Nelson Mandela, the former political prisoner who became one of history’s most influential statesmen, the heroic freedom fighter who became the first president of a democratic post-apartheid South Africa died on 5 December 2013 at age 95.

Current SA President Jacob Zuma went on television to announce, “we’ve lost our greatest son.”  No cause of death was given, but Mandela was ailing with a stubborn lung infection for several months and was in hospital for a big portion of this year.  Some believe the lung infection was made worse by his earlier life when he spent nearly three decades in the infamous Robben Island prison, much of it at hard labor in a lime quarry.  Even if the connection is true, the fact is that he lived until age 95, enjoying the fruits of his life’s labor.

“He achieved more than can be expected of any one man,” said America’s first African-American President Barack Obama about an hour after Zuma’s announcement.  “He no longer belongs to us, he belongs to the ages.”

Mandela’s first challenge to the brutal and thuggish oppression of South Africa’s white-minority Apartheid government came in 1952, when he helped organize the first nationwide protests called the “Defiance Campaign”.  That same year he opened the country's first black law firm.

His African National Congress (ANC) party had always been dedicated to non-violence, until 21 March 1960 when the Apartheid cops opened fire and murdered 69 black protestors in what became known as the Sharpeville massacre.  The party became radicalized.  Mandela became the first commander of the ANC’s military wing in 1961.  But a year later, Mandela came face to face with destiny.

“At 1:30 in the morning, on March 30, I was awakened by sharp, unfriendly knocks at my door, the unmistakable signature of the police.  ‘The time has come,’ I said to myself as I opened the door to find half a dozen armed security policemen,” Mandela once recalled.

He was sentenced to life in prison for sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the white government.  The government banned any public use of his name and image, but that only made the myth and legend grow.  And during his imprisonment, South Africa became a pariah nation, scorned by much of the world culturally and economically until the Apartheid model became unsustainable.  Behind the prison walls, the SA government began negotiations

“Mr. Nelson Mandela will be released from Victor Vestor prison,” President F.W. de Klerk announced in 1990.  Mandela and de Klerk would forge a working relationship that would have been unheard of just a few years earlier.  They shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.  And in 1994, after a troubled and violent run-up, millions of Black South Africans would cast their first ballots in the presidential election.  Mandela and the ANC won in a landslide.

“I am the product of Africa and her long cherished dream of a rebirth that can now be realized so that all of her children may play in the sun,” he said at the time.

South Africa still has its problems.  The black “townships” are now suburbs, but they’re still impoverished.  Economic equality hasn’t come and whites have dropped into poverty.  But that is not because of vengeance, Mandela did not seek that against his former tormentors.  He signed the law prohibiting revenge against the white minority.

And despite its problems, because of Nelson Mandela.. South Africa is a democracy.