Nelson Mandela, who has died aged 95, was the architect of South Africa’s transformation from racial despotism to liberal democracy, saving his country from civil war and becoming its first black president.
This singular triumph crowned a tempestuous life, filled with hardship and struggle. Mandela spent 27 years behind bars, and more than a decade before that as a hardened enemy of the white supremacist regime, serving variously as street activist, guerrilla leader and township lawyer.
As such, he was the one man with the credibility to secure the political settlement that toppled apartheid and allowed the birth of a democratic South Africa in 1994. Not even the fiercest black radical could question Mandela’s devotion to the struggle and, by the same token, no white South African could doubt the sincerity of his remarkable gestures of reconciliation. » | Thursday, December 05, 2013
NELSON MANDELA OBITUARY PART 2: Stirring up trouble » | Thursday, December 05, 2013
