Nelson
Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, into a royal family of the
Xhosa-speaking Thembu tribe in the South African village of Mvezo, where
his father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa (c. 1880-1928), served as chief.
His mother, Nosekeni Fanny, was the third of Mphakanyiswa’s four wives,
who together bore him nine daughters and four sons. After the death of
his father in 1927, 9-year-old Mandela—then known by his birth name,
Rolihlahla—was adopted by Jongintaba Dalindyebo, a high-ranking Thembu
regent who began grooming his young ward for a role within the tribal
leadership.
The first in his family to receive a formal education, Mandela
completed his primary studies at a local missionary school. There, a
teacher dubbed him Nelson as part of a common practice of giving African
students English names. He went on to attend the Clarkebury Boarding
Institute and Healdtown, a Methodist secondary school, where he excelled
in boxing and track as well as academics. In 1939 Mandela entered the
elite University of Fort Hare, the only Western-style higher learning
institute for South African blacks at the time. The following year, he
and several other students, including his friend and future business
partner Oliver Tambo (1917-1993), were sent home for participating in a
boycott against university policies.
After learning that his guardian had arranged a marriage for him,
Mandela fled to Johannesburg and worked first as a night watchman and
then as a law clerk while completing his bachelor’s degree by
correspondence. He studied law at the University of Witwatersrand, where
he became involved in the movement against racial discrimination and
forged key relationships with black and white activists. In 1944,
Mandela joined the African National Congress (ANC) and worked with
fellow party members, including Oliver Tambo, to establish its youth
league, the ANCYL. That same year, he met and married his first wife,
Evelyn Ntoko Mase (1922-2004), with whom he had four children before
their divorce in 1957.
Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress
Nelson
Mandela’s commitment to politics and the ANC grew stronger after the
1948 election victory of the Afrikaner-dominated National Party, which
introduced a formal system of racial classification and
segregation—apartheid—that restricted nonwhites’ basic rights and barred
them from government while maintaining white minority rule. The
following year, the ANC adopted the ANCYL’s plan to achieve full
citizenship for all South Africans through boycotts, strikes, civil
disobedience and other nonviolent methods. Mandela helped lead the ANC’s
1952 Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws, traveling across the
country to organize protests against discriminatory policies, and
promoted the manifesto known as the Freedom Charter, ratified by the
Congress of the People in 1955. Also in 1952, Mandela and Tambo opened
South Africa’s first black law firm, which offered free or low-cost
legal counsel to those affected by apartheid legislation.
On December 5, 1956, Mandela and 155 other activists were arrested
and went on trial for treason. All of the defendants were acquitted in
1961, but in the meantime tensions within the ANC escalated, with a
militant faction splitting off in 1959 to form the Pan Africanist
Congress (PAC). The next year, police opened fire on peaceful black
protesters in the township of Sharpeville, killing 69 people; as panic,
anger and riots swept the country in the massacre’s aftermath, the
apartheid government banned both the ANC and the PAC. Forced to go
underground and wear disguises to evade detection, Mandela decided that
the time had come for a more radical approach than passive resistance.
Nelson Mandela and the Armed Resistance Movement
In
1961, Nelson Mandela co-founded and became the first leader of Umkhonto
we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), also known as MK, a new armed wing of
the ANC. Several years later, during the trial that would put him
behind bars for nearly three decades, he described the reasoning for
this radical departure from his party’s original tenets: “[I]t would be
wrong and unrealistic for African leaders to continue preaching peace
and nonviolence at a time when the government met our peaceful demands
with force. It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of
peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to
embark on violent forms of political struggle.”
Under Mandela’s leadership, MK launched a sabotage campaign against
the government, which had recently declared South Africa a republic and
withdrawn from the British Commonwealth. In January 1962, Mandela
traveled abroad illegally to attend a conference of African nationalist
leaders in Ethiopia, visit the exiled Oliver Tambo in London and undergo
guerilla training in Algeria. On August 5, shortly after his return, he
was arrested and subsequently sentenced to five years in prison for
leaving the country and inciting a 1961 workers’ strike. The following
July, police raided an ANC hideout in Rivonia, a suburb on the outskirts
of Johannesburg, and arrested a racially diverse group of MK leaders
who had gathered to debate the merits of a guerilla insurgency. Evidence
was found implicating Mandela and other activists, who were brought to
stand trial for sabotage, treason and violent conspiracy alongside their
associates.
Mandela and seven other defendants narrowly escaped the gallows and
were instead sentenced to life imprisonment during the so-called Rivonia
Trial, which lasted eight months and attracted substantial
international attention. In a stirring opening statement that sealed his
iconic status around the world, Mandela admitted to some of the charges
against him while defending the ANC’s actions and denouncing the
injustices of apartheid. He ended with the following words: “I have
cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all
persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an
ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an
ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
Nelson Mandela's Years Behind Bars
Nelson
Mandela spent the first 18 of his 27 years in jail at the brutal Robben
Island Prison, a former leper colony off the coast of Cape Town, where
he was confined to a small cell without a bed or plumbing and compelled
to do hard labor in a lime quarry. As a black political prisoner, he
received scantier rations and fewer privileges than other inmates. He
was only allowed to see his wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (1936-), who
he had married in 1958 and was the mother of his two young daughters,
once every six months. Mandela and his fellow prisoners were routinely
subjected to inhumane punishments for the slightest of offenses; among
other atrocities, there were reports of guards burying inmates in the
ground up to their necks and urinating on them.
These restrictions and conditions notwithstanding, while in
confinement Mandela earned 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.
