There is more to Nelson Mandela than the genial old man seen shaking hands with the great, the good and the famous. Paul Vallely recalls the persecuted activist and prisoner
Published: 02 September 2007
Every Thursday at one point during Nelson Mandela's long incarceration on Robben Island he and a group of other black prisoners would be taken outside and told to dig a trench six feet deep. When it was complete, they were told to get down into it, whereupon their white warders would urinate on them. Then they were told to fill in the trench and go back to their solitary cells.
Years later, when Nelson Mandela was about to be inaugurated as the first president of South Africa elected by all its people, he was asked who he would like to invite to his first dinner as president. The warders from Robben Island, he said. "You don't have to do that," his advisers told him. "I don't have to be president either," he replied. The first time he sat down to break bread as head of state those same warders were his guests.
i was thinking a few weeks ago about who I would pick as the 3 greatest people of the 20th Century
2 where for me a complete no brainer to pick
Nelson Mandela
Gandhi
the third i found a puzzle but eventually settled on FDR -- by restoring American faith in capitalism and democracy -- even if it was only actually by asserting there was nothing to fear but fear itself -- America was ready and able to assert American values militarily and economically during and post WW2 -- thus the two great autocratic threats to freedom were defeated
