Johannesburg - An irritable man who got cross when he couldn't have his favorite brand of mineral water? A fusser who obsessively folded his daily newspapers just so, who got annoyed if things weren't lined up in their precise order?

Nelson Mandela always insisted that he wasn't a saint, and by all accounts was quite irritated with the gilded view of him as an almost mystical figure.

He even asked the Nelson Mandela Foundation to avoid using images of his face, which had become a kind of trademark, and focus on other things, such as his hands. He ordered them to make room for other people's voices and memories. But the idolatry endured.

The myth had a price, said Verne Harris, project leader at the Nelson Mandela Center of Memory, a unit of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

"In the process, all the complexities of this human being, all the flaws and elements of his characters and his life which don't fit just get left out," he said.

Even though he rebelled against his status as an icon, Mandela was complicit in creation of the narrative, a myth-making process with roots in the anti-apartheid struggle.

Harris said the original draft of Mandela's autobiography, "Long Walk to Freedom," as put together by a collective of senior African National Congress figures at Robben Island prison, had a political objective: international support for the ANC and its vision.

"The ANC decided way back in the mid-1970s to use Mandela as the symbol of the struggle," Harris said.

In the end, Mandela realized the book played a role in deifying him. The 2010 book "Conversations With Myself," put together by the Nelson Mandela Center of Memory, took a hammer to the image.

It even includes his comments on allegations that he had beaten his first wife, Evelyn Mase. Mandela said he had wrenched her arm to make her drop the bar she had picked up to attack him, in what clearly was a very unhappy marriage.

But there seemed no end to the world's obsession with Mandela.

"What more do we want of him?" fellow Nobel laureate and retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in early 2011 as journalists thronged outside a hospital where Mandela was being treated for a severe cold.

"It's what he represents in the popular mind: the way that he suffered so much and forgave his enemies." Harris said.

"I think part of our job has been to restore the complexity of this human being."