Unconquered

The world doesn’t stop when someone dies. We know that not least from Pieter Bruegel’s painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” which shows a landscape with ships passing by the sea, men going about their work on land, sunrise bursting in the horizon. Nobody much minds Icarus thrashing in the water where he has fallen after the sun had melted his wings. A rather indifferent, if not cynical, view of things, but which is not entirely wrong in an indifferent, if not cynical, world. No, the world doesn’t stop when someone dies.

Unless that someone is Nelson Mandela.

I was wrong of course to have ushered him a little too early into the next life, giving him a eulogy last June when he lay at death’s door in a hospital after being felled by lung problems. He already had one foot in the grave, and I thought then it wouldn’t be long before his other one slipped there too. I should have known that the one person who had defied pretty much everything in life, persecution, an eternity of prison, racial strife and the hatreds it bred, factionalism, even the odds that South Africa’s not very outstanding rugby team could possibly win the World Cup, would defy death itself.

At least he did so for another half year. And while death crept up on him eventually, it left him unconquered, it left him unbowed. “And death shall have no dominion,” Dylan Thomas said, and nowhere does that apply more magnificently than to Mandela.

Britain’s royal family was watching the gala of Mandela’s biopic when word came about Mandela’s death, which stunned all of them. Though many knew Mandela was living on borrowed time, his end when it came was unnerving just the same. “Sad and tragic,” Prince William said after the audience had observed a two-minute silence. It’s how it is, and how it should be, when a great man dies. And Mandela wasn’t just a great man, he was the greatest man of the 20th century and well afterward. Bar none.

Over the last few days, the paeans have been streaming forth, extolling his life and appreciating the various aspects of it that made him so. I myself can only marvel at the extent to which he showed how one person could make a difference. “What counts in life,” he said on his 90th birthday, “is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others.” And what a difference he has made to them.

The most jailed among them—he spent more years in prison, 27, than he did as a free man afterward, 23—he was also the freest among his compatriots. Prison did not vanquish him, he vanquished prison. The most oppressed among them—he was jailed in 1963 for being the head of the armed wing of the African National Congress—he became president only to preside over a policy of reconciling with his oppressors. Though he would insist on never forgetting the past, never quite forgiving Willem de Klerk, his corecipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, for never apologizing for the monstrosity of apartheid, he would insist as well on never allowing the past to bury the future.

If I had to guess what made him make all the difference, it was that he was a man of profound and unparalleled faith. Yes, faith. Not the faith of religion, though that has been known to move mountains too—it did Martin Luther King. It is faith in the basic goodness of human beings, of people. “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion,” he once said. “People learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” That article of faith did not come blithely, it came out of the darkest depths of anguish and deprivation.

Easy to imagine how luminously logical it was that the path to uniting a fractured and wounded country lay in forgiving, lay in reconciliation. Not so easy when you think of what that country went through, when you think of what the person zealously advocating it went through. Twenty-seven years of prison, with little hope of smelling the air of freedom again, is unimaginable anguish. To be unbowed by all that, no, to continue to live in freedom in spite of all that, that is unimaginable fortitude.

Roger Ebert, who reviewed “Invictus,” wrote about Mandela’s incarceration thus: “My wife, Chaz, and I were taken to the island early one morning by Ahmed Kathrada, one of Mandela’s fellow prisoners, and yes, the movie shows his very cell, with the thin blankets on the floor. You regard that cell and you think, here a great man waited in faith for his rendezvous with history.” At the time Ebert himself has one foot in the grave. He knew whereof he spoke.

It was the faith of someone who would say in the fullness of his life: “I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say…. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death.”

In the ripeness of age, Mandela would reaffirm a truth others had pointed out before him, which was that courage was not the absence of fear, it was the ability to conquer fear. But the far more impressive thing is not how he conquered fear, it was how he conquered triumph. You look at those 27 years of jail, you look at the harassment and murder of friends, you look at the rage of an oppressed population unleashed at the moment of victory, and you have to wonder how he was able to do what he did. That was courage of epic proportions, the kind that had little to do with the conquest of fear.

And faith, lots and lots of faith. It’s what kept him unconquered throughout his life. It’s what keeps him unconquered even now.

Even by death.