In real life, it wasn’t just Margaret Thatcher who branded Mandela a terrorist and resisted sanctions, or David Cameron who went on pro-apartheid lobby junkets. Almost the entire western establishment effectively backed the South African regime until the bitter end. Ronald Reagan described it as “essential to the free world”. The CIA gave South African security the tipoff that led to Mandela’s arrest and imprisonment for 27 years. Harold Wilson’s government was still selling arms to the racist regime in the 1960s, and Mandela wasn’t removed from the US terrorism watch list until 2008.

Airbrushed out of the Mandela media story has been the man who launched a three-decade-long armed struggle after non-violent avenues had been closed; who declared in his 1964 speech from the dock that the only social system he was tied to was socialism; who was reported by the ANC-allied South African Communist party this week to have been a member of its central committee at the time of his arrest; and whose main international supporters for 30 years were the Soviet Union and Cuba.

Mandela supported the ANC’s armed campaign of sabotage, bombings and attacks on police and military targets throughout his time in prison. Veterans of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the ANC’s armed wing, emphasise that the military campaign was always subordinate to the political struggle and that civilians were never targeted (though there were civilian casualties).

But as Ronnie Kasrils, MK’s former intelligence chief, told me on Wednesday, Mandela continued to back it after his release in 1990 when Kasrils was running arms into South Africa to defend ANC supporters against violent attacks. And there’s no doubt that under today’s US and British law, he and other ANC leaders would have been jailed as terrorists for supporting such a campaign.

Mandela was not imprisoned for opposing apartheid, or segregation, in Africa, but for being a communist terrorist murderer-bomber in service to the Soviet Union.

The ANC’s guerrilla force, known as uMkhonto we Sizwe—MK, or “Spear of the Nation”—was founded in 1961 by Mandela and his advisor, the Lithuanian-born communist Jew Joe Slovo, born Yossel Mashel Slovo, who was officially named secretary general of the South African Communist Party in 1986.

Slovo had been the planner of many of the ANC terrorist attacks, as detailed in the book Victory or Violence: The Story of the AWB of South Africa, including the January 8, 1982 attack on the Koeberg nuclear power plant near Cape Town, the Church Street bombing on May 20, 1983, which killed 19 people, and the June 14, 1986 car-bombing of Magoo’s Bar in Durban, in which three people were killed and 73 injured.

In 1962, Mandela was arrested along with 19 others, half of whom were White communist Jews, in a police raid of ANC headquarters at a farm owned by Andrew Goldreich, also a communist Jew, at Rivonia, a Johannesburg suburb.

In the Rivonia Trial, which took place between 1963 and 1964, the defendants were tried for 221 acts of sabotage designed to overthrow the government and conspiring to aid foreign military units, when they invaded SA to further the objects of communism.

The prosecutor, Percy Yutar said at the trial that “production requirements for munitions were sufficient to blow up a city the size of Johannesburg.”

Escaping the death sentence, Mandela was given life in prison.

By 1990, the communists behind Mandela had gained enough power to force his release. Apartheid was abolished in 1992 and the ANC was put into power in 1994 with Mandela as president. Slovo became his secretary of housing.

Shortly thereafter, Mandela and Slovo, along with a group of ANC leaders, were filmed chanting a pledge to kill all whites in South Africa.

For many whites abroad, he seems even Christ-like – someone who’d suffered for the sins of white guilt, and absolved those who believed in him of the sin of racism.

But Mandela was no Christ nor even Gandhi nor Martin Luther King. He was for decades a man of violence. In 1961, he broke with African National Congress colleagues who preached non-violence, creating a terrorist wing.

He later pleaded guilty in court to acts of public violence, and behind bars sanctioned more, including the 1983 Church St car bomb that killed 19 people.

Mandela even suggested cutting off the noses of blacks deemed collaborators. His then wife Winnie advocated “necklacing” instead – a burning tyre around the neck.

Mandela argued the apartheid regime left him no option but to fight violence with violence, but it is too easy to claim events proved him right. His legacy is not yet played out.

Mandela’s support for other leaders of violence is even less forgivable. He maintained close ties to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and backed Palestinian terrorist leader Yasser Arafat. As president in 1997, he gave his country’s highest award for a foreigner to Libya’s dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who’d donated $10 million to the ANC. He gave the same award to the corrupt Indonesian president Suharto, who he said had donated $60 million.