We still like to believe in heroes. We like to believe that it is possible that there are people out there who could be truly kind, truly brave, truly generous, that there are men and women who will lay down their lives for us, who can rise above the petty jealousies and anxieties and be more than just human. 

But there seem to be so few heroes, although we try desperately to create them. We build them up, and then we knock them down. We are overflowing with hero worship and we try to unload it onto whoever looks a likely fit, and then we are angry and vicious when they turn out to have flaws. David Beckham was not, after all, a true family man. Gordon Brown turns out to not to be a statesman, but a paranoid bungler. Barack Obama - it is almost 100% certain - will not live up to all of our expectations. 

There is only a handful of people who have really turned out to be heroes. Nelson Mandela came out of his long imprisonment spiritually enriched, still full of love, and was able to heal and hold together a South Africa that would, surely, have imploded under a lesser man. Mahatma Gandhi stayed absolutely, completely true to his beliefs, and battled on and on and on for them, never compromising or even contemplating the easy route. During the second world war Oscar Schindler saved the lives of hundreds of Jews when Hitler was exterminating them in his concentration camps, and on the other side of the North Sea Winston Churchill refused to give in, even when his country was on the brink of bankruptcy and invasion.

And Aung San Suu Kyi has refused, steadfastly and unwaveringly, to give in to the Burmese junta. As founder of the National League for Democracy in the ‘80s, she posed a threat to the military dictatorship which
had been in place since 1962. Married to an Englishman - the steadfast (and heroic in his own way) Michael Aris - and with two half-English sons, Aung was placed under house arrest in 1989, and remained there almost permanently ever since. 

The junta have several times offered her a passage out of the country, particularly when her most beloved husband was dying of cancer. Aung always refused, afraid that she would not be able to come back to Burma to serve her people.

In the last couple of weeks she has been put into prison. Her most recent period of house arrest was due to come to an end; an eccentric American attempted to swim to the island where she is kept, and the incident has been turned into a pretext to charge her with violating the terms of her house arrest.

She will still be steadfast, in a way that we normal human beings can only gaze at. Any of the rest of us would have caved in years ago, would have needed our husband, our children, freedom, too much to stay so strong, to have refused freedom. But Aung is made of different stuff, the stuff of heroes. She can see the truth of things more clearly, more intensely than we can. Long long ago, before she had married Aris, she wrote to him with such foresight, already drawing on such depths of wisdom, not yet 30, that 'Sometimes I am beset by fears that circumstances and national considerations might tear us apart just when we are so happy in each other that separation would be a torment. And yet such fears are so futile and inconsequential: if we love and cherish each other as much as we can while we can, I am sure love and compassion will triumph in the end.'

Words: Bibi Van Der Zee