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.
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