Madiba

I probably don't know a tenth of the life that Nelson Mandela had. Growing up in the United States in the 80s and 90s, the only time he was really talked about, to my recollection, was when I watched the nightly news and Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings did so.

I knew he was in South Africa and he was in jail, but I couldn't tell you about apartheid or his political affiliations or even what happened to land him prison in the first place.

I was old enough to recognize the importance of his release from Robben Island in 1994, and his subsequent election as South Africa's first Black president. He's one of those seminal figures in history who as both a journalist and a person, I'd have loved to meet. But when Mandela passed away on Thursday, I did something I honestly couldn't have anticipated.

I cried.

Right in the middle of my office, I found myself breaking down and crying, all because of this quote.

I spent over a year behind bars and by comparison to what Mandela went through for his 27-year incarceration, that is where the similarities abruptly and definitely end. The three prisons I had to live in gave me books to read, television to watch at night and on the weekends and a place to exercise. People could come to visit if they wanted to.

And yes...I had to work hard labor. Instead of splitting rocks though, I split trees. Ten-hours a day, five days a week, with an axe, and made about all of 10-15 cents an hour once you took out restitution and all the fines I had to pay as part of my sentence.

By comparison, my time was infinitely easier than a man locked up by a country and people who both feared and hated what he represented. And yet once a free man again, Mandela somehow had the strength of character to leave everything he brought into his cell there when he walked out.

It's been 15 years and I find myself just as bitter and angry at the world as I was then, if not a little more, in some ways. I get so frustrated every time I get denied a job I know I can do, or a place to live, or a relationship because I still have this perpetual Sword of Damocles hanging over my head, and as far as I know, it's always going to be there.

That knowledge is enough to make any man angry and jaded and bitter, not just with the world they have to occupy but also with themselves for putting it there in the first place. Especially the longer they live and realize that it's still there, even when common sense would dictate that it shouldn't be.

Mandela, because of his influence, understood the necessity both for himself and for those his own people saw as the enemy, to reach complete and total reconciliation with one another. It's not hyperbole to suggest that in doing so, he saved both sides countless lives in avoiding what would've been a brutal and bloody civil war.

Was he perfect? No. Mandela had his faults as much as anyone else, but there's no denying he was a great man, and the world is better off for his having been so.

I didn't learn much about him in school, but I'd like to learn more about him now. I'd like to learn how he did it and the reasons why. Hopefully in doing so, I can learn what I need to and leave those things behind in my own cell, where they belong.