But some would say that while Mandela has the strength to birth a nation, he lacks the creativity and flexibility to nurse it as it grows. In South Africa he brought together the white and black communities but has failed to effectively help his nation's economy thrive as a post-apartheid nation.

British Broadcasting Company (BBC) commentator Brian Walden say Mandela "perhaps the most generally admired figure of our age, falls short of the giants of the past."

To this, Mandela replied with characteristic humor, "It helps to make you human."

The Calm in the Eye of the Hurricane

Perhaps the serenity that emanates from Mandela and entrances the world derives from his earliest companions, the wide-eyed, lumbering cattle of the fields.

Born in 1918, six years after the African National Congress (ANC) was founded to put leadership back in the hands of the Africans, Mandela grew up in rural South Africa in the soft, rolling hills and green valleys of the Transkei.

The other members of Mandela's village where his father was the chief, approved by the British government, treated him with respect, bowing to him in the streets and addressing him in accordance with his royal status.

But outside the community he suffered from discrimination by Afrikaner whites, as well as the British Boer settlers.

"The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions were automatically assumed to be superior," Mandela explains in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. "There was no such thing as African culture."

Throughout his career he would face imprisonment, torture and ridicule but he never expressed a desire for revenge.

"One of his greatest qualities is his serenity, the sense of dignity under incredible turmoil and strife," says Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell, who has worked with Mandela. "During all his years of captivity they never broke his spirit."

Many credit his gentle strength with encouraging the reconciliation between the black and white communities that led to the abolition of apartheid.

Bestowed by his father with the name Rolihlahla, meaning "troublemaker," Mandela began struggling against the white regime at an early age. He started non-violent student protests at the Missionary College of Fort Hare that resulted in his expulsion in 1940.

After running away from an arranged marriage at home and completing his B.A. in 1941 by correspondence through the University of South Africa, Mandela entered the law profession, only to realize that his prospects as a black lawyer were limited under apartheid.

Unlike those before him who had fought back vindictively and sporatically, Mandela planned a methodical strategy for combating the injustice he saw around him-a strategy of societal education and leadership by personal strength.