There is a particular cruelty in becoming a legend while you are still alive. By the time Nelson Mandela died in December 2013, the world had long since smoothed away his edges, repackaging a man who had once been denounced as a terrorist — by governments, by newspaper columnists, by young British Conservatives who pinned "Hang Nelson Mandela" posters to their walls — into the planet's most beloved grandfather. James Rogan's three-part documentary series ends in 1994, at the moment of Mandela's presidential election victory, catching the story precisely at the hinge between lived struggle and comfortable myth. What makes the series so unsettling, and so necessary, is the weight it places on absence.

Mandela himself is largely offscreen, imprisoned on Robben Island, and yet he exerts a gravitational pull on every character drawn into his orbit — lawyers and activists, journalists and judges, musicians and pop stars. His half-life in captivity becomes the documentary's structural spine. As Dali Tambo, son of ANC leader Oliver Tambo, observes with quiet precision: "He became more than himself." That transformation, the series argues, was purchased at a devastating personal price.

The resistance, it becomes clear, had many faces and many continents. In South Africa itself, ANC fighters such as James Mange operated at the sharpest possible edge of danger, eventually joining Mandela on Robben Island, where the older man was reportedly startled by the movement's new militancy.