The World Doesn’t Make Them Like That

Twenty-seven years. That’s how long Nelson Mandela spent in a cell on Robben Island, and when he finally walked out he hadn’t become a vessel of pure rage. He went on to become South Africa’s first Black president—president of the country that had imprisoned him—and then stepped down after a single term because that’s what a functioning democracy requires. He died Thursday at 95, from complications following a lung infection.

Our nation has lost its greatest son, our people their father, Jacob Zuma said in a national address that evening. There isn’t much to add to that. What I keep returning to is the sheer improbability of him: a man who spent nearly three decades in captivity for fighting apartheid, who walked out without the bitterness that would have consumed almost anyone, who then governed with a generosity his oppressors never extended to him. That’s not forgiveness as performance. That’s discipline operating at a scale most of us will never comprehend.

There are too few people like that. Far too few.