They say there are six degrees of freedom but all his life Madiba fought for only one. And on the day they gave it to him, he held no sword that dripped sweet blood, nor words that roused an army; it was but a simple smile that lit his wrinkled face.

Twenty-seven years had taken their toll. He walked little by little, did Madiba, and as the crowd that thronged the prison gates parted for him, I, watching History unfold on television a thousand miles away, gulped my spit. Respect.

Now, 20 years later, Madiba lies on his deathbed. They say he will not walk out of this one. They say it is time to let him go (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57590159/nelson-mandelas-health-is-it-time-to-let-go/). Yes, the wires are abuzz and the copywriters scuttle about their desks to ready obituaries and documentaries and sketches and clips. Any day now, they say. Any moment.

But knowing Madiba he’ll fool them once again. And with a smile on his wrinkled face and a forgiving shake of his head he’d want to read his obituary.

So here it is.

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela came to this world at a time of great upheaval. The year was 1918. The Great War was coming to an end. The Ottoman and the Prussian empires had crumbled to dust. Unimaginable massacres had drenched the poppy fields of Europe. The Russian revolution was a year in and Jalianwallah a year away.

History has a strange way of grouping people and events. Mandela was born in the same year as the great Russian writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose work The Gulag Archipelago exposed man’s barbarism and cruelty exactly 400 years after Bartolomé de las Casas’ A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Death, destruction, annihilation, slavery, subjugation and racism are the ghostly shadows that forever accompany man, their master. They are his. To stop their sweep is to stop the march of mankind itself. Every particle in this universe meets its match in its anti-particle. Has good ever existed without evil? The beauty of Dirac’s equation only confirms this ugly truth. Life prospers not when evil is eradicated from the world, but rather when it is ebbed. As man and his shadow sweep through lands native or foreign, conquered or newfound, the like-minded join him in reverence, the meek in fear. Only a handful dare to stand in his way. Madiba was one of them. He didn’t eradicate racism or injustice or bigotry or destruction from this world – they still exist. But he ebbed their flow. And how!

“It was a crime to walk through a Whites Only door, a crime to ride a Whites Only bus, a crime to use a Whites Only drinking fountain, a crime to walk on a Whites Only beach, a crime to be unemployed, a crime to be employed at the wrong place, a crime to live in certain places and a crime to have no place to live.”

– from Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela

To value Mandela is to understand not what he was fighting for, but what he was fighting.

Inequality is a fact of life, but the desire to be rich, impossibly rich, to lead a life of immense comfort that would allow a culture, a kind of culture to prosper, books to be written, music to be composed, science to be conducted – is not promoting inequality, it is building an empire. Perversely, it was an incorrect and convenient interpretation of one of science’s unshakable axioms that allowed empires to be built – Darwinism; that if one has the means to kill or conquer, one should go right ahead, that man sits at the top of the pyramid of life. And not just man, but a particular mutant of man, a white man. For, in actuality, what is skin colour but a mutation, an adaptation to a particular environment?

“While I was walking in the city one day, I noticed a white woman in the gutter gnawing on some fish bones. She was poor and apparently homeless, but she was young and not unattractive. I knew of course that there were poor whites, whites who were every bit as poor as Africans, but one rarely saw them. I was used to seeing black beggars on the street, and it startled me to see a white one. While I normally did not give to African beggars, I felt the urge to give this woman money. In that moment I realised the tricks that apartheid plays on one. In South Africa to be poor and black was normal, to be poor and white was a tragedy.”

Empires necessitated a slow percolation of racism to the subconscious, so that even the congenial and the sympathetic were programmed not to disrupt the status quo that was ultimately rewarding to them and their race. Newton, Dirac, Curie, Focault stood not on the shoulders of giants in order to see further. They stood on the dead bodies of millions of coloured men and women. They prospered because their nations allowed them quietly to prosper at the expense of a mind-crushing vacuum that was forced upon all subjugated lands. They helped peddle this vicious cycle. Every invention, every new thought, new idea, was touted as a natural result of an advanced mind, an advanced civilisation at work, spurring the notion of superiority that ultimately rusted their Arab spring.

If this wasn’t the case then why are always brown or black or yellow men and women eternal symbols of freedom movements? Where were the white Mandelas when the black Mandela needed them? Writing a novel? Listening to Bob Dylan? Mixing things up in test-tubes?

But Madiba didn’t think like this. Even early on in his struggle, he had in mind a rainbow nation. A nation where no one will be blamed, a nation that will forgive and forget, will reconcile. Reading his autobiography one realises how entrenched these thoughts were in his mind. Man achieves greatness when he refuses to care for it. The other kind is a demagogue, a show pony. Madiba was a stallion.

The enormity of any task becomes clear only when you confront it, meet its eye. It has to scare you in the beginning, to overawe you – the limbs have to freeze before they can move again. As the young Madiba stood in front of this vast ugly ocean called apartheid, with its angry surf gliding over his feet and beyond and then retreating, he must have felt utterly alone and hopeless and he must have asked himself: Can evil be undone?

“American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bomber opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel containers were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve.”

–Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut

No, evil cannot be undone. But it can be forgiven. Forgiveness: a virtue for many but a sin for some. To decide which of the two it is exactly must be the prerogative of those who have suffered evil, and not just any evil but sanctioned evil. When a state takes away 27 years of a man’s life for nothing, what else is it but sanctioned evil? How could a nation look itself in the eye for those 27 years and not die of shame? How could the words Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika not ring in the ears of the judge for the rest of his life, the words that erupted in the court the moment he announced his verdict against Madiba?

A man was condemned to spend the rest of his life breaking stones in a lime quarry, the same man who would later forgive those who condemned him.

“…We would fetch our picks, shovels, hammers and wheelbarrows from a Zinc shed at the top of the quarry. Unarmed warders walked among us, urging us to work harder. ‘Go on! Go on!’ they would shout, as if we were oxen. Worse than the heat at the quarry was the light. Our backs were protected from the sun by our shirts, but the sun’s rays would be reflected into our eyes by the lime itself. Our eyes streamed and our faces became fixed in a permanent squint…”

As one year gave way to the next, one decade to another, Madiba the stone-breaker became Madiba the vegetable-grower.

“The bible tells us that gardens preceded gardeners, but that was not the case…I cultivated a garden that became one of my happiest diversions. It was my way of escaping the monolithic concrete world that surrounded us. I grew onions, aubergines, cabbage, cauliflower, beans, spinach, carrots, cucumbers, broccoli, beetroot, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, and much more. I also gave quite a lot of my harvest to the warders, who used to bring satchels to take away their fresh vegetables.”

Then, one day, the stone-breaker and the vegetable-grower and the conscience of mankind walked out of prison, and with a smile that made me gulp spit. And a few years later, with that same disarming smile and that slow pummelling with a clenched fist of the air above, he addressed his people as the first black president of South Africa. “You have shown such a calm, patient determination to reclaim this country as your own”, he said. “I am your servant. It is not the individuals that matter, but the collective. This is a time to heal the old wounds and build a new South Africa.”

And at this point, even those Devas immortalised by Uncle Pie cried and showered Madiba with petals, for they, too, knew a tiny corner of their abode in the clouds would have to be cleared and made inhabitable when the time came.

That time has come, as it must. Madiba watches over us from his bed of arrows like the great warrior Bhishma Pitamah, and like Bhishma he is blessed with choosing his time of death. The shafts of those arrows make him stay awake and crane his neck just a little longer as he stares one more time at the wars and the destruction and the inequality and the racism and the injustice. Soon he’d have had enough. He’ll lower his head and close his eyes.

Madiba! I’ve never believed in spirits but, by god, for you I’ll make an exception. For you taught me to be neither black nor white, neither man nor animal, you resided neither inside nor out, and you arrived when it was neither day nor night. You are everywhere and nowhere Madiba, and as your body withers to dust, it releases a billion atoms of love and forgiveness, enough to slay the Hiranyakashyaps of the world all over again.

And for that I’ll never let you go.

This article first appeared in newslaundry on Jul. 07, 2013.