(Related: "Nelson Mandela's Life and Times in Photographs.")

Part of me wonders if the dementia of Mandela's final years wasn't grief at watching the nation he loved and the family he adored become venal, corrupt, and shallow. As dementia took hold and, with it, restrictions on who could visit him, his family cashed in with clothing lines, a wine label, art, and a reality television show.

Crowds swelled at the house he donated to the people of Soweto, but which his second wife Winnie Madikizela Mandela turned into a profitable private museum. Today, his beloved South Africa is a nation of shopping centers and searingly violent crime: a rape every 26 seconds, an average of 49