It's taken a long time for us to let you go, Madiba. For several years, even as your health faltered irreparably and rumours of your increasing fragility could no longer be denied, the world refused to release its hold. We said prayers, sent love and held vigils until we had brought our Madiba — a man who had lived longer than most — back to life. Such was our belief in the immortality of our hero that we were incapable of relinquishing you.
But now, despite our efforts, you are gone. I said my own private goodbye almost two years ago, when I visited Robben Island on a trip back to my homeland. As the ferry skated across Table Bay, a cold wind blew in through one of its hatches. A young man made everyone laugh when he said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, we will vote to have this door open or closed. This is a free and fair election — you will only be allowed to vote once!'
I had left the country a decade earlier, and was touched by the benign, self-deprecating tone so many black South Africans now adopted when referencing the past. The country's social undertone had transformed so radically I felt I could pluck a chunk of it from the atmosphere and take it home with me.
'Race relations', as the stilted interaction between black, white, Indian, coloured and Asian South Africans had been peculiarly labelled during apartheid, were so natural now as to be invisible; the lack of tension was tangible, the normalisation apparent to all of us who had grown up in the dystopia that preceded democracy.
Two decades after those first free elections, it was your warmth and forgiveness, Madiba, that was now being emulated by so many South Africans. That journey across Table Bay, towards the tiny green cell in which you lived for much of your 27-year incarceration, took me not so much to an outpost of apartheid as to the birthplace of democratic South Africa.
Robben Island and the icy, steel-grey ocean that swirls around it are metaphors for pain and loss and eventual triumph: 68 ships lie wrecked around here, mangled by an angry, unforgiving sea; the bones of the imprisoned Xhosa prophet Makhanda, who drowned while trying to escape to the mainland in 1820, have crumbled into the seabed; the graves of those who lived here across the centuries