[Mail & Guardian]
Nelson Mandela is once again in the hospital and as has been the case so often in the past, his lungs are the source of his health problems. Mandela is obviously such a symbolically resonant figure in the country’s history that it is nearly unimaginable that he has slowed down to the point of invisibility in recent years, and it will be a horrible blow when he passes from this mortal coil. In some ways his legacy, and even mythology, serves as a glue for an ANC that, no matter what its critics assert, is far from monolithic and far from unified.