Mandela at 100
The lessons of the South African leader resonate
He spent 27 years behind bars. He was prisoner number 466/64. He was South Africa’s first democratically elected black president. He served from 1994 to 1999.
He did more than anyone to end South Africa’s 40-year era of segregation and oppression. He negotiated the end of apartheid with Frederik Willem de Klerk, the last South African president who served during the apartheid era.
He went to jail because he was a revolutionary, and that meant that violence was an option — a viable tactic — he could not and would not renounce.
His cell was the size of an American’s closet. It was there that he taught himself stoicism and meditation. It was there that he learned mercy, reconciliation and peace — the peace he ultimately brought to his divided country.
In his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom,” he wrote, “I was not born with a hunger to be free. … It was only when I began to learn that my boyhood freedom was an illusion, when I discovered as a young man that my freedom had already been taken from me, that I began to hunger for it.”
What is the lesson of this man’s life, which ended five years ago and began 100 years ago today? Perhaps, “we shall overcome.” Liberty is in the heart of every human being who is enslaved, in any way. And if he fights for his liberty, however he must fight, he will find his way, alone or in concert with other noble souls.
Nelson Mandela was a prophet who became a politician, not an easy transition and not something he needed to do. Perhaps he wanted to show that if a man can hope, so can a nation. If a man can transform and transcend, so can a nation.
Today, the U.S. is rife with political and racial tension. And South Africans have ousted Jacob Zuma after nine corrupt years in office. They have elected Cyril Ramaphosa, who promises change.
President Mandela brought true change, and, as the poet wrote, “knew it was never enough.” But Prisoner Mandela knew hope. One hundred years after his birth, a light shines in the darkness.