Nelson Mandela: A great man, great spirit, great soul
When I heard Nelson Mandela was dead I was in my car, just about to leave the grocery-store parking lot. I sat there for a few minutes and watched the news stream on my phone turn solid Madiba. And thought about what this man had meant to me, and so very many like me, and unlike me, and what his having been on this planet, and leaving it, will mean to us.
He is the last of the giants of the 20th century, often mentioned alongside Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Like them, he fought and won great battles. Unlike them, he lived to see the world he came up in utterly changed. In doing so he became one of the most profoundly unifying figures of our time, or any time. His appeal crosses all party lines, from left to right; all political persuasions, from libertarian to communist; all races; all creeds. As he goes to his rest, aged 95, it’s worth asking ourselves, again, how he did that.
Of course I never met Mandela. In the mid-1980s, like many students, I was taken with the battle against apartheid in South Africa. I read about him and Steve Biko and followed the shifts globally as the Commonwealth, led by Martin Brian Mulroney of Canada, ably aided by his UN appointee, Stephen Lewis, and dogged by the redoubtable Margaret Thatcher, wheeled to deal with this abscess in their midst. Eventually, economic sanctions were imposed. It was one of Mulroney’s finest moments, perhaps his finest moment, as prime minister of Canada.
When Mandela was finally released from prison in 1990, following lengthy negotiations with the South African government that were kept secret even from his closest confidants, the world held its breath. South Africa at the time, as Mandela recounts in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, was a powder keg. Tribal violence threatened to devolve into full-blown civil war. There were fears of reprisals, land seizures, the whole sad panoply of disintegration that had beset other African nations in which freedom movements had come to power.
Instead, Mandela forgave — as he had always forgiven his jailers, while digging lime on Robben Island. No one else could have pulled it off: Such was Mandela’s stature as a founding father of the South African revolution, as the founder of the ANC’s armed wing in 1961, as the man imprisoned for 27 years because of his belief in democracy and freedom for his people, that he did. He had the very rare gift of compassion with strength — or strength, with compassion — that makes a truly great leader.
His life story is a masterpiece; required reading. From it emerges a portrait, never grandiose, never self-flattering, of a man with an astonishing work ethic and physical resilience. Mandela loved boxing and athletics of all kinds; he loved books and the study of law. He was a devout Methodist; a devotee of Westminster-style parliamentary tradition; and a fervent admirer of Winston Churchill. He was never, temperamentally, a rabble-rouser or rebel. He was pushed, as the autobiography makes clear, reluctantly at every step of the way, towards greatness. His ambition was immense, but a good deal of that was directed inward. In his cell he studied, wrote and did pushups. He constantly set goals for himself. The humiliations and abasements he endured and opposed without rancor — not because he was comfortable being a victim, but because he believed that to harbour hatred would damage and destroy him.
Can anyone be that perfect? Mandela never claims perfection or anything close to it. In fact the dominant recurring sub-text of his story is regret — that in choosing a life of political struggle, he was not present for his wife and children. That sentiment surfaces again and again. He wrote large sections of the book on Robben Island (at one point cutting the manuscript into pieces and burying bits of it around the prison yard, to prevent its discovery.) This sadness shines through in his unadorned, elegant, very clear prose.
In the summer of 1995, I happened to be in the U.K. on a fellowship, with a group of journalists from across the Commonwealth, many from central and southern Africa. We sat in a pub in London and watched South Africa defeat New Zealand’s famed All-Blacks in the Rugby World Cup. It was a stunning upset — one that made my Kiwi colleague, Grant Bradley, cry, and my South African colleague, Charon Chetty, weep with joy. Many in the pub were weeping, in fact: It was the ultimate symbol of South Africa’s triumph, Mandela’s triumph, the greatness of his spirit, that he could don the jersey of an Afrikaner team, playing an Afrikaner sport, and become the magic that led them to victory. Invictus, the movie is called, Latin for unconquered. “In the fell clutch of circumstance,” reads a verse of the poem by William Henley, “I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance, my head is bloody, but unbowed.”
Not only unbowed: Under the crushing pressure of hatred and hardship, privation and long struggle, Mandela’s spirit grew. That is his extraordinary example. That is his transcendent life. And that is why today, I think, so many who might normally disagree about so much, are sad and grateful, together.