Nelson Mandela has always felt most at ease around children, and in some ways his greatest deprivation was that he spent 27 years without hearing a baby cry or holding a child's hand. Last month, when I visited Mandela in Johannesburg — a frailer, foggier Mandela than the one I used to know — his first instinct was to spread his arms to my two boys. Within seconds they were hugging the friendly old man who asked them what sports they liked to play and what they'd had for breakfast. While we talked, he held my son Gabriel, whose complicated middle name is Rolihlahla, Nelson Mandela's real first name. He told Gabriel the story of that name, how in Xhosa it translates as "pulling down the branch of a tree" but that its real meaning is "troublemaker."
- Richard Stengel
Friday, December 6, 2013
"Mandela has always felt most at ease around children"
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why did Speaker Johnson change his mind about aid to Ukraine?
Over the last few days, Speaker Mike Johnson has done an about-face on the U.S. providing aid to Ukraine. In case you didn't know, a gr...
-
Back in 2011, David Roberts wrote that Republicans had become the "post-truth" party. [Republicans] talk about cutting the defici...
-
When former President Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland to a seat on the Supreme Court, a group called the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN)...
-
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's hand picked board overseeing the newly named Central Florida Tourism Oversight District (formerly the Re...
No comments:
Post a Comment