So today I will add my voice to the millions honouring the life of one of the greatest men of our time: Nelson Mandela.

For me he is a symbol of all that everyone else is saying, hope, inspiration, et al.  But to my shame it wasn’t always that way, because when we are young we think as our parents have told us to think, we take on their values and worldview, it’s only as we start to strive for independence as teenagers that we sometimes realise they are wrong, flawed, or even prejudiced or bigoted.

While not fascists or white supremacist radicals, the family I grew up in had a strange, antiquated views on race, and like many would use inappropriate language and perhaps what today we might call “everyday Racism” as we do everyday sexism.  But there was also an more sinister edge to their prejudice.  My mum and stepfather deep down genuinely thought that non-whites, whatever their race, were inferior to white people. A home where the casual dropping of the N-bomb was considered normal: “Where’s Mum? Oh she ran off with a big black n________” Where the sight of a black person on TV was a cause for groans or tuts. Where the wonderful Floella Benjamin was cause for Playschool to be turned off.

I was brought  up in a household that believed Mandela was a terrorist, an extremest who wanted black-rule. I heard from an early age that he had killed and maimed people for ‘the cause’.  I heard patronising stories of why the blacks couldn’t be trusted and that apartheid was good for them. That South Africa was better, more prosperous, because of segregation.

I thought this was normal until I got to that age when you start to question the things you have always accepted.

Then I learned a very different history.  A history of a humble man who dedicated his life to the greater good. A man of genuine humility and driven by love for people regardless of colour of gender. I love the line from his defence speech at his trial in 1963: ‘I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination’.  A true hero who sort equality and freedom not power and dominance.  I realised all I had been told or that had been insinuated about race and colour was wrong, dangerous and deeply disturbing.

There will be folk who portray Mandela as flawless, there will be those who seek to honour by re-writing history. Let’s not do that, Nelson himself was aware that not all his decisions were good, that there were things he did that in later life he regretted.  Let’s honour a man whose integrity and life’s work brought (with others) real change. That turned injustice into justice, that made a difference in the world.