海角大神

Standing in Africa today, the first black American president called the first black South African president an inspiration and a "hero."聽

Whether Nelson Mandela did open his eyes and smile in the hospital room when he was told days back that Barack Obama was coming for a visit isn't verified. It is what his daughter said.

But while such a scene might seem a little too perfect or scripted, in fact that itself is not out of keeping with much of Mr. Mandela's actual life.聽

His life reads like an endless聽series of firsts: the first in his family to go to school, the first black man to open a law firm in South Africa, the nation鈥檚 first black president.

For many of us, Mandela arrived on the world stage in 1990 as history turned a corner no one could imagine: China was asking itself about democracy in the tragedy of Tiananmen Square. The Soviet Union was falling like a domino, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In South Africa, decades of apartheid were ending.

It was a time of miracles, rainbows, unseen hopes, and new fears. Even though it all arrived together, no one predicted it.

Mandela emerged from prison with a smile like perpetual summer and a light touch. He seemed filled with history and humility, and he waved to the world just as video and celebrity culture were hitting a peak. He bespoke the globalizing times 鈥� articulated racial equality in a way that penetrated to the heart.

鈥淚 stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people,鈥� he said. 鈥淵our tireless and heroic sacrifices have made it possible for me to be here today. I therefore place the remaining years of my life in your hands."

Before that moment, the last time we had heard from Mandela was the year after Martin Luther King gave his 鈥淒ream鈥� speech at the Lincoln Memorial. It was 1964: Mandela was in the dock, on trial, facing a death sentence, saying,聽鈥淚 have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. It is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.鈥�

Then he disappeared, and in many ways had died to the world.

During the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, he sat in Robben Island prison; it might as well have been the dark side of the moon. Those years had little silver lining: no flowers, meetings with world leaders, plaudits, cameras, attention. No one expected the Soviet Union to collapse, for China to become the workshop of the world, or for a black man named after Britain's Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson to help peaceably end apartheid.

Only recently has Mandela鈥檚 thinking at this time come to light. His many public speeches are known. But his interior self during the depths of prison have not been. Yet it bespeaks a man who found the strength not to hate, and who, while savvy to the world, also had a separate 鈥渟piritual life.鈥�

In 1975,聽he could write:

That letter (which is included in his book "Conversations with Myself") was sent to his then-wife, Winnie Mandela, who had just been incarcerated in Kroonstad Prison. At the time, many of Mandela鈥檚 friends were being arrested, beaten, killed. The warden of Robben Island took to urinating in the cells and gathering places of inmates.聽

Yet Mandela does not talk about malice or feelings of revenge, at least in the letters. He takes a wholly different line:

The potent fears of a bloody civil or racial war in South Africa never materialized. Apartheid at the time had come under terrific opprobrium聽in much of the world. It is probably going too far to say Mandela preached the idea of Martin Luther King Jr. in the segregated American South, of a love for the oppressor so serious that it loved in order to wipe away the self-harm done to them who act out of hatred.

But Mandela鈥檚 idea certainly was to reconcile differences on the basis of nonviolence, and to honor the other:

What distance the man born in 1918 had come. In a fragment of his unfinished autobiography that appears in 鈥淐onversations,鈥� he remembers his early days with some ruefulness:

Yet something remarkable develops in the self-described young black man, who joins the Methodist church, and does have an interest in the Bible.

From prison, Mandela describes to his wife a novel he read in 1964 called 鈥淪hadows of Nazareth.鈥� It is about the trial of Christ Jesus. The narrative voice in the novel is that of Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator who is asked by the Sanhedrin to judge Jesus.

Mandela, who in 1964 had just been recently sentenced in court, writes that though the trial of Jesus 鈥渙ccurred about 2000 years ago, the story contains a moral whose truth is universal and which is as fresh and meaningful today as it was at the height of the Roman Empire.鈥�

He goes on, reciting from memory, and actually adopts the voice of Pilate in the first person, as he remembers it:

Mandela describes how Pilate agreed to judge Jesus, then offered the public a choice that freed not Jesus but the zealot Barabbas, and then how he, Pilate, finally ordered Jesus brought into the Roman court:聽