Last year, Nelson Mandela’s death gave me pause. Not so much music and dancing in the streets but rather a singular moment when, for once, a pundit went to a real place: “The man was not a saint. He was a man. We may not think we can live up to what he did. But what we can reach for is one light within ourselves and connect positively with others in our own way.”

Mandela spent almost 20 years in this bare cell on Robben Island. “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realised. But, My Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”— Rivonia Trial Speech, 1964

In the 1964 Rivonia…