Nelson Mandela

 Nelson Mandela  1918-2013

I envy that he lived longer than my father who was born the same year as he was.

I envy that he inspired countless numbers of people on earth, such as Barack Obama who joined politics after encountering his leadership. I envy that South Africa with a similar population of 50 million had such a great leader who eradicated the ills of racism and opened an era of black and white coexistence.

Although I have heard the news that he became the first black president after twenty-seven years of prison life and that he won the Nobel Peace Prize, it was still a story from a country too far away.

It was only after I had watched the movie Invictus (“unconquerable” in Latin, the poem by William Ernest Henley, 1875, which Mandela used to recite in every moment of crisis: “I am the master of my fate …”) on a plane to Europe three years ago that I took specific interest in him.

It was a movie based on Mandela’s true story directed by Clint Eastwood. I had never heard of the moving story before: Hosting the Rugby World Cup in South Africa, Mandela persuaded the blacks, suppressed and oppressed by the whites, to cheer for the country’s rugby union team even though rugby was a white-dominant sport. Then they achieved the victory in the World Cup with the power of union between black and white.

Later Mandela recollects like this. Oprah Winfrey once asked him in her interview, “How is it possible to have a forgiving mind, not a revengeful one, after such a inhumane life in prison?” Mandela answered, “If I had not been to prison, I would not have achieved one of the most difficult tasks of life, to change myself. The chance to sit in the cell and to think was the chance that I could never have gotten out in the world.”

A great man changes and sublimates himself and his life even if he falls in hell.

How great it would be if somebody with such a great embracing heart were to appear to us as well and bridge the chasms in our society between regions, generations, ideology, classes, and further between us and our neighboring countries!

No.

We should inherit the great heritage of Mandela’s forgiving and reconciling spirit and each of us should change ourselves and achieve that goal on our own.

I felt grateful that I could share a little bit of the same time with him, who upgraded the class of human beings, and I was able to contemplate deeply.