Mandela: 1918-2013

What a lifetime--born in rural Transkei in 1918, herding sheep as a child, fighting against racial oppression, imprisoned 27 years, dying in a world filled with cell phones and Twitter feeds.

A map of South Africa showing the state of Transkei on the southeastern coast:
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ad15/south_african_homelands.gif&imgrefurl=http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ad15/SApolitics-contents.htm&h=1234&w=1014&sz=221&tbnid=8DWbbKOiLPzlBM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=74&zoom=1&usg=__4RNIlfclDaRbuM9hrrkFb8K4Z0k=&docid=tLEb0CuPsqE3TM&sa=X&ei=lnajUvX6HMn1oASrroDgDQ&ved=0CDYQ9QEwBA

I was moved to watch President Obama's tribute to him this morning.  The depth of Obama's feeling for his friend and role model was apparent.

He chose these words of Mandela to remember: "I'm not a saint unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying."

Concluding, he paraphrased the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., to describe Mandela as "a man who took history in his hands and bent the arc of the moral universe toward justice."

http://theweek.com/article/index/253791/watch-president-obamas-remarks-on-the-death-of-nelson-mandela

In his death we all continue to learn from the retrospective accounts of his life.