The first time Kyle met the great man was 1996. “Yeah, I was only a toddler,” he recalls. “Can you believe this, dad brought me to see President Mandela and he put an All Blacks hat on my head. I mean, what were you thinking, dad?
“Mandela was full of warmth and kindness. That’s what I remember. You arrive at his residence and it’s a pretty intimidating environment but he was very relaxed. He must have been incredibly busy but he made you feel like he had all the time in the world for you.”
It’s weird how life goes. When Rory was listening to those phone taps as a young special branch officer, he was detailed to focus on one woman in particular: Mary Mxadana, PA to the general secretary of the Council of Churches.
When he became the team leader of Mandela’s protection unit, he went to the union building one day to get his programme of engagements for the following week and there was the same Mary whose phone he’d listened to years before. She was now the president’s principal PA.
“I said, ‘I need to tell you something, I was a special branch cop and we bugged your phone and I used to listen to your calls’,” says Rory. “She threw back her head and roared with laughter. What a fantastic woman.”
He travelled the world with Mandela. In 1997, they were in Edinburgh and the Queen invited the president for tea at the Palace of Holyroodhouse.
“Ordinarily, we’d just drop him at the door and in he’d go, but I was told to go with him because he was in his 80s and they were worried about the stairs. We were in a room and the Queen walked in and with these two ears I heard them call each other by their first name.
“He said, ‘Your majesty, how are you, Elizabeth?’ and her majesty said, ‘My president, how are you, Nelson?’ It was such a special thing to witness.”
When Mandela passed away, Steyn and his old colleagues in the protection team were invited to say their own goodbyes. There were 10 of them, five either side of the coffin at the air force base in Pretoria, just before the president made his final journey.
“Being with him for five years was one of the greatest privileges of my life and being there at the end one of the greatest honours,” he says.