When I look back, the absolute highlight was meeting Mandela himself. When I shook his hand, I felt like he was a very old soul, gentle and kind. I know absolutely nothing about reincarnation, but the only way to describe it is that it felt like this wasn’t his first life. His energy was unique, unlike any person I’d ever met. He was comfortable, wise, settled and strong. Being in his company, celebrating his birthday, was one of the greatest honours of my life.

When Mandela died on 5 December 2013, I thought a lot about meeting him and the energy he gave us. It was sad that he died, but he had lived a very long life and had been through so much. He emerged a man not soured by experience but someone who tried his absolute best to bring his people some power and some dignity, without anger, death or retribution. I’m glad he spent his later years in happiness at home with his family. But the damage apartheid did was so heinous and deep, I feel it will take many more decades to heal.

In fact, one of the things that people in this country find so utterly disorientating, is the banality of violence that surrounds them. The word ‘senseless’ is invoked repeatedly when describing violence in South Africa, which provides, paradoxically, an important clue for making sense of it. It is precisely the senselessness of the violence, in other words, that helps us comprehend it.

Even those who then called him a terrorist

Now acclaim him a freedom fighter.

Those who once wanted him gone

Are now shedding tears that he’s gone.

It is said that truth never dies.

It cannot be buried in a hole.

They tried to kill it with bullets.

They wondered, how did it escape?

They put it in chains.

They sent it to Rob’em Island.

They made it break stones twenty seven years.

They tortured it to make truth give up hope.

They tried all to make truth surrender to lies.

They did not realize it was the body breaking stones,

That truth cut through the handcuffs and barbed wire long ago,

That it was truth that guided the armed struggle,

Singing that which had been sung by other seekers of freedom.

You can send us to exile and prisons

Or confine us to islands,

But we shall never stop struggling for freedom. . . .

Mandela Madiba Rolihlahla of Thembu and African clan,

Your body that has gone to rest under the shades of holy peace.

The truth they tried to shoot down with bullets,

The truth they put in hand and leg chains,

The truth for which they put you in jail and detention—

That truth lives on among the people for ever

In the hearts of all fighters for truth and justice the world over.

The most compelling thing about Mandela is how he endured those years of solitary confinement and other torture without ever surrendering to the racist vampires. In him people see the infinite capacity of the human spirit to resist and to conquer. Do we not for the same reason identify in literature with characters like Prometheus? And in history with people like Paul Robeson, Kwame Nkrumah, Ho Chi Minh, Nat Turner, Toussaint Louverture, Kenyan freedom fighter Dedan Kĩmathi, Zimbabwean resistance leader Mbuya Nehanda, and martyred Chilean poet and singer Víctor Jara?

All these figures are heroic because they reflect more intensely in their individual souls the souls of their community. Their uniqueness is the uniqueness of the historical moment. They make history even as history makes them. They are torches that blaze new paths. Each torch has been lit by the fire of the masses, and every time the flame seems to fade, the great ones turn to their people for more energy.