THE TRAGEDY OF JACKIE SELEBI'S DEATH.
At the height of Jackie Selebi's unimaginable personal pain, political humiliation and judicial conviction, whilst he was behind bars - lonely, ill, abandoned by the world as he had come to know it, and almost despairing of life itself in a Pretoria jail - I wrote a tribute to him under the title "The tragedy of Jackie Selebi", which appeared on Politicsweb of 07 February 2012.
In the article, after lauding Selebi's great, undoubted personal qualities and immeasurable contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle, I pointed to his glaring failings, flaws and his fall-from-grace tragic situation of being a jailed criminal in democratic South Africa he fought so hard and for so long to bring about.
Writing and saying something positive at the time about Selebi was frowned upon and seen as fraternizing with the criminal, Mafia world of alleged mobster Glenn Agliotti.
I ended the article by declaring that Selebi was "...like one of those deeply flawed but transformational heroes from Thomas Carlyle's "On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History".
I further quoted Carlyle when he declared about his heroes that "...their heroism lay in their creative energy in the face of difficulties, not in their moral perfection".