While Nelson Mandela was the most spectacular embodiment of the ANC’s commitment to peace and reconciliation, he was not the only leader so committed. There were others, younger and less well known, who had had harrowing experiences at the hands of apartheid’s exponents and had yet emerged from the ordeal unscathed, wonderfully seeking not revenge against the perpetrators but a healing for their traumatized and divided nation. Two such were themselves up and coming stars in the political firmament. They had been among the accused in one of the longest treason trials, dubbed the Delmas treason trial after the small town on the East Rand where it was held. One of this pair was Patrick “Terror” Lekota and the other was Popo Molefe. Both spent a spell in jail when they had met legends such as Nelson Mandela on

His day is done.

Is done.

The news came on the wings of a wind, reluctant to carry its burden.

Nelson Mandela’s day is done.

The news, expected and still unwelcome, reached us in the United States, and suddenly our world became somber.

Our skies were leadened.

His day is done.

We see you, South African people standing speechless at the slamming of that final door through which no traveller returns.

Our spirits reach out to you Bantu, Zulu, Xhosa, Boer.

We think of you and your son of Africa, your father, your one more wonder of the world.

We send our souls to you as you reflect upon your David armed with a mere stone, facing down the mighty Goliath.

Your man of strength, Gideon, emerging triumphant.

Although born into the brutal embrace of Apartheid, scarred by the savage atmosphere of racism, unjustly imprisoned in the bloody maws of South African dungeons.

Would the man survive? Could the man survive?

His answer strengthened men and women around the world.

In the Alamo, in San Antonio, Texas, on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, in Chicago’s Loop, in New Orleans Mardi Gras, in New York City’s Times Square, we watched as the hope of Africa sprang through the prison’s doors.

His stupendous heart intact, his gargantuan will hale and hearty.

He had not been crippled by brutes, nor was his passion for the rights of human beings diminished by twenty-seven years of imprisonment.

Even here in America, we felt the cool, refreshing breeze of freedom.

When Nelson Mandela took the seat of Presidency in his country where formerly he was not even allowed to vote we were enlarged by tears of pride, as we saw Nelson Mandela’s former prison guards invited, courteously, by him to watch from the front rows his inauguration.

We saw him accept the world’s award in Norway with the grace and gratitude of the Solon in Ancient Roman Courts, and the confidence of African Chiefs from ancient royal stools.

No sun outlasts its sunset, but it will rise again and bri

a man the South African government evidently thought too dangerous to be free, but also by then too prominent to be killed.

Colored people had it rough. Imagine: You’ve been brainwashed into believing that your blood is tainted. You’ve spent all your time assimilating and aspiring to whiteness. Then, just as you think you’re closing in on the finish line, some fucking guy named Nelson Mandela comes along and flips the country on its head. Now the finish line is back where the starting line was, and the benchmark is black. Black is in charge. Black is beautiful. Black is powerful. For centuries colored people were told: Blacks are monkeys. Don’t swing from the trees like them. Learn to walk upright like the white man. Then all of a sudden it’s Planet of the Apes, and the monkeys have taken over.

...(It) is to one British colonial policy-maker or another that we owe the Boxer Rebellion, the Mau Mau insurrection, the Boer War, and the Boston Tea Party

Nothing could be more jolting and discordant with the vision of today's intellectuals than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious leaders and Western imperialists who together destroyed slavery around the world. And if it doesn't fit their vision, it is the same to them as if it never happened.

الرجال الذين غيروا مجرى التاريخ استطاعوا أن يغيروا نظرة الناس إلى نفسها, هتلر والمسيح وستالين وبوذا... والايجا محمد المحترم

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

I believe that the struggle against death, the unconditional and self-willed determination to live, is the mode of power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men.

The whole of his life was only one long protest against his lack of importance: that, I’m sure, was what drove him to kill so many magnificent animals — some of the finest and most powerful in creation. One day, I won the confidence of a writer who comes regularly to Africa to kill his ration of elephants, lions and rhino. I had asked him where he got this need and he had had enough to drink to make him sincere: ‘All my life I’ve been half-dead with fear. Fear of living, fear of dying, fear of illness, fear of becoming impotent, fear of the inevitable physical decline. When it becomes intolerable, I come to Africa, and all my dread, all my fear, is concentrated on the charging rhino, on the lion rising slowly in front of me out of the grass, on the elephant that swerves in my direction. Then at last my dread becomes something tangible, something I can kill. I shoot, and for a while I’m delivered, I have complete peace, the animal has taken away with him in his sudden death all my accumulated terrors — for a few hours I’m rid of them. At the end of six weeks it amounts to a real cure.’ I’m sure there was something of that in Orsini — but above all, there was a violent protest against the smallness and impotence of being a man, the smallness and impotence of being Orsini. He had to kill a lot of elephants and lions to compensate for that.

The two chief enemies of the free society or free enterprise are intellectuals on the one hand and businessmen on the other, for opposite reasons. Every intellectual believes in freedom for himself, but he's opposed to freedom for others. He thinks that the business world is different, that because of a chaos of competition and waste, there ought to be a central planning board that will establish social priorities. But he's horrified at the thought of having a central planning board to establish social priorities for writers and researchers. So the intellectuals favor freedom for themselves and oppose it for everybody else.

The businessmen are just the opposite — every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that's a different question. He's always the special case. He ought to get special privileges from the government, a tariff, this, that and the other thing. And it's this coalition that's really difficult for us so I think we ought to be careful of according businessmen too much power, or of believing that they are the major source of support for a free society.

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Why, who are the real social reformers? The men who don’t care a scrap for the people, but take up ideas because they can make capital out of them. It isn’t idealists who do the work of the world, but the hard-headed, practical, selfish men. A big employer of labour ‘ll do more good in a day, just because he sees profit’ll come of it, than all the mooning philanthropists in a hundred years.

I heard somebody say, 'Where's (Nelson) Mandela?' Well, Mandela's dead. Because Saddam killed all the Mandelas. — George W. Bush, on the former South African president, who is still very much alive, Washington, D.C., Sept. 20, 2007