
Nelson Mandela is very different from so many African leaders because of his personal commitment to reconciliation, his moral authority, integrity and intense compassion. Furthermore, Mandela is sensitive to criticism from certain African leaders that he has leaned onto whites for conciliation and forgiveness.
His long humiliating jail experience have a positive effect on him because he became the first South African's first democratically elected (black) president in 1994 and became a world's famous person and regarded as a particular person whom people admire and see him as a symbol of what a true leader should be after he spent nearly three decades of his life as a political prisoner.