There was nothing unusual about the small ferry as it chugged across the Cape Town harbor and dropped anchor at Robben Island.

Nothing unusual until the gang plank stretched across the water and out stepped a black prisoner of the elite, white regime, a prisoner whose name would become synonymous with the struggle for equality and dignity for blacks and whites in South Africa.

Nelson R. Mandela, eyes at once penetrating and steady, told the guards he refused to jog from the harbor to the prison gates like the other prisoners.

He had been sentenced to five years at Robben prison for acting against the injustice of South Africa's apartheid system and would eventually spend 27 years behind bars.

The guard, in response, unflinchingly threatened Mandela with death.

Without raising his voice, Mandela responded, "If you so much as lay a hand on me, I will take you to the highest court in the land, and, when I finish with you, you will be poor as a church mouse."

Mandela walked to the prison gates. He later told friends, "Any man or institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose."

The words are characteristically simple and the tone characteristically firm, free of confrontation and pretension.

While Harvard is far from the first institution to honor Mandela, those who know the South African president say he will be remembered for his grandfatherly face, gentle humor and wide smile rather than for his many awards or specific government policies.

Mandela, the man, the first democratically elected president of an embattled nation, has become a symbol of our era-a symbol of triumph and reconciliation after decades of division and oppression.

He was a victim of unjust punishment, an authority figure with whom the public can empathize. He leads by example, not by rhetoric. He is a man educated by the ruling elite who has always identified with the underprivileged.

On his 80th birthday last July, leaders and citizens from around the world sent thousands of letters to Mandela praising his sense of self-confidence that they say restored a sense dignity to a formerly divided nation.

When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, typically Mandela downplayed his own role in defining the civil rights struggle of his time.

"We stand here today as nothing more than a representative of the millions of our people who dared to rise up against a social system whose very essence is war, violence, racism, oppression, repression and the impoverishment of an entire people," Mandela said.

"We live with the hope that as she battles to remake herself, South Africa will be like a microcosm of the new world that is striving to be born," he added.