For the fourth time this year, South African icon Nelson Mandela was rushed to a Pretoria hospital, with symptoms of yet another infection. He was last reported to be breathing on his own, which is important for a frail man turning 95 next month.
Once again, all of South Africa seems to be on a deathwatch for a beloved leader. All the world prepares to mourn.
Prayers have been called in all churches of South Africa for Mandela’s recovery. One of Mandela’s closest friends, however, called on his people to release their beloved leader, allow him to go and rest.
No political leader in living memory is so universally revered as Mandela. No political icon inspired the world like he did. Yet no great man exhibited as much humility and possessed so much love even for those who persecuted him as Mandela.
Nelson Mandela’s life is pretty much also his country’s. It is as troubled at the onset and as triumphant in the end as the story of South Africa.
While much of the colonized world struggled for national liberation in the fifties, the people of South Africa struggled against the internalization of the colonial order. After most of the colonized world won independence from European powers exhausted by war, South Africa struggled on against apartheid.
Apartheid is a grossly oppressive system instituted by the supremacist white minority that basically produced two countries out of one. The races were not only legally but also physically set apart. Those of European descent were accorded all privileges and the colored peoples were denied all rights.
The system of apartheid represented the antithesis of all civility won for humanity. It instituted inequality, justified oppression and legalized racism. It was a system that required a brutally repressive political order to enforce.
All the civilized world condemned apartheid. South Africa was ostracized by the community of nations. Every conceivable sanction, including exclusion from sports competitions, were imposed on the racist country. Yet apartheid persisted for decades because of the duplicity of the western powers.
In the depths of the Cold War, the western capitals feared that is apartheid collapsed, resource-rich South Africa would fall under the sway of the Soviet bloc. During this time, Moscow overtly supported the national liberation movements in Africa.
Mandela was a young man when he joined the struggle against apartheid, helping establish the African National Congress (ANC). The ANC has held sway over South Africa since the historic end of apartheid swept Mandela to the rebirthed nation’s leadership.
As an anti-apartheid militant, Mandela was instrumental in keeping the movement humane. He resisted more radical elements who wished to confront racism with racism in another form: a persecution of the white minority. The same radical elements likewise saw the struggle as necessarily bloody, involving acts of terrorism that would make life unlivable for the white supremacists.
As a leader of the ANC, Mandela was captured and thrown into a heavily-fortified prison complex on a small island off the coast. He would spend 27 years in a small cell, cut off from the rest of the world. The white supremacists somehow hoped that by keeping Mandela in isolation, the world will eventually forget the man and the struggle he represented.
The world, however, remembered. Demonstrations continued to be held in nearly all countries where equality was valued and human rights deemed a sacred creed of modern existence. Activists all over the world, especially in Europe, maintained pressure on their governments to take tougher action against apartheid. Athletes competing in South Africa were sanctioned in their home countries and companies doing business in that ostracized country became targets of consumer boycotts.
Confinement in an invisible prison cell did not cause Mandela to be forgotten by his own people. His unyielding spirit continued to animate the struggle against apartheid. Although effectively silenced, he was never reduced to irrelevance.
The South African struggle against apartheid was the icon the late twentieth century’s struggle against oppression of every form, whether for reasons of race or gender or faith. It was the reference point for ethos of multiculturalism and the ethic of pluralism that shaped our contemporary political culture.
From the dead silence of his prison cell, Mandela became a much larger image. He became an important point in the compass by which humanity charted its course forward.
Those of my generation reflected on our values under the shadow of the two greatest living men of this period: Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama. That made us a most fortunate generation.
Neither Mandela nor the Dali Lama are explicit philosophers or prolific writers (although the Dalai Lama has made a conscious effort to share his thoughts by social media). They taught us by the way they lived, by the way they embraced the trials of their time.
Both Mandela and the Dalai Lama are so unimpressed by the mundane things associated with the common wielding of power, even as they both served as leaders of their respective countries. The Dalai Lama only recently abandoned his role as the traditional ruler of the Tibetan people, saying the trivial concerns of the world of politics were too much of a bother.
Both, despite their greatness and abundant spirit, are equally heirs to the limits of mortality. All the world would not want to see either go, although eventually they must.
Both saw the world become a better place than when they found it. Both, free of the affliction of hubris and arrogance, would deny the greatness attributed to them. That is why they are truly loved.