Nelson Mandela, the Father of South Africa : The New Yorker: I interviewed Mandela in 1994, a few days before he was to be sworn in as President of the Republic of South Africa. I apologized to him for not being able to be at the inauguration itself, explaining that there was hardly anything on earth that would make me miss that historic occasion, but that my son Chuma was graduating from Emory University, in Atlanta, on the same day. And I needed to fly back for it. At that, Mandela relaxed his stiff, about-to-be-interviewed posture, leaned forward slightly in his chair, and smiled, with an enveloping warmth.
“Of course you have to be there. You can always interview me,” he said.
I found myself responding, “Thank you, Tata”—just what a child of Mandela would have called him.