Do we like them?

Do we like Nelson Mandela?

Our score: 8 out of 10. A lifetime on the right side of equality, with real blood on the history of the armed struggle and a slow start on AIDS.

After the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, Mandela turned from non-violent protest and became the first commander in chief of the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. In 1964 he was convicted of sabotage at the Rivonia Trial, walked in expecting a death sentence, and got life instead. That is the man behind the saint: someone who made a hard choice and paid for it.

The armed struggle is the messy bit, and it is worth being straight about it. NBC reports that over about three decades MK carried out more than 3,000 attacks and killed at least 100 people, mostly civilians, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The US labelled the ANC a terrorist group, and Mandela's name stayed on a US watch list until 2008. Whether you read the struggle as self-defence against apartheid violence or as a moral stain depends on where you stand, but he never wavered from it until negotiations began in 1990.

The asterisk is AIDS. Justice Edwin Cameron told PBS that Mandela did not lead on it in office and first spoke about it in February 1997, years into his term. Cameron said AIDS fell out of his agenda while president. That cost something in a country the epidemic was ravaging, even though the ANC had a plan on paper.

He made up for a lot of it afterwards. From 2001 he spoke openly about AIDS and treatment. In July 2002 he wore an HIV Positive T-shirt and talked publicly about a family loss to the disease. Cameron called those moves magnificent, and said it would have been something if he had done the same seven years earlier.

What he stood for never really changed. At his trial he said he cherished an ideal of a free, democratic society where everyone lives in harmony with equal opportunities, and that he was prepared to die for it if needs be. He then spent decades in prison for that ideal and came out talking about unity rather than revenge.

Nothing new has turned up on him lately that we could confirm; what is out there is mostly commemoration and family and legacy squabbles. We did not find court cases against him other than the 1964 sabotage conviction. The record is thin on his private conduct, so we have judged him on the public one: the armed struggle, the constitution, and his slow start on AIDS.