by Cory Woodroof | Dec 6, 2013 | News Slider
A man who changed the world over his 95 years — a man President Bill Clinton said, in an interview on NBC, was in a class shared only by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. – Nelson Mandela has died. To many, he’s known as a ground-breaking politician and social reformer who helped heal South Africa from the wounds of apartheid, a system of racial prejudice and social injustice literally meaning “the state of being apart” that sometimes violently discriminated against black residents and kept the minority white Afrikaners in power from 1948-1994. Tributes and memories have been pouring in from all over the world on television, on the internet and in newspapers. The importance of this man and significance of his loss reaches all the way to Lipscomb University, not only because the changes he led affected the entire world, but because there are students from South Africa who today are themselves remembering and asking what’s next? South African Miguel Hof, a sophomore and Bisons soccer player, says Mandela’s passing signifies the end of an era. “Obviously, it’s a tremendous blow for our country,” Hof said. “Because, if it wasn’t for Mandela, we would’ve most probably had a civil war in 1994 after the apartheid.” When Mandela – who served 27 years in prison for his youthful battles against apartheid – was released in 1990, he worked for peaceful resolution of the institution and worked with the white government to end apartheid and establish democratic elections in 1994, when he was elected president of his homeland. Instead of coming out of prison embittered and preaching revolution, Mandela focused...
