NELSON MANDELA
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The South African activist and former
president Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) helped bring an end to apartheid and has been a global
advocate for human rights. A member of the African National Congress party beginning in the 1940s,
he was a leader of both peaceful protests and armed resistance against the white minority’s
oppressive regime in a racially divided South Africa. His
actions landed him in prison for nearly
three decades and made him the face of the antiapartheid movement both within his country and
internationally. Released in 1990, he participated in the eradication of apartheid and in 1994
became the first black president of South Africa, forming a multi ethnic government to oversee the
country’s transition. after retiring from politics in 1999, he remained a devoted champion for peace
and social justice in his own nation and around the world until his death in 2013 at the age of
95.
Childhood and Education
Nelson Mandela was born on July 18,
1918, into a royal family of the Xhosa-speaking Thembu tribe in the South African
village of Mvezo, where his father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa (c. 1880-1928), served as
chief. His mother, Nosekeni Fanny, was the third of Mphakanyiswa’s four wives, who
together bore him nine daughters and four sons. After the death of his father in 1927, 9-year-old
Mandela—then known by his birth name, Rolihlahla—
was adopted by Jongintaba Dalindyebo, a
high-ranking Thembu regent who began grooming his young ward for a role within the
tribal leadership.
The first in his family to receive a
formal education, Mandela completed his primary studies at a local missionary school. There, a
teacher dubbed him Nelson as part of a common practice of giving African students
English names. He went on to attend the Clarkebury Boarding Institute and Healdtown, a
Methodist secondary school, where he excelled in boxing and track as well as academics.
In 1939 Mandela entered the elite University of Fort Hare, the only Western-style higher
learning institute for South African blacks at the time.
The following year, he and several
other students, including his friend and future business partner Oliver Tambo (1917-1993), were
sent home for participating in a boycott against university policies.
After learning that his guardian had
arranged a marriage for him, Mandela fled to Johannesburg and worked first as a
night watchman and then as a law clerk while completing his bachelor’s degree by
correspondence. He studied law at the University of Witwatersrand, where he became involved in the
movement against racial discrimination and forged key relationships with black and white
activists. In 1944, Mandela joined the African National Congress (ANC) and worked with fellow
party members, including Oliver Tambo, to establish its youth league, the ANCYL.
That same year, he met and married his first wife,
Evelyn Ntoko Mase (1922-2004), with
whom he had four children before their divorce in 1957.
Nelson Mandela and the African National
Congress
Nelson Mandela’s commitment to
politics and the ANC grew stronger after the 1948 election victory of the Afrikaner-dominated
National Party, which introduced a formal system of racial classification and
segregation—apartheid—that restricted nonwhites’ basic rights
and barred them from government while
maintaining white minority rule. The following year, the
ANC adopted the ANCYL’s plan to
achieve full citizenship for all South Africans through boycotts, strikes, civil disobedience
and other nonviolent methods. Mandela helped lead the ANC’s 1952 Campaign for the Defiance
of Unjust Laws, traveling across the country to organize protests against
discriminatory policies, and promoted the manifesto known as the Freedom Charter, ratified by the
Congress of the People in 1955. Also in 1952, Mandela and Tambo opened South Africa’s first
black law firm, which offered free or low-cost legal counsel to those affected by apartheid
legislation.
On December 5, 1956, Mandela and 155
other activists were arrested and went on trial for treason. All of the defendants were
acquitted in 1961, but in the meantime tensions within the ANC escalated, with a militant faction
splitting off in 1959 to form the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). The next year, police
opened fire on peaceful black protesters in the township of Sharpeville, killing 69
people; as panic, anger and riots swept the country in the massacre’s aftermath, the apartheid
government banned both the ANC and the PAC. Forced to go underground and wear disguises to
evade detection, Mandela decided that the time had come for a more radical approach than
passive resistance.
Nelson Mandela and the Armed Resistance
Movement
In 1961, Nelson Mandela co-founded and
became the first leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), also known
as MK, a new armed wing of the ANC. Several years later, during the trial that would put
him behind bars for nearly three decades, he described the reasoning for this radical
departure from his party’s original tenets: “[I]t would be wrong and unrealistic for African leaders to
continue preaching peace and nonviolence at a time when the government met our peaceful
demands with force. It was only when all else had
failed, when all channels of peaceful
protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of
political struggle.”
Under Mandela’s leadership, MK
launched a sabotage campaign against the government, which had recently declared South
Africa a republic and withdrawn from the British Commonwealth. In January 1962, Mandela
traveled abroad illegally to attend a conference of African nationalist leaders in Ethiopia, visit the exiled Oliver Tambo in London and undergo guerilla training in Algeria. On August
5, shortly after his return, he was arrested and
subsequently sentenced to five years in
prison for leaving the country and inciting a 1961 workers’ strike. The following July,
police raided an ANC hideout in Rivonia, a suburb on the outskirts of Johannesburg, and
arrested a racially diverse group of MK leaders who had gathered to debate the merits of a
guerilla insurgency. Evidence was found implicating Mandela and other activists, who were
brought to stand trial for sabotage, treason and violent conspiracy alongside their associates.
Mandela and seven other defendants
narrowly escaped the gallows and were instead sentenced to life imprisonment during
the so-called Rivonia Trial, which lasted eight months and attracted substantial international
attention. In a stirring opening statement that sealed his iconic status around the world, Mandela
admitted to some of the charges against him while defending the ANC’s actions and
denouncing the injustices of apartheid. He ended with the
following words: “I have cherished
the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and
with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs
be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
Nelson Mandela's Years Behind Bars
Nelson Mandela spent the first 18 of
his 27 years in jail at the brutal Robben Island Prison, a former leper colony off the coast of
Cape Town, where he was confined to a small cell without a bed or plumbing and compelled
to do hard labor in a lime quarry. As a black political prisoner, he received
scantier rations and fewer privileges than other inmates. He was only allowed to see his wife,
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (1936-), who he had married in 1958 and was the mother of his two
young daughters, once every six months. Mandela and
his fellow prisoners were routinely
subjected to inhumane punishments for the slightest of offenses; among other atrocities, there
were reports of guards burying inmates in the ground up to their necks and urinating on
them.
These restrictions and conditions
notwithstanding, while in confinement Mandela earned abachelor of law degree from the
University of London and served as a mentor to his fellow prisoners, encouraging them to seek
better treatment through nonviolent resistance. He also smuggled out political statements and a
draft of his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom,”
published five years after his
release.
Despite his forced retreat from the
spotlight, Mandela remained the symbolic leader of the antiapartheid movement. In 1980 Oliver
Tambo introduced a “Free Nelson Mandela” campaign that made the jailed leader a
household name and fueled the growing international outcry against South Africa’s racist
regime. As pressure mounted, the government offered Mandela his freedom in exchange for
various political compromises, including the renouncement of violence and
recognition of the “independent” Transkei Bantustan, but he categorically rejected these deals.
In 1982 Mandela was moved to Pollsmoor
Prison on the mainland, and in 1988 he was placed under house arrest on the grounds of a
minimum-security correctional facility. The following year, newly elected president F. W. de
Klerk (1936-) lifted the ban on the ANC and called for a nonracist South Africa, breaking with
the conservatives in his party. On February 11, 1990, he ordered Mandela’s release.
Nelson Mandela as President of South
Africa
After attaining his freedom, Nelson
Mandela led the ANC in its negotiations with the governing National Party and various
other South African political organizations for an end to apartheid and the establishment of a
multiracial government. Though fraught with tension and conducted against a backdrop of
political instability, the talks earned Mandela and de Klerk the Nobel Peace Prize in December
1993. On April 26, 1994, more than 22 million South Africans turned out to cast
ballots in the country's first multiracial parliamentary
elections in history. An overwhelming
majority chose the ANC to lead the country, and on May 10 Mandela was sworn in as the
first black president of South Africa, with de Klerk serving as his first deputy.
As president, Mandela established the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate human rights and political violations
committed by both supporters and opponents of apartheid between 1960 and 1994. He
also introduced numerous social and economic programs designed to improve the living
standards of South Africa's black population. In 1996 Mandela presided over the
enactment of a new South African constitution, which established a strong central government
based on majority rule and prohibited discrimination
against minorities, including whites.
Improving race relations, discouraging
blacks from retaliating against the white minority and building a new international image of a
united South Africa were central to President Mandela’s agenda. To these ends, he
formed a multiracial “Government of National Unity” and proclaimed the country a “rainbow
nation at peace with itself and the world.” In a gesture seen as a major step toward
reconciliation, he encouraged blacks and whites alike to rally
around the predominantly Afrikaner
national rugby team when South Africa hosted the 1995 Rugby World Cup.
On his 80th birthday in 1998, Mandela
wed the politician and humanitarian Graça Machel (1945-), widow of the former president
of Mozambique. (His marriage to Winnie had ended in divorce in 1992.) The following
year, he retired from politics at the end of his first term as president and was succeeded by his
deputy, Thabo Mbeki (1942-) of the ANC.
Nelson Mandela's Later Years and
Legacy
After leaving office, Nelson Mandela
remained a devoted champion for peace and social justice in his own country and around
the world. He established a number of organizations, including the influential Nelson
Mandela Foundation and The Elders, an independent group of public figures committed to
addressing global problems and easing human suffering. In 2002, Mandela became a vocal advocate
of AIDS awareness and treatment programs in a culture where the epidemic had been
cloaked in stigma and ignorance. The disease later claimed the life of his son Makgatho
(1950-2005) and is believed to affect more people in
South Africa than in any other
country.
Treated for prostate cancer in 2001 and
weakened by other health issues, Mandela grew increasingly frail in his later years
and scaled back his schedule of public appearances. In 2009, the United Nations declared July
18 “Nelson Mandela International Day” in recognition of the South African
leader’s contributions to democracy, freedom, peace and human rights around the world. Nelson
Mandela died on December 5, 2013 from a recurring lung infection.
