Most of us can’t recall where we were or how old we may have been when we first learned of Nelson Mandela’s life and struggle. But few of us will ever forget where we were on December 5, 2013, the day of his death. I was stuck in New York City traffic, inwardly cursing the driver, and mere inches—yet another half an hour in NYC traffic—from my hotel room in Times Square. My cell rang, and my friend broke the news that South Africa’s tireless freedom fighter had been called home to rest.Coincidentally, I was headed to South Africa the next day.
In Johannesburg, two days after his passing, the mourners flooded the streets, hotel lobbies and retail stores. Photos of him filled the newspapers. Documentaries and news interviews of him looped endlessly on television channels. The hysteria continued until he was finally buried December 15. Acquaintances from all walks of life, from dignitaries to domestics, reflected on his impact at major berths around the nation.
In Nelson Mandela Square, hundreds queued up and patiently waited to snap a pic with the nearly 20-foot statue in his likeness and piled flowers near its feet. Close to 100 world leaders attended his public memorial in Soweto on a rainy day, sharing their thoughts and memories of Mandela with tens of thousands of South Africans braving the rain, a sign of a life well lived. At Table Mountain in Cape Town, the ticker, positioned where visitors board the train, displayed tweets of love and sadness for the beloved Madiba. Countless people waited hours to view his body in Pretoria, with many being turned away on the final day.
Related: Life Lessons From Nelson Mandela, 1918 – 2013
It’s nearly impossible to articulate what Nelson Mandela meant to his country. “When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace,” he said 10 years prior to his passing when accepting an honorary doctorate of laws at the National University of Ireland in Galway. And Mandela definitely earned this right.
“I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances,” he wrote in his 1994 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. His fight against the institutionalized segregation and brutality of apartheid transformed him into a leader among leaders. In his native language of Xhosa, Rolihlahla, the name his father gave him when he was born July 18, 1918, means, “pulling the branch of a tree” or, more colloquially, “troublemaker.” And did he ever live up to his name.
In the 1940s, Mandela discovered kindred spirits at the African National Congress, launched just three years after this country’s NAACP, from which it was largely modeled. By the time the ANC’s Defiance Campaign, which mirrored the tactics the civil rights movement used to topple America’s apartheid (Jim Crow), launched in 1952, Mandela had become a lawyer, even opening South Africa’s first black law firm with Oliver Tambo that same year.
Like Martin Luther King, Jr., he rallied the troops with his thunderous oratory. He also walked the walk. He defied “whites only” signs, publicly mingled with white and Indian South Africans and marched without permits. As a result, he shuffled in and out of jail. More like Malcolm X, however, he was dedicated to achieving freedom “by any means necessary.” When the South African government banned the ANC in response to world outrage over the Sharpeville Massacre on March 21, 1960, in which police fired on thousands of peaceful demonstrators, leaving 69 dead and nearly 200 others seriously injured, he went underground and engaged in actions some deemed “terroristic” and others found were “justified.”
During the historic Rivonia Trial in 1964, Mandela, along with the nine other captured ANC leaders, surely facing death, stood in the courtroom and reiterated his unwavering commitment to “the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.” Although he firmly stated that, “It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve,” he also let it be known, “But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” Instead, he spent 27 years imprisoned— away from his wife Winnie and his children—mostly at the notorious Robben Island. As he patiently served, his supporters in South Africa and around the world demonstrated for his freedom in the streets, on college campuses and in government halls, calling for an end to apartheid through boycotts and other means.
His release from prison February 11, 1990 was celebrated all over the world, with him touring Africa and beyond, including several U.S. cities, but his mission was hardly completed. Working with the racist South African government, through political moderate, and South Africa’s President, F.W. de Klerk, he helped end apartheid, and both men shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. The world watched as the formerly oppressive country held its first democratic free elections in 1994, and, in poetic justice, selected the former prisoner to serve as its first black president.
Instead of enacting revenge, Mandela, in true Christian teaching, forgave and embraced his captors, from government officials to the guards who tormented him for nearly three decades. “People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite,” Mandela often said. Even after stepping down as president in 1999, he remained active on the world stage. That work played a significant role in South Africa hosting the World Cup in 2010.
“We will never see the likes of Nelson Mandela again,” President Obama said at his public memorial. “What a magnificent soul it was,” he proclaimed. “We will miss him deeply.”