It was one year ago, on Dec. 5, 2013, that Nelson Mandela died at age 95. To mark the passing of a man who U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called “a giant for justice and a down-to-earth human inspiration,” TIME put out a special issue, with remembrances from luminaries like Bono and Morgan Freeman, as well as a look back by the magazine’s former managing editor, Rick Stengel, who had worked closely with Mandela.
Stengel recalled visiting Mandela’s ancestral village with him, and finding that the South African leader seemed uninterested in talking about death:
Mandela might have been a more sentimental man if so much had not been taken away from him. His freedom. His ability to choose the path of his life. His eldest son. Two great-grandchildren. Nothing in his life was permanent except the oppression he and his people were under. And everything he might have had he sacrificed to achieve the freedom of his people. But all the crude jailers, tiny cells and bumptious white apartheid leaders could not take away his pride, his dignity and his sense of justice. Even when he had to strip and be hosed down when he first entered Robben Island, he stood straight and did not complain.
Read the full issue, here in the TIME archives: Nelson Mandela, 1918–2013
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Write to Lily Rothman at lily.rothman@time.com