In the upmarket hotel area of Johannesburg there is a giant statue of Nelson Mandela. It is golden bronze in colour and towers above its surroundings. When it was inaugurated Mandela did not seem at ease.   

When I saw his house in Soweto, neighbouring that of retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu, I was humbled by its simplicity. What a difference to the private palaces of most African leaders.  

However, when the former president of South Africa turned 94 last week, the world’s media treated him like a giant. Is it an exaggeration, however, to give Mandela such attention many years after his retirement?

Or is he one of those giants on whose shoulders we must stand to gain some perspective on the world today?

The birthday celebrations were no ordinary ones. A national holiday was declared. Twelve million schoolchildren sang songs for him. Prison convicts offered to mow lawns and tidy up towns. Entire communities offered 67 minutes, each one for a year of Mandela’s public service, of volunteer work.

Despite all this, the suspicion remains that it is all exaggeration. It arises from the state of South Africa today. It is 20 years since Mandela’s release from prison after serving 27 years as a political prisoner of the racist apartheid regime. However, the national economy is still dominated by the white minority. A few black South Africans have become millionaires, although it is assumed that most made their money through corrupt political dealings.

Meanwhile, the country is still a study in stark contrasts. They are blatant even to a casual visitor like myself. There are the rich natural and mineral resources and widespread squalid human poverty.  There is the luscious, breathtaking wild landscape and the urban shantytowns and dangerous streets. This is most evident in Cape Town which is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen. But less than 20 minutes’ drive away one comes across black neighbourhoods that are reminiscent of ghettoes      

My last visits to South Africa took place over the last twelve months. They were private visits which took me to Johannesburg and Durban. More than ever I was convinced of the need of Mandela’s imprint on the direction being taken by South Africans.        

During the birthday celebrations, one or two speakers made a point of spelling out the difference between Mandela’s uncompromising honesty and present-day affairs.

Of course, no one blames Mandela. However, his political dream of freedom and prosperity and equality for his country has hardly been realised. The widow of a martyr in the struggle against apartheid was quoted as asking if today’s South Africa was worth dying for.

There is another argument that a politician of my generation must address honestly. Do today’s senior Western politicians and journalists, who came of age at a time when the injustice of apartheid was becoming increasingly apparent in the West, celebrate Mandela out of some nostalgia for the idealistic politics of their youth?

For us, Nelson Mandela’s photo was a rallying call. His face was iconic because it was a reminder of the collusion of Western businesses which invested in South Africa despite its racist system. It exposed the hypocrisy of some of our governments, who called for sanctions against leftwing regimes they did not like but said sanctions would not work against South Africa.

Taking a stand in favour of Mandela was taking a stand against one’s country’s own complacency. It was a timely reminder of the racist tinge of any low-key feeling of Western moral superiority. The regime in South Africa was a warning sign of where triumphalism could lead. Of how unsustainable it was.

However, I think there is more than just nostalgia involved. The past shows why celebrating Mandela’s 94th birthday is relevant. Not just for South Africans. But for Europeans as well.

I do not think it was at all a coincidence that the era of globalisation began in earnest, as far as ordinary people were concerned, at around the same time that the apartheid system was being dismantled.

Of course I am not saying that Mandela brought about globalisation. However, all the post-Cold War hopes for greater global solidarity and peace would have rung hollow if the apartheid system had not been torn down at around the same time as the Iron Curtain. What credible claim could Europeans and Americans have made that they wanted a new world order if they were complicit in a racist system?

Twenty years later, despite all its difficulties, South Africa is a magnet for migration, like other emerging countries, such as Brazil, India and China, in the global south.

Mandela’s birthday is the occasion for us Europeans to ponder the point raised earlier this week by Commissioner Cecilia Malstrom and Peter Sutherland, chairman of Goldman Sachs International: Is Europe so tied to the past that it cannot respond to emerging global realities?  

Mandela’s broad shoulders give us a healthy perspective on that question. His birthday was the celebration of a grand old man who still symbolises the future.