When it comes to icons, they don’t come more iconic than Nelson Mandela. You have to enter the realm of the divine to even get close. He’s up there with the big boys like Buddha and Jesus. Alright, one big boy and one skinny boy with a beard and sandals, but still.
There was a time when the great man seemed as shrouded in mystery as any deity. It’s easy to forget that during his 27 years of incarceration there were no pictures, no words, just some grainy images and the occasional artist’s impression in the tabloids of what he might look like. These renderings inevitably appeared less like the great man and more like Eddie Murphy’s Grandma Klump from The Nutty Professor II (seriously, Google it). He was invisible, yet omnipotent. So when the news of his release finally came, for many of us in the anti-apartheid movement it was like a Second Coming.
