RIP, Mandela

 Today, there’s a memorial service for Nelson Mandela and dozens of world leaders will attend. I’ve read figures from 50 to 90. This group includes President Obama and former presidents Clinton, Bush, and Carter. Speakers include Obama and the leaders of China, Cuba, India, Brazil…well, you get the idea. All inclusive.

When you think about this for a moment, it’s remarkable. Across the span of his life, Mandela was labeled an anti-apartheid rebel, became the most wanted terrorist in the world, an icon of anti-apartheid, president of South Africa, a winner of the Nobel peace prize, and ultimately, a man often equated with Gandhi.

 In 1964, at the age of 46, he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He spent 27 years in prison, 18 of those years on Robban Island, in a cell only large enough for a bed and a bucket for a toilet. While incarcerated, Mandela was permitted to write one letter every six months and to receive a visitor just once a year. In other words, the conditions would have sent most of us around the bend early on.

He could have grown bitter. But in his prison memoir, The Long Road to Freedom, he wrote, “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

Mandela became one of my personal heroes at some point in the 70s, when his wife Winnie was gaining recognition as his spokesperson against apartheid.   I remember watching his inauguration on TV in 1994, blown away by the road he had traveled to that point in his life. He had lived through the worst days of apartheid, when blacks were non-entities, without any rights at all, and here he was, becoming the country’s president.

RIP, Mandela. You changed the course of history and we are all richer for your having spent 95 years among us.