What a privilege it is to be together to honor the leadership of the Nelson Mandela Foundation. For 27 years, this organization has insisted that Madiba’s legacy belongs not only in museums, but in movements for freedom too. I would like to recognize a man whose legacy lives on in the millions that he inspired.

Madiba lives in every protest for justice, every call for democracy, every march with a righteous demand. Madiba lives in every township and slum where dignity remains just out of reach, and he lives in each person who reaches for that dignity, who works all day and then returns home with food for the hungry and medicine for the sick. Madiba lives each time someone bears witness to oppression, or want, or misery, and does not accept it as inevitable, but rather as something that we each can fight. So many of us are only where we are today – can only conceive of the principled as possible – because Madiba showed us the path.

By every measure, Madiba was first. Mzansi’s first Black president. South Africa’s first head of state elected in a democratic election, when he was voted in by South Africans of every skin color. But for a five-year-old in 1996 Cape Town, who saw Madiba’s face on banners waving from building facades, he represented a different kind of first altogether. Madiba was the first president I ever knew – a man who, it seemed, had the power to change the world.

It’s difficult to explain what that meant as a child, so let me put it this way – next to my childhood fridge magnets of David Seaman, Sylvain Wiltord, and the Arsenal squad was a magnet of Madiba in a Bafana Bafana kit. When I return to those early years of my life, the lesson I remember most is that justice must be more than an ideal; it must be material. And I remember a leader, larger than life, who saw the same world I was just starting to glimpse and was trying, always trying, to use his power to change it.

In the years before his death, Madiba was elevated into a pantheon beyond mere mortals. Today, the Nobel Peace Center describes him as “a Messiah for millions of people”. If anyone was deserving of such reverence, it was Madiba. Perhaps it was him that Riky Rick was thinking about when he rapped: “Everything I do they wanna do / Everything I say they wanna say.”

And yet tonight, as we gather to recommit ourselves to what Madiba’s leadership showed could be made possible, we must also recognize that to treat him as more myth than man is to do him a grave disservice. It is to sanctify a man who famously once said: “I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.”

He was a man, as subject to self-doubt as any of us. He was a member of a movement as inclined towards infighting as any collective on a long, winding march towards a noble goal. He was a leader who won seismic victories and yet the struggle to win the South Africa he dreamed of is still there to be won.

What a gift it is that Madiba was flawed like each of us – for it is impossible to emulate a Messiah; all one can do is worship. And it is his humanity that allows us to look towards the next generation of leaders and say sincerely: you, too, can be Madiba.

We are together this evening to launch the Mandela Foundation Global Leadership Forum – to continue the struggle for dignity that guided Madiba for nearly a century. We are together to chart a course through the turbulent waters that lie before us – a global landscape roiled by strongmen and corruption, where rights are stolen away in the dead of night and apartheid, in different forms, endures. We are together, all of us, searching for answers, seeking to make sense of........

© The Guardian