In the course of his lifetime, Nelson Mandela saw his elevation in the West from terrorist to secular sainthood. The world’s media continues churning out headline after headline on his life and legacy, remembering him as one of the exemplary moral figures of the twentieth century alongside the likes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Mandela is lauded as a hero by everyone from Lindsey Lohan to ex-apartheid apologists like British Prime Minister David Cameron. Yet he wasn’t a pacifist, a tame advocate of nonviolence, an non-ideological figure of singular moral righteousness. He was an exemplary revolutionary, fueled by political commitment.

Yet while Mandela was certainly a “great historical figure,” too many of the obituaries and tributes published so far have been unable to move beyond hagiography or platitude. Far too little critical reflection on his actual political legacy or analysis of the nature and dangers of the Mandela mythologies has been written so far. The image of a progressive “rainbow nation” generally on the right track invoked in many of these pieces bares little relation to the actual social realities of post-apartheid South Africa.