Nelson Mandela

Rolihlahla Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, in the village of Mvezo on the banks of the Mbashe River in the Transkei region of South Africa ^[1]. His father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa, served as a chief and counsellor to the Thembu royal house until a dispute with a colonial magistrate cost him his position. The family moved to the nearby village of Qunu, where the boy herded cattle and lived in a cluster of huts with his mother, Nosekeni Fanny ^[2].

A teacher at his Methodist primary school gave him the English name Nelson on his first day of class, a common practice in mission schools of the era ^[1]. After his father died, the nine-year-old was taken into the household of Jongintaba Dalindyebo, regent of the Thembu people, at the Great Place at Mqhekezweni. There he absorbed the workings of tribal governance, listening to elders debate at the regent's court, an experience he later credited with shaping his ideas about leadership and consensus ^[2].

Mandela studied at Clarkebury Boarding Institute and Healdtown, a Wesleyan college, before enrolling at the University of Fort Hare, then the only residential university for Black students in South Africa ^[1]. He was expelled in 1940 for joining a student protest over the quality of food and the powers of the Students' Representative Council. When the regent responded by arranging marriages for Mandela and his cousin Justice, both young men fled to Johannesburg in 1941 ^[2].

Johannesburg transformed the runaway aristocrat into a political activist. Mandela worked briefly as a mine security guard, then found a clerkship at the law firm of Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman through the estate agent and ANC activist Walter Sisulu ^[2]. He completed his bachelor's degree by correspondence through the University of South Africa and began law studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was the only Black African student in his class ^[1].

In 1944 Mandela joined the African National Congress and helped found its Youth League alongside Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, and Anton Lembede, pushing the cautious older organization toward mass action ^[3]. The National Party's election victory in 1948 brought apartheid, a formal system of racial segregation, into law. Mandela rose quickly within the ANC as it responded, becoming national volunteer-in-chief of the 1952 Defiance Campaign, which mobilized thousands to deliberately break unjust laws ^[2]. That same year he and Tambo opened Mandela and Tambo, the first Black law partnership in South Africa, handling a stream of clients caught in the machinery of pass laws and forced removals ^[3].

The state answered protest with prosecution. Mandela was among 156 activists charged in the marathon Treason Trial that began in 1956 and ended in acquittals in 1961 ^[1]. After police killed 69 unarmed protesters at Sharpeville in March 1960 and the government banned the ANC, Mandela concluded that nonviolent methods alone had been exhausted. In 1961 he helped establish Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the ANC's armed wing, which began a sabotage campaign against government installations while he traveled abroad seeking support and military training ^[3].

Mandela lived underground for seventeen months, earning the press nickname the Black Pimpernel for his ability to evade capture, before police arrested him near Howick in Natal in August 1962 ^[2]. He received a five-year sentence for incitement and leaving the country without a passport. While he was serving it, police raided the movement's hideout at Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia and seized documents that led to a far graver prosecution ^[1].

At the Rivonia Trial of 1963 and 1964, Mandela and his co-accused faced charges of sabotage that carried the death penalty. Rather than testify, he delivered a statement from the dock lasting several hours, closing with a declaration that a democratic and free society was an ideal for which he was prepared to die ^[4]. On June 12, 1964, he and seven others were sentenced to life imprisonment ^[1].

He spent eighteen of his 27 prison years on Robben Island, breaking rocks in a lime quarry, sleeping in a small cell, and permitted at first only one visitor and one letter every six months ^[4]. Prisoners turned the island into an informal university, debating politics and tutoring one another; Mandela studied for a London law degree by correspondence. He was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison in 1982 and later to Victor Verster Prison, where, from a warder's house, he held secret exploratory talks with government ministers as international sanctions and internal unrest pressed the apartheid state toward negotiation ^[3]. He refused a 1985 offer of conditional release from President P. W. Botha, replying through his daughter that prisoners cannot enter into contracts ^[2].

On February 11, 1990, nine days after President F. W. de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC, Mandela walked free from Victor Verster Prison before a global television audience ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Nelson Mandela at that moment saw a 71-year-old man stepping directly from prison into the leadership of delicate national negotiations. Elected ANC president in 1991, he steered talks with the government through repeated breakdowns, township violence that killed thousands, and the 1993 assassination of the popular leader Chris Hani, when his televised appeal for calm arguably did more than the government's to prevent an explosion ^[3].

Mandela and de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for their work toward dismantling apartheid ^[5]. On April 27, 1994, South Africans of all races voted together for the first time. The ANC won just under 63 percent of the vote, and on May 10, 1994, Mandela was inaugurated as president in Pretoria before the largest gathering of world leaders on South African soil ^[1].

His single term produced achievements that reached beyond legislation. He established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission under Archbishop Desmond Tutu, which traded amnesty for full public disclosure of political crimes rather than pursuing mass trials ^[3]. His government extended clean water, electricity, housing, and free health care for pregnant women and small children to millions previously excluded ^[2]. Perhaps the most famous image of his presidency came at the 1995 Rugby World Cup final, when he wore the Springbok jersey, long a symbol of Afrikaner pride, to congratulate the victorious South African captain, a gesture of reconciliation that disarmed many white skeptics ^[6]. Among the most cited Nelson Mandela achievements, though, was the simplest: he kept his promise to serve one term and handed power peacefully to Thabo Mbeki in 1999 ^[1].

Mandela married three times. His first marriage, to the nurse Evelyn Mase in 1944, produced four children and ended in divorce in 1958, strained by his political commitments and her turn to the Jehovah's Witnesses ^[2]. That same year he married the social worker Winnie Madikizela, who became a prominent and controversial anti-apartheid figure in her own right during his imprisonment; they had two daughters. The couple separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996 ^[1].

On his eightieth birthday in 1998 he married Graça Machel, widow of Mozambican president Samora Machel, making her the only woman to have been first lady of two different countries ^[2]. Family life carried heavy losses. His eldest son Thembi died in a car crash in 1969 while Mandela was on Robben Island, and prison authorities refused him permission to attend the funeral. His son Makgatho died of an AIDS-related illness in 2005, and Mandela announced the cause publicly to fight the stigma surrounding the disease in South Africa ^[7].

Among the durable Nelson Mandela facts is his clan name, Madiba, by which South Africans affectionately addressed him. He published his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, in 1994; portions had been drafted secretly on Robben Island decades earlier ^[4]. Friends described a man of formal, old-world courtesy who rose before dawn, made his own bed even as president, and retained a boxer's discipline from his amateur heavyweight days in the 1950s ^[2].

Retirement from the presidency did not mean retirement from public life. Through the Nelson Mandela Foundation, established in 1999, he raised funds for rural schools and clinics and turned increasingly to the fight against HIV and AIDS, a crisis he acknowledged his own government had answered too slowly ^[7]. His 46664 concert campaign, named for his Robben Island prison number, carried the AIDS message to global audiences ^[3].

He also worked as an international mediator, brokering peace efforts in Burundi, and in 2007 convened The Elders, a group of senior statesmen and stateswomen including Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, and Jimmy Carter, to work on global problems ^[3]. In 2004, at 85, he announced he was stepping back from public engagements, telling reporters with characteristic dry humor not to call him, he would call them ^[2].

His final years were quiet and increasingly frail, divided between his Johannesburg home in Houghton and the village of Qunu. His last major public appearance came at the closing ceremony of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in Johannesburg, the first held on African soil ^[1]. After repeated hospitalizations for a recurring lung infection, traceable in part to tuberculosis contracted in prison, Nelson Mandela died at his Houghton home on December 5, 2013, at the age of 95. South Africa observed ten days of mourning, and roughly 90 heads of state and government attended the memorial events ^[8].

Few modern leaders have been so widely claimed as a moral example. Mandela received more than 250 honors, including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Soviet Order of Lenin, an unusual pairing that measured his reach across Cold War divides ^[1]. In 2009 the United Nations declared July 18 Nelson Mandela International Day, inviting people everywhere to spend 67 minutes in community service, one for each year of his public life ^[5].

His legacy is argued over as much as celebrated. Critics on the left contend that the negotiated settlement preserved white economic power and left land reform and inequality largely unaddressed, while some conservatives long emphasized his early embrace of armed struggle; the United States did not remove him from its terrorism watch list until 2008 ^[3]. Mandela himself resisted sainthood, writing that he was an ordinary man who had tried to do his duty, and his willingness to admit error, notably on AIDS policy, set him apart from most heads of state ^[7].

What endures is the outcome. A country that many observers in the 1980s expected to end in racial civil war instead held peaceful elections and wrote one of the world's most liberal constitutions, and Mandela's insistence on reconciliation was central to that result ^[3]. Robben Island is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and museum, his prison cell among the most visited rooms in Africa ^[4]. Statues of him stand in Pretoria, London's Parliament Square, and at the United Nations, and his long imprisonment and short presidency remain the reference point for political forgiveness worldwide ^[1].