• Melissa Levin

South African political party, the DA, pivots its election campaign around claiming Nelson Mandela. Who came up with this?

• Daniel Massey

The writer, an American graduate student at the time, goes in search of Nelson Mandela to tell the story of Mandela's alma mater, the University of Fort Hare.

• Premesh Lalu

Mandela’s significance can be understood through his ability to concede that the concept of the post-apartheid could not be entrusted to messianism or figureheads.

• Sean Henry Jacobs

The American public radio network, NPR, asked me, in anticipation of Nelson Mandela's birthday, to recommend 3 books its listeners could read on his life and legacy.

• Sean Henry Jacobs

Nelson Mandela would recognize himself in young protesters for whom freedom has been postponed and view South Africa's government as an obstacle.

• Herman Wasserman

The long-held and widespread attitudes some South African journalists share about the struggle for liberation.

• Duane Jethro

The ways in which Nelson Mandela’s image as a referent of South Africa's recent past has been appropriated, signified and transformed into material form as commemoration.

• Elliot Ross

• Basia Cummings

The best films of 2012 with African subjects as their focus: incredibly powerful and moving activist filmmaking that has documented the shifting politics of the continent.

• Dennis Laumann

It's 2012 and FW de Klerk still thinks Apartheid had been beneficial to its black victims. Yet global media treats him like an analyst on South African politics.

• Sean Henry Jacobs

• Basia Cummings

'Dear Mandela' questions whether the history of South Africa's ruling party obscures its corruption and immoralities. And what kinds of movements it would take to challenge the ANC's power head on.

• Sean Henry Jacobs

Revisionism pervades popular culture in South Africa now, coloring our perception of the past.

• Basia Cummings

A new series of documentaries explore the politics of leadership via an imaginative, malleable, deeply personal treatment of history.

• Sean Henry Jacobs

• Basia Cummings

• Prexy Nesbitt

A veteran anti-apartheid figure writes about the day Nelson Mandela — after 27 years — was released from prison.

• Melissa Levin

Nelson Mandela has always elicited divergent, incorrect and unrealistic reactions among his detractors and supporters.

• Africa Is a Country

Nelson and Winnie Mandela's descendants fought apartheid for the right to make a reality TV show and South Africans fought for the right see it.

• Dan Moshenberg

Maathai, who died this week, stood up to the dictatorship of Daniel Arap Moi, and the global regimes of the IMF, the World Bank and all the rest.