Attributes of leadership

Abstract

In 1988 Nelson Mandela was still in South Africa's apartheid prison system, where he had been incarcerated for a quarter of a century. He would turn 70 that July, and his friend, the doughty president of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, C R, had suggested that the world should celebrate this birthday. Many young people started pilgrimages from various parts of the United Kingdom, and they converged on Hyde Park Corner in London on Nelson's birthday. The crowd that gathered to celebrate this prisoner's birthday was about a quarter million strong, mostly youngsters who had not even been born when Mandela went to prison. And yet here they were gathered to honour this prisoner as if he were a pop star.