‘Hello Timothy, this is Nelson Mandela’

On a hot day at the end of August 2000, I was walking through the lunchtime crowds near Bank underground station in London. My mobile phone rang and answering it, I heard a familiar voice say: “Hello Timothy, this is Nelson Mandela.”

It sounded like the voice I’d listened to through countless press conferences as South Africa struggled out of apartheid. A voice that had been banned nearly all my life, and one which I’d first heard when shooting an interview with its owner just after he walked free from prison in 1990.

We had become familiar to Nelson – we filmed everything he did. Tim Lambon

But was it really Nelson Mandela on the line? Amongst the Johannesburg press corps at the time, it was an old gag to call up a colleague and adopting the unmistakable accent, pretend to be the former president, offering the ever sought-after interview.

I was immediately suspicious that a prankster was calling. But I knew that my old friend and colleague Gugu Radebe was going to see Nelson that day to thank him: Mandela had intervened on our behalf when Charles Taylor, the president of Liberia, had locked us up earlier that month.

‘Charles, you’ve got my boys!’

After it was brought to his attention that Gugu and I, along with David Barrie and Sorious Samoura, were being held on charges of espionage in Liberia (we were there to make a documentary for Channel 4), he had spared no effort to convince President Taylor that he needed to get himself out of the hole he was digging and release us.

I thought I’d better err on the side of caution. “Hello, Mr President…”, I replied.

Indeed it was him, and there followed a conversation in which I had the opportunity to thank him profusely for the calls he’d made and the faxes he’d sent to Taylor. This extraordinary man knew Gugu and myself from all the press conferences we’d covered in the run-up to the 1994 elections. Through those years, as the ANC rebuilt itself within the country and negotiated the end of apartheid, we had become familiar to Nelson – we filmed everything he did.

The conversation continued and as we talked, I experienced the most humbling moment of my life when Madiba told me: “I called Charles Taylor and I said to him: ‘Charles, you’ve got my boys, but you can’t keep them!'”

It is a moment I cannot think of without great emotion and a certain moistening of the eyes. That a man of such monumental stature should have cared about some child-of-apartheid white boy who’d got himself into trouble in a distant nasty place, illustrated for me the breadth of his magnanimity, and the depth of his humanity.

The eulogies to this giant will be multitude in the coming days but those 10 words, for me, sum up everything I came to respect and love about Nelson Mandela.