Johannesburg: Nelson Mandela launched a new comic book about his life on Friday but said he could not comment much on his role as the main character for fear of exaggeration.
"It is hard for me to say a lot about it," the anti-apartheid icon told a crowded news conference in Johannesburg.
"I am not an expert on the subject of comics. And it would be unwise for me to discuss myself as the main character. We human beings tend to exaggerate most when we are talking about ourselves," he said.
The Mandela Foundation's Centre of Memory commissioned the nine-part series with the hope to help South Africans learn what one called the "correct and proud" history of their country, which was not taught in apartheid schools.
Now retired and increasingly frail at 87, Madiba, as he is fondly referred to by his clan name, continues to champion social causes including the fight against AIDS.
The promoters of "The history we were taught started with the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck in 1652," Nic Buchanan, publisher of the series told Reuters earlier, referring to the first Dutch white settler in South Africa.
"Everything before then was written off as savagery or barbarism. Any story that involved heroism was about white people," said Buchanan, who leads five other young African artists working on the project.
The first of the nine comics, "A Son of the Eastern Cape", covers Mandela's birth on July 18, 1918, in the mud hut village of Mwezo, near Qunu in what was then the Transkei region of South Africa, up to his arrival in Johannesburg as a precocious lad in 1941.
It captures the condition most South Africans lived in and presents Mandela as a normal human being who made his mistakes.
Just over 1 million copies of the first comic, sponsored by mining group Anglo American, have been shipped to schools and newspapers for free distribution.
The series will eventually be translated from English into South Africa's 10 other official languages.
The Mandela Centre of Memory says it has received publishing enquiries from Russia, Italy and Canada.
African-American readers and Japan's $7 billion a year comics market are other potential outlets.
At Friday's launch Mandela said, "My hope is that the elementary reading of comics will lead the youth to the joy of reading good books. That joy has been mine all my life, and it is one I wish for all South Africans."
He said he hoped adults would also read the comics.
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