The world has been abuzz since the weekend over the death of our country's greatest son.
Thanks to technology, his life has been documented more assiduously than any other person in human history. There are more than 8 billion images of the man in cyberspace – and that's only counting those that Google knows about.
There are themes that run through the discourse. The tales of his heroic ingenuity, dignity in the face of certain death, diplomatic triumphs, tragedy of loss, exaltation of love and laughter – all of these have been recounted and shared millions of times over.
Here's one theme that struck me: the idea that youth of today are shallow, obsessed with the pursuit of the superficial, lacking in moral fibre.
There's the corollary that there was something extraordinary about the youth of the struggle era.
It's a train of thought that has occupied my mind much for the past days. I loved the man dearly. He had this uncanny ability to make me want to be a better person. I know of many other people who feel this way too.
What was it that created this human being who more than any other leader of the past 100 years managed to touch the hearts of most of our six billion people?
“The village of Qunu was situated in a narrow, grassy valley crisscrossed by clear streams, and overlooked by green hills,” Nelson Mandela recounts in his autobiography.
“It was in the fields that I learned how to knock birds out of the sky with a slingshot, to gather wild honey and fruits and edible roots, to drink warm, sweet milk straight from the udder of a cow, to swim in the clear, cold streams, and to catch fish with twine and sharpened bits of wire.”
It sounds a bit like the description of The Shire from Lord of the Rings, doesn't it? Our hero lives an idyllic life until his life is turned upside down by the discovery that evil lurks in the world.
And there we see the extraordinary thing that gave us Nelson Mandela. The extraordinary thing was apartheid.
If not for apartheid, had Nelson Mandela been born into a free society, his intellect would have been set free to explore other paths.
He might have been a doctor with his fondness for healing. He might have been a journalist with his fondness for storytelling.
Instead, he was confronted with a reality he could not ignore. “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.”
He sets off on a quest, encounters unspeakable terrors, triumphs over impossible odds, and emerges victorious.
It's a terrifying thought, isn't it? Evil is a prerequisite for greatness. Evil crushes most of us, but those who are able to reach within ourselves to overcome evil become the greatest of us.
It is for that reason that I hope that the world never needs a Nelson Mandela again. Yes, the youth of today are less focused, less serious, and they drive us up the wall.
But isn't that what we fought for?
So perhaps the best way I can say farewell is to repeat my words in my open letter to him in the final week of his presidency:
31 May 1999
Dear Madiba
April 27, 1994. It seems like yesterday. I held my daughter Aura, then just one week away from her first birthday, close to me as I carefully placed my “X” on the national ballot paper. Then, placing the pencil between her tiny fingers, I drew my “X” on the provincial list.
I must confess... I cried. I was overwhelmed by the emotion of the moment. When I left the land of my birth in 1986 at the height of the state of emergency, I did so with an overwhelming sense of dejection, of frustration, of despair.
To be standing in that polling booth at that moment eight years later, finally a citizen of my country, able to look around me and see neither friends nor enemies but only fellow South Africans... it was a miracle.
Unlike most of my fellow South Africans, I have been fortunate enough to have travelled quite widely after our re-entry into the family of nations. I'm going to share with you a few mental snapshots of those visits.
1994, London, England: Journalists at the Mirror point out that South Africa now has a freer press than the UK.
1994, Stockholm, Sweden: My hosts sing our praises for being the first country to work towards enshrining gay rights in our constitution.
1995-1996, London, England: Following our Rugby World Cup win, our trouncing of England at cricket and our taking of the African Nations Cup in soccer, my UK colleagues ask whether there is anything that we cannot do well.
1996, Washington DC, US: Don Graham, publisher and CEO of the Washington Post, notes (somewhat wistfully) that Nelson Mandela is the only truly impressive leader left in today's world. “We haven't had someone of that stature since Franklin Roosevelt,” he tells me.
1997, Nairobi, Kenya: Babafemi Ojudo, managing editor of The News, Nigeria, tells me, “If Mr Mandela were to stand for election in my country, he would win hands down.” A colleague from Ghana concurs, as does another from Kenya. “Why?” I ask. “Because you have given us hope,” comes the reply.
1998, Dusseldorf, Germany: I stand with an international group of journalists watching President Nelson Mandela tell the American people on CNN how he would not dream of interfering in US politics – and then proceeds to do just that with tact and style. “That,” says a colleague from Korea, “is true statesmanship.”
1999, Jaffna, Sri Lanka: I stand amid the devastation on the northern tip of this island where thousands of years of culture have been bombed to the brink of extinction by a war the world has forgotten. One of the first places to be rebuilt after the bombing stopped is the bookstore. It is named for Nelson Mandela.
There's a thread running through all of this that I'm having difficulty articulating. You've had lots of people telling you what's gone wrong in the five years that have passed since that day. You've heard about the crime, you've heard about the loss of jobs, you've heard about the fall of the rand, you've heard about people fleeing the country. Those things affect me, too.
But I also know I've travelled the world these past five years carrying my South African passport as a badge of honour. There are things that we have done well, and the world recognises this. And these things have come about largely because of one man.
Like you, I will be voting this Wednesday. I do so with optimism. You have defined the standard by which a new generation of leaders across the continent will be judged – a standard that puts South Africa and Africa before party politics. If they live up to it, we will do well.