Most people judge a country by what it shows the world, its skylines, its universities, its economic growth. Nelson Mandela judged it by something almost nobody puts on a brochure. "It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails," he said. "A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones." Coming from a man who spent 27 years in prison before becoming South Africa's first democratically elected Black president, that was not a comfortable observation made from a distance. Instead, it challenged governments and citizens alike to consider justice, dignity and equality as the true measures of national character. It came from direct experience of exactly the kind of treatment he was describing, which is likely why the line has outlasted so many other pieces of political rhetoric from the same era.
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