Change can be wrought in the most unlikely of circumstances.
Who, for example, would expect a man sentenced to life in prison to become an agent of change for his nation and a symbol of freedom and justice for millions around the globe?
Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned for more than 15 years when I arrived in South Africa in my 20s. He would spend 11 more years behind bars before emerging into an altered world that he would help change even more. Had anyone asked back in 1979, I would have said that a free white American like me would be more likely to have an impact on world affairs than an aging African in a prison cell. But, of course, I didn't know Nelson Mandela.
South Africa was then run by a white tribe called Afrikaaners, descendants of Dutch colonialists. Following their reading of Judeo-Christian Scripture, they circumscribed every element of life — schooling, jobs, marriage, neighborhood, travel — by race. I was one of five young American men dropped into this odd society for several weeks that year on a fellowship from Rotary International. We traveled from one community to another, touring industrial and cultural centers at each stop, feted graciously at luncheons and fine dinners. There were gold and diamond mines to see, factories, university research centers, museums and, for me, newspaper and broadcasting offices, as well as leisure trips to Indian Ocean beaches and the Drakensberg Mountains.
Most of our host Rotarians were descendants of English colonialists. They professed disdain for the Afrikaaners and hope for full democracy in South Africa, including equal rights for all races. There were always caveats, of course: majority rule could come "someday" and "gradually," we heard. It was said that English South Africans voted for the liberals but thanked God for the Afrikaaners.
Each home had black servants, whom our hosts insisted were paid adequately and were happy in their work. Clearly less so were the miners I met deep underground, digging gold. They lived in ramshackle dorms far from their families. At dinner each miner was served a pile of rice and a tiny portion of protein — a single piece of stale white fish, or two pieces for a team foreman. After each shift, they could drink the vinegary pink alcoholic beverage labeled "kaffir beer" by mine owners. "It suits the Africans' preference for sour tastes," a white manager assured me.
Late one night the daughter of a Rotary host, defying curfew, took me from their posh suburban home to an apartment in Soweto, the black township that only three years before had been rocked by riots at which hundreds had died. The hushed talk that night was of politics. Some of it was in Zulu, a language I couldn't understand.
We were self-righteous Americans, steeped in the long-prevalent notion that our exceptional society is called upon to induce discipleship among other nations. So we occasionally would (ever so politely) scold our hosts for the injustices in their society, prompting some (similarly polite) reminders of our own difficulties in assuring equal rights.
"There's not so much difference between your Indian reservations and our homelands now, is there?" one young woman asked me, referring to the areas of South Africa where tribal leaders were being given limited authority over civil matters. No, not much difference, indeed.
A white woman in her 60s, eyes wide with fear, described a mass rally she had witnessed, led by the Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. She had heard Buthelezi exhort the crowd in his language and thousands of voices respond, with fists upraised, "Amandla!" — which means "power" in both Zulu and Xhosa. She was terrified, she said, as to what power might mean in the hands of such people.
But when power in fact came to black hands in South Africa, what resulted was not revenge against white oppression, but rather a march toward justice and reconciliation. That is because the leader of the new South Africa was that exceptional man who had sat in a lonely cell while we young Americans had enjoyed his nation's hospitality.
Nelson Mandela was born to tribal royalty, a lineage that didn't foreshadow his ultimate choice of magnanimity over vengeance and shared governance over authoritarianism. Schooled in Gandhian nonviolence, he had urged armed resistance to apartheid in the years before his imprisonment when he finally concluded that justice would only come through force.
Yet when he was finally freed from prison and then elected as South Africa's first black president, his insistence on reconciliation dramatically changed the trajectory of his country. It also demonstrated humanity at its highest realization.
Has any one of Mandela's contemporaries achieved such distinction? Consider the change engendered by this man who came from the bowels of a prison to both political and moral leadership. Then tell me, if you can, that he was not the greatest leader of our time. I think he was.