gathering of some of our best health and science minds to meet with Mandela. Of the requests put to him, two stand out: first was to declare HIV/AIDS a national emergency. At the time Thabo Mbeki as Deputy President made promising remarks about the issue and Nkosasana Dlamini-Zuma, as Minister of Health, appear to understand the urgency well enough.

It was a time of transition as national elections loomed. Mandela raised the issue with his outgoing government but nothing came of it, at least so it appeared. The real difficulty set in when Mbeki became President and Manto Tsabalala-Msimang the Health Minister, not once, but as if to add perversity to tragedy, twice. There was the calamitous pseudo-science of Mbeki’s Virodene. He sought refuge in the anonymity of the Internet and with AIDS dissidents.

In her book Mortal Combat: Aids Denialism and the Struggle for Antiretrovirals in South Africa (Durban, 2007) Nicoli Nattrass documented the denialism that emerged. It ran wide and deep so much so that people lost their careers and integrity to the twisted expectations of the government of the day.  On the sidelines now, Mandela tried his utmost to help through his foundations. The Nelson Mandela Foundation commissioned a major study of HIV prevalence. It supported the complicated business of HIV vaccine design undertaken by the South African Vaccine Initiative (SAVI). The Chairman of the Foundation Jakes Gerwel once told me that they scrutinized all of Tsabalala-Msimang’s speeches to see whether there was anything they could publicly hold her to.

At our October 2007 meeting with Mandela, Baltimore shared with him the immense disappointment that struck the world’s science and health community ‘about the lack of efficacy of the Merck trial’, the most promising initiative at the time. Mandela responded by saying that we must never give up the fight against HIV/AIDS, that we must take the battle to everybody, especially the South African government. We promised him that we would.

Mandela was and is a modernizer. He led the modernization of the ANC. In Dispatches From the War Room (New York, 2009) Stanley Greenberg describes how he worked with Madiba (and four others including Bill Clinton and Tony Blair) to turn the ANC into a modern political party competing for votes in democratic elections. His book is about that moment of truth when he has to tell the leaders things they do not want to hear.

Mandela, more than any of the others, cared about what the voters thought and wider public opinion, says Greenberg. Having spent 27 years in prison, he was concerned that he might be out of touch as he took the ANC from being a liberation movement operating in secret and had no real proper processes for competing in an election. There was a concern about heading up the post 1994 government. Mandela sat through a three-hour polling seminar that Greenberg conducted and even attend his famous focus groups.

It was almost inevitable that the ANC could not deliver results to keep pace with the expectations Mandela had wittingly and unwittingly unleashed. There were the normal unintended consequences that follow campaigns. When Greenberg presented negative findings to the ANC leadership about what real living and breathing voters thought, Ealinor Clift of Newsweek (July 10, 2009) wrote, ‘the leaders were so stunned, they accused Greenberg of rigging the poll and using a non-representative sample.’

ANC leaders thought it was enough that they had brought electricity and water to rural areas. But in fact the voters said that the ANC government had not created the jobs or the housing they promised. The voters felt betrayed. Mandela's personal support fell in the polls within three years to below 50 percent, and he did not run for a second term. The voters did not desert the ANC, they supported Mbeki. Before the end of his second term, Mbeki’s support was pulverized by both the voters and his party. As we know, the ANC lost some votes and Jacob Zuma came in on the back of even greater economic promises.

To struggle and to build, to wrestle with issues and to make progress, to grow from pain, to learn from past mistakes, to say that you are sorry and to admit human fallibility, to listen to the voters and to modernize old practises, these are some of the qualities of Mandela. In the edited collection of his speeches Nelson Mandela: From Freedom to the Future (Johannesburg & London, 2003) Kader Asmal, David Chidester and I assembled a collection of tributes as introductions to Mandela’s speeches that covered the full canvas of his contribution. He also has the ability to stretch and elevate us beyond the ordinary and he can be masterful with his timing.

His surprise appearance at the 1995 Rugby World Cup final as an act of encouragement and symbol of reconciliation, nation-building in motion in a manner of speaking, is widely regarded as one of more extraordinary acts of his time. Mace Neufeld, producer the feature film INVICTUS that stars Morgan Freeman and is directed by Clint Eastwood remarked about Mandela and his role in South Africa winning the 1995 Rugby World Cup.

‘I only had the usual general information about Nelson Mandela’ Neufeld wrote, ‘his struggle to end apartheid, his philosophy of reconciliation and his iconic status as a national leader. It was only when I started developing a screenplay’ Neufeld continued ‘based on a book proposal by John Carlin that became Playing The Enemy that I began to research Madiba. Along with Morgan Freeman and his partner Lori McCreary, we discovered the miracle that was this man. Hopefully, our film, which opens on December 11 2009 will convey to audiences around the world the meaning of Madiba.’

Mandela had once told Ramphele that, like him, people come to this world wounded, some covered in mud, others yearning to belong, all with value in their humanity that makes them individually special. She adds that he was always ready to celebrate human achievement great or small. Ramphele remarks that the substance of the man is always ‘personal, professional and political’. She continues: ‘It is the kind of leadership that is inspirational in an unselfconscious way. It comes from a deep love of humanity. For him all people are there to embrace.’

As a change agent and political leader it is David Baltimore’s entry in his diary that reveals most about the spirit of Mandela: ‘He said that he had to fight for everything in his life and believed that you must fight continually if you want to produce change’. It is a credo for everybody and anybody who cares about human progress.

Everyone will join me in saying Happy 91st Birthday, Madiba!