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 situation— and this was the case not just in Kenya but throughout postcolonial Africa— is that described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, wherein the global vision that guided the anticolonial struggle gradually shrinks to the level of the continent, then the national territory, then down to the regional and ethnic level. The symbols of the nation left standing are the flag, the anthem, the nationalized colonial army and police force, and of course the Leader.

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.

In the South African system, people see the bitter fruition of at least five forces that have bedeviled the development of human beings: classical colonialism, neocolonialism, slave wages, racism, and the usurpation of the people’s sovereignty through the denial of democracy.

But Black South Africans are not endlessly helpless victims of superior forces. Their history presents a people who have been pioneers in the struggle for communal survival, national liberation, and social emancipation. The ferocity of Black South African resistance blunted the determined efforts of European settlers to annihilate them.

Racial oppression carries within it many forms of denial— economic, political, cultural, and psychological. Who does not see themselves reflected in the mirror?

South Africa is me. South Africa is you. South Africa is all the black people of the Earth. South Africa is all the workers of the world. South Africa is all of humanity in its struggles to save itself. If that struggle for the recovery of a sense of human community is led by South Africa’s masses through their political organizations, like the South African Communist Party, and the Pan-African Congress, it is equally true that Nelson Mandela has been its leading symbol.