Nelson Mandela, who died on Thursday at age 95, fully deserved the legendary stature he enjoyed around the world for the last quarter-century of his life.
He was one of the most extraordinary liberation leaders Africa, or any other continent, ever produced. Not only did he lead his people to triumph over the deeply entrenched system of apartheid that enforced racial segregation in every area of South African life; he achieved this victory without the blood bath so many had predicted and feared.
And, as South Africa’s first president elected by the full democratic franchise of all its people, he presided over a landmark Truth and Reconciliation process that finally allowed apartheid’s victims a measure of official recognition and acknowledgment of their suffering.
Mr. Mandela’s enormous strength of character steeled him for his long struggle and ultimate victory over apartheid. Even deeper resources of political wisdom and courage steered him toward the course of constructive reconciliation over destructive vengeance.
Mr. Mandela did not, of course, achieve all of this on his own. The movement he led, the African National Congress, was sustained by lesser-known activists and martyrs, many of whom did not live to see the day of victory they had dreamed of for so long. And the country’s peaceful transition owes a huge debt to the apartheid era’s last white president, F. W. de Klerk, who in 1990 ordered an end to Mr. Mandela’s 27-year imprisonment and negotiated with him and others the terms of the political transition. Three years later, Mr. Mandela and Mr. de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize.
Having spent the prime years of his life in prison, Mr. Mandela was already 75 when he first took office as president in 1994, 80 when he retired in 1999.
His successors, even those he personally supported, have, sadly, not been his equals. South Africa today faces many challenging problems. Scandalous mismanagement of the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic by Thabo Mbeki brought widespread, unnecessary suffering. South Africa under Mr. Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, the current president, has failed to provide the enlightened regional leadership many had expected and has helped sustain the murderous Robert Mugabe in power in neighboring Zimbabwe. Most ominously, the end of apartheid did not, and still has not, brought an end to the deep poverty of millions of its victims.
It will be up to a new generation of South African leaders to resolve these problems. All of them will owe a historic debt to Nelson Mandela.