An almost immodest conviction wells from the page in William Ernest Henley’s gritty, four-stanza poem, Invictus, a forthright declaration of the poet’s resolve in the face of what he describes as ‘the fell clutch of circumstance’ and ‘the bludgeonings of chance’.

      We all know now the special South African connection to these stirring verses – mirrored in the life and what I think of as the invincible morality of Nelson Mandela, who is memorably portrayed by Morgan Freeman in the Clint Eastwood film named after the poem. Invictus the movie achieved deserving acclaim.

      For me, personally, there are meaningful associations with Invictus. Some are coincidental, but the most inspiring association has been a gathering appreciation of the sentiments of the poem through the impulses and achievements of the man who, perhaps more than any other, has truly lived up to them.

      Nelson Mandela, of course, is a very different man from the Victorian poet who inspired him.

      Henley was born in 1849, and his widely quoted poem, first published in 1875, bears the hymn-like stamp of its time. Initially it appeared without a title in a book called Book of Verses, but was given the name Invictus – from the Latin for ‘unconquered’ – by editor Arthur Quiller-Couch when it was later included in The Oxford Book of English Verse.

      For Henley, Invictus was his statement of personal bravery as he confronted and dealt with the consequences of a debilitating medical condition. He had contracted tuberculosis of the bone, also known as Pott’s disease, at the age of twelve. Five years later, he was compelled to have one leg amputated just below the knee and, immediately after, intensive surgery on the other if he was to live. He wrote Invictus while recovering in the infirmary.

      Remarkably, this young man’s poem, virtually the only one he is known by, has inspired many over the years; it has cropped up in songs and declarations, novels, films and autobiographies.

      Most memorably, perhaps, Henley’s four stanzas of defiant fortitude reached across an ocean of time and geography, nearly a century after they were written, to enthral the man to whom we in South Africa are indebted, and whose challenge to us – his primary legacy, if you like – remains vivid.

      The historic and monumental task Mandela began, of reconciling a nation forged through conflict, is ours to continue if we are to succeed in achieving anything of value and to match the vision for which he gave up so much.

      The poem tells us something about that, too.

      One can imagine how, perhaps reading it aloud to himself in the spare cell he had every reason to believe would be his home for life, Mandela found in Henley’s stirring cadences some essence of courage and self-mastery, and the inspiration to endure.

      The poem is a perfect match for the man, right from its opening stanza: ‘Out of the night that covers me / Black as the pit from pole to pole, / I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul.’

      We recognise much else too: ‘I have not winced nor cried aloud. / Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed’; that for all the ‘wrath and tears ... the menace of the years / Finds and shall find me unafraid’. Yet, if like all of us, really, when we read them, Mandela felt the transcendent lift of Henley’s closing lines – ‘I am the master of my fate; / I am the captain of my soul’ – there is little doubt that the man apartheid South Africa turned into the 20th century’s most famous prisoner understood them less as an instance of inspirational sentiment, of piercing poetic effect, than as the confirmation of his credo, that he must remain unbowed, unafraid and unconquerable, master his fate and be captain of his soul, not merely for himself and his own dignity and sense of self-worth, but for his country and all the people in it.

      He had, after all, already demonstrated a rare conviction in declaring in the dock in 1964 his willingness to die for what he believed was right – a society of indivisible dignity, freedom and equality. He was spared the gallows; now the challenge was to remain true to that conviction and see the thing through.

      Invictus tells us something of the strength of character that lies behind the humanity Mandela breathed into his efforts at nation building. He was undoubtedly a smart politician who knew perfectly well where to take the gap, but it’s not a matter of lionising him, which would be a disservice, to see that for him nation building was an act of deep faith, a moral imperative.

      Nelson Mandela’s moral stamina was, at heart, selfless. The resonance he found in the lines of Invictus reveals, I believe, something of the fact that reconciliation for him was the expression of self-actualisation under unimaginably difficult circumstances. It was neither an election ploy nor a public relations gimmick nor an opportunistic repertoire of programmed outcomes. As a result, it imbued Mandela with monumental moral authority.

      Reconciliation for Mandela was the process through which all South Africans could be drawn into a single moral universe where, given our bitter and divided history, none existed before. At the heart of nation-building, therefore, lay the conviction that we needed a single ethical code which all could trust and by which all could live in harmony, peace and civility.

      Two institutions were critical to advancing these goals.

      The first was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It was imperfect. The ethics of reconciliation and justice required authentic repentance and authentic forgiveness. The real culprits responsible for apartheid-era atrocities never repented and yet the victims magnanimously forgave them.

      The second was the Constitution of 1996. In its unyielding fidelity to the rights, responsibilities and obligations of a free people living under circumstances in which the rule of law and justice prevailed, and in a state kept in balance by the constraints the separation of powers imposed on the arbitrary exercise of power, it had lasting endurance.

      James Joseph, whom I got to know well when he was US ambassador to South Africa during Mandela’s term as president, once made the distinction between ‘soft power’ and ‘hard power’. Soft power, he argued, was having influence by virtue of moral suasion; hard power was having your way by the use of force.

      Mandela, with his moral authority, was the master of soft power.

      In his short time as president, he made striking progress in drawing all South Africans into the single moral universe he understood we must all inhabit. He not only advocated it, but also gave substance to it both in his personal political style and in what he did, nationally, as the first president of a democratic South Africa.

      His successor Thabo Mbeki undid much of this with his ‘two nations’ thesis, one white and rich and the other black and poor, eroding the power of the idea of Mandela’s single moral universe, and deflecting society from its journey towards it.

      Mandela’s idea remains with us; it is his legacy, but it is unfinished business.

      Reconciliation was, and had to be, a work in progress, but it dissipated after he left office. Nationalists and ethnic entrepreneurs now occupy that space.

      It did not take very long for former guerrilla and intelligence chief Jacob Zuma to sully Mandela’s bequest by turning the soft power of moral suasion into the hard power of organised intimidation. Zuma’s leadership appears to