In... “he had to catch up on almost three decades of social ...

Mandela

    Nelson Mandela has achieved many things, but his greatest influence may be for something he didn’t do: run for a second term as South Africa’s leader. As the first President of a post-apartheid South Africa, he was, like George Washington, aware that everything he did would be a model for those who would follow. He once said, “I don’t want to be an octogenarian President.”

    What he really meant was that no man - not even one unfairly imprisoned for 27 years - should be above the law or the people. Mandela will remain perhaps the only figure on the world stage who has been an unambiguous moral giant. He could be considered a hero precisely because he always admitted his errors and then tried to rise above them. And never stop learning. He had to catch up on almost three decades of social change, and one of the things he had to learn about was AIDS. At first, this man didn’t have the most enlightened view. But within a year-long before other, younger South African leaders - he understood that AIDS was an enormous tragedy for his country and his continent, and he saw it as another moral challenge in a life of facing up to them. That’s a moral leadership.

Adapted from Grad Two