MANDELA'S cell. I stood among a crowd of tourists from abroad and stared into his past: a cage of bricks and bars, as gloomy and as cramped as racial bias in the mind, and in that narrow tomb a bench, a gleam of bowl, a stonecold strip of floor.

I could not hear the clang shook from a gate of steel that bigotry kept locked, nor see a gaunt-faced man fold up each dawn for years the mat on which he'd dreamt.

Instead, far off, I heard the cheering of the world when he, the era's Lazarus, walked out into the sun. Around that unlocked gate, that legacy's stark shrine, the cameras flashed applause.

By Professor Chris Mann

Source: Cape Argus