Nelson Mandela, who led
the emancipation of South Africa from
white minority rule and served as his country’s first black president, becoming
an international emblem of dignity and forbearance, died Thursday night. He was
95. The South African president, Jacob Zuma, announced Mr Mandela’s death. Mr
Mandela had long said he wanted a quiet exit, but the time he spent in a
Pretoria hospital this summer was a clamour of quarrelling family, hungry news
media, spotlight-seeking politicians and a national outpouring of affection and
loss. The vigil eclipsed a visit by President Obama, who paid homage to Mr
Mandela but decided not to intrude on the privacy of a dying man he considered
his hero.
Mr Mandela ultimately died at
home at 8:50 p.m. local time, and he will be buried according to his wishes in
the village of Qunu, where he grew up. The exhumed remains of three of his
children were reinterred there in early July under a court order, resolving a
family squabble that had played out in the news media. Mr Mandela’s quest for
freedom took him from the court of tribal royalty to the liberation underground
to a prison rock quarry to the presidential suite of Africa’s richest country.
And then, when his first term of office was up, unlike so many of the
successful revolutionaries he regarded as kindred spirits, he declined a second
term and cheerfully handed over power to an elected successor, the country
still gnawed by crime, poverty, corruption and disease but a democracy,
respected in the world and remarkably at peace.
And as president, from 1994 to
1999, he devoted much energy to moderating the bitterness of his black
electorate and to reassuring whites with fears of vengeance.
The explanation for his
absence of rancour, at least in part, is that Mr. Mandela was that rarity among
revolutionaries and moral dissidents: a capable statesman, comfortable with
compromise and impatient with the doctrinaire. When the question was put to Mr.
Mandela in an interview for this obituary in 2007 — after such barbarous
torment, how do you keep hatred in check? — His answer was almost dismissive:
Hating clouds the mind. It gets in the way of strategy. Leaders cannot afford
to hate.
Except for a youthful
flirtation with Black Nationalism, he seemed to have genuinely transcended the
racial passions that tore at his country. Some who worked with him said this
apparent magnanimity came easily to him because he always regarded himself as
superior to his persecutors. In his five years as president, Mr. Mandela,
though still a sainted figure abroad, lost some lustre at home as he strained
to hold together a divided populace and to turn a fractious liberation movement
into a credible government. Some blacks — including Winnie Madikizela-Mandela,
Mr. Mandela’s former wife, who cultivated a following among the most
disaffected blacks — complained that he had moved too slowly to narrow the vast
gulf between the impoverished black majority and the more prosperous white
minority. Some whites said he had failed to control crime, corruption and
cronyism. Some blacks deserted government to make money; some whites emigrated,
taking capital and knowledge with them.
Undoubtedly Mr. Mandela had
become less attentive to the details of governing, turning over the daily
responsibilities to the deputy who would succeed him in 1999, Thabo Mbeki.
But few among his countrymen
doubted that without his patriarchal authority and political shrewdness, South
Africa might well have descended into civil war long before it reached its
imperfect state of democracy. After leaving the presidency, Mr. Mandela brought
that moral stature to bear elsewhere around the continent, as a peace broker
and champion of greater outside investment.
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