ON Monday Defence Questions was booted into next week by a whole-day Commons tribute to Nelson Mandela. I attended the well done speeches of the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition.

Nelson Mandela was a towering figure of our time. True, some will take issue with his political movement, the ANC, its past and its politics, and I would hesitate to compare Mandela with Gandhi, but he certainly warrants the adoration of his country and the admiration of the world.

Apartheid was very ugly. It never was some benign attempt to have horizontal co-existence of ethnic groups, as I learned very quickly on visiting South Africa in 1983.

Travelling to my medical student attachment at a Dutch Reformed Church hospital in what was then the Transkei tribal homeland, I crossed into South Africa from Swaziland and got a train heading south. Student-style, on the cheapest possible ticket, I parked myself in the grottiest coach. I recall curious glances from the other passengers and the bemused guard “upgrading” me.

Evidently, in my naivety, I had selected the part of the train reserved for non-whites. Apartheid was a disgracefully vertical segregation and the pity is it lasted as long as it did.

South Africa, as its societies bumped and ground against each other, made an enduring impact on me and helped shape my views on the world and its ways. After ten weeks among the kindly, dignified Xhosa of the Transkei I was a different person. I also learned quite a lot of medicine, especially about TB. Returning to Bristol, I was much better placed to comment on what was then a pressing issue in student politics.

In the event, the remarkable reconciliation achieved by, among others, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu allowed the country to effect its transition to democracy, enfranchisement and decency without the sort of catastrophe predicted by doom-mongers and which has afflicted other African states. Nelson Mandela and the movement he came to epitomise may well have stumbled along the way, as he himself admitted, but the world is a much, much better place for him having trodden it. Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika