Madiba, hamba kahle kwezulu….Nelson Mandela, rest in peace.

Madiba, hamba kahle kwezulu–the translation is “Nelson Mandela, travel safely to heaven.”

I wanted to take a minute to pay tribute to South Africa’s most famous fighter against injustice and racism, Nelson Mandela, who died yesterday after a long bout of illness.

For me personally, Nelson Mandela means a great deal. Bear with me a minute.

As a young white girl growing up in El Paso, Texas, I was a minority in a heavily Mexican and Mexican-American city. Yet despite the fact that whites made up only a small part of the demographic, we held much of the political and economic power. My parents were not interested in living adjacent to the university, where most of the other professors and their families lived, so they moved us to a working class barrio in Canutillo, Texas. There, my classmates and friends were the children of recent immigrants or immigrants themselves–some documented and some undocumented. Migrant workers followed the power lines next to our house to go work in the chile fields of southern New Mexico. I witnessed firsthand the injustices of our economic system that encouraged migrant labor, did not pay migrants sufficient wages to support their families, and made it necessary for those who did bring their families to live in our country in poverty and without the protection of legal rights despite working back-breaking jobs every day. These were people I knew. These were people I went to school with, young men I had crushes on, girlfriends I shared secrets with.

As a young scholar intrigued with the continent of Africa, my heart leapt when I first began reading about apartheid. There are huge differences, of course, and I don’t wish to draw the two systems as parallel structures–but I also recognized the similarities to the system of migrant labor in South Africa, to men being paid wages insufficient to support their families, to the families who lived their lives illegally because of strict apartheid laws about where they could live, how, and why.

With everything in me, I knew how unjust it was, just as a six-year-old, reading a biography of Harriet Tubman, I was horrified by the very idea of slavery. On a personal, professional, and scholarly level, my heart, soul, and mind are tied up with these questions of race, poverty, injustice in both my own hometown of El Paso and my chosen country of South Africa.

I have spent much time in meditation over the words and lives of people like Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Mahatma Gandhi (who shaped his ideas of peaceful resistance first in South Africa before applying them in India), and others from South Africa.

I am ever grateful for the kindness, forgiveness, and leadership that Nelson Mandela showed the world during his lifetime. Ngiyabonga, Tata Madiba (Thank you, Dad/Nelson Mandela). May you rest in peace.