On the South Bank of the River Thames in London, near the Royal Festival Hall, there stands an eight-foot-high bust of Nelson Mandela. It has become a famous London landmark. Mandela is widely admired around the world not only for his efforts to dismantle apartheid in South Africa, but also for the remarkable spirit of reconciliation he helped to foster as his country's first post-apartheid president.
In 1995, soon after Mandela's term as president began, his government created a commission intended to bring the balm of reconciliation to the scars that many years of apartheid had left on the South African people. Called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the body's goal was, in part, to restore dignity to victims affected by decades of legally sanctioned racial separation—not through revenge, but in a morally responsible way. And from there, the nation could move forward with an attitude of reconciliation.
To the post of chairperson of the TRC, President Mandela appointed Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu. In his book No Future Without Forgiveness, the archbishop commented on his fellow countryman's natural tendency toward forgiveness: Nelson Mandela "invited his white gaoler to attend his inauguration as an honoured guest, the first of many spectacular gestures he made that showed his breathtaking magnanimity and willingness to forgive. . . . This man, who had been vilified and hunted down as a dangerous fugitive and incarcerated for nearly three decades, was transformed into the embodiment of forgiveness and reconciliation, and had most of those who has hated eating out of his hand." Desmond TuTu, No Future Without Forgiveness (London: Random House, 1999), p. 7 .
