Nelson Mandela obituary: Madiba - the father of South African democracy
![Nelson Mandela obituary: Madiba - the father of South African democracy](https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2012/02/25/09/nelson-mandela-landscape-AP.jpg)
"Rwanda is our nightmare, South Africa is our dream." So wrote the Nobel Prize-winning African novelist Wole Soyinka in 1994. It was just a month after two events which seemed to span the polarities of despair and hope so many saw in the continent of Africa in the post-independence era. In Rwanda a million people had died in a ghastly genocide. But South Africa had made an astonishingly peaceful transition from oppressive white rule to a black-majority government elected in the country's first free elections ever - and it had done so under the guidance of one extraordinary man.