COMETH the hour, cometh the man.

Never has the old saying been more apposite than it was in South Africa in the summer of 1993, not long after it was announced that the first ever all-race elections would take place in April the following year. If it was a time of hope and expectation, it was also a time of fear and anger on both sides of the racial divide.

Many in the black community hoped that after the long night of apartheid this would be a day of reckoning, yet they also feared that the recently released Nelson Mandela had gone soft by talking to Afrikaner leaders like President FW de Klerk. Still more in the white community were terrified that the coming of democracy was a disaster which would spark terrorism and economic decline, and they remembered with fear Mandela's reputation as a socialist.

Both extremes were wrong and the resulting elections were not only a triumph for democracy but they paved the way for the creation of the "Rainbow Nation", the description coined by Mandela's friend, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. In place of strife there was harmony, instead of bloodshed there was reconciliation. Far from plunging into bankruptcy the South African economy remained reasonably buoyant and the lamb lay down with the lion.

To many people, especially the sceptical, this was little short of a miracle and there was something marvellous about the outcome, but the truth was more prosaic. It owed nothing to divine intervention or even to luck. It was all due to the faith, commitment and studied intelligence of one man who had spent long years incarcerated on Robben Island and who had put that time to good use.

Mandela would hardly have been human had he not yearned for revenge; instead he quickly demonstrated that he had learned to accept the need to find common ground with those who had imposed apartheid.

To do that might mean contradicting or enraging his allies in the African National Council, but Mandela was big enough to do just that. Out of the ruins and tyranny of captivity here was a man who had the vision and courage to break with his party's orthodoxies - in particular over negotiating with the white supremacists and abandoning the stricter tenets of socialism. Above all, he handed down the unyielding message to his followers that if they were not for him, they were against him.

Two decades later South Africa is still a work in progress and it would be a mistake to suggest Mandela's time in office was unblemished. However, one thing is uncertain. If any man forged the country in his own image it was Mandela and he fully deserves to be remembered as the father of the nation: a great leader and a great man, who made the world a better and fairer place.