Nelson Mandela was laid to rest today in Qunu, the village in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province where he was born 95 years ago. Even though he’d been ailing for several months and we knew it was a matter of time, the news of his death knocked me back unexpectedly. I thought I was ready when I wrote earlier that it was time to let him go but I feel...

I’ve never been interested in meeting famous people but I would have given a vital body part to have met Nelson Mandela or failing that, hear him speak in person. The closest I’ve come is a visit to a few of the places that will always be connected to him and to his “ideal of a democratic and free society” for which he declared in 1964, that he was “prepared...