How South Africa Can Honor the Legacy of Nelson Mandela: View

The great conciliator is gone. Nelson Mandela, whose unbreakable spirit and shining magnanimity knit together a South Africa torn by centuries of racism and exploitation, died today at 95.

Mandela will rightly be remembered as a paragon of reconciliation, a man who, as former U.S. President Bill Clinton put it in 2012, “was willing to share the future even with the people who imprisoned him.” He was the president who accepted his former adversary, apartheid’s last president, F.W. de Klerk, as his deputy; the democratic socialist who refused calls to nationalize industries and sought to lure foreign investment; the former black prisoner who, as De Klerk said, “won the hearts of millions of white rugby fans” by famously celebrating the 1995 triumph of the Springboks, South Africa’s once-boycotted rugby team.