CNN  —  Ernest Cole was dying. Lying in a hospital bed in Manhattan, New York, thousands of miles from his homeland of South Africa, the photographer and documenter of apartheid was faced with a bitter irony: he was leaving the world just as his nation was being reborn. The date was February 11, 1990, and on TV, Cole watched Nelson Mandela emerge from prison, taking the final steps of his long walk to freedom. A week later Cole succumbed to pancreatic cancer. He was 49. A brief obituary in the