PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad – AS I write this Nelson Mandela is still with us. He may even still be living at the end of this year. But this is his fourth hospitalisation in six months, and the prognosis for 94-year-old men with persistent lung infections is not good. How will South Africa do without him? Wrong question, actually. In practice, South Africa has been doing without him for more than a decade already—but psychologically, it is just now getting to grips with the reality that he will soon be gone entirely. For all its many faults and failures, post-apartheid South Africa is a miracle that few expected to happen. Although Mandela retired from the presidency in 1999, 14 years later he is still seen as the man who made the magic work, and somehow the guarantor that it will go on working. If only in some vague and formless way, a great many people fear that his death will remove that safety net.
