South Africa has a lesson for the whole world

Few people in the world generate more consensus than the South African politician Nelson Mandela. His story is unrepeatable: after almost three decades in prison, imprisoned by the white supremacist regime that had ruled South Africa since 1948, Mandela won the country's first democratic elections in 1994 . With the support of the majority of the black population, he governed without a spirit of revenge against the whites who had turned racial segregation into a state policy. Many whites, who feared being expropriated and losing everything at the hands of an extremist leader, were surprised by the kindness of Mandela – whom, a few years earlier, many had considered a dangerous terrorist–.