nelson mandela biography in isizulu

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Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

Childhood in the Eastern Cape

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was the son of Nonqaphi Nosekeni and Henry Mgadla Mandela, a chief and chief councillor to the paramount chief of the Thembu and a member of the Madiba clan. Mandela’s original name was Rolihlahla, which literally means ‘pulling the branch of a tree’, or colloquially, ‘troublemaker’. He was given the name, ‘Nelson’, by his White missionary school teacher at the age of seven. He has also been known as Dalibunga, his circumcision name, as well as Madiba, his clan name. His father,  Mgadla, was one of the grandsons of Ngubengcuka, a king of the abaThembu and leader of the Madiba clan.

Mgadla Mandela, in line with the traditional leadership structures, was chief of the Mvezo district.  Mgadla was a traditionalist and  Nonqaphi was his third wife. He was involved in a minor dispute with the local White magistrate regarding cattle and refused a summons to appear before the magistrate as he did not believe that the matter fell under the colonial government's purview. As a result, he was charged with insubordination and the colonial authorities stripped him of his chieftainship,  land and cattle on the 1 October 1926 without any consultation with the Paramount Chief, Sampu Jongilizwe. The Mandela family was thus forced to move to Qunu, a little village in the Eastern Cape. Mgadla Mandela was known to be a close confident and senior councillor to his cousin, King (Paramount Chief) Jongintaba Dalindyebo whom Mgadla recommended for the position in 1928.. Another factor in Jongintaba's election was the fact that the chosen heir, Sabata Dalindyebo, was too young to rule as Paramount Chief. In 1930 when his father died, Mandela was placed under the care of Jongintaba. The adoption into the royal abaThembu family meant that Mandela moved from Qunu to ‘the Great Place’ at Mqhekezweni.  

In 1934, at 16 years old, Mandela went to initiation school to undergo ulwaluko, a traditional ceremony that whereby young boys transition into manhood (For more information on this ceremony, click here ).  In the same year, Mandela enrolled at Clarkebury , a school run by C.C Harris. It was here that Mandela was first introduced to a western style of education.  At the age of 19, Mandela was enrolled at Healdtown , the Wesleyan College of Fort Beaufort, which was a Mission School of the Methodist Church. Healdtown was the largest school for Africans with more than a thousand students. The school  curriculum focused on British history but his history teacher, Weaver Newana, added his own oral history about the wars between the British and amaXhosa. Mandela’s nephew, Justice Dalindyebo, four years his senior, was already enrolled at the school. . Mandela was the first member of his family to attend high school and he developed a love for boxing and long-distance running. He also developed a great interest in African culture (under the influence of his teacher, Mr Newana). He matriculated at Healdtown Methodist Boarding School in 1938 and as such, formed part of a very small number of black pupils who had attained a high school education in South Africa.

The patronage of Mandela’s relative, Paramount Chief Dalindyebo, resulted in Mandela joining the Regent’s son, Justice, at the University of Fort Hare , near Alice in the Eastern Cape , the only university for Blacks (African, Coloured and Indian) in South Africa at the time. At Fort Hare, Mandela befriended African, Indian and Coloured students, many of whom went on to play leading roles in the South African liberation struggle and in the anti-colonial struggle in some African countries. One of Mandela’s fellow students was Oliver Tambo . They would later become partners in their law firm, close comrades and lifelong friends. Another notable friend Mandela made at Fort Hare was Kaizer Daliwonga Matanzima , a man who would become a political opponent. By law and custom, Matanzima was also Mandela’s nephew as they came from the same royal family. Mandela did not complete his degree at Fort Hare. He was involved in a dispute related to elections of the Student Representative Council (SRC) in 1940. Mandela refused to take his seat on the council as the majority of the students had not voted in the election. This was due to a boycott of the elections over university food and desire among the students to give more power to the SRC. After he rejected the university’s ultimatum to take his elected seat or face expulsion, the university gave him until the end of the student holidays to think the matter through, but he felt there were principles at stake that could not be compromised. He informed his guardian that he would not be returning to Fort Hare.

The move to Johannesburg

The Regent had also made arrangements for his son Justice and Mandela to marry two young women chosen by the Regent. Both young men decided to defy the Regent, stole two of his cattle and used them to raise funds to secretly leave for Johannesburg . Once there, Justice took a job as a clerk with Crown Mines which had been arranged for him by his father some months earlier. Justice then approached a headman, or induna, who was employed at the mine to give Mandela a job as a mine policeman. An induna typically acted as a second in command to a chief. In the apartheid era, this had evolved into something new. The induna would act with the chief’s authority at the mine compounds, ensuring that the rule of law was maintained among the men when they were away from home. Within days of arriving, both Justice and Mandela were dismissed when the induna learnt they had defied Dalindyebo and had left Mqhekezweni. Mandela found temporary lodging in Alexandra townships and communicated to the Regent his regret about defying and disrespecting him. Mandela convinced Chief Dalindyebo that he wanted to further his study in Johannesburg and received the Regent’s consent to remain in Johannesburg as well as financial support.

A few months into his stay in Johannesburg, Mandela was introduced to a young estate agent named Walter Sisulu , who immediately took him under his wing. Sisulu had joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1940 and would prove to have a great influence over Mandela as a lifelong friend, political mentor and closest political confident. Mandela moved in with Sisulu and his mother in their home in Orlando, Soweto . Furthermore, Sisulu found Mandela a White firm of attorneys who were prepared to give him a job and register him as an articled clerk, an exceedingly rare offer in segregated South Africa. While working at the firm, Mandela enrolled for a BA degree in law at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) after completing his BA from Fort Hare University via correspondence. At Wits, he befriended fellow students I.C. Meer , J.N.Singh , Joe Slovo and Ruth First , all of whom were members of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) [later renamed as the South African Communist Party (SACP)]. Mandela became very close to I.C. Meer and J.N. Singh, both of whom played leading roles under the leadership of Dr. Yusuf Dadoo in making the Transvaal and Natal Indian Congress es become mass-based and militant organisations. Both Meer and Singh would serve prison terms during the 1946 Indian Passive Resistance campaign .

Political beginnings

In 1944, Mandela joined the African National Congress (ANC) and soon became part of a group of young intellectuals that included Walter Sisulu , Oliver Tambo , Anton Lembede , and Ashley Mda . The group articulated its dissatisfaction with the way the ANC was being run, critiqued its policy of appeasement, and became the driving force in the formation of the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) in April of the same year. Influenced by the Natal and Transvaal Indian Congresses’ Passive Resistance campaign of 1946 and the 1946   Mineworkers  Strike , the ANC Youth League, led by Mandela, Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, began drafting what came to be known as the Programme of Action for the ANC. This called for the ANC to become a more militant organisation, and would only be adopted by the ANCYL’s parent organisation in 1949. One can view the tangential influence of Mandela’s friendship with I.C Meer and J.N Singh here, as they were involved in the Indian Passive Resistance Campaign which proved so influential in guiding the ANC’s future resistance movements.

On 15 July 1944, Mandela married Evelyn Mase, a nurse at Johannesburg General Hospital and Walter Sisulu's cousin. The newlyweds moved to live with Evelyn's married sister in Orlando and became neighbours with Es'kia Mphalele , a teacher and later a noted scholar, journalist, writer and activist. In 1945, Evelyn Mandela gave birth to the couple's first child, a boy named Madiba Thembekile (Thembi for short). They were able to get a council house in Orlando, which had three rooms but neither electricity nor an inside toilet. Mandela's younger sister, Nomabandla (Leaby), came to live with them and enrolled at Orlando High School. Evelyn was the breadwinner in the family while Mandela studied law at Wits where he devoted much of his time to politics. Evelyn was described by Nomabandla as not wanting to hear a thing about politics, yet she was very supportive of her politically minded husband. However, Mandela’s busy political and academic life meant that the burden of care-giving and homemaking also fell to Evelyn, in addition to her role as breadwinner. In 1946, Mandela and Evelyn had their second child, a daughter named Makaziwe. Makaziwe would tragically pass away at 9 months old.

In 1948, the National Party (NP) narrowly won a Whites-only national election on the platform of a new policy of total racial segregation called apartheid (which translates from Afrikaans as ‘apartness’). By this stage, Mandela was National Secretary of the ANCYL. Mandela, Sisulu and Tambo began lobbying the ANC to embark on militant mass action against a plethora of new segregationist laws that the Nationalist Party were drawing up to give effect to the new policy apartheid. The lobbying paid off as at the ANC’s annual conference in December 1949, the Youth League’s Programme of Action was adopted by the parent organization. From an organisation which believed  it could, through persuasion, wring concessions from the White government, the ANC now became a militant liberation movement. The Programme of Action called on the ANC to embark on mass action, involving civil disobedience, strikes, boycotts and other forms of non-violent resistance. Furthering the ideological influence of the ANCYL on the ANC as a whole, Walter Sisulu was elected as Secretary General at the conference.

From its inception the ANCYL was heavily influenced by the strident African nationalism espoused by its inaugural President, Anton Lembede. His biography on this site states that "[h]e is best remembered for his passionate and eloquent articulation of an African-centred philosophy of nationalism that he called "Africanism". A call to arms for Africans to wage an aggressive campaign against white domination, Africanism asserted that in order to advance the freedom struggle, Africans first had to turn inward. They had to shed their feelings of inferiority and redefine their self-image, rely on their own resources, and unite and mobilize as a national group around their own leaders. Though African nationalism remains to this day a vibrant strand of African political thought in South Africa, Lembede stands out as the first to have constructed a philosophy of African nationalism. Mandela was a strong advocate of the Lembede line that the ANC should stand on its own and not enter into alliances with the Indian Congress, the Communist Party or the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM). Indeed, the Youth League’s policy of going it alone brought it into tension with the older generation ANC and led to the League opposing some of the most important campaigns of the 1940s, including the Mine Workers Strike , the Indian Passive Resistance Campaign and the cooperation pact signed between the ANC President Dr Xuma and the South African Indian Congress (the ‘Doctor’s Pact’ ).

Political campaigns

In 1950, when the CPSA, the Transvaal and Natal Indian Congresses, and the newly elected ANC President-General Dr James Sebe Moroka jointly endorsed the Defend Free Speech Convention, Mandela, along with the rest of the ANCYL leadership, was strident in his criticism. The Youth League believed that the endorsement by Dr Moroka undermined the ANC’s Programme of Action. Notwithstanding his Africanist political stance, Mandela did not allow the issue to influence his personal relationships with Indian, White and African communist leaders. A pivotal moment in the struggle against apartheid came in May, 1950. At the Convention, the represented parties called for a national strike to protest the proposed banning of the Communist Party. Once again,  the ANCYL opposed the organisation of this strike. Elinor Sisulu writes, in her book ‘Walter and Albertina Sisulu: In Our Lifetime’ that “[t]he Youth Leaguers opposed the strike because the ANC had not initiated the campaign.  They saw the decision to hold a May Day strike as further evidence that the communists and the Indian Congress wanted to undermine the Programme of Action and steal the thunder of the ANC.” However, the 'May Day' (1 May ) strike was immensely successful and the government responded with unrestrained brutality. Furthermore, the Unlawful Organisations Bill, which was the legislation behind the banning of the SACP, was broad enough that any dissident party wanting social or political change could be labelled communist and banned. An  emergency  meeting was called, with Dr Moroka presiding, consisting of the ANC Youth League, South African Indian Congress (SAIC), Communist Party, the African People’s Organisation (APO), and the Transvaal Council of Non-European Trade Unions. 

A change in Mandela’s ideological stance is indicated by the fact that when Dr Yusuf Dadoo called for a united front against the apartheid government, Mandela agreed. Elinor Sisulu writes that Mandela recalled, “It was at that meeting that Oliver [Tambo] uttered prophetic words: ‘Today it is our Communist Party, tomorrow it will be our trade unions, our Indian Congress, …. our African National Congress.’”  Confronted by opposition from the ANC’s Africanist wing, Mandela stuck by this new position and together with Tambo and Communist Party general secretary Moses Kotane , they joined their friend Walter Sisulu in forging what came to be known as the Congress Alliance . In 1952, the Congress Alliance embarked on the first of its national campaigns against a select number of Apartheid government’s laws. The campaigns were modelled on the earlier passive resistance campaigns of the 1940s.The main Congress Alliance campaign was named the Defiance Campaign , which continued for two years. While the campaign did not succeed in changing any laws, it transformed the ANC into a mass-based and militant organization and the largest of the liberation movements, growing from 7000 to over 100 000 by the time the campaign ended in 1954.

During the Defiance Campaign , Mandela emerged as one of the most influential leaders of the liberation struggle, alongside Walter Sisulu and Chief Albert Luthuli . Before the Defiance Campaign began, Mandela was serving as the President of the ANC Youth League. He was then made the public spokesperson and leader of the campaign itself, having been appointed National 'Volunteer-in-chief'. Together with Maulvi Cachalia of the Transvaal Indian Congress (TIC), Mandela travelled around South Africa enlisting volunteers to defy apartheid laws. Subsequently, both were charged with recruiting and training ‘congress volunteers’. As a result of his abilities as a mass leader, Mandela was elected the ANC Transvaal President as well as Deputy National President in 1952.

The campaign officially began on 26 June 1952 when 51 volunteers led by President of the Transvaal Indian Congress Nana Sita and Patrick Duncan entered the Boksburg Native Location in defiance of the law that required non-Africans to have permits to enter an African location. In the course of the campaign thousands of volunteers served harsh prison terms, but Mandela was instructed not to break the law or court arrest to ensure that the campaign would not be rendered leaderless should all the leaders be imprisoned at the same time. He was nevertheless arrested on several occasions during the course of the campaign and released after short stints in jail.

At the height of the Defiance Campaign, the ANC recognised the likelihood that the organisation would be banned as the Communist Party had been three years earlier. Asked by the ANC executive to devise a contingency plan for such an eventuality, Mandela drew up what became known as the 'M Plan' , which provided for the creation of street-based cell structures. This structure would provide more security and secrecy for the organisation in the event of the banning. This meant that the ANC was moving away from public events such as rallies and speeches towards more ‘underground’ activities.

During the same period, Mandela become increasingly uneasy with the policy of non-violent resistance, but was held back by the ANC leadership’s strong advocacy of non-violence. This is evidenced by the following quote from an interview with Richard Stengel from the 1990s:

The Chief [Albert Luthuli] was a passionate disciple of Mahatma Gandhi and he believed in non-violence as a Christian and as a principle. Many of us did not because when you regard it as a principle you mean throughout, whatever the position is, you’ll stick to non-violence. We took up the attitude that we would stick to non-violence only insofar as the conditions permitted that. Our approach was to empower the organization to be effective in its leadership. And if the adoption of non-violence gave it that effectiveness, that efficiency, we would pursue non-violence. But if the condition shows that non-violence was not effective, we would use other means.

In December 1952, Tambo joined Mandela as a partner in his legal practice - the first African-run legal partnership in the country. During the next two years Mandela and Tambo worked together in their legal practice defending hundreds of people affected by apartheid laws. Their practice became very successful. During the same month Mandela and 19 other leading  Congress  Alliance activists were arrested and charged under the Suppression of Communism Act . Mandela, like all the others, was sentenced to nine months imprisonment with hard labour, suspended for three years. He was also served with a banning order that prohibited him from attending gatherings for six months and from leaving the Johannesburg magisterial district. For the following nine years, his banning orders were repeatedly renewed which served the purpose of limiting Mandela’s sphere of influence to Johannesburg.

Although Mandela was officially the deputy national president of the ANC, he was not legally allowed to play any role in ANC activities because of his banning order. However, he continued to meet clandestinely with the ANC and Congress Alliance leadership. In this way, he was able to play a key role in the planning of all the major campaigns after 1952. The ANC-led Alliance called off the Defiance Campaign at the end of 1953 after the government passed new legislation proposing very harsh sentences for people breaking apartheid laws.

One of the most important Congress Alliance campaigns was the Freedom Charter campaign . Mandela along with his banned colleagues Dr. Yusuf Dadoo , Moses Kotane and Joe Slovo played a leading role. The campaign culminated in the convening of the historic Congress of the People on 25-26th June 1955 in Kliptown near Soweto. However Mandela, Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada could not attend the conference because their banning orders prohibited their participation. They viewed the proceedings of the Kliptown conference from the rooftop of a nearby Indian-owned shop. At the end of 1955, while Mandela was imprisoned for two weeks, Evelyn Mase, his wife, moved out of their home. Their marriage had become strained due to Mandela’s increasing devotion of time to politics. Evelyn was a member of the Jehovah’s Witness Christian following and did not have any interest in politics. This tension between the two was further exacerbated by the tragic death of their second child, Makaziwe, of meningitis at 9 months, in 1947. They were subsequently divorced in 1957.

Mandela was one of 156 African, Indian, Coloured and White men and women leaders in the Congress Alliance who were arrested and charged with treason, following a police raid in December 1956. For four-and-a-half years the Treason Trial dragged on with charges being periodically withdrawn against some of the accused.

In 1958, half way through the trial, Mandela married Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela , a social worker 16 years younger than him, from Bizana in the Transkei, Eastern Cape.

In March 1961, Justice Rumpff found Mandela and the remaining 36 accused not guilty of treason and discharged them.

Turn to the Armed Struggle

In 1959, with the Treason Trial still in progress, the ANC planned an anti-pass law campaign to begin on 31 March 1960. However, the campaign was pre-empted by the newly formed Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) . The PAC was formed because of an ideological split within the ANC. Specifically, the split revolved around the ANC’s move away from an Africanist position, evidenced by the adoption of the Freedom Charter. As such, those who advocated an Africanist stance, split from the ANC in 1959, with Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe elected as its first president. The PAC called for mass peaceful anti-pass protests on 21 March 1960. Heavily armed police outside a police station in the small southern Transvaal (now Gauteng) township of Sharpeville opened fire on a peaceful gathering of protesters, killing 69 people and wounding more than 200 others, many of whom were shot in the back as they fled. The Sharpeville Massacre changed the face of South African politics as on 30 March 1960, the government declared a state of emergency . Mandela and 2000 other political activists across all liberation movements were detained as a result of this.

Furthermore, on 8 April 1960, the government banned the ANC and PAC. The banning of political organisations and the shutting down of space for political protest prompted Mandela to begin seriously thinking about the armed struggle. The discussion to take up arms against the apartheid regime was also being discussed independently by activists detained under the emergency regulations as well as some leaders who had gone underground across all the remaining anti-apartheid groupings. The underground Communist Party had already smuggled a small group of people out of the country to receive military training in China.

Mandela and Tambo’s law firm had virtually collapsed by this time, and Mandela rarely saw his family because of his semi-clandestine life. In August, when the state of emergency was lifted, Tambo was smuggled out of South Africa to establish an ANC office abroad. With the release of political detainees, Mandela immediately became involved in discussions about convening a national convention. He was made secretary of the organising committee of the All-In Africa Conference and secretly travelled around the country preparing for the meeting. The All-In Africa Conference was held in Pietermaritzburg, Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal –KZN0 on 22 March 1961 and was attended by 1400 representatives from 145 political, cultural, sports and religious organisations. This conference was called in response to the calling of the state of the emergency. It called for countrywide demonstrations as well as the joining of all anti-apartheid forces, regardless of racial identity of the organisations involved. A full list of the resolutions can be found here . Mandela's banning order expired on the eve of the conference. Anticipating that his ban would be renewed, he went into hiding and made a dramatic appearance at the conference, where he made his first public speech since his first banning in 1952.

The conference appointed him honorary secretary of the All-In African National Action Council, whose task was to organise a three day stay-at-home on 29, 30 and 31 May 1961 to coincide with the proclamation of South Africa as a Republic on 31 May. This was the last public meeting he addressed for the next 29 years. On 3 April 1961 Mandela issued a statement on behalf of the All-in African National Action Council calling on students and scholars to support the stay-at-home campaign.

Immediately after being acquitted in the Treason Trial, which had begun in 1956, Mandela went underground. He and Sisulu secretly travelled around the country organising the strike, and Mandela (nicknamed the Black Pimpernel at the time) remained a fugitive for the next 17 months. Mandela called off the stay-at-home protest on its second day after massive police repression of strikers. The failure of this action was important in changing his political thinking and he became more committed to the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe (the Spear of the Nation, also known as MK) as the military wing of the ANC.

Mandela and some of his colleagues concluded that violent resistance in South Africa was inevitable and that it was unreasonable for African leaders to continue with their policy of non-violent protest when the government met their demands with force. The decision to form MK, however, was not made by the ANC alone, but by a small leadership group comprised of Mandela, Sisulu and others representing the ANC, members of the Communist Party, South African Indian Congress (SAIC) and the South African Coloured Peoples Congress (SACPO). Mandela was appointed MK's first Commander-in-Chief. The decision to form MK was endorsed by a secret meeting of the Congress Alliance chaired by Chief Albert Luthuli , despite the fact that Chief Luthuli was staunchly against violent resistance.

On 11 January 1962, Mandela travelled under a pseudonym, David Motsamayi, to Bechuanaland (Botswana ) and made a surprise appearance, via Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, at the Pan-African Freedom Movement Conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia . This 'Bechuanaland Aerial Pipeline' had been used by other South African political refugees and freedom fighters and is examined in greater detail by Garth Benneyworth in his essay, ' Bechuanalands's Aerial Pipeline: Intelligence and Counter Intelligence Operations against the South African Liberation Movements, 1960-1965 '.While in Dar es Salaam, he met with the Tanzanian President, Julius Neyere , who agreed to facilitate a meeting with the Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie , in which they would discuss Ethiopia as an option for MK military training.

Once in Addis Ababa, Mandela would meet ambassadors and leaders of many African political parties. Mandela's address to the conference on 3 February, a few weeks after the first sabotage attacks by MK, explained and justified the turn to violent action. The full text of his address can be read here .  While interacting with other African political leaders, Mandela was able to gain insight into how the African National Congress was viewed across the continent. Garth Conan Benneyworth writes, in his dissertation entitled Armed and Trained , that "[...] Mandela learnt that the ANC alliance with South Africa's Communist Party and Indian political parties unsynchronised them with mainstream African nationalism. Two perceptions prevailed - the PAC represented African interests while the ANC, excessively influenced by white communists was essentially their stooge. To worsen matters, some viewed Chief Luthuli's recent Nobel Prize as the West having bought the Chief. This theme - being out of step - was a matter that Mandela believed he had to address."After viewing a military parade in Ethiopia, Mandela travelled to Casablanca, Morocco where he received 'guerrilla' training by the National Liberation Front of Algeria (FLNA). He trained with various rifles, pistols, explosives and in hand-to-hand combat. Furthermore, Mandela's conversations with the leaders of various resistance groups from Angola, Mozambique, Algeria and Cape Verde provided insight into armed struggle against a colonial power. In particular, Mandela found the advice of the leader of the Algerian mission in Morocco, Dr Mustafa to be 'brilliant'. In Armed and Trained , Benneyworth writes that "Mustafa outlined that a key part of the general plan is military action, followed by the political objective and then psychological warfare. International opinion, Mustafa said, 'is sometimes worth more than a fleet of jet fighters.'"

Mandela then travelled to London where he met with leaders of British opposition parties. He returned to South Africa in July, once again via the British protectorate of Bechuanaland (modern day Botswana), and he travelled to Tongaat in Natal to meet with the banned ANC President Albert Luthuli, ostensibly to discuss the issue of the ANC's image in Africa. After visiting friends in Durban, he was driving back with his friend Cecil Williams to Johannesburg disguised as his chauffeur. On 5 August, they were stopped and arrested just outside the Natal midlands town of Howick. It is alleged that the police were informed of Mandela’s movements by an American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent based in Durban. It is known, however, that Mandela's movements were followed by the British, American and South African intelligence services. Mandela was tried in Pretoria's Old Synagogue and in November 1962 sentenced to five years' imprisonment for incitement and illegally leaving the country. He was imprisoned at Pretoria Central Prison where he met his old friend and political opponent Robert Sobukwe , the leader of the breakaway PAC. Mandela spent seven months at Pretoria Central Prison before he was transferred to Robben Island .

In July police raided the underground safe house of the South African Communist Party at Lilliesleaf Farm , Rivonia Johannesburg, Transvaal (now Gauteng). Among those arrested were Walter Sisulu , Govan Mbeki , Raymond Mhlaba , Ahmed Kathrada , Dennis Goldberg and Lionel Bernstein . Police found Mandela's diary of his African tour, documents relating to the manufacture of explosives, and copies of a draft memorandum entitled 'Operation Mayibuye' , which set out the stages and requirements for a 'guerrilla' war. The Rivonia Trial , as it came to be known, commenced in October 1963. Mandela was brought from Robben Island to stand trial with the rest of his comrades on charges of sabotage, conspiracy to overthrow the government by revolution, and assisting an armed invasion of South Africa by foreign troops. Mandela and his co-accused were convinced that they would be executed. Mandela, in a statement from the dock at the end of their trial, gave a powerful address in which he explained why he had turned from non-violent protest to armed struggle. ‘ I am Prepared to Die ’, as the statement came to be known, received worldwide publicity and enhanced Mandela’s status as a leader of the South African liberation struggle.

Imprisonment on Robben Island

On 12 June 1964 all the accused were sentenced to life imprisonment and held at Pretoria Central prison. That same night Mandela and his co-accused were flown by a military plane to Robben Island Prison just outside Cape Town, Western Cape. Upon arrival at the Robben Island airstrip, Mandela and the others were handcuffed, loaded into a vehicle and taken into an old building, known as B Section, which was still under construction, where he would be imprisoned. . He was issued with prison clothes, short pants, no socks and sandals - not shoes. The issuing of short pants and sandals was significant as it was calculated by the prison authorities to undercut their rights as men to wear long pants and shoes. This demonstrates that the apartheid logic of racial subjugation and segregation extended to the prison system as African prisoners received different food rations and clothes in contrast to their Indian and Coloured inmates. Mandela and his comrades were held in the Old Jail until 25 June.

Mandela was relocated to B section once its construction was complete. This section housed leaders and politically influential figures in single cells from across political formations, separate from other political prisoners and common law prisoners as the state feared that the political influence of these prisoners would spread. As a result, Mandela and his comrades were imprisoned together, along with leaders of other Southern Africa political organisations. For instance, he shared B Section with leading figures of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), African Resistance Movement (ARM) and the National Liberation Front (NLF). In addition, there was also a member of South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO), Andimba Herman Toivo ya Toivo , demonstrating that political prisoners were brought to Robben Island Prison B section from as far afield as South West Africa (modern day Namibia). In the 1960s, there were about 30 prisoners in B Section. In January 1965, Mandela alongside other B Section prisoners were forced to work at the Lime Quarry where they dug lime which was used to pave roads. He was exposed to the glare of the lime particularly during summer resulting in eye damage despite his three year fight against prison authorities to obtain dark glasses for protection. In 1966, he took part in the hunger strike that was aimed at forcing prison officials to improve the food quality. Daily routine involved working for eight hours a day breaking slate boulders into gravel-sized stones. Prisoners were allowed one letter and one family visit every six months.

His wife, Winnie Madikizela Mandela , visited him in July 1966 after being granted permission to do so by the government on condition that she had a passbook. The visit was 30 minutes long and their conversations were monitored by prison guards. This was followed by another visit in June 1967. Then the following year, in 1968, Mandela was visited by his mother, who was accompanied by his sister Mabel, his eldest daughter Makie and youngest son Makgatho. After visiting him, his mother died a few weeks later and prison authorities refused to grant him permission to bury his mother. Tragedy struck the Mandela family again in 1969 when his eldest son, Thembi, died in road accident. Mandela sent a condolence letter to his ex-wife, Evelyn Mase, his only correspondence with her while he was in prison. Nevertheless, the death of his son affected Mandela deeply. He would write later in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, "What can one say about such a tragedy? I do not have words to express the sorrow or the loss I felt. It left a hole in my heart that can never be filled."

There were also visits from government officials, members of Parliament and other political figures from outside South Africa, demonstrating Mandela’s influence on and role in the anti-apartheid struggle. In 1976, the Minister of Prisons Jimmy Kruger visited him and offered to release him on condition that he recognized the independence of the Transkei , and that he goes to live there. Mandela rejected this offer by Kruger outright. That same year Helen Suzman , a member of the Progressive Party, visited him in prison. Dennis Healey, a British MP from the Labour Party, visited Mandela on Robben Island demonstrating the extent to which Mandela’s celebrity status had grown internationally.

In the 1970s, prisoners were allowed to keep a vegetable garden after years of petitioning the authorities. Mandela took a great interest in gardening. By 1975, Mandela had been reclassified as an “A” group prisoner allowing him three letters and two non contact visits every six months. Between 1975 and 1976, Mandela was writing his autobiography with help from Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada . Mac Maharaj was due for release in 1976, and it was felt that Mandela’s biography could be smuggled out of prison by Maharaj. Mandela spent four months secretly writing his autobiography by night, holding discussions with Sisulu and Kathrada throughout. His script was transcribed by Mac Maharaj and Laloo Chiba and hidden in Maharaj’s study books. Mandela’s original manuscripts were wrapped in plastic cocoa containers and buried in different sections of the garden. As planned, Maharaj smuggled copies of Mandela’s autobiography on his release. But in 1977, when prison authorities began building a wall to completely isolate B Section, they discovered the manuscript hidden in the garden. As a consequence, study privileges for Mandela, Kathrada and Sisulu were revoked for four years. The originally transcribed manuscript was never read by the public as the ANC did not want to publish the material while Mandela was still in jail. The original manuscript would, however, form the basis of his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, published in 1995.

On 31 March 1982 Mandela, Walter Sisulu , Raymond Mhlaba and Andrew Mlangeni were transferred from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison , while Ahmed Kathrada, Elias Motsoaledi and Govan Mbeki were left behind. They were also finally moved to Pollsmoor in April. That same year a campaign demanding the release of all political prisoners was launched in South Africa and abroad. The campaign was titled ‘Release Nelson Mandela’ and together with the campaign for economic and other sanctions against South Africa become the symbol of the international Anti-Apartheid Movement . This campaign became one of the most powerful international solidarity movements in history. With the apartheid government reeling under international pressure and mounting internal unrest, State President P.W. Botha was forced to issue a statement on 31 January 1985 that he was prepared to release Mandela and other Rivonia Trialists. This was on condition that he renounced violence and the armed struggle. Mandela issued his response through a letter read by his daughter, Zinzi Mandela, at a United Democratic Front (UDF) organised Rally in Soweto which rejected the offer. Despite this rejection, Botha repeated his willingness to release Mandela on 15 February under the same conditions stated in the previous statement, but Mandela stood his ground. From July 1986 onwards, a small group of the government and intelligence agents visited Mandela to persuade him to renounce the armed struggle. Mandela refused but did not close the door to dialogue with the government. He had contact with government representatives, first with Minister of Justice Kobie Coetzee and subsequently with Minister of Constitutional Development, Gerrit Viljoen .

In 1988, the ANC and the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM) inside South Africa planned worldwide celebrations to mark Mandela's 70th birthday and prepared for mass celebrations inside the country. The government banned all gatherings and arrested some activists and leaders of the birthday celebrations. A 12-hour music concert in London, broadcast to over 50 countries, drew enormous attention and many foreign countries pressured the South African government to release Mandela. On 12 August 1988, Mandela was taken to Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town for treatment for fluid on the lungs. He stayed in hospital for six weeks. It was subsequently revealed that he was suffering from tuberculosis. On 31 August, he was transferred to the Constantiaberg Medi-Clinic where he was treated until 7 December. From here, Mandela was moved to a house in the grounds of the Victor Verster Prison, near Paarl, Western Cape. On 4 July 1989, Mandela held a short meeting with State President P.W. Botha at Tuynhuys in the Parliamentary precinct. The meeting was historic as this was the first time the two men had met face to face. The meeting was courteous and polite, yet Botha rejected Mandela’s request for the unconditional release of all political prisoners. In spite of this, the two maintained a cordial relationship after the end of apartheid with Mandela visiting Botha’s Wilderness home on a few occasions after his release from prison. One can view this relationship as an example of Mandela’s commitment to reconciliation post-apartheid.  Botha resigned as state president in August 1989 and was succeeded by F.W. De Klerk .

In December 1989, Mandela met the new state president, FW de Klerk . Unknown to the government, Mandela had kept Oliver Tambo, the President of the ANC in exile, informed of his discussions with the government through Mac Maharaj , a former Robben Island prisoner and a confidant of Mandela. Maharaj, who had fled into exile, had secretly entered South Africa and established a highly sophisticated underground network known as ‘Operation Vula’. In addition to meeting government representatives, Mandela was allowed to meet with senior members of the United Democratic Front (UDF), the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and other political groups. At this point, the government realised that apartheid was nearing its end, and opted for formal negotiations with the ANC through Mandela.

From prisoner to President

On 2 February 1990, State President FW de Klerk, in his opening speech in parliament, announced the unbanning of the ANC and all other proscribed political parties, and the release of Mandela and all other political prisoners. On Sunday 11 February, after 27 years in prison, Mandela was released from Victor Verster  Prison. That same day he addressed a mass rally in the centre of Cape Town, his first public appearance in nearly three decades, beginning his speech with, “I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all”. The subsequent welcome rallies held in Soweto and Durban drew thousands of people.

The following month Mandela travelled to Lusaka to meet the ANC's Executive Committee. The ANC had announced their intention to move its headquarters from Lusaka to Johannesburg as soon as possible. While meeting with the Executive Committee, Mandela was elected Deputy President of the ANC. He then travelled to Sweden to meet his comrade and friend, the incumbent ANC president Oliver Tambo, but had to cut short the rest of his proposed trip abroad as a result of increased unrest in South Africa. The government of the ‘independent homeland’ of Ciskei had been overthrown by a military coup, led by Brigadier Oupa Gqozo, on 4 March. Adding to the chaos of this time, the apartheid government gave emergency powers to the President, allowing de Klerk to govern in a state of emergency. Later in March, police opened fire on anti-apartheid protesters in Sebokeng, killing 14 people and wounding more than 380. 

In May 1990, Mandela headed an ANC delegation in talks with the South African government representatives at Groote Schuur in Cape Town. At the end of the meeting a document known as the Groote Schuur Minute was signed. This signified a commitment from both the ANC and the government to end the political violence which had gripped the country. Furthermore, a working party was formed, including ANC cadres, to advise on the release of political prisoners. In June, he began a six week tour of Europe, the United Kingdom, North America and Africa. His reception by heads of state and hundreds of thousands of admirers confirmed his stature as an internationally respected leader. In July that year he attended the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) summit held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia but had to leave for Kenya when he contracted pneumonia. Talks resumed with the South African government in August and in the same month Mandela visited Norway. This was followed by visits to Zambia, India and Australia.

In February 1991, Mandela met with Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi , president of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) , in an attempt to end the political violence sweeping Natal and the Transvaal as the IFP and ANC fought for political control of the provinces. Further fanning the flames of this conflict was alleged government interference, the so-called ‘third force’. However, despite their pledges to work towards peace, the violence continued. Mandela then issued an ultimatum to the government, setting a deadline by which it had to fire the Minister of Defence and Minister of Law and Order and end the ongoing violence. He indicated that the ANC would quit the negotiation process if these demands were not met. The government failed to meet these demands.

Mandela attended a meeting between the ANC and the PAC in Harare in April 1991, where the movement resolved to work together to oppose apartheid. The two parties had previously been split on ideological issues regarding the role of non-Africans in the struggle for freedom. The meeting also agreed to convene a conference of anti-apartheid organisations in support of the demand for a national constituent assembly. In June 1991, Mandela attended the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) summit in Abuja, Nigeria, following which he travelled to the United Kingdom and Belgium. A month later, at the ANC conference in Durban, he was elected ANC president, succeeding the ailing Oliver Tambo. In August, Mandela travelled to countries in South America. These visits were to drum up investor support for the future post-apartheid South Africa as well as trading on Mandela’s international celebrity.

He signed the National Peace Accord on behalf of the ANC in September, 1991. This agreement between a number of political organisations, including the ANC, Inkatha Freedom Party and the National Party , established structures and procedures to attempt to end political violence which had become widespread. In October 1991, a meeting of the Patriotic Front was held in Durban in an attempt to bring together all the anti-apartheid groupings in the country. All attended with the exception of the Azanian People's Organisation (AZAPO). Policy regarding future negotiations was formulated and the ANC and the PAC began preparatory meetings for the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) . However, the PAC could not see its way clear to participate in the convention due to its belief that the convention should be held outside the country under the stewardship of a neutral party. In November that year, Mandela travelled to West Africa and the following month, met United States President, George Bush Snr.

The first meeting of Codesa, set up to negotiate procedures for constitutional change, was held in December 1991. At the end of the plenary session, after De Klerk had raised the question of disbanding Umkhonto we Sizwe , Mandela delivered a scathing personal attack on him. Mandela argued that even the head of an illegitimate and discredited minority regime should have certain moral standards. During 1992, Mandela continued his programme of extensive international travel, visiting Tunisia, Libya and Morocco. He and De Klerk jointly accepted Unesco’s Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize in Paris on 3 February. At the same time the two men attended the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. On 13 April 1992, Mandela called a press conference at which he announced that he and his wife, Winnie , had agreed to separate as a result of differences which had arisen between them in recent months. Later in April Mandela, De Klerk and the IFP’s Chief Buthelezi addressed a gathering of more than a million members of the Zion Christian Church (ZCC) at Moria, near Pietersburg (now Polokwane, Limpopo Province), and committed themselves to end the ongoing violence and move speedily towards a political settlement.

In May 1992, the second plenary meeting of Codesa was held, but the working group dealing with constitutional arrangements reached a deadlock when the ANC and the government could not reach agreement on certain constitutional principles. Codesa's management committee was asked to find a way out of the logjam but by 16 June (by then known as Soweto Day) no progress had been made and the ANC called for a mass action campaign to put pressure on the South African government. While visiting the Scandinavian countries and Czechoslovakia in May, Mandela suggested that FW de Klerk was personally responsible for the political violence in South Africa. He likened the violence in South Africa to the killing of Jews in Nazi Germany. Mandela also criticised what he felt was the stranglehold imposed on the South African press, which represented White-owned conglomerates; however, he expressed support for a critical, independent and investigative press.

Following the Boipatong massacre of June 1992, Mandela announced the suspension of negotiations until the ANC’s demands were met, including that the government take steps to end political violence, form a transitional government and move towards the election of a constituent assembly. At the end of June, Mandela addressed a Heads of States Summit of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Dakar, Senegal. The OAU agreed to raise the issue of South Africa's continuing political violence at the United Nations (UN). In July, Mandela and representatives of other South African parties addressed the UN Security Council. Mandela asked the UN to provide continuous monitoring of the violence and submitted documents, which he claimed, proved the 'criminal intent' of the government, both in the instigation of violence and in failing to curb it. He maintained that the government was conducting a 'cold-hearted strategy of state terror to impose its will on negotiations'. On his return to South Africa, Mandela called for disciplined and peaceful protest and involved himself in the ANC's mass action campaign. Following violent incidents between ANC supporters in the Transvaal, Mandela admitted that the organisation had disciplinary problems with some of its followers, particularly in township Self-Defence Units and promised to take action against those who abused their positions of power and authority.

Mandela indicated in September 1992 that he was prepared to meet De Klerk on condition that he agreed to fence off township hostels, ban the public display of dangerous weapons and release political prisoners. They met at the end of the month and these bi-lateral talks resulted in the signing of a Record of Understanding between the two leaders, thereby enabling negotiations to resume.

During 1992 and 1993 Mandela repeatedly called for peace. Following the assassination of the South African Communist Party (SACP) leader, Chris Hani , in April 1993, he again called for restraint, discipline and peace. At a rally in Soweto's Jabulani Stadium he was booed by a militant crowd when he tried to convey a message of peace in the wake of the killing. Mandela caused a political row in May when he suggested that South Africa's voting age should be lowered to enable 14 year old children to vote. However, he was persuaded to accept that only people aged 18 and above could vote in the April 1994 elections. In September 1993, after the election date had been set for 27-29 April 1994, Mandela used a visit to the United States of America to urge world business leaders to lift economic sanctions and invest in South Africa. During the latter half of 1993 and early 1994 he campaigned on behalf of the ANC for the 1994 election and addressed a large number of rallies and people's forums. At the same time, he continued his efforts to draw the Freedom Alliance partners (White right wing groups, IFP, Bophuthatswana and Ciskei Bantustan governments) into the election process. However, he ruled out the possibility of delaying the election date to accommodate them.

In March 1994, following a civil uprising in the homeland of Bophuthatswana, which led to the downfall of the Mangope government, Mandela guaranteed striking civil servants their jobs, but harshly criticised the looting that had occurred during the unrest. In April, last minute talks were held in the Kruger Park between Mandela, De Klerk, Buthelezi and Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini to try to break the deadlock on IFP participation in the elections. The meeting was unsuccessful and was followed by an attempt at international mediation. This, too, failed, but a final effort by Kenyan academic, Washington Okumu, brought the IFP back into the election process. Mandela and De Klerk then signed an agreement stating that the institution, status and role of the King of the Zulus, as well as the Kingdom of KwaZulu, be recognised and protected. Mandela contested the April 1994 election as the head of the ANC. He cast his vote in Inanda, Durban, on the first day of voting on 27 April 1994. Early in May, the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) announced that the ANC had won 62% of the national vote. Mandela indicated his relief that the ANC did not achieve a two-thirds majority, as this would allay fears that it would unilaterally re-write the constitution. He restated his commitment to a government of national unity wherein each party shared in the exercise of power.

On 9 May, Mandela was elected unopposed as president of South Africa in the first session of the Constituent Assembly. His presidential inauguration took place the next day at the Union Buildings in Pretoria and was attended by the largest gathering of international leaders in South African history, as well as about 100 000 jubilant supporters on the lawns. The ceremony was televised and broadcast internationally. In his inaugural speech Mandela called for a 'time of healing' and stated that his government would fight against discrimination of any kind. He pledged to enter into a covenant to build a society in which all South Africans, Black and White, could walk tall without fear, assured of their rights to human dignity, 'a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world'. In his State of the Nation speech in parliament on 24 May 1994 , Mandela announced that R2.5 billion would be allocated in the 1994/95 budget for the government's Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) . This policy focused on basic needs such as jobs, land, housing, water, electricity, telecommunications and transport, among others. Furthermore, this policy emphasised that the people should be part of the decision making process. His pragmatic economic policy was welcomed by business in general.

Mandela continued to draw the White right wing into the negotiation process and in May, 1994 held a breakthrough meeting with the leader of the Conservative Party (CP) , Ferdie Hartzenberg. Negotiations also involved a possible meeting with Eugene Terre Blanche , leader of the right wing Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) , but it did not transpire. In June, Mandela attended the OAU summit in Tunis and was appointed second vice-president of the organisation. The following month he held talks with his Angolan, Mozambican and Zairean counterparts in an attempt to further peace-making efforts in Angola. UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi welcomed his participation in the Angolan peace process. Mandela underwent eye surgery for a cataract in July. The operation was complicated by the fact that his tear glands had been damaged by the alkalinity of the stone at Robben Island where he had done hard labour breaking rocks.

In September 1994, Mandela made a crucial speech at the annual conference of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) where he called on the labour movement to transform itself from a liberation movement to one that would assist in the building of a new South Africa. In this speech, he urges workers and COSATU to assist in making the ANC's RDP programme work and to challenge the notion that strikes are ‘inimical to the task of reconstruction and development’. The government of national unity nearly collapsed in January 1995 over an alleged secret attempt by two former cabinet ministers and 3 500 police to obtain indemnity on the eve of the April 1994 elections. At a cabinet meeting on 18 January, Mandela attacked Deputy President De Klerk, stating that he did not believe De Klerk was unaware of the indemnity applications. He went on to question De Klerk's commitment to reconciliation. At a press conference on 20 January, De Klerk maintained that this attack on his integrity and good faith could seriously jeopardise the future of the government of national unity.

In April 1995, Mandela removed his estranged wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, as Deputy Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, following a series of controversial issues in which she was involved. She challenged her dismissal in the Supreme Court, claiming that it was unconstitutional. She obtained an affidavit from IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi to the effect that he had not, as a leader of a party in the government of national unity, been consulted about her dismissal. This was a constitutional requirement. Winnie Mandela was then briefly reinstated before being dismissed again, Mandela having consulted with all party leaders involved in the government. Mandela and Madikizela-Mandela would divorce in 1996 due to political differences and the tension which she was causing within the ANC. An example of this was Madikizela-Mandela’s repeated contradiction and repudiation of the ANC’s policy of reconciliation and her refusal to co-operate with the rest of the ANC leadership. 

In May 1995, following a dispute between the IFP and the ANC regarding international mediation for the new constitution, Buthelezi called on Zulus to 'rise and resist' any imposed constitutional dispensation. Mandela accused Buthelezi of encouraging violence and attempting to foment an uprising against central government. In this context, Mandela threatened to cut off central government funding to KwaZulu-Natal, indicating that he would not allow public funds to be used to finance an attempt to overthrow the constitution by violent means. Although a subsequent meeting between the two leaders seemed cordial in tone, the matter of mediation remained an unresolved point of conflict and the ANC’s relationship with the IFP remained strained.

In 1995 the Rugby World Cup was held in South Africa.  South Africa had recently been allowed to compete in international events after the dissolution of apartheid. Mandela saw this tournament as an opportunity to unite the country and diffuse the racial tensions which had built up before the 1994 elections. The South African national rugby team (nicknamed the Springboks) won the tournament, and in an iconic moment, Mandela presented the trophy to the captain of the team, Francois Pienaar, while wearing a Springbok jersey. This action highlights Mandela’s dedication to reconciliation as the Springbok rugby team long been associated with the apartheid government due to rugby being by far the most popular sport amongst white South Africans.

On his eightieth birthday on 18 July 1998, he married his third wife, Graca Machel . Machel, at the time, was the widow of Mozambican president, Samora Machel. Graca Machel has served as Minister of Education and Culture in Mozambique (1975 - 1989) as well as on various humanitarian committees devoted to women’s and children’s rights.

Retirement from political life

Mandela retired from active political life in June 1999 after his first term of office as president. He was succeeded by Thabo Mbeki , who had been elected as ANC president in 1997. Mandela continued to play an active role in mediating conflicts around the world. For instance, in 2000 he was appointed mediator in the war-torn, Burundi, a mission he accomplished with aplomb.

In 2003, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He devoted a large amount of his time to raising funds for the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund. In November 2003, a concert was held at Green Point Stadium to raise funds for the Nelson Mandela Foundation , the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund and global AIDS organisations. International musicians such as Beyonce, Queen and The Who responded to Mandela's call, as well as local artists such as Johnny Clegg, Danny K and the Soweto Gospel Choir. The concert was called Nelson Mandela's 46664 Global AIDS initiative as 466/64 was Mandela’s prison number during his 27 years of incarceration. This concert would be the first of six international concerts of the same name that took place between 2003 and 2008.

Evelyn Mase passed away on 4 April, 2004 and Mandela cut short his overseas trip to attend her funeral. On 10 May 2004, Mandela addressed a joint-sitting of parliament in celebrating a decade of democracy in which he acknowledged the extraordinary position he was in, being allowed to address Parliament despite not being an MP or sitting leader. Furthermore, he stated that while incredible steps had been taken in the 10 years of democracy, he urged governmental action on issues including poverty, unemployment, preventable disease and ill health, with specific mention of HIV/Aids. Throughout the months of April and May that same year, Mandela lobbied intensely in support of South Africa’s bid to host the 2010 World Soccer Cup. According to him, it would be a fitting present for the 10 years of democracy. On 15 May 2004, he was in Zurich, Switzerland when South Africa was awarded the right to host the 2010 soccer showpiece. Mandela cried openly at the achievement. He said he felt like a 15-year-old boy and the memory would live with him forever.

On 1 June 2004, Mandela announced that he was bowing out of public life to lead a quieter life, issuing the now famous statement: ‘Don't call me, I'll call You’, to those who would require his presence at their functions. Though retired from public life, Mandela carried the Olympic torch on Robben Island on 14 June 2004 on its first journey on African soil since the inception of the Olympic Games. In 2005, in an attempt to destigmatise HIV and AIDS , he came out openly to announce that his son Makgatho, from his first wife Evelyn Mase, had died of AIDS. Mandela was the recipient of numerous awards and honours both within South Africa and abroad. In line with his desire to recede from the political limelight, the unending invitations to receive more awards and honours prompted him to publicly urge that other leaders in the struggle to liberate and democratise South Africa should be recognised and honoured as he had been.

His 88th birthday celebrations on 18 July, 2006 kicked off with a new round of honours, including a photo exhibit and the release of a book called The Meaning of Mandela during the week before his birthday. The event was meant to be part of a series of three, which the Nelson Mandela Foundation would be conducting to celebrate Mandela's birthday, according to Jakes Gerwel , chairman of the foundation's board. The photo exhibition by South African veterans Alf Khumalo and Jurgen Schadeberg capture Mandela's years as a young lawyer and the emergence of Black resistance before he was jailed for 27 years in 1964 and includes photographs of his family.

Events to celebrate the birthday of the ageing statesman that year also included a ceremony to present him and fellow graduates of Fort Hare University with honorary rings, as well as the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, to be delivered by South African President Thabo Mbeki. However, he also spent some quiet time with his family. Although he retired from active politics and cut down on functions, Mandela still continued to do charitable work. He campaigned for health and educational issues through the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund. As part of his 89th birthday in 2007, Mandela established The Elders, a group of 12 eminent leaders chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu , who aim to use their wisdom to tackle global problems. Archbishop Tutu and Graca Machel were integral with regards to the founding of this organisation and are still associated with The Elders as of 2018.

On 30 April 2008 the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the flagging of Mandela on the US terrorist watch lists "embarrassing”, and US lawmakers’ erased references to Mandela as a terrorist from national databases on 26 June. To celebrate his 90th birthday, the Soweto Heritage Trust began restoration work on Mandela House, in Soweto. The United Nations General Assembly announced on 10 November 2009 that Mandela's birthday, 18 July, would henceforth be known as “Mandela Day” marking his contribution to freedom and human rights. This is the first time that the United Nations (UN) has designated a day dedicated to a person. The UN also asked the people of the world to set aside 67 minutes of their day to undertake a task that would contribute to bringing joy or relief to the millions of disadvantaged and vulnerable people of the world.

In June 2010, tragedy struck the Mandela family when Zenani, Mandela’s great-granddaughter, was killed in a car accident. He was forced to cancel plans to attend the opening of the 2010 FIFA World Cup at Soccer City, Johannesburg. She was buried on 17 June. However, Mandela was able to briefly attend the closing ceremony of the Soccer World Cup at Soccer City, Johannesburg.

At the beginning of January 2011, Mandela was checked into Milpark Hospital with acute respiratory difficulties but returned home on 28 January. Mandela soon moved back to his home in Qunu, in the Eastern Cape. On 27 March of the same year, Google and The Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory’s launched the Nelson Mandela Multimedia Archive. The archive digitises photographs, recordings and documents related to Mandela and make them available online. Throughout 2012 and 2013, rumours abounded about Mandela's failing health until the nation's worst fears were confirmed on 5 December, 2013. Mandela had passed away in Houghton Estate in Johannesburg. His memorial service was held 15 December in the FNB Stadium, Johannesburg and was attended by 91 sitting heads of state and a number of other dignitaries. Mandela is survived by a daughter from his first marriage to Evelyn Ntoko Mase. Mandela is also survived by two daughters with his second wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. From these children, he is survived by 18 grandchildren.

• Anon (Unknown).  Nelson Mandela Quotes . Available at   https://www.goodreads.com   [online]. Accessed on 5 June 2011
• Anon (unknown).  Quotes: Nelson Mandela.  Available at  www.africanhistory.about.com    [online]. Accessed on 5 June 2011
• Anon (2001)   Mandela - In his own words - Quotations from Nelson Mandela's best-known speeches and statements  Available at  https://www.guardian.co.uk  [online]. Accessed on 5 July 2011
• Gastrow, S. (1995). Who's Who in South African Politics, Vol. 5, Johannesburg: Ravan Press, pp-137-146.
• Sampson, A (2000). Mandela. Harper Collings publishers.
• Sisulu, W; Houser, G; Shore, H (circa 1990s). I will go singing. Robben Island Museum.
• Mandela, N; Meer, F (1989). Higher than Hope. Madiba publishers.
• Benson, M. (1966). The Struggle for a Birthright, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
• Carter, G. et al. (1977). From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882-1964, Vol. 4, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press.
• First, R. (ed)(1980). No Easy Walk to Freedom: Articles and Trial Addresses of Nelson Mandela, London: Heinemann.
• Mandela, N. (1986). The struggle is my life, London: IDAF.
• Mandela, N. (1995). Long Walk to Freedom, (rev. ed), London: Abacus.
• 11. Meer, F. (1988). Higher Than Hope: 'Rolihlahla We Love You', Johannesburg: Skotaville.
• ------- (n.d.). Nelson Mandela: Symbol of a Nation, South Africa: QData Consulting. (CD)
• Sampson, A. (1999). Mandela: The Authorized Biography, Jonathan Ball: Johannesburg.
• Schadeberg, J. (1994). Voices from Robben Island, Randburg: Ravan Press.

Nelson Mandela Family Tree The digital Nelson Mandela archive Robben Island Mandela, Communism and South Africa by Stephen Ellis Mandela’s membership of the Communist Party: what needs to be reassessed? Tom Lodge Mandela: an audio history Mandela memories on the Grand Parade Nelson Mandela: becoming a freedom

Mandela's 'intuitive' letter that unravelled a plot to murder him 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVcAN73DkII

https://mailchi.mp/fairview/celebrating-nelson-mandela-day-embracing-values-of-courage-equality-and-unity?e=528076b587

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Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela became known and respected all over the world as a symbol of the struggle against apartheid and all forms of racism; the icon and the hero of African liberation.

Mandela or Madiba, as he was affectionately known, has been called a freedom fighter, a great man, South Africa's Favourite Son, a global icon and a living legend, among countless other names. He has been an activist, a political prisoner, South Africa's first democratically elected president, an international peacemaker and statesman, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

As a husband and a father, Mandela sacrificed the joys of family life and of seeing his children grow up. As a young man, he missed out on a normal life spent with family and friends and pursuing a career of his choice, to fight for the cause he unshakably stood for.

Most ordinary South Africans knew little about Mandela during his prison years, as the apartheid government suppressed information, and what was released was biased. Limited information about Mandela was available from the international press, anti-apartheid activist groups and the Free Nelson Mandela campaign.

But prison bars could not prevent him from continuing to inspire his people to struggle and sacrifice for their liberation. Public opinion polls repeatedly showed that he was the most popular leader the country has ever had. As the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group observed in 1986, he had become "a living legend", galvanising the resistance in his country.

He is the most honoured political prisoner in history. He has received prestigious international awards, the freedom of many cities and honorary degrees from several universities.

Musicians have been inspired to compose songs and music in his honour. Major international art exhibits have been dedicated to him and some of the most prominent writers have contributed to books for him and about him. Even an atomic particle has been named after him.

Mandela is a universal symbol of freedom and reconciliation, an icon representing the triumph of the human spirit. During his lifetime he not only dedicated himself to the struggle of the African people, but with his humility, and his spirit of forgiveness, he captured hearts and inspired people all over the world. As South Africans, we owe it to this great champion of our nation to continue to live by his example.

The early years

Rolihlahla Nelson Mandela was born in Mvezo, a village near Mthatha in the Transkei, on 18 July 1918, to Nongaphi Nosekeni and Gadla Henry Mandela. His father was the key counsellor/adviser to the Thembu royal house. His Xhosa name Rolihlahla literally means "pulling the branch of a tree". After his father's death in 1927, the young Rolihlahla became the ward of Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo, the acting regent of the Thembu nation. It was at the Thembu royal homestead that his personality, values and political views were shaped. Hearing the elders' stories of his ancestors' valour during the wars of resistance to colonialism, he dreamed also of making his own contribution to the freedom struggle of his people.

After receiving his primary education at a local mission school, where he was given the name Nelson, he was sent to the Clarkebury Boarding Institute for his Junior Certificate and then to Healdtown, a reputable Wesleyan secondary school, where he matriculated. He then enrolled at the University College of Fort Hare for a Bachelor of Arts (BA) Degree where he was elected onto the Students' Representative Council. He was suspended from college for joining a protest boycott, along with Oliver Tambo.

Shortly after his return to the royal homestead, he and his cousin, Justice, ran away to Johannesburg to avoid arranged marriages and for a short period he worked as a mine policeman. Mandela was introduced to Walter Sisulu in 1941 and it was Sisulu who arranged for him to serve his articles at Lazar Sidelsky's law firm. Completing his BA through the University of South Africa (Unisa) in 1942, he commenced study for his Bachelor of Laws Degree shortly afterwards (though he left the University of the Witwatersrand without graduating in 1948). He entered politics in earnest while studying, and joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1943.

At the height of the Second World War in 1944, a small group of young Africans who were members of the ANC, banded together under the leadership of Anton Lembede. Among them were William Nkomo, Sisulu, Oliver R Tambo, Ashby P Mda and Mandela. Starting out with 60 members, all of whom were residing around the Witwatersrand, these young people set themselves the formidable task of transforming the ANC into a more radical mass movement.

In September 1944, they came together to found the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL).

Mandela soon impressed his peers by his disciplined work and consistent effort and was elected as the league's national secretary in 1948. Through painstaking work, campaigning at the grass-roots and through its mouthpiece Inyaniso ("Truth"), the ANCYL was able to canvass support for its policies among the ANC membership.

The political journey

Spurred on by the victory of the National Party, which won the 1948 all-white elections on the platform of apartheid, at the 1949 Annual Conference, the Programme of Action, inspired by the Youth League, which advocated the weapons of boycott, strike, civil disobedience and non-cooperation, was accepted as official ANC policy.

In December, Mandela was elected to the National Executive Committee at the National Conference.

When the ANC launched its Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws in 1952, Mandela, by then president of the Youth League, was elected national volunteer-in-chief. The Defiance Campaign was conceived as a mass civil disobedience campaign that would snowball from a core of selected volunteers to involve more and more ordinary people, culminating in mass defiance. Fulfilling his responsibility as volunteer-in-chief, Mandela travelled the country, organising resistance to discriminatory legislation. Charged, with Moroka, Sisulu and 17 others, and brought to trial for his role in the campaign, the court found that Mandela and his co-accused had consistently advised their followers to adopt a peaceful course of action and to avoid all violence.

For his part in the Defiance Campaign, Mandela was convicted of contravening the Suppression of Communism Act and given a suspended prison sentence. Shortly after the campaign ended, he was also prohibited from attending gatherings and confined to Johannesburg for six months.

In December 1952, in partnership with Tambo, Mandela opened South Africa's first black law firm in central Johannesburg.

In 1953, Mandela was given the responsibility to prepare a plan that would enable the leadership of the movement to maintain dynamic contact with its membership without recourse to public meetings. The objective was to prepare for the possibility that the ANC would, like the Communist Party, be declared illegal and to ensure that the organisation would be able to operate from underground. This was the M-Plan, named after him.

During the early 1950s, Mandela played an important part in leading the resistance to the Western Areas removals, and to the introduction of Bantu Education. He also played a significant role in popularising the Freedom Charter, adopted by the Congress of the People in 1955.

During the whole of the 1950s, Mandela was the victim of various forms of repression. He was banned, arrested and imprisoned. A five-year banning order was enforced against him in March 1956.

The prison years

For much of the latter half of the 1950s, Mandela was one of the 156 accused in the mammoth Treason Trial. After the Sharpeville Massacre on 21 March 1960, the ANC was outlawed, and Mandela, still on trial, was detained, along with hundreds of others.

The Treason Trial collapsed in 1961 as South Africa was being steered towards the adoption of a republic. With the ANC now illegal, the leadership picked up the threads from its underground headquarters and Nelson Mandela emerged as the leading figure in this new phase of struggle.

Forced to live apart from his family, moving from place to place to evade detection by the Government's ubiquitous informers and police spies, Mandela had to adopt a number of disguises. Sometimes dressed as a labourer, Politicsat other times as a chauffeur, his successful evasion of the police earned him the title of the Black Pimpernel.

It was during this time that he, together with other leaders of the ANC, constituted a new section of the liberation movement, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), as an armed nucleus with a view to preparing for armed struggle, with Mandela as its commander-in-chief.

In 1962, Mandela left the country as "David Motsamayi", and travelled abroad for several months. In Ethiopia, he addressed the Conference of the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa, and was warmly received by senior political leaders in several countries, including the then Tanganyika, Senegal, Ghana and Sierra Leone. He also spent time in London. During this trip, Mandela met with the first group of 21 MK recruits on their way to Addis Ababa for guerrilla training.

Not long after his return to South Africa, Mandela was arrested, on 5 August, and charged with illegal exit from the country, and incitement to strike.

Mandela was convicted and sentenced to five years imprisonment. He was transferred to Robben Island in May 1963 only to be brought back to Pretoria again in July.

Not long afterwards, he encountered Thomas Mashifane, the foreman from Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia where MK had set up their headquarters. He knew then that their hide-out had been discovered. A few days later, he and 10 others were charged with sabotage.

The Rivonia Trial, as it came to be known, lasted eight months.

Mandela's statement in court during the trial is a classic in the history of the resistance to apartheid, and has been an inspiration to all who have opposed it. He ended with these words: "I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. 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."

All but two of the accused were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment on 12 June 1964. The black prisoners were flown secretly to Robben Island immediately after the trial was over to begin serving their sentences.

In March 1982, after 18 years, he was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town (with Sisulu, Raymond Mhlaba and Andrew Mlangeni) and in December 1988, he was moved to the Victor Verster Prison near Paarl, from where he was eventually released. While in prison, Mandela flatly rejected offers made by his jailers for remission of sentence in exchange for accepting the bantustan policy by recognising the independence of the Transkei and agreeing to settle there. Again in the 1980s, Mandela and others rejected an offer of release on condition that he renounce violence.

Nevertheless, Mandela did initiate talks with the apartheid regime in 1985, when he wrote to then Minister of Justice, Kobie Coetsee. They first met later that year when Mandela was hospitalised for prostate surgery. Shortly after this, he was moved to a single cell at Pollsmoor and this gave Mandela the chance to start a dialogue with the Government – which took the form of "talks about talks". Throughout this process, he was adamant that negotiations could only be carried out by the full ANC leadership.

Released on 11 February 1990, Mandela plunged wholeheartedly into his life's work, striving to attain the goals he and others had set out almost four decades earlier. In 1991, at the first national conference of the ANC held inside South Africa after being banned for decades, Nelson Mandela was elected president of the ANC while his lifelong friend and colleague, Oliver Tambo, became the organisation's national chairperson.

The era of apartheid formally came to an end on 27 April 1994, when Nelson Mandela voted for the first time in his life – along with his people. However, long before that date, it had become clear, even before the start of the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) negotiations at the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park, that the ANC was increasingly charting the future of South Africa.

Rolihlahla Nelson Dalibunga Mandela was inaugurated as President of a democratic South Africa on 10 May 1994. In his inauguration speech, he said: "We dedicate this day to all the heroes and heroines in this country and the rest of the world who sacrificed in many ways and surrendered their lives so that we could be free. Their dreams have become reality. Freedom is their reward. We are both humbled and elevated by the honour and privilege that you, the people of South Africa, have bestowed on us, as the first President of a united, democratic, non-racial and non-sexist government."

In June 1999, Nelson Mandela retired from the Presidency of South Africa. But although he retired as President of South Africa, he worked tirelessly, campaigning globally for peace, children and the fight against HIV/Aids in particular.

Shortly before his 86th birthday in June 2004, Mandela officially retired from public life. However, he did not retreat from working for the good of the world – as a testimony to his sharp political intellect, wisdom and unrelenting commitment to make the world a better place, Mandela formed the prestigious group of Elders, an independent group of eminent global leaders, who offer their collective influence and experience to support peace-building, help address major causes oh human suffering and promote the shared interest of humanity.

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Nelson Mandela

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 29, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009

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 multiethnic 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.

Nelson Mandela’s 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.

Did you know? As a sign of respect, many South Africans referred to Nelson Mandela as Madiba, his Xhosa clan name.

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 Black South Africans 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 a bachelor 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.

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UPDATED December 5, 2013

The life and legacy of nelson mandela: 1918-2013.

Mr. Mandela is hospitalized for nearly 19 days, being treated for pneumonia and having an operation for gallstones, government officials say. He will be hospitalized several times in 2013 , as an increasingly ugly battle over his legacy and money erupts.

Even the African National Congress, the party to which Mr. Mandela dedicated his life, will come under harsh criticism for releasing a video of party leaders visiting the visibly ailing former president.

Mr. Mandela contracted tuberculosis during his 27-year imprisonment for fighting apartheid, and he has suffered from chronic lung problems.

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Biography & Timeline

Rolihlahla Mandela was born into the Madiba clan in the village of Mvezo, in the Eastern Cape. His mother was Nonqaphi Nosekeni and his father was Nkosi Mphakanyiswa Gadla Mandela.

Our archivists and researchers have compiled a chronology of important events in Nelson Mandela's life.

Nelson Mandela was arrested on several occasions and stood trial four times. He spent over 27 years in prison. Our archivists and researchers have assembled dates and locations of transfers and time spent in confinement.

The following resources are maintained by the  Archive and Research team . They are updated as new information becomes available. To make a contribution, corrections or additions please  contact us .

Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela was the first Black president of South Africa, elected after time in prison for his anti-apartheid work. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.

(1918-2013)

Who Was Nelson Mandela?

Beginning in 1962, Mandela spent 27 years in prison for political offenses. In 1993, Mandela and South African President F.W. de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to dismantle the country's apartheid system. For generations to come, Mandela will be a source of inspiration for civil rights activists worldwide.

Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, in the tiny village of Mvezo, on the banks of the Mbashe River in Transkei, South Africa.

His birth name was Rolihlahla Mandela. "Rolihlahla" in the Xhosa language literally means "pulling the branch of a tree," but more commonly translates as "troublemaker."

Mandela's father, who was destined to be a chief, served as a counselor to tribal chiefs for several years but lost both his title and fortune over a dispute with the local colonial magistrate.

Mandela was only an infant at the time, and his father's loss of status forced his mother to move the family to Qunu, an even smaller village north of Mvezo. The village was nestled in a narrow grassy valley; there were no roads, only footpaths that linked the pastures where livestock grazed.

The family lived in huts and ate a local harvest of maize, sorghum, pumpkin and beans, which was all they could afford. Water came from springs and streams and cooking was done outdoors.

Mandela played the games of young boys, acting out male right-of-passage scenarios with toys he made from the natural materials available, including tree branches and clay.

At the suggestion of one of his father's friends, Mandela was baptized in the Methodist Church. He went on to become the first in his family to attend school. As was custom at the time, and probably due to the bias of the British educational system in South Africa, Mandela's teacher told him that his new first name would be Nelson.

When Mandela was 12 years old, his father died of lung disease, causing his life to change dramatically. He was adopted by Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo, the acting regent of the Thembu people — a gesture done as a favor to Mandela's father, who, years earlier, had recommended Jongintaba be made chief.

Mandela subsequently left the carefree life he knew in Qunu, fearing that he would never see his village again. He traveled by motorcar to Mqhekezweni, the provincial capital of Thembuland, to the chief's royal residence. Though he had not forgotten his beloved village of Qunu, he quickly adapted to the new, more sophisticated surroundings of Mqhekezweni.

Mandela was given the same status and responsibilities as the regent's two other children, his son and oldest child, Justice, and daughter Nomafu. Mandela took classes in a one-room school next to the palace, studying English, Xhosa, history and geography.

It was during this period that Mandela developed an interest in African history, from elder chiefs who came to the Great Palace on official business. He learned how the African people had lived in relative peace until the coming of the white people.

According to the elders, the children of South Africa had previously lived as brothers, but white men had shattered this fellowship. While Black men shared their land, air and water with white people, white men took all of these things for themselves.

READ MORE: 14 Inspiring Nelson Mandela Quotes

Political Awakening

When Mandela was 16, it was time for him to partake in the traditional African circumcision ritual to mark his entrance into manhood. The ceremony of circumcision was not just a surgical procedure, but an elaborate ritual in preparation for manhood.

In African tradition, an uncircumcised man cannot inherit his father's wealth, marry or officiate at tribal rituals. Mandela participated in the ceremony with 25 other boys. He welcomed the opportunity to partake in his people's customs and felt ready to make the transition from boyhood to manhood.

His mood shifted during the proceedings, however, when Chief Meligqili, the main speaker at the ceremony, spoke sadly of the young men, explaining that they were enslaved in their own country. Because their land was controlled by white men, they would never have the power to govern themselves, the chief said.

He went on to lament that the promise of the young men would be squandered as they struggled to make a living and perform mindless chores for white men. Mandela would later say that while the chief's words didn't make total sense to him at the time, they would eventually formulate his resolve for an independent South Africa.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S NELSON MANDELA FACT CARD

University Life

Under the guardianship of Regent Jongintaba, Mandela was groomed to assume high office, not as a chief, but a counselor to one. As Thembu royalty, Mandela attended a Wesleyan mission school, the Clarkebury Boarding Institute and Wesleyan College, where, he would later state, he achieved academic success through "plain hard work."

He also excelled at track and boxing. Mandela was initially mocked as a "country boy" by his Wesleyan classmates, but eventually became friends with several students, including Mathona, his first female friend.

In 1939, Mandela enrolled at the University of Fort Hare , the only residential center of higher learning for Black people in South Africa at the time. Fort Hare was considered Africa's equivalent of Harvard , drawing scholars from all parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

In his first year at the university, Mandela took the required courses, but focused on Roman-Dutch law to prepare for a career in civil service as an interpreter or clerk — regarded as the best profession that a Black man could obtain at the time.

In his second year at Fort Hare, Mandela was elected to the Student Representative Council. For some time, students had been dissatisfied with the food and lack of power held by the SRC. During this election, a majority of students voted to boycott unless their demands were met.

Aligning with the student majority, Mandela resigned from his position. Seeing this as an act of insubordination, the university expelled Mandela for the rest of the year and gave him an ultimatum: He could return to the school if he agreed to serve on the SRC. When Mandela returned home, the regent was furious, telling him unequivocally that he would have to recant his decision and go back to school in the fall.

A few weeks after Mandela returned home, Regent Jongintaba announced that he had arranged a marriage for his adopted son. The regent wanted to make sure that Mandela's life was properly planned, and the arrangement was within his right, as tribal custom dictated.

Shocked by the news, feeling trapped and believing that he had no other option than to follow this recent order, Mandela ran away from home. He settled in Johannesburg, where he worked a variety of jobs, including as a guard and a clerk, while completing his bachelor's degree via correspondence courses. He then enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg to study law.

Anti-Apartheid Movement

Mandela soon became actively involved in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress in 1942. Within the ANC, a small group of young Africans banded together, calling themselves the African National Congress Youth League. Their goal was to transform the ANC into a mass grassroots movement, deriving strength from millions of rural peasants and working people who had no voice under the current regime.

Specifically, the group believed that the ANC's old tactics of polite petitioning were ineffective. In 1949, the ANC officially adopted the Youth League's methods of boycott, strike, civil disobedience and non-cooperation, with policy goals of full citizenship, redistribution of land, trade union rights, and free and compulsory education for all children.

For 20 years, Mandela directed peaceful, nonviolent acts of defiance against the South African government and its racist policies, including the 1952 Defiance Campaign and the 1955 Congress of the People. He founded the law firm Mandela and Tambo, partnering with Oliver Tambo , a brilliant student he'd met while attending Fort Hare. The law firm provided free and low-cost legal counsel to unrepresented Black people.

In 1956, Mandela and 150 others were arrested and charged with treason for their political advocacy (they were eventually acquitted). Meanwhile, the ANC was being challenged by Africanists, a new breed of Black activists who believed that the pacifist method of the ANC was ineffective.

Africanists soon broke away to form the Pan-Africanist Congress, which negatively affected the ANC; by 1959, the movement had lost much of its militant support.

Wife and Children

Mandela was married three times and had six children. He wed his first wife, Evelyn Ntoko Mase, in 1944. The couple had four children together: Madiba Thembekile (d. 1964), Makgatho (d. 2005), Makaziwe (d. 1948 at nine months old) and Maki. The couple divorced in 1957.

In 1958, Mandela wed Winnie Madikizela . The couple had two daughters together, Zenani (Argentina's South African ambassador) and Zindziswa (the South African ambassador to Denmark), before separating in 1996.

Two years later, in 1998, Mandela married Graca Machel, the first Education Minister of Mozambique, with whom he remained until his death in 2013.

Prison Years

Formerly committed to nonviolent protest, Mandela began to believe that armed struggle was the only way to achieve change. In 1961, Mandela co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe, also known as MK, an armed offshoot of the ANC dedicated to sabotage and use guerilla war tactics to end apartheid.

In 1961, Mandela orchestrated a three-day national workers' strike. He was arrested for leading the strike the following year and was sentenced to five years in prison. In 1963, Mandela was brought to trial again. This time, he and 10 other ANC leaders were sentenced to life imprisonment for political offenses, including sabotage.

Mandela spent 27 years in prison, from November 1962 until February 1990. He was incarcerated on Robben Island for 18 of his 27 years in prison. During this time, he contracted tuberculosis and, as a Black political prisoner, received the lowest level of treatment from prison workers. However, while incarcerated, Mandela was able to earn a Bachelor of Law degree through a University of London correspondence program.

A 1981 memoir by South African intelligence agent Gordon Winter described a plot by the South African government to arrange for Mandela's escape so as to shoot him during the recapture; the plot was foiled by British intelligence.

Mandela continued to be such a potent symbol of Black resistance that a coordinated international campaign for his release was launched, and this international groundswell of support exemplified the power and esteem that Mandela had in the global political community.

In 1982, Mandela and other ANC leaders were moved to Pollsmoor Prison, allegedly to enable contact between them and the South African government. In 1985, President P.W. Botha offered Mandela's release in exchange for renouncing armed struggle; the prisoner flatly rejected the offer.

F. W. de Klerk

With increasing local and international pressure for his release, the government participated in several talks with Mandela over the ensuing years, but no deal was made.

It wasn't until Botha suffered a stroke and was replaced by Frederik Willem de Klerk that Mandela's release was finally announced, on February 11, 1990. De Klerk also lifted the ban on the ANC, removed restrictions on political groups and suspended executions.

Upon his release from prison, Mandela immediately urged foreign powers not to reduce their pressure on the South African government for constitutional reform. While he stated that he was committed to working toward peace, he declared that the ANC's armed struggle would continue until the Black majority received the right to vote.

In 1991, Mandela was elected president of the African National Congress, with lifelong friend and colleague Oliver Tambo serving as national chairperson.

Nobel Peace Prize

In 1993, Mandela and President de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work toward dismantling apartheid in South Africa.

After Mandela’s release from prison, he negotiated with President de Klerk toward the country's first multiracial elections. White South Africans were willing to share power, but many Black South Africans wanted a complete transfer of power.

The negotiations were often strained, and news of violent eruptions, including the assassination of ANC leader Chris Hani, continued throughout the country. Mandela had to keep a delicate balance of political pressure and intense negotiations amid the demonstrations and armed resistance.

Due in no small part to the work of Mandela and President de Klerk, negotiations between Black and white South Africans prevailed: On April 27, 1994, South Africa held its first democratic elections. Mandela was inaugurated as the country's first Black president on May 10, 1994, at the age of 77, with de Klerk as his first deputy.

From 1994 until June 1999, President Mandela worked to bring about the transition from minority rule and apartheid to Black majority rule. He used the nation's enthusiasm for sports as a pivot point to promote reconciliation between white and Black people, encouraging Black South Africans to support the once-hated national rugby team.

In 1995, South Africa came to the world stage by hosting the Rugby World Cup, which brought further recognition and prestige to the young republic. That year Mandela was also awarded the Order of Merit.

During his presidency, Mandela also worked to protect South Africa's economy from collapse. Through his Reconstruction and Development Plan, the South African government funded the creation of jobs, housing and basic health care.

In 1996, Mandela signed into law a new constitution for the nation, establishing a strong central government based on majority rule, and guaranteeing both the rights of minorities and the freedom of expression.

Retirement and Later Career

By the 1999 general election, Mandela had retired from active politics. He continued to maintain a busy schedule, however, raising money to build schools and clinics in South Africa's rural heartland through his foundation, and serving as a mediator in Burundi's civil war.

Mandela was diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer in 2001. In June 2004, at the age of 85, he announced his formal retirement from public life and returned to his native village of Qunu.

On July 18, 2007, Mandela and wife Graca Machel co-founded The Elders , a group of world leaders aiming to work both publicly and privately to find solutions to some of the world's toughest issues. The group included Desmond Tutu , Kofi Annan , Ela Bhatt, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Jimmy Carter , Li Zhaoxing, Mary Robinson and Muhammad Yunus.

The Elders' impact has spanned Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and their actions have included promoting peace and women's equality, demanding an end to atrocities, and supporting initiatives to address humanitarian crises and promote democracy.

In addition to advocating for peace and equality on both a national and global scale, in his later years, Mandela remained committed to the fight against AIDS . His son Makgatho died of the disease in 2005.

Relationship With Barack Obama

Mandela made his last public appearance at the final match of the World Cup in South Africa in 2010. He remained largely out of the spotlight in his later years, choosing to spend much of his time in his childhood community of Qunu, south of Johannesburg.

He did, however, visit with U.S. first lady Michelle Obama , wife of President Barack Obama , during her trip to South Africa in 2011. Barack Obama, while a junior senator from Illinois, also met with Mandela during his 2005 trip to the United States.

Mandela died on December 5, 2013, at the age of 95 in his home in Johannesburg, South Africa. After suffering a lung infection in January 2011, Mandela was briefly hospitalized in Johannesburg to undergo surgery for a stomach ailment in early 2012.

He was released after a few days, later returning to Qunu. Mandela would be hospitalized many times over the next several years — in December 2012, March 2013 and June 2013 — for further testing and medical treatment relating to his recurrent lung infection.

Following his June 2013 hospital visit, Machel, canceled a scheduled appearance in London to remain at her husband's side, and his daughter, Zenani Dlamini, flew back from Argentina to South Africa to be with her father.

Jacob Zuma , South Africa's president, issued a statement in response to public concern over Mandela's March 2013 health scare, asking for support in the form of prayer: "We appeal to the people of South Africa and the world to pray for our beloved Madiba and his family and to keep them in their thoughts," Zuma said.

On the day of Mandela’s death, Zuma released a statement speaking to Mandela's legacy: "Wherever we are in the country, wherever we are in the world, let us reaffirm his vision of a society ... in which none is exploited, oppressed or dispossessed by another," he said.

Movie and Books

In 1994, Mandela published his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom , much of which he had secretly written while in prison. The book inspired the 2013 movie Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.

He also published a number of books on his life and struggles, among them No Easy Walk to Freedom ; Nelson Mandela: The Struggle Is My Life ; and Nelson Mandela's Favorite African Folktales .

Mandela Day

In 2009, Mandela's birthday (July 18) was declared Mandela Day, an international day to promote global peace and celebrate the South African leader's legacy. According to the Nelson Mandela Foundation , the annual event is meant to encourage citizens worldwide to give back the way that Mandela has throughout his lifetime.

A statement on the Nelson Mandela Foundation's website reads: "Mr. Mandela gave 67 years of his life fighting for the rights of humanity. All we are asking is that everyone gives 67 minutes of their time, whether it’s supporting your chosen charity or serving your local community."

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Nelson Mandela
• Birth Year: 1918
• Birth date: July 18, 1918
• Birth City: Mvezo, Transkei
• Birth Country: South Africa
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Nelson Mandela was the first Black president of South Africa, elected after time in prison for his anti-apartheid work. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.
• Civil Rights
• World Politics
• Astrological Sign: Cancer
• University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
• University College of Fort Hare
• Wesleyan College
• University of London
• Clarkebury Boarding Institute
• Nacionalities
• South African
• Interesting Facts
• Mandela's African name "Rolihlahla" means "troublemaker."
• Mandela became the first Black president of South Africa in 1994, serving until 1999.
• Beginning in 1962, Mandela spent 27 years in prison for political offenses.
• Death Year: 2013
• Death date: December 5, 2013
• Death City: Johannesburg
• Death Country: South Africa

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Nelson Mandela Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/political-figures/nelson-mandela
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: January 7, 2022
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• I hate race discrimination most intensely and in all its manifestations. I have fought it all during my life; I fight it now, and will do so until the end of my days.
• Difficulties break some men but make others. No axe is sharp enough to cut the soul of a sinner who keeps on trying, one armed with the hope that he will rise even in the end.
• Death is something inevitable. When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace. I believe I have made that effort and that is, therefore, why I will sleep for the eternity.
• Those who conduct themselves with morality, integrity and consistency need not fear the forces of inhumanity and cruelty.
• Everyone can rise above their circumstances and achieve success if they are dedicated to and passionate about what they do.
• Our march to freedom is irreversible. We must not allow fear to stand in our way.
• When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.
• I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it....The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.
• Prison itself is a tremendous education in the need for patience and perseverance. It is above all a test of one's commitment.
• I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.
• During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against Black domination. 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.
• For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
• If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.
• Man's goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished.
• I was made, by the law, a criminal, not because of what I had done, but because of what I stood for, because of what I thought, because of my conscience.
• The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
• Wherever we are in the country, wherever we are in the world, let us reaffirm his vision of a society ... in which none is exploited, oppressed or dispossessed by another.

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Figure 1 and Figure 2 did not just depict the alignment of the uploaded texts but furnished word count information as well. Looking at the bottom right corner of Figure 1 , one notices the word count for each text. The word count for parts eight and nine is 51 149 for the English text; 38 077 for isiXhosa and 37 180 words for isiZulu. Figure 2 portrays the word count of part eight only. From these figures, one notices the difference in word count between the two translations: isiXhosa uses 20 522 and isiZulu 19 775 words. Figure 3 displays the results of the word search for ‘High Organ’. The concordance lines show that this word was rendered as ‘High Organ’ (iSigqeba esiPhezulu) in isiXhosa, a loan word plus the isiXhosa equivalent in brackets; and as ‘High Organ’ in isiZulu. What cannot be seen from the window are the italicised words. These can only be observed in the hard copy.

When the researchers were looking at the hard copies of the translations, they could note immediately that the book covers have the same design, but there is a slight difference in the title and contents. Mtuze rendered the title Long Walk to Freedom as Indlela ende eya enkululekweni (Long road to freedom) while Ntuli used Uhambo olude oluya enkululekweni (Long walk to freedom), which means the same as the source text. Looking at the page numbers, it was noticed that there is a difference of approximately 20 pages in length between the two translations. This corresponds with the difference in word count that has been noted above. Another difference that was noted is that the isiZulu translation has a translator’s preface, while the isiXhosa one does not. Instead, it contains a brief note on the list of technical terms that appear in the book. This is found at the end of the book. In his preface, Ntuli reports on the challenges he encountered whilst he was translating the autobiography. One of those he mentions, for instance, is that of indigenising loan words but at the same time not adhering strictly to isiZulu orthographic rules. Instead of writing ihelikhophutha , he chose to write ihelikhoptha because the former does not sound right: ‘kuzwakala kungemnandi’ (Mandela 2001b ). Mtuze however reported on the challenges he faced when he was translating the text in the form of a journal article (Mtuze 2003 ). These differences prompted a more detailed analysis of the texts. The following characteristics were noted and examined: use of loan words for place names and months, loan words in italics plus target equivalents, loan words with paraphrase, use of indigenised words with paraphrase and expansion and deletion.

Findings and interpretation

This section presents the interpretation of findings.

Use of loan words for place names and months

This section provides the incidences of loan words in the isiXhosa and isiZulu translations and the source text. Translating by using loan words is a strategy that can be used to compensate for non-equivalence, that is, when the target language lacks the specific word. With regard to names of places and institutions, Mtuze uses African names in all possible instances while Ntuli keeps to English names. However, it was observed that Ntuli rendered Johannesburg and Durban as eGoli and eThekwini, respectively. Although these are only two examples, they suggest that Mtuze would prefer coming closer to the vocabulary of the target reader whenever possible. It is interesting to note here that both translators used loan words for months of the year when they could have used indigenous names. One can argue that they opted for indigenised loan words in this respect because the latter have been accepted by the speech communities and have become part of their everyday discourse. Hence, they wanted the texts to be more accessible to their target readers. Table 1 portrays the use of loan words.

Use of loan words in italics and target equivalent for legal and/or political terms

Here, we discuss the most prominent stylistic feature in the translations, that is, the use of italicised loan words and their equivalents in brackets. Both translators used many such words, especially those that had to do with legal and/or political terms. Words of this type are used to compensate for the lack of equivalence in the target language (Baker 2011 :33). Using borrowed words is one way of creating new terms or words and is a common strategy for language development. Striking are the different approaches the translators adopted when rendering these terms in their target languages. For example, Mtuze, in most cases, first writes the Act in italics and then gives the equivalent thereof in isiXhosa in brackets. He then uses the italicised English word or phrase alone later in the text. Ntuli on the other hand starts with the isiZulu expression followed by the English equivalent. The English equivalent is not italicised. This can be noticed throughout the texts as shown in Table 2 . The examples cited here are just a small sample of what is in the book.

When reading texts are published in any language, usually one notices that foreign words appear in italics. For example, in an English text, French words or phrases are normally printed in italics. In Long Walk to Freedom (Mandela 1994 :32, 544), words and phrases in isiXhosa or Afrikaans are italicised. Ntuli has deviated from this norm: this is a significant decision that differentiates his style from Mtuze’s. It can be argued that Ntuli chose not to italicise the English words because people incorporate these words ‘as is’ in their daily conversations most of the time. In this regard, Mabuza ( 2000 :382) notes Ntuli’s preference for loan words in his short stories and essays. He comments that this demonstrates that isiZulu is a flexible language (Mabuza 2000 :385). Also noteworthy in this table is that Mtuze supplies isiXhosa equivalents for almost all the loan words he uses in his translation. Ntuli on the other hand sometimes avoids loan words and uses paraphrase instead (refer to examples 3, 8, 11, 15, 20, 22 and 23). In some examples, one notes that Mtuze did not italicise the source words (see example 24). In this regard, Pekkanen ( 2010 :51) maintains that individual propensities need not be uniform but may vary or contradict each other.

The following section briefly discusses indigenised loan words plus paraphrase and expansion and contraction as examples of explicitation and simplification. The latter two strategies are some of the features that reveal translator style. Simplification can be defined as the translator’s attempt to make the language of translation more easily understood by the reader. According to Baker (1996 in Moropa 2005 :269), simplification involves making matters easier for the reader. It raises the level of explicitness by resolving ambiguity. Three types of simplification have been identified in translation studies: syntactic, stylistic and lexical. Stylistic simplification, which has been observed in this study, entails splitting long sentences in the source text, replacing elaborate phraseology with shorter ones and reducing or deleting redundant information (Laviosa-Braithwaite in Moropa 2011 :269). Kruger (2000 in Moropa 2005 :11) notes that in South Africa this phenomenon is used frequently in health texts which are aimed at African readers in rural areas. This is not true for health texts only, but for literary and other texts as well, as has been revealed in studies conducted by Moropa ( 2005 , 2011 ). Moropa ( 2005 ) rightfully asserts that translators apply this strategy subconsciously.

Explicitation is the flipside of simplification. Shuttleworth and Cowie ( 1997 :55) define the former as ‘the phenomenon which frequently leads to TT stating ST information in more explicit form than the original’. The translator may add explanatory phrases, spell out implicit information or add connectives so that the text can flow logically and read easily. This process may be motivated by the translator’s conscious desire to explain the meaning to the target text reader.

Indigenised loan words plus explanation

Using a borrowed word plus an explanation is one of the strategies for dealing with non-equivalence (Baker 2011 ). Here, we have two strategies combined: adopting a borrowed word in the target language and thereafter indigenising it, that is, using the target language orthography and coupling it with a paraphrase or explanation. As illustrated in Table 3 , Mtuze tends to combine these strategies while Ntuli would either use the loan word in indigenous form or employ a paraphrase. The reason for Mtuze to utilise both strategies, one could argue, is for the benefit of the target reader, to facilitate her or his understanding. It can also be argued that this represents a method of preserving and developing the language. For instance, if the reader did not know the Xhosa word for ‘crayfish’, he or she will be able to deduce it from the translation. It is also interesting to observe that Mtuze chose ‘iiferkekire’ a word borrowed from Afrikaans ‘verkyker’ (cf. example 5). This illustrates that languages expand their lexicon by borrowing from languages with which they co-exist. It has now become common to use borrowed words in ordinary conversation even when the particular word exists in the target language; as a result, the indigenous words tend to be lost. Keeping the original word in the domain benefits the language.

The Zulu translator only uses the loan word or a paraphrase at any one time. One may argue that he does not see the need to combine loan word and explanation since these are in the domain already. Since the word is used more often, the translator possibly did not regard it as necessary to explain further. The fact that the word has been indigenised indicates that it has been accepted by the speech community and has been included as part of the lexicon. Using a paraphrase is another characteristic that distinguishes Ntuli’s style from that of Mtuze.

Expansion and contraction

Expansion in simple terms means an increase in size. In this study, it refers to a process where the translator adds more words or information in an attempt to facilitate understanding on the part of the reader. Contraction is the opposite. This may be referred to as stylistic simplification which may be characterised by shortening of words, condensing of sentences and so forth. Instead of distracting the target reader with long explanations, the translator simply omits a word or expression.

As has been observed above, the isiXhosa text contains more pages and words than the isiZulu translation. This suggests that there is a kind of expansion or contraction in either of the translations. Expansion or contraction can be determined on the basis of word count. After a close examination of the two translations, it was discovered that Mtuze displays a tendency to explicate or add information, thereby expanding the text, while Ntuli has a propensity to delete or omit certain words or shorten sentences, resulting in a contracted text. Table 4 illustrates instances of expansion.

As illustrated, the additional information is printed in bold. The extra information provided by Mtuze in brackets is not crucial in that the meaning of the text is not dependent on it but could be useful. For example, the information provided in example 9 ‘ eliphakathi eKoloni ’ (which is inside the Cape) could be useful to a reader who does not know where the Great Karoo is situated. It would also help the reader to not confuse the Great Karoo with the Little Karoo (Klein Karoo). The description of the game ‘Scrabble’ (example 5) could also be useful to the reader who does not know what Scrabble is. In these examples, Mtuze employed explication as a way of simplifying information for the reader. In his article, he confirms (Mtuze 2003 :151) that he sometimes used explication so that the ‘ordinary person could understand’. Words or phrases like ‘ukutsho ke’ (which means) ‘ngabula bona’ (according to them) or ‘ngabula maqabane’ (as the comrades would say) expose Mtuze’s voice as translator because these are not translations of what is in the source texts but translator’s additions. Ntuli, however, did not see the need to add anything. Unlike Mtuze, he did not regard it as necessary to repeat the direct quote in example 13 in English because he could render it in isiZulu. It could be argued, therefore, that the tendency to add more information is a personal trait distinguishing Mtuze from Ntuli.

Table 5 draws attention to sentences with deletions or contractions.

It is interesting to note that in their attempt to facilitate understanding, Mtuze and Ntuli applied different approaches. Mtuze seems to prefer elaborate phraseology while Ntuli opts for condensing the text. For instance, Ntuli in example 1 translated the source text in six words while Mtuze did so in 12 words, by omitting certain words or phrases which he thought were not important because they were not contributing to the meaning of the text. For example, the description of katkop (example 4) which is provided in brackets in the English and isiXhosa texts is omitted from the isiZulu text. Example 6 is another instance where Ntuli used a metaphor ‘ ngaphakathi kopha kakhulu ’ (inside I bled profusely) to shorten a longer expression. The choice of metaphor expressed the emotion more strongly than the source text.

As may be observed from the discussion above, translator style involves decision-making during the translation process. The translator displays her or his personal touch through the words he selects from his or her lexicon or ‘idiolect’. The most important aspect in our adapted definition of style is the recurrence or patterning of certain features. It has also been shown that style can be investigated from different angles, such as use of grammatical aspects, explicitation or, as in the case of this study, translation strategies. The literature furthermore revealed that style can be identified by comparing translated texts with other translations or with non-translated texts. In this study, we compared isiXhosa and isiZulu translations of Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom . The investigation of the use of loan words in general suggests that Mtuze is closer to the source text than Ntuli. The frequent use of target equivalents alongside the English expressions not only facilitates understanding but also teaches translation students about translation strategies. Although the use of italics cannot be said to be a unique feature attributable to Mtuze, when compared with Ntuli’s work, it cannot be ignored. In the same vein, by not italicising foreign words in the isiZulu text, Ntuli made evident his thought processes, which differentiates him from Mtuze. By avoiding foreign words as much as possible and adopting the paraphrasing technique, Ntuli was moving the text closer to the reader.

As proposed by Mikhailov and Villikka ( 2001 ), expansion and contraction are other features which clearly distinguish the two translators. Mtuze displayed tendencies towards expansion while Ntuli was inclined to contraction. Although contraction and deletion could be disadvantageous to the target reader, in that crucial information could be lost, such a strategy simplifies the text and eases the tension whilst reading; sometimes too-long sentences hamper the reading process. Although sentence construction was not the focus of this study, sentence by sentence alignment suggests that Ntuli prefers to break up longer sentences. This finding is not conclusive but is an area that could be explored further. The analysis presented here illustrates that the function of the translation and the target reader were always at the back of the translators’ minds. It also suggests that Mtuze and Ntuli have different translating styles and have subsequently left indelible fingerprints on their respective translations of Long Walk to Freedom . Whether consciously or unconsciously, the two translators exemplified Venuti’s ( 1986 ) advocacy for visibility. This is evident in their translation of this autobiography. Doing so did not deter them from displaying their personal imprints as creative writers. As Pekkanen ( 2010 ) has indicated that translator style can be investigated in various ways, more features could be examined in future to reveal the style of the two translators or of others. It is hoped that this article will pave the way for further research into comparative translation studies as regards the indigenous languages of South Africa.

Acknowledgements

Competing interests.

The authors declare that they have no financial or personal relationships which may have inappropriately influenced them in writing this article.

Authors’ contributions

A.N. was the project leader and was responsible for data collection. K.M. was responsible for theoretical framework on corpus design. Analysis was done by both authors.

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Biography – Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

• Image Credits :
• 2011-06-11_805bc400472f79cd86109f04758a6c68_age19
• 11 June 2011, 07:43 [SAST]

Nelson Mandela’s greatest pleasure, his most private moment, is watching the sun set with the music of Handel or Tchaikovsky playing.

Locked up in his cell during daylight hours, deprived of music, both these simple pleasures were denied him for decades. With his fellow prisoners, concerts were organized when possible, particularly at Christmas time, where they would sing. Nelson Mandela finds music very uplifting, and takes a keen interest not only in European classical music but also in African choral music and the many talents in South African music. But one voice stands out above all – that of Paul Robeson, whom he describes as our hero.

The years in jail reinforced habits that were already entrenched: the disciplined eating regime of an athlete began in the 1940s, as did the early morning exercise. Still today Nelson Mandela is up by 4.30am, irrespective of how late he has worked the previous evening. By 5am he has begun his exercise routine that lasts at least an hour. Breakfast is by 6.30, when the days newspapers are read. The day s work has begun.

With a standard working day of at least 12 hours, time management is critical and Nelson Mandela is extremely impatient with unpunctuality, regarding it as insulting to those you are dealing with.

When speaking of the extensive traveling he has undertaken since his release from prison, Nelson Mandela says: I was helped when preparing for my release by the biography of Pandit Nehru, who wrote of what happens when you leave jail. My daughter Zinzi says that she grew up without a father, who, when he returned, became a father of the nation. This has placed a great responsibility of my shoulders. And wherever I travel, I immediately begin to miss the familiar – the mine dumps, the colour and smell that is uniquely South African, and, above all, the people. I do not like to be away for any length of time. For me, there is no place like home.

Mandela accepted the Nobel Peace Prize as an accolade to all people who have worked for peace and stood against racism. It was as much an award to his person as it was to the ANC and all South Africa s people. In particular, he regards it as a tribute to the people of Norway who stood against apartheid while many in the world were silent.

We know it was Norway that provided resources for farming; thereby enabling us to grow food; resources for education and vocational training and the provision of accommodation over the years in exile. The reward for all this sacrifice will be the attainment of freedom and democracy in South Africa, in an open society which respects the rights of all individuals. That goal is now in sight, and we have to thank the people and governments of Norway and Sweden for the tremendous role they played.

Personal Tastes

Breakfast of plain porridge, with fresh fruit and fresh milk.

A favorite is the traditionally prepared meat of a freshly slaughtered sheep, and the delicacy Amarhewu (fermented corn-meal).

Saturday 11 June 2011 07:43

I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born in a village near Umtata in the Transkei on the 18 July 1918. His father was the principal councilor to the Acting Paramount Chief of Thembuland. After his father s death, the young Rolihlahla became the Paramount Chief s ward to be groomed to assume high office. However, influenced by the cases that came before the Chief s court, he determined to become a lawyer. Hearing the elders stories of his ancestors valor during the wars of resistance in defence of their fatherland, he dreamed also of making his own contribution to the freedom struggle of his people.

After receiving a primary education at a local mission school, Nelson Mandela was sent to Healdtown, a Wesleyan secondary school of some repute where he matriculated. He then enrolled at the University College of Fort Hare for the Bachelor of Arts Degree where he was elected onto the Student’s Representative Council. He was suspended from college for joining in a protest boycott. He went to Johannesburg where he completed his BA by correspondence, took articles of clerkship and commenced study for his LLB. He entered politics in earnest while studying in Johannesburg by joining the African National Congress in 1942.

At the height of the Second World War a small group of young Africans, members of the African National Congress, banded together under the leadership of Anton Lembede. Among them were William Nkomo, Walter Sisulu, Oliver R. Tambo, Ashby P. Mda and Nelson Mandela. Starting out with 60 members, all of whom were residing around the Witwatersrand, these young people set themselves the formidable task of transforming the ANC into a mass movement, deriving its strength and motivation from the unlettered millions of working people in the towns and countryside, the peasants in the rural areas and the professionals.

Their chief contention was that the political tactics of the old guard’ leadership of the ANC, reared in the tradition of constitutionalism and polite petitioning of the government of the day, were proving inadequate to the tasks of national emancipation. In opposition to the old guard’, Lembede and his colleagues espoused a radical African Nationalism grounded in the principle of national self-determination. In September 1944 they came together to found the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL).

Mandela soon impressed his peers by his disciplined work and consistent effort and was elected to the Secretaryship of the Youth League in 1947. By painstaking work, campaigning at the grassroots and through its mouthpiece Inyaniso’ (Truth) the ANCYL was able to canvass support for its policies amongst the ANC membership. At the 1945 annual conference of the ANC, two of the League s leaders, Anton Lembede and Ashby Mda, were elected onto the National Executive Committee (NEC). Two years later another Youth League leader, Oliver R Tambo became a member of the NEC.

Spurred on by the victory of the National Party which won the 1948 all-White elections on the platform of Apartheid, at the 1949 annual conference, the Programme of Action , inspired by the Youth League, which advocated the weapons of boycott, strike, civil disobedience and non-co-operation was accepted as official ANC policy.

The Programme of Action had been drawn up by a sub-committee of the ANCYL composed of David Bopape, Ashby Mda, Nelson Mandela, James Njongwe, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo. To ensure its implementation the membership replaced older leaders with a number of younger men. Walter Sisulu, a founding member of the Youth League was elected Secretary-General. The conservative Dr A.B. Xuma lost the presidency to Dr J.S. Moroka, a man with a reputation for greater militancy. The following year, 1950, Mandela himself was elected to the NEC at national conference.

The ANCYL programme aimed at the attainment of full citizenship, direct parliamentary representation for all South Africans. In policy documents of which Mandela was an important co-author, the ANCYL paid special attention to the redistribution of the land, trade union rights, education and culture. The ANCYL aspired to free and compulsory education for all children, as well as mass education for adults.

When the ANC launched its Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws in 1952, Mandela was elected National Volunteer-in-Chief. The Defiance Campaign was conceived as a mass civil disobedience campaign that would snowball from a core of selected volunteers to involved more and more ordinary people, culminating in mass defiance. Fulfilling his responsibility as Volunteer-in-Chief, Mandela traveled the country organizing resistance to discriminatory legislation. Charged and brought to trial for his role in the campaign, the court found that Mandela and his co-accused had consistently advised their followers to adopt a peaceful course of action and to avoid all violence.

For his part in the Defiance Campaign, Mandela was convicted of contravening the Suppression of Communism Act and given a suspended prison sentence. Shortly after the campaign ended, he was also prohibited from attending gatherings and confined to Johannesburg for six months.

During this period of restrictions, Mandela wrote the attorneys admission examination and was admitted to the profession. He opened a practice in Johannesburg, in partnership with Oliver Tambo. In recognition of his outstanding contribution during the Defiance Campaign Mandela had been elected to the presidency of both the Youth League and the Transvaal region of the ANC at the end of 1952, he thus became a deputy president of the ANC itself.

Of their law practice, Oliver Tambo, ANC National Chairman at the time of his death in April 1993, has written:

To reach our desks each morning Nelson and I ran the gauntlet of patient queues of people overflowing from the chairs in the waiting room into the corridors… To be landless (in South Africa) can be a crime, and weekly we interviewed the delegations of peasants who came to tell us how many generations their families had worked a little piece of land from which they were now being ejected… To live in the wrong area can be a crime… Our buff office files carried thousands of these stories and if, when we started our law partnership, we had not been rebels against apartheid, our experiences in our offices would have remedied the deficiency. We had risen to professional status in our community, but every case in court, every visit to the prisons to interview clients, reminded us of the humiliation and suffering burning into our people.

Nor did their professional status earn Mandela and Tambo any personal immunity from the brutal apartheid laws. They fell foul of the land segregation legislation, and the authorities demanded that they move their practice from the city to the back of beyond, as Mandela later put it, miles away from where clients could reach us during working hours. This was tantamount to asking us to abandon our legal practice, to give up the legal service of our people… No attorney worth his salt would easily agree to do that, said Mandela and the partnership resolved to defy the law.

Nor was the government alone in trying to frustrate Mandela s legal practice. On the grounds of his conviction under the Suppression of Communism Act, the Transvaal Law Society petitioned the Supreme Court to strike him off the roll of attorneys. The petition was refused with Mr. Justice Ramsbottom finding that Mandela had been moved by a desire to serve his black fellow citizens and nothing he had done showed him to be unworthy to remain in the ranks of an honorable profession.

In 1952 Nelson Mandela was given the responsibility to prepare an organizational plan that would enable the leadership of the movement to maintain dynamic contact with its membership without recourse to public meetings. The objective was to prepare for the contingency of proscription by building up powerful local and regional branches to whom power could be devolved. This was the M-Plan, named after him.

During the early fifties Mandela played an important part in leading the resistance to the Western Areas removals and to the introduction of Bantu Education. He also played a significant role in popularizing the Freedom Charter , adopted by the Congress of the People in 1955.

In the late fifties, Mandela s attention turned to the struggles against the exploitation of labor, the pass laws, the nascent Bantustan policy, and the segregation of the open universities. Mandela arrived at the conclusion very early on that the Bantustan policy was a political swindle and an economic absurdity. He predicted, with dismal prescience, that ahead there lay a grim programme of mass evictions, political persecutions, and police terror. On the segregation of the universities, Mandela observed that the friendship and inter-racial harmony that is forged through the admixture and association of various racial groups at the mixed universities constitute a direct threat to the policy of apartheid and baasskap, and that it was to remove that threat that the open universities were being closed to black students.

During the whole of the fifties, Mandela was the victim of various forms of repression. He was banned, arrested and imprisoned. For much of the latter half of the decade, he was one of the accused in the mammoth Treason Trial, at great cost to his legal practice and his political work. After the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the ANC was outlawed, and Mandela, still on trial, was detained.

The Treason Trial collapsed in 1961 as South Africa was being steered towards the adoption of the republic constitution. With the ANC now illegal the leadership picked up the threads from its underground headquarters. Nelson Mandela emerged at this time as the leading figure in this new phase of struggle. Under the ANC’s inspiration, 1,400 delegates came together at an All-in African Conference in Pietermaritzburg during March 1961. Mandela was the keynote speaker. In an electrifying address he challenged the apartheid regime to convene a national convention, representative of all South Africans to thrash out a new constitution based on democratic principles. Failure to comply, he warned, would compel the majority (Blacks) to observe the forthcoming inauguration of the Republic with a mass general strike. He immediately went underground to lead the campaign. Although fewer answered the call than Mandela had hoped, it attracted considerable support throughout the country. The government responded with the largest military mobilization since the war, and the Republic was born in an atmosphere of fear and apprehension.

Forced to live apart from his family, moving from place to place to evade detection by the government s ubiquitous informers and police spies, Mandela had to adopt a number of disguises. Sometimes dressed as a common laborer, at other times as a chauffeur, his successful evasion of the police earned him the title of the Black Pimpernel. It was during this time that he, together with other leaders of the ANC constituted a new specialized section of the liberation movement, Umkhonto we Sizwe, as an armed nucleus with a view to preparing for armed struggle. At the Rivonia trial, Mandela explained : “At the beginning of June 1961, after long and anxious assessment of the South African situation, I and some colleagues came to the conclusion that as violence in this country was inevitable, it would be wrong and unrealistic for African leaders to continue preaching peace and non-violence 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, and to form Umkhonto we Sizwe…the Government had left us no other choice.”

In 1961 Umkhonto we Sizwe was formed, with Mandela as its commander-in-chief. In 1962 Mandela left the country unlawfully and traveled abroad for several months. In Ethiopia he addressed the Conference of the Pan African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa, and was warmly received by senior political leaders in several countries. During this trip Mandela, anticipating an intensification of the armed struggle, began to arrange guerrilla training for members of Umkhonto we Sizwe.

Not long after his return to South Africa Mandela was arrested and charged with illegal exit from the country, and incitement to strike.

Since he considered the prosecution a trial of the aspirations of the African people, Mandela decided to conduct his own defence. He applied for the recusal of the magistrate, on the ground that in such a prosecution a judiciary controlled entirely by whites was an interested party and therefore could not be impartial, and on the ground that he owed no duty to obey the laws of a white parliament, in which he was not represented.

Mandela prefaced this challenge with the affirmation: I detest racialism, because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man.

Mandela was convicted and sentenced to five years imprisonment. While serving his sentence he was charged, in the Rivonia Trial, with sabotage. Mandela s statements in court during these trials are classics in the history of the resistance to apartheid, and they have been an inspiration to all who have opposed it. His statement from the dock in the Rivonia Trial ends with these words:

I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. 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.

Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment and started his prison years in the notorious Robben Island Prison, a maximum security prison on a small island 7Km off the coast near Cape Town. In April 1984 he was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town and in December 1988 he was moved the Victor Verster Prison near Paarl from where he was eventually released. While in prison, Mandela flatly rejected offers made by his jailers for remission of sentence in exchange for accepting the Bantustan policy by recognizing the independence of the Transkei and agreeing to settle there. Again in the ‘eighties Mandela rejected an offer of release on condition that he renounce violence. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts. Only free men can negotiate, he said.

Released on 11 February 1990, Mandela plunged wholeheartedly into his life’s work, striving to attain the goals he and others had set out almost four decades earlier. In 1991, at the first national conference of the ANC held inside South Africa after being banned for decades, Nelson Mandela was elected President of the ANC while his lifelong friend and colleague, Oliver Tambo, became the organization’s National Chairperson.

Nelson Mandela has never wavered in his devotion to democracy, equality and learning. Despite terrible provocation, he has never answered racism with racism. His life has been an inspiration, in South Africa and throughout the world, to all who are oppressed and deprived, to all who are opposed to oppression and deprivation.

In a life that symbolizes the triumph of the human spirit over man s inhumanity to man, Nelson Mandela accepted the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of all South Africans who suffered and sacrificed so much to bring peace to our land.

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Former South African president and civil rights advocate Nelson Mandela dedicated his life to fighting for equality—and ultimately helped topple South Africa's racist system of apartheid. His accomplishments are now celebrated each year on July 18, Nelson Mandela International Day.

• HISTORY & CULTURE

How Nelson Mandela fought apartheid—and why his work is not complete

This activist dedicated his life to dismantling racism—and went from being the world’s most famous political prisoner to South Africa’s first Black president.

Nelson Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, in what was then known as the Union of South Africa, a dominion of the British Empire. Though the majority of its inhabitants were Black, they were dominated by a white minority that controlled the land, the wealth, and the government—a discriminatory social structure that would later be codified in the country’s legal system and called apartheid.

Over the next 95 years, Mandela would help topple South Africa’s brutal social order. During a lifetime of resistance, imprisonment, and leadership, Nelson Mandela led South Africa out of apartheid and into an era of reconciliation and majority rule.  

( Read with your kids about Nelson Mandela’s life. )

Mandela began his life under another name: Rolihlahla Dalibhunga Mandela. His father was a chief of the Thembu people, a subgroup of the Xhosa people, who make up South Africa’s second-largest cultural group. After defying a British magistrate, Mandela’s father had been stripped of his chieftainship, title, and land. On his first day in a segregated elementary school, Rolihlahla, too, was stripped of his identity when his schoolteacher gave every child an English name—a common practice in a society in which whites “were either unable or unwilling to pronounce an African name, and considered it uncivilized to have one,” he   wrote in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom .

While Mandela’s skin relegated him to the lowest social order in segregated South Africa, his royal blood—and connections—gave him access to the country’s only university for Black people, the University of Fort Hare. There, he became an activist, and was expelled for protesting the student government’s lack of power. He returned home to his small village on the eastern Cape only to find that his family wanted him to enter an arranged marriage to punish him for leaving school. So he fled north to Soweto, South Africa’s largest Black city, in 1941.

Apartheid and activism

In Soweto, Mandela became a part-time law student at Wits University and began to practice law, starting the nation’s first Black law firm. He joined the   African National Congress , a group that agitated for the civil rights of Black South Africans. In 1948, the segregation that was already rampant in South Africa became state law when its ruling party formally adopted apartheid , or apartness. This policy required Black South Africans to carry identification with them at all times, which they needed to enter areas designated for whites. They were forced to live in all-Black zones and forbidden from entering into interracial relationships. Black people were even removed from the voter rolls and eventually fully disenfranchised.

For Hungry Minds

At first, Mandela and his fellow members of the ANC used nonviolent tactics like strikes and demonstrations to protest apartheid. In 1952, Mandela helped escalate the struggle as a leader of the Defiance Campaign, which encouraged Black participants to actively violate laws. More than 8,000 people —including Mandela—were jailed for violating curfews, refusing to carry identification passes, and other offenses.  

( See pictures from the life and times of Mandela. )

Protesters gather in front of a courthouse in Johannesburg, South Africa, during the 1956 treason trial of anti-apartheid activists, among them Nelson Mandela. The defendants were found not guilty, but some—including Mandela—were later convicted on a separate charge in 1964.

The Defiance Campaign catapulted the ANC’s agenda, and Mandela, into the public eye as they continued to agitate for Black rights. After serving his sentence, Mandela continued to lead protests against the government and, in 1956, he, along with 155 others, was tried for treason . He was acquitted in 1961 and lived in hiding for 17 months after the trial.

Over time, Mandela came to believe that armed resistance was the only way to end apartheid. In 1962, he briefly left the country to receive military training and gain support for the cause but was arrested and convicted soon after his return for leaving the country without a permit. Then, while he was in prison, police discovered documents related to Mandela’s plan for guerrilla warfare. They charged him and his allies with sabotage.

Mandela and the other defendants in the ensuing   Rivonia Trial knew they were sure to be convicted and executed. So they turned their show trial into a statement, publicizing their anti-apartheid struggle and challenging the legal system that oppressed Black South Africans. When it was Mandela’s turn to speak for the defense, he delivered a   four-hour-long speech .

“The lack of human dignity experienced by Africans is the direct result of the policy of white supremacy,” he said. “Our struggle is a truly national one. It is a struggle of the African people, inspired by our own suffering and our own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live.” Mandela was committed to the ideal of a free society, he said, and “if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

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Prison years.

Mandela wasn’t put to death—but, in 1964, he was sentenced to life in prison. He was   allowed only one 30-minute visit with a single person every year, and could send and receive two letters a year. Confined in austere conditions, he worked in a limestone quarry and over time, earned the   respect of his captors and fellow prisoners. He was given chances to leave prison in exchange for ensuring the ANC would give up violence but refused.

Over his 27 years of imprisonment, Mandela became the world’s best-known political prisoner. His words were banned in South Africa, but he was already the country’s most famous man. His supporters agitated for his release and news of his imprisonment galvanized anti-apartheid activists all over the world.

In the 1960s, some members of the United Nations began to call for sanctions against South Africa—calls that grew louder in the decades that followed. Eventually, South Africa became an international pariah. In 1990, in response to international pressure and the threat of civil war, South Africa’s new president, F.W. de Klerk, pledged to end apartheid and released Mandela from prison.

Nelson Mandela and wife, Winnie, raise their fists upon his release from Victor Verster prison in South Africa. Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years for his fight against apartheid. Upon his release, he negotiated an end to the racist policy and was elected president of South Africa.

Apartheid did not immediately end with Mandela’s release. Now 71, Mandela negotiated with de Klerk for a new constitution that would allow majority rule. Apartheid was repealed in 1991, and in 1994, the ANC, now a political party, won more than 62 percent of the popular vote in a peaceful, democratic election. Mandela—who now shares   a Nobel Peace Prize with de Klerk—became the president of a new nation, South Africa.  

( Here's how South Africa has changed since the end of apartheid. )

Post-apartheid leadership

Mandela served as president for five years. Among his accomplishments was South Africa’s   Truth and Reconciliation Commission , designed to document human rights violations and help victims and violators come to term with their past. Though its results are contested, the commission offered the beginnings of restorative justice—a process that focuses on repair rather than retribution— to a nation still smarting from centuries of scars.

Mandela’s legacy wasn’t unassailable: He was considered by some analysts a largely ineffective president and was criticized for his handling of violence and the economy while in office.

After leaving office in 1999, Mandela spent the remainder of his life working to end poverty and raise awareness of HIV/AIDS. He died in 2013 at age 95.

Every year on July 18, he is   remembered on Nelson Mandela International Day, a United Nations holiday that commemorates his service and sacrifice. It’s a reminder that Mandela’s work is not yet done—an opinion shared by Mandela himself.  

( Even in the U.S., Mandela is a symbol of hope. )

“To be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others,” he   wrote in his autobiography. “The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.”

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‘I am prepared to die’: Mandela’s speech which shook apartheid

Sixty years ago during the Rivonia Trial in South Africa, Nelson Mandela delivered one of the most famous speeches of the 20th century. He expected to be sentenced to death but instead lived to see his dream ‘of a democratic and free society’ realised.

“Accused number one” had been speaking from the dock for almost three hours by the time he uttered the words that would ultimately change South Africa. The racially segregated Pretoria courtroom listened in silence as Nelson Mandela’s account of his lifelong struggle against white minority rule reached its conclusion. Judge Quintus de Wet managed not to look at Mandela for the majority of his address. But before accused number one delivered his final lines, defence lawyer Joel Joffe remembered, “Mandela paused for a long time and looked squarely at the judge” before saying:

“During my lifetime, I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against Black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realised. But, my Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Keep reading

Ramaphosa hails anc record as south africa marks 30 years of democracy, ‘free at last’: when south africa voted in democracy, kicked out apartheid, april 27, 1994: what has changed in south africa 30 years after apartheid, south africa seeks to stop auction of historic nelson mandela artefacts.

After he spoke that last sentence, novelist and activist Nadine Gordimer, who was in the courtroom on April 20, 1964, said, “The strangest and most moving sound I have ever heard from human throats came from the Black side of the court audience. It was short, sharp and terrible: something between a sigh and a groan.”

This was because there was a very good chance that Mandela and his co-accused would be sentenced to death for their opposition to the apartheid government. His lawyers had actually tried to talk him out of including the “I am prepared to die” line because they thought it might be seen as a provocation. But as Mandela later wrote in his autobiography, “I felt we were likely to hang no matter what we said, so we might as well say what we truly believed.”

‘The trial that changed South Africa’

The Rivonia Trial – in which Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and seven other anti-apartheid activists were charged with sabotage – was the third and final time Mandela would stand accused in an apartheid court. From 1956 to 1961, he had been involved in the Treason Trial, a long-running embarrassment for the apartheid government, which would ultimately see all 156 of the accused acquitted because the state failed to prove they had committed treason.

And in 1962, he had been charged with leaving the country illegally and leading Black workers in a strike. He knew he was guilty on both counts, so he decided to put the apartheid government on trial. On the first day of the case, Mandela, known for his natty Western dress, arrived in traditional Xhosa attire to the shock of all present. He led his own defence and did not call any witnesses. Instead, he gave what has been remembered as the “Black man in a white court” speech, during which he asserted that “posterity will pronounce that I was innocent and that the criminals that should have been brought before this court are the members of the Verwoerd government,” a reference to Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd.

The Rivonia Trial, which kicked off in October 1963, was named after the Johannesburg suburb where Liliesleaf Farm was located. From 1961 to 1963, the Liliesleaf museum website notes, the farm served “as the secret headquarters and nerve centre” of the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK, the military wing of the ANC). On July 11, 1963, acting on a tip-off, the police raided Liliesleaf, seizing many incriminating documents and arresting the core leadership of the underground liberation movement. Mandela, who was serving a five-year sentence on Robben Island from his conviction in the 1962 trial, was flown to Pretoria to take his place as accused number one.

Instead of charging the men with high treason, State Prosecutor Percy Yutar opted for the easier-to-prove crime of sabotage – the definition of which was so broad that it included misdemeanours such as trespassing – and which had recently been made a capital offence by the government. Thanks to the evidence seized from Liliesleaf, which included several documents handwritten by Mandela and the testimony of Bruno Mtolo (referred to as Mr X throughout the trial), a regional commander of MK who had turned state witness, Yutar was virtually assured of convictions for the main accused.

In his autobiography, Mandela explains their defence strategy: “Right from the start we had made it clear that we intended to use the trial not as a test of the law but as a platform for our beliefs. We would not deny, for example, that we had been responsible for acts of sabotage. We would not deny that a group of us had turned away from non-violence. We were not concerned with getting off or lessening our punishment, but with making the trial strengthen the cause for which we were struggling – at whatever cost to ourselves. We would not defend ourselves in a legal sense so much as in a moral sense.”

The accused and their lawyers decided that Mandela would open the defence case not as a witness – who would be subject to cross-examination – but with a statement from the dock. This format would allow him to speak uninterrupted, but it carried less legal weight.

Mandela writes that he spent “about a fortnight drafting [his] address, working mainly in my cell in the evenings”. He first read it to his co-accused, who approved the text with a few tweaks, before passing it to lead defence lawyer Bram Fischer. Fischer was concerned that the final paragraph might be taken the wrong way by the judge, so he got another member of the defence team, Hal Hanson, to read it. Hanson was unequivocal: “If Mandela reads this in court, they will take him straight to the back of the courthouse and string him up.”

“Nelson remained adamant” that the line should stay, wrote George Bizos, another member of the defence team. Bizos eventually persuaded Mandela to tweak his wording: “I proposed that Nelson say he hoped to live for and achieve his ideals but if needs be was prepared to die.”

On the evening of April 19, Bizos got Mandela’s permission to take a copy of his statement to Gordimer. The respected British journalist Anthony Sampson, who knew Mandela well, happened to be staying with her and he retired to Gordimer’s study with the text. “What seemed like hours” later, Bizos wrote, Sampson “eventually returned, obviously moved by what he had read”. Sampson made no major changes to the text, but he did advise moving some of the paragraphs because he felt journalists were likely to read the beginning and the end properly and skim over the rest.

Gordimer does not seem to have suggested changes to the address, but she did see several drafts. She, too, was happy with the final version.

The statement from the dock

Yutar, who had been hoodwinked by the defence team’s constant requests for court transcripts into spending weeks preparing to cross-examine Mandela, was visibly shocked when Fischer announced that Mandela would instead be making a statement from the dock. He even tried to get the judge to explain to Mandela that he was committing a legal error. But the usually stone-faced judge laughed as he dismissed the request. Mandela, himself a lawyer, was represented by some of the country’s finest legal minds. He knew exactly what he was doing.

“My Lord, I am the first accused,” Mandela said. “I admit immediately that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto we Sizwe and that I played a prominent role in its affairs until I was arrested in August 1962.” Thanks to the recent recovery of the original recordings of Mandela’s statement, we now know that he spoke for 176 minutes , not the four and a half hours regularly cited.

As Martha Evans, author of Speeches That Shaped South Africa, explained, Mandela “candidly confessed some of the crimes levelled against him before giving a cogent and detailed account of the conditions and events that had led to the establishment of MK and the adoption of the armed struggle”.

He spoke at length of the ANC’s tradition of nonviolence and explained why he had planned sabotage: “I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness nor because I have any love for violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the whites.”

The final section of the address focused on inequality in South Africa and humanised Black South Africans in ways that Mandela argued the country’s white population rarely acknowledged:

“Whites tend to regard Africans as a separate breed. They do not look upon them as people with families of their own. They do not realise that we have emotions, that we fall in love like white people do, that we want to be with our wives and children like white people want to be with theirs, that we want to earn money, enough money to support our families properly.”

And: “Above all, my Lord, we want equal political rights because without them our disabilities will be permanent. I know this sounds revolutionary to the whites in this country because the majority of voters will be Africans. This makes the white man fear democracy. But this fear cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the only solution which will guarantee racial harmony and freedom for all.”

Interestingly, Gordimer noted that the speech “read much better than it was spoken. Mandela’s delivery was very disappointing indeed, hesitant, parsonical (if there is such a word), boring. Only at the end did the man come through.”

Hanging by a thread

After Mandela’s address, several of the accused subjected themselves to cross-examination. Gordimer was particularly impressed by Walter Sisulu: “Sisulu was splendid. What a paradox – he is almost uneducated while [Mandela] has a law degree! He was lucid and to the point – and never missed a point in his replies to Yutar.”

The defence team enjoyed a number of minor victories with Judge de Wet fairly regularly telling the court that Yutar had failed to prove one point or another. After final arguments were heard in mid-May, court was adjourned for three weeks for the judge to consider his verdict.

For the main accused, that verdict was always going to be guilty. Avoiding the noose became the defence team’s number one priority. In the courtroom, this entailed asking Alan Paton, a world famous novelist who was leader of the vehemently anti-apartheid Liberal Party, to give evidence in mitigation of sentence.

But the real action happened outside the court, Sampson wrote in his authorised biography of Mandela: “The accused had been buoyed up by the growing support from abroad, not only from many African countries but also, more to Mandela’s surprise, from Britain. … On May 7, 1964, the British Prime Minister, Alec Douglas-Home, offered to send a private message to Verwoerd about the trial. But Sir Hugh Stephenson [Britain’s ambassador to South Africa] recommended that ‘no more pressure should be exerted’ and, contrary to some published reports, there is no evidence the message was sent. When the South African Ambassador called on the Foreign Office that month, he was told that the government was now under less pressure to take a stronger line against South Africa, though death sentences would bring the matter to a head again.”

A week before the verdicts, Bizos visited British Consul-General Leslie Minford at his Pretoria home. “As I was leaving, Leslie put his arm around my shoulders and said, ‘George, there won’t be a death sentence.’ I did not ask him how he knew. For one thing, he had downed a number of whiskies. Certainly, I felt I could not rely on the information nor could I tell the team or our anxious clients.”

Upping the stakes further was the decision by Mandela, Sisulu and Mbeki to not appeal their sentence – even if it were death. As he listened to sentencing arguments, Mandela clutched a handwritten note that concluded with the words: “If I must die, let me declare for all to know that I will meet my fate as a man.”

Paton and Hanson spoke in mitigation of sentence on the morning of June 12, 1964. Bizos noted, “Judge de Wet not only took no note of what was being said but he appeared not to be listening.” He had already made his mind up, and when the formalities were over, he announced: “I have decided not to impose the supreme penalty, which in a case like this would usually be the penalty for such a crime. But consistent with my duty, that is the only leniency which I can show. The sentence in the case of all the accused will be one of life imprisonment.”

Professor Thula Simpson, the leading historian of MK, told Al Jazeera, “There is no evidence that De Wet was leaned on by the state. I don’t believe there’s any evidence for this being a political rather than a judicial judgement.”

Professor Roger Southall, author of dozens of books on Southern African politics, agreed. “At the time, there was a lot of speculation about whether there was pressure on the SA government to ensure that capital punishment was not imposed,” he told Al Jazeera. “But there is also no proof that the SA government intervened. That remains an unanswered question. We have to presume that the judge knew the international and local climate.”

Business as usual?

“Rivonia got a lot of global publicity,” Southall said. “But once the trial ended, it seemed like Mandela had been forgotten.” Mandela and other senior ANC figures were either locked up on Robben Island or were living in relative obscurity in exile. “Capital came pouring into South Africa at a rate that’s never been equalled since,” Southall continued. “The apartheid government seemed totally in control. The resistance was dead. It was a thoroughly grim period for the ANC.”

This only started to change in 1973, Southall said, “with the Durban strikes and the revival of the trade union movement”, which had been battered into submission. The rebirth of the Black trade union movement signalled the beginning of a new phase of opposition politics. Things ratcheted up several notches on June 16, 1976, when apartheid policemen opened fire on a peaceful protest of schoolchildren in the Black township of Soweto, killing 15 people. In the eight months that followed, violence spread across South Africa, killing about 700 people.

The resuscitation of Black opposition to apartheid under a new band of leaders coincided with the decline of the economy. After the Soweto uprising, foreign investors fled South Africa in their droves, laying bare the fundamental flaws of the apartheid government’s dependence on cheap labour and mining and its point-blank refusal to meaningfully educate people of colour. The apartheid government spent about 12 times more per child on white schoolchildren than it did on Black ones.

By the 1980s, even the apartheid government could see something had to change, and in 1983, Prime Minister PW Botha announced plans to include multiracial and Indian South Africans, but not Black South Africans, in a new “tricameral” parliament. His plan backfired spectacularly, uniting the opposition like never before under the newly formed United Democratic Front (UDF). One of the UDF’s key demands was the unconditional release of all political prisoners, especially Mandela. Soon after its launch in August 1983, the UDF numbered almost 1,000 different organisations from all segments of South African society. Botha didn’t know what had hit him.

When, in 1984, Oliver Tambo, the ANC’s exiled leader, asked his supporters to “make South Africa ungovernable”, the townships rose up. Things got so bad in 1985 that Botha declared a state of emergency – but this was also the year in which tentative secret talks with Mandela began.

An icon re-emerges

“In the late 1970s, you started getting occasional demands that Mandela be released,” Southall said. By the mid-1980s, “Free Nelson Mandela” became a constant and global refrain with the “I am prepared to die” statement being quoted at rallies and emblazoned on T-shirts. “On one level, the ANC ‘invented’ this version of Mandela,” Southall said. “Until 1976, the apartheid government had done a very good job of erasing him from public memory.”

What might have happened if Mandela had been sentenced to death at Rivonia? One does not need to look far for a possible answer. The other poster boy of the global anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s was Steve Biko (subject of the Peter Gabriel hit song), the young leader of the Black Consciousness movement, who had been tortured to death by apartheid police in 1977. “You can also have myths develop when you execute people,” Simpson said. “If they had executed Mandela, he would have been a different icon in a different struggle.”

A dream realised

On February 11, 1990, Mandela was released from prison. From the balcony of Cape Town City Hall, he addressed his supporters for the first time since Rivonia. He opened his speech by saying: “I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people. Your tireless and heroic sacrifices have made it possible for me to be here today. I, therefore, place the remaining years of my life in your hands.”

He ended by quoting the final lines of his 1964 statement from the dock, explaining that “they are true today as they were then.” Over the course of the next decade, as Mandela first navigated the treacherous path to democracy and then served as the country’s first democratically elected president, he lived out his vision of a “democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities”.

When the ANC’s Chris Hani was assassinated by an apartheid supporter in 1993, Mandela assumed the moral leadership of the country by urging his incensed supporters not to derail the peace process. After becoming president, he engaged in numerous public shows of reconciliation: He went for tea with the widow of slain apartheid Prime Minister Verwoerd, and he donned the Springbok rugby jersey (for many, a symbol of white supremacy) when he presented the almost entirely white South African team with the World Cup trophy in 1995.

When Mandela died in 2013, US President Barack Obama spoke at his memorial, famously – and predictably – quoting the final paragraph of the statement from the dock at Rivonia. By that stage, there were already some in South Africa who felt that Mandela was a “sellout” because he had been too forgiving of whites during the transition.

Now, more than a decade later as inequality continues to plague the country and South Africa stands on the cusp of its most competitive general election in 30 years of democracy, it is common to hear young Black South Africans accuse Mandela of selling out . Southall does not take such claims too seriously: “People who say he’s a sellout are either too young or too forgetful to appreciate how close we came to civil war. Mandela played a huge role in pulling off the peaceful transition.”

“Now, after 30 years of democracy, there is still a tension between white domination and Black domination,” Simpson said. “South Africa is not what Mandela dreamed of. He might be turning in his grave, but we can’t forget that many of the policies that have gone wrong were introduced by him. He might have turned things around, but he might have not.”

“You can’t blame Mandela for where we are now,” Southall said. “There are individual things he got wrong. But he also got a lot of things right.”

Mandela’s is one of the 12 remarkable lives covered in Nick Dall’s recent book, Legends: People Who Changed South Africa for the Better, co-written with Matthew Blackman.

Biography Online

Biography Nelson Mandela

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

– Nelson Mandela

Short Bio of Nelson Mandela

A young Nelson Mandela (1938)

Nelson Mandela was born in Transkei, South Africa on July 18, 1918. He was the son of a local tribal leader of the Tembu tribe. As a youngster, Nelson took part in the activities and initiation ceremonies of his local tribe. However, unlike his father Nelson Mandela gained a full education, studying at the University College of Fort Hare and also the University of Witwatersrand. Nelson was a good student and qualified with a law degree in 1942.

During his time at University, Nelson Mandela became increasingly aware of the racial inequality and injustice faced by non-white people. In 1943, he decided to join the ANC and actively take part in the struggle against apartheid.

As one of the few qualified lawyers, Nelson Mandela was in great demand; also his commitment to the cause saw him promoted through the ranks of the ANC. In 1956, Nelson Mandela, along with several other members of the ANC were arrested and charged with treason. After a lengthy and protracted court case, the defendants were finally acquitted in 1961. However, with the ANC now banned, Nelson Mandela suggested an active armed resistance to the apartheid regime. This led to the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe, which would act as a guerilla resistance movement. Receiving training in other African countries, the Umkhonto we Sizwe took part in active sabotage.

In 1963, Mandela was again arrested and put on trial for treason. This time the State succeeded in convicting Mandela of plotting to overthrow the government. However, the case received considerable international attention and the apartheid regime of South Africa became under the glare of the international community. At the end of his trial, Nelson Mandela made a long speech, in which he was able to affirm his commitment to the ideals of democracy.

“We believe that South Africa belongs to all the people who live in it, and not to one group, be it black or white. We did not want an interracial war, and tried to avoid it to the last minute.”

– Nelson Mandela, Supreme court of South Africa, Pretoria, April 20, 1964

Closing remark at the 1964 trial

“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. 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, Supreme court of South Africa, Pretoria, April 20, 1964. (See: full speech )

Time in Prison

F.W.De Klerk and Nelson Mandela at World Economic Forum 1992.

During his time in prison, Mandela became increasingly well known throughout the world. Mandela became the best known black leader and was symbolic of the struggle against the apartheid regime. Largely unbeknown to Mandela, his continued imprisonment led to a world-wide pressure for his release. Many countries implemented sanctions on apartheid South Africa. Due to international pressure, from the mid-1980s, the apartheid regime increasingly began to negotiate with the ANC and Nelson Mandela in particular. On many occasions, Mandela was offered a conditional freedom. However, he always refused to put the political ideals of the ANC above his own freedom.

Freedom and a new Rainbow Nation

Mandela voting in 1994 election. Photo. P.Weinburg

Eventually, Nelson Mandela was released on February 11, 1990. The day was a huge event for South Africa and the world. His release symbolic of the impending end of apartheid. Following his release there followed protracted negotiations to secure a lasting settlement. The negotiations were tense often against the backdrop of tribal violence. However, in April 1994, South Africa had its first full and fair elections. The ANC, with 65% of the vote, were elected and Nelson Mandela became the first President of the new South Africa.

“The time for the healing of the wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come. The time to build is upon us.”

As President, he sought to heal the rifts of the past. Despite being mistreated, he was magnanimous in his dealing with his former oppressors. His forgiving and tolerant attitude gained the respect of the whole South African nation and considerably eased the transition to a full democracy.

“If there are dreams about a beautiful South Africa, there are also roads that lead to their goal. Two of these roads could be named goodness and forgiveness.”

Photo: Governor-General of Australia

In 1995, the Rugby World Cup was held in South Africa. Nelson Mandela was instrumental in encouraging black South Africans to support the ‘Springboks’ – The Springboks were previously reviled for being a symbol of white supremacy. Mandela surprised many by meeting the Springbok captain, Francois Pienaar, before the World Cup to wish the team well. After an epic final, in which South Africa beat New Zealand, Mandela, wearing a Springbok jersey, presented the trophy to the winning South Africa team. De Klerk later stated Mandela successfully won the hearts of a million white rugby fans.

Nelson Mandela also oversaw the formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in which former crimes of apartheid were investigated, but stressing individual forgiveness and helping the nation to look forward. The Committee was chaired by Desmond Tutu , and Mandela later praised its work.

Nelson Mandela retired from the Presidency in 1999, to be succeeded by Thabo Mbeki. In Mandela’s later years, ill health curtailed his public life. However, he did speak out on certain issues. He was very critical of the US-led invasion of Iraq during 2003. Speaking in a Newsweek interview in 2002, he expressed concern at American actions, he said:

“I really wanted to retire and rest and spend more time with my children, my grandchildren and of course with my wife. But the problems are such that for anybody with a conscience who can use whatever influence he may have to try to bring about peace, it’s difficult to say no.” (10 September 2002)

He has also campaigned to highlight the issue of HIV / AIDS in South Africa.

Mandela was married three times, fathered six children, and had 17 grandchildren. His first wife was Evelyn Ntoko Mase. His second wife was Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, they split after an acrimonious dispute. Winnie was alleged to have an involvement in human rights abuses. Mandela married for a third time on his 80th birthday to Graça Machel.

Graça Michel, Sri Chinmoy and Nelson Mandela holding Peace Torch. Source

Nelson Mandela was often referred to as Madiba – his Xhosa clan name.

Nelson Mandela died on 5 December 2013 after a long illness with his family at his side. He was 95.

At his memorial, Barack Obama, the President of the US said:

“We will not likely see the likes of Nelson Mandela ever again, so it falls to us, as best we can, to carry forward the example that he set. He no longer belongs to us; he belongs to the ages.”

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of Nelson Mandela”, Oxford, UK.  www.biographyonline.net.   Published: 7th December 2013. Last updated 13th February 2018.

Nelson Mandela – In His Own Words

Nelson Mandela – In His Own Words at Amazon

Mandela – The Authorised Portrait

Mandela – The Authorised Portrait at Amazon

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