R.I.P MADIBA

Nelson Mandela, who led the emancipation of South Africa from
white minority rule and served as his country’s first black president,
 becoming an international emblem of dignity and forbearance, died
 Thursday night. He was 95.

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The Life of Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013

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The South African president, Jacob Zuma, announced Mr.
 Mandela’s death.

Mr. Mandela had long said he wanted a quiet exit, but the time
 he spent in a Pretoria hospital this summer was a clamor of
 quarreling family, hungry news media, spotlight-seeking politicians
 and a national outpouring of affection and loss. The vigil eclipsed a
 visit by President Obama, who paid homage to Mr. Mandela but
 decided not to intrude on the privacy of a dying man he considered
 his hero.

Mr. Mandela ultimately died at home at 8:50 p.m. local time,
and he will be buried according to his wishes in the village of Qunu,
where he grew up. The exhumed remains of three of his children
were reinterred there in early July under a court order, resolving
a family squabble that had played out in the news media.

Mr. Mandela’s quest for freedom took him from the court of tribal
royalty to the liberation underground to a prison rock quarry to the
 presidential suite of Africa’s richest country. And then, when his first
 term of office was up, unlike so many of the successful revolutionaries
he regarded as kindred spirits, he declined a second term and cheerfully
 handed over power to an elected successor, the country still gnawed by
crime, poverty, corruption and disease but a democracy, respected in the
 world and remarkably at peace.

The question most often asked about Mr. Mandela was how, after whites
 had systematically humiliated his people, tortured and murdered many of
 his friends, and cast him into prison for 27 years, he could be so
 evidently free of spite.

The government he formed when he finally won the chance was
 an improbable fusion of races and beliefs, including many of his
 former oppressors. When he became president, he invited one
 of his white wardens to theinauguration. Mr. Mandela overcame
a personal mistrust bordering on loathing to share both power and
 a Nobel Peace Prize with the white president who preceded him,
 F. W. de Klerk.

And as president, from 1994 to 1999, he devoted much energy to
 moderating the bitterness of his black electorate and to reassuring
 whites with fears of vengeance.

The explanation for his absence of rancor, at least in part, is that
 Mr. Mandela was that rarity among revolutionaries and moral
dissidents: a capable statesman, comfortable with compromise
and impatient with the doctrinaire.

When the question was put to Mr. Mandela in an interview for
this obituary in 2007 — after such barbarous torment, how do
you keep hatred in check? — his answer was almost dismissive:
 Hating clouds the mind. It gets in the way of strategy. Leaders
cannot afford to hate.

Except for a youthful flirtation with black nationalism, he seemed
 to have genuinely transcended the racial passions that tore at his
country. Some who worked with him said this apparent magnanimity
 came easily to him because he always regarded himself as superior to
 his persecutors.

In his five years as president, Mr. Mandela, though still a sainted figure
 abroad, lost some luster at home as he strained to hold together a divided
 populace and to turn a fractious liberation movement into a credible
 government.

Some blacks — including Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Mr. Mandela’s
 former wife, who cultivated a following among the most disaffected
 blacks — complained that he had moved too slowly to narrow the
vast gulf between the impoverished black majority and the more prosperous
white minority. Some whites said he had failed to control crime, corruption
and cronyism. Some blacks deserted government to make money; some whites
 emigrated, taking capital and knowledge with them.

Undoubtedly Mr. Mandela had become less attentive to the details of
governing, turning over the daily responsibilities to the deputy who
would succeed him in 1999, Thabo Mbeki.

But few among his countrymen doubted that without his patriarchal
authority and political shrewdness, South Africa might well have
descended into civil war long before it reached its imperfect state of democracy.

After leaving the presidency, Mr. Mandela brought that moral stature
 to bear elsewhere around the continent, as a peace broker and champion
 of greater outside investment.
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