Mandela to Me

I still remember the first time I bought a "Free Mandela" pin.

Sting concert, BC Place in Vancouver, 1987. Amnesty International had a table of assorted pamphlets and wares and I picked the button partly because it was the most colourful thing they had, but mostly because it was hip to display back then - even if, like me, you had no idea who Nelson Mandela was.

The pin did, however, get me thinking. Who was this person the world seemed to think had been treated unjustly, I wondered. So, as we did in those primordial pre-Wikipedia days, I went to my local library and spent an afternoon looking into the life of the man who, by then, had already spent over two decades in prison.

Quickly, words like "apartheid" and "keffer" and the grim reality of state-sanctioned racial segregation in the modern world were burned into my consciousness, sad reminders that we still had a long, long road to walk en route to Mr. Lennon's dream of a universal brotherhood of man.

That same year saw the release of Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom, with Denzel Washington as Stephen Biko. Now it was on. I tore through the biographies and published writings of the real Stephen Biko, then Gandhi, then Bishop Desmond Tutu, then Martin Luther King. With each passing page, new light was shed on the historical, worldwide struggle for equality and human rights.

And yet South Africa as a nation, as a people, remained an unfathomable mystery to me. My girlfriend at the time (coincidentally a native of Pretoria) tried her best to bring me up to speed on how and in what ways racism had managed to sustain itself for so long as a part of the national fabric, but I still didn't get it. It merely convinced me that whatever else was true, Mandela was never, ever going to be set free.

And then, in 1990, he was. Finally, I could throw that old pin away. (I didn't.)

For a while, no one could believe it. I wondered secretly how long it would take before the government realized what it had done and throw him back in prison. But then he was meeting with every world leader on the planet regardless of political or philosophical stripe, from the Pope and Fidel Castro to Muammar Gaddafi and President George H.W. Bush. In 1993, he and South African president F.W. de Klerk jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Then in 1994, the unthinkable happened: the people of South Africa elected him as their President. That same year, he published his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom.

He was 76.

Then things got really scary. After all, in a country with a black-to-white ration of roughly 4:1, one could reasonably assume that payback was about to become, as I believe Plato put it, a "nastly, old bitch". It was then that Mandela ceased being just a profoundly important political figure to me and became my hero.

Determined to prevent a bloody civil war and help South Africa become a bona fide multicultural democracy, Mandela worked hard to rally black support for the reviled national rugby team, the Springboks, at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, then followed it up by forming the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a body committed to investigating crimes committed by both the government and his own African National Congress during the apartheid years. Forgiveness and healing would come, but only after properly reckoning with the past. We're going to do this the hard way, he seemed to be saying, because that's the only path to a true and lasting peace.

The rest is history.

On December 5, 2013, he passed away at the age of 95. Earlier this evening, I attended a candlelight tribute in his honour. Though it's sad to know he's gone, it's hard to stay so for very long, given the life he lived and the powerful legacy he left behind.

Bottom line: Forget DC or Marvel; Mandela's life is real superhero stuff.

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Catch Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom starring Idris Elba, in theatres now. 

You can also see Mandela's life portrayed in:

• Invictus (starring Morgan Freeman) 
• Mandela (starring Danny Glover)
• Mandela and de Klerk (starring Sidney Poitier and Michael Caine) 
• Goodbye Bafana (starring Dennis Haysbert)
• Mrs Mandela (BBC telefilm starring David Harewood)