Mandela, in one of his last books, Conversations with Myself.
In it, Mandela said that he bears the scars of a long struggle, which “bring out into the full glare of public scrutiny the embarrassing contradictions in which individuals live out their lives.
“We are told that a saint is a sinner who keeps on trying to be clean. One may be a villain for three-quarters of his life and be canonized because he lived a holy life for the remaining quarter of that life.
“In real life we deal not with gods, but with ordinary humans like ourselves: men and women who are full of contradictions, who are stable and fickle, strong and weak, famous and infamous, people in whose bloodstream the muckworm battles daily with potent pesticides.”
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