To me, and presumably to the 25,000 other people assembled for the occasion, it gave exuberant joy to see personally one of the greatest moral heroes of the 20th century. To behold him standing on the stage in Harvard Yard bowing and smiling in response to our cheers brought tears to my eyes.
Nelson Mandela, president of South Africa, came to be honored but he honored us all with his presence. As Harvard President Neil Rudenstine said to him, “You are the conscience of a nation, the soul of a people.”
Others helped bring out the dimensions of the man. “You have led the entire world on a walk toward truth,” said Prof. Jeffrey Sachs in tribute. And another faculty member, Henry Louis Gates, spoke to Mandela of “your nobility, your presence, your straight back; your unbowed head… as regal as any king.”
Mandela is now 80 years of age, so those words of Gates describe an elder statesman as yet vigorous and dynamic. In fact, if you examine photos of the younger Mandela, you will see a man whose looks, in the way of some older people, have much improved with age. He has come into the full maturity of years with distinction, both physical and spiritual.
Nelson Mandela carries those years lightly. In fact, he joked about his age by telling about a middle¬aged woman who wanted to see him 10 years ago. After his aides admitted her to his presence he asked what she wanted. She replied, “I came to see how a man of 70 looks like.”
“Now I am 80,” Mandela explained. “I am encouraged to see so many people who have turned out. I am not sure if you came here to see how a man of 80 looks like.”
Nelson Mandela has lived to an old age which has brought fulfillment both for himself and his people which he could only have dreamed about. For me he is a modern-day Simeon, that New Testament elder who lived into his 80s, long enough to see the Lord's promises fulfilled.
Mandela came to Harvard accompanied by his wife Grace Marchel, herself an elder citizen, who married him this past summer. She, too, has a charismatic personality which she showed forth waving and smiling in response to enthusias¬tic applause. This column could have been about Mandela and Marchel finding new love in old age.
To me, and presumably to the 25,000 other people assembled for the occasion, it gave exuberant joy to see personally one of the greatest moral heroes of the 20th century. To behold him standing on the stage in Harvard Yard bowing and smiling in response to our cheers brought tears to my eyes.
Nelson Mandela, president of South Africa, came to be honored but he honored us all with his presence. As Harvard President Neil Rudenstine said to him, “You are the conscience of a nation, the soul of a people.”
Others helped bring out the dimensions of the man. “You have led the entire world on a walk toward truth,” said Prof. Jeffrey Sachs in tribute. And another faculty member, Henry Louis Gates, spoke to Mandela of “your nobility, your presence, your straight back; your unbowed head… as regal as any king.”
Mandela is now 80 years of age, so those words of Gates describe an elder statesman as yet vigorous and dynamic. In fact, if you examine photos of the younger Mandela, you will see a man whose looks, in the way of some older people, have much improved with age. He has come into the full maturity of years with distinction, both physical and spiritual.
Nelson Mandela carries those years lightly. In fact, he joked about his age by telling about a middle¬aged woman who wanted to see him 10 years ago. After his aides admitted her to his presence he asked what she wanted. She replied, “I came to see how a man of 70 looks like.”
“Now I am 80,” Mandela explained. “I am encouraged to see so many people who have turned out. I am not sure if you came here to see how a man of 80 looks like.”
Nelson Mandela has lived to an old age which has brought fulfillment both for himself and his people which he could only have dreamed about. For me he is a modern-day Simeon, that New Testament elder, who lived into his 80’s, long enough to see the Lord’s promises fulfilled.
Among current world leaders Nelson Mandela is one of the few who deserves the title given to Ghandi – Mahatma, or “Great-Souled One.” In his lifetime he has demonstrated his great soul through many actions but none so meaningful as those which followed his release from prison in 1990.
The great day of liberation came after he had spent 27 years in confinement on trumped-up charges of treason leveled against him by the apartheid government. Those years he spent on Robben Island, which in “Long Walk to Freedom” he calls “the university.” He and his fellow political prisoners called it that “because of what we learned from each other.”
After walking free at last, Mandela led the nation through a series of epoch-making transformations. Throughout, he insisted on not taking any revenge of those who had treated him and his followers so badly for so long. To this day he has refused to direct reprisals toward his oppressors. That takes a kind of spiritual power which few other leaders have ever proven capable of.
Almost anyone else, unjustly deprived of almost three decades of freedom, along with forced labor and other punishments imposed on him, would find it impossible to forgive his abusers. But if Mandela had given into the impulse for revenge, he would have condemned his country to continued strife, perhaps civil war.
As he approaches the end of his term of office, the president of South Africa continues to show himself a man for others. He is determined to do all that he can to improve living conditions for the people of his coun¬try. And his concern includes the other countries of the world.
As he said in his acceptance speech at Harvard, “The greatest single challenge facing our globalized world is to combat and eradicate its disparities… We constantly need to remind ourselves that freedoms which democracy brings will remain empty shells if they are not accompanied by real and tangible improve¬ments in the material lives of the millions of ordinary citizens of those countries “
Richard Griffin