And ya'll revolutionaries better take note because by and large you aren't shit compared to him. I'll go ahead and say he was the greatest human alive at the same time as me so far. South Africa had a horrible government. It's shameful that its institutionalized racism lasted so long, but that's true of a lot of places.
Anyway, Mandela and others wanted to break the subjugation they were under, by any means necessary. The ANC initially used only peaceful methods of resistance, but Mandela co-founded an armed wing of the ANC after police fired into crowds protesting outside a police station. The militant wing began a sabotage and hit-and-run campaign that got Mandela thrown in prison for 27 years. He could have gotten out earlier with an offer of release if he renounced the use of violence against the apartheid state. He refused.
Upon his release, and the democratic reforms, for which many people within the establishment deserve some credit, he saw that the goals of the ANC could be most effectively accomplished through peaceful participation in the reformed system. For him "by any means necessary" was better described as "by the most effective means necessary". A war torn and divided country would not accomplish his goals, regardless of if it gave him power. It's similar to the lesson I was going for about that loser Gavrilo Princip: bringing down the ~system sounds cool and all, but if you actually want to accomplish something, that childish daydream is worse than useless.
Fortunately for the entire world Mandela was too smart for that distraction. His message was unity, opposed to the division wrought by South Africa's previous governments. He instructed his fellow revolutionaries that education was their "most powerful weapon". And that was no metaphor. Once he came to power he did the most beneficial and powerful thing he could with it: he gave it up in a democratic transition, establishing a precedent with the full moral weight of his character behind it.
South Africa definitely isn't perfect (neither was Mandela, but we're all human), his successors largely terrible, and income inequality between the races hasn't diminished. But for a one term president who was in a cell for 27 years his accomplishments are amazing. And he left behind institutions that have preserved a constitutional democracy that is better than it was before him.
Compare that with chumps like Chavez, Castro, Qaddafi, Mugabe especially, and countless other small minded wannabe dictators who seemed to have struggled to come to power because they disliked that someone else had it. They aren't shit compared to him, and they didn't accomplish shit compared to him.
