AGE: 89
OCCUPATION: Former President of South Africa and the African National
Congress
NUMBER OF TIME COVERS: 4
PREVIOUS APPEARANCES ON THE TIME 100: 2
PRO: As Kenya exploded, Chad rumbled, Sudan bled and Zimbabwe festered, the aging icon's name was on everyone's lips — who will inherit his supernatural wisdom and moral fortitude?
CON: "Mandela's dead," George W. Bush helpfully informed us. (He was trying to explain how Saddam Hussein killed off all potential Mandelas in Iraq long before the U.S. arrived.) Mandela himself still lives, of course, but in today's world, the kind of bloodless revolution he produced in South Africa now sounds like something out of a neocon's dream journal.