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.

What looked like a rainbow, therefore, was never a rainbow to begin with - and this was certainly not because Mandela ‘sold out’, as young radicals nowadays seem determined to believe. Indeed, that is the kind of retrospective judgement that can only be made by people who did not sit in jail for twenty-seven years. That there appeared to be a rainbow was only because South Africans did what human being ordinarily do: rather than confront the monsters of our deep, we chose instead to believe that they were no longer there. In the inspired words of James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

The two incidents brought home to me the meaning of Mandela’s introspective tone. The country was literally on the verge of a bloodbath, and he knew it. He held the key to its stability. Despite his calm demeanor, this must have weighed on him.

He held the nation together for the five years that he was president, guided by the realization that there is no room for vengeance in good politics. It is easier to tear down than to build up. In his one term, he showed his faith in the ANC and the people.

Nine days earlier, when F.W. de Klerk announced that Mandela would be free, a nine-year-old girl I know greeted the news by jumping up and down and urging her mother, “Please, let's make a big card and send it to Mandela. It’s say, ‘Welcome home, Baba Mandela!’” The girl and her mother lived in Newark, and in 1963, when Mandela had been jailed for life, the mother Kenyan had been only a baby. Quite clearly, Mandela is in the minds and hearts of several generations— all of whom value human freedom— in Africa and the world.

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.