Tell me about what you were like when you first met Mandela.

I was cynical, I was a cop – I was more than a cop, I was a special branch cop – and we were trained in the ideology of the ANC (the African National Congress), which had a lot of its roots and its origins and its support even, especially in the later years, from communist regimes.

So of course it was easy for the apartheid government to say, “You see? Those guys are just revolutionary organisations and you must have nothing to do with them.” I thought that all of what [Mandela] was espousing, such as “South Africa is for all people both black and white”, I thought yeah, yeah, whatever, that’s the party line, that’s rhetoric, of course you’re going to say that – it’s propaganda, it’s the ANC Freedom Charter based policy.

Rory Steyn, and (inset) Nelson Mandela and his wife Graca in 1998.

It wasn’t until my very great privilege of serving Madiba [Mandela was also affectionately known by his clan name ‘Madiba’]brought me into contact with him was I able to study him up close and personal and realise I’d probably been wrong all my life.

And that’s an extraordinary thing to do for another person: to be able to undo 30-something years of social conditioning. He did that in my life in a matter of two or three months, so that by the end of those months I was completely convinced that I had been wrong and that this was a man we needed to give a chance to, to realise this goal or this dream of reuniting our country into one nation.

How did your time with Mandela impact your faith?

It certainly made me think about how I previously judged my fellow South Africans, purely on the basis of their skin colour when Jesus in fact died for them too: so who the heck am I to reject a bloke because he’s got a different skin colour to me when he’s acceptable to my Saviour? But that took quite a long time to sink into my thick skull. But when I did realise it, it was because of Madiba, and I was very grateful for that.

There were 12 years between meeting Jesus and meeting Madiba, and I was still living with a lot of messed up stuff in my heart during those 12 years. That’s the great thing about God’s love and his mercy and grace, is that if I’d died in those intervening 12 years, I still would’ve been covered by Christ’s blood, even though I had this heart that was very far from being whole and perfect. And it’s not going to be whole or perfect until we get to the other side of eternity.

When you spent time with him, did the way he treated you personally affect you? What was he like to work for?

He was one of the best principals you could ever have. He treated us exactly the same way he would treat anyone else, and I mean anybody else. The way he spoke to another head of state, a king, queen, prince, or the garden boy, or his family – he never treated anybody any differently. And I’ve never seen that before in anybody, because every politician has a private face and a public face…there was no such thing with Madiba at all. 

I’ve travelled all over the world and I can tell you that you see in the behaviour of a President’s bodyguard the President or Prime Minister’s personality. So if you go to Zimbabwe, you’re going to see a whole lot of little Mugabe’s protecting Mugabe and they all behave like dictators, pushing people around and shoving them, that kind of thing, which Mandela would never have allowed. We were very conscious of that, because the last thing we wanted was for him to reprimand us because we weren’t treating the people decently.

He famously said once, “When I appear in public, people not only see me, they see my bodyguards and they need to respect my agenda”, which is why he insisted that there were all skin colours amongst our teams who were protecting him, as well as amongst the staff.

What’s the biggest thing Mandela taught you during your time with him?

It would inevitably be something along the lines of: when you have all the power, it takes a great person not to crush a weak person, even if it’s your opponent who deserves it. To sit down with him [your opponent] and to talk about how to jointly move forward in finding a solution takes tremendous strength of character.

What did you get to see of his faith?

Not a great deal…In terms of speaking about his faith, Madiba knew that I was involved in the church, but he never told me where he stood personally, although I heard him say on many occasions that he was a Methodist…but he also didn’t ever put Christianity above the other three mainline religions in our country – Judaism, Islam and Hinduism – because he probably couldn’t afford to do that as a politician.

After he died, a letter appeared in the press in South Africa written by a Dutch Reformed Afrikaans minister who wrote about a chance encounter in an airport terminal once with the President, where the President asked him what it was that he did and he said, well actually I’m a Dutch Reformed minister. And Madiba said to him, this guy wrote, “Well, I too gave my life to Jesus a long time ago, but I don’t always push that into the public domain because of my position in society.” And that was almost a vindication to me that the stuff that I thought after all those years was in fact so.

So, if you ask me: do I think that Nelson Mandela was a Christian? I’d have to say yes, but at the end of the day only God knows the answer to that question.

After all that, it must’ve been quite something to attend his funeral. Can you tell me what that was like and what thoughts crossed your mind at the time?

I was there when they buried Madiba on the 12th of December last year in his home town. I saw that coffin come past me on the gun carriage, and I saw them lower it into the ground. I know exactly where he was buried as I’ve seen his grave.

But what I contemplated was the big difference between Jesus and Madiba. The big difference is that Jesus’ tomb is empty, because he rose again from the grave and defeated death and won the victory for all who believe in him as their Saviour. The difference is massive, and it’s eternal. Although both men profoundly changed my life,
the change that Jesus brings is an eternal one, and that’s how you bring reconciliation. Although Madiba was the great reconciler of our nation and in fact many other people, Jesus Christ is the reconciler of the entire world and his reconciliation is permanent.