Nelson Mandela

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born on 18 July 1918 in the village of Mvezo, then part of the Cape Province, into the Thembu royal family. His name Rolihlahla colloquially meant troublemaker in Xhosa. His great-grandfather Ngubengcuka had ruled the Thembu Kingdom, and his father Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa Mandela served as a local chief and royal councillor until he was dismissed in 1926 on accusations of corruption. Because his branch of the family descended from a wife of a lesser royal house, Mandela and his relatives were barred from the throne itself but retained status as hereditary councillors.

Mandela grew up in his mother's homestead in Qunu, tending herds and playing outdoors with other boys. Both parents were illiterate, but his mother was a devout Christian who sent him to a local Methodist school around age seven, where a teacher gave him the English name Nelson. After his father's death when Mandela was about nine, his mother took him to live under the guardianship of the Thembu regent, Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo, who raised him alongside his own children and enrolled him at a mission school. At sixteen, Mandela underwent the traditional Xhosa circumcision ritual and was given the name Dalibunga.

Mandela's schooling continued at Clarkebury Methodist High School, then at Healdtown, the Methodist college favoured by Thembu royalty. In 1939 he began a university degree at the University of Fort Hare, studying subjects including law and native administration. His time there ended when he was suspended for joining a student boycott over food quality and never returned to complete the degree. Back home, he learned that his guardian Jongintaba had arranged a marriage for him; unwilling to accept it, Mandela fled with his cousin Justice to Johannesburg in 1941.

In Johannesburg, Mandela initially worked as a night watchman before a cousin introduced him to activist Walter Sisulu, who helped him secure a position as an articled clerk at a law firm run by a white lawyer sympathetic to the ANC. There Mandela mixed with Black, white, Indian, and communist colleagues, attending Communist Party gatherings where people of different races interacted as equals, though he did not join at the time. He completed his bachelor's degree by correspondence and later enrolled to study law at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was the only Black African student and encountered open racism, while also forming lasting friendships with future comrades such as Oliver Tambo.

Mandela's political involvement deepened through the early 1940s. He joined the African National Congress and helped found its Youth League in 1944, serving on its executive committee. He married Evelyn Mase, a nurse and ANC activist, in October 1944; the couple had children together, though one daughter died in infancy and their eldest son later died in a car accident. Mandela rose within the ANC's Transvaal branch, and by 1950 he had also become national president of the Youth League, pushing the organisation toward a more assertive, direct-action stance against the country's escalating racial segregation laws.

His involvement in the 1952 Defiance Campaign, a joint nonviolent effort with Indian and other allied groups against apartheid legislation, brought him national prominence and his first arrest. That year he also opened a law firm with Tambo, the only Black African-run firm in the country, which became popular among Black clients facing police brutality but was hampered by forced relocation under racial zoning laws. Mandela's marriage to Evelyn broke down under the strain of his political commitments and allegations of infidelity, ending in divorce in 1958. He soon married Winnie Madikizela, a social worker who became active in the ANC herself.

Through the mid-1950s Mandela helped organise the Congress of the People, which produced the Freedom Charter calling for a democratic, non-racial South Africa. He was arrested in December 1956 alongside much of the ANC leadership and charged with treason; the trial dragged on until 1961, when he and his co-defendants were acquitted for lack of evidence that they had advocated violent revolution. During this period Mandela's political thinking shifted away from strict non-racial and non-violent purism, and he began reading Marxist theory, eventually joining the South African Communist Party, a fact he denied publicly for decades but which was confirmed after his death by both the ANC and the party itself.

The 1960 Sharpeville massacre, in which police killed 69 protesters demonstrating against pass laws, convinced Mandela that peaceful protest alone could not end apartheid. The government banned the ANC, and Mandela went underground, evading police as the so-called Black Pimpernel while organising resistance. In 1961 he co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC's armed wing, aiming to conduct sabotage against infrastructure while avoiding civilian casualties. He travelled across Africa seeking support and funding, met several African heads of state, and began training in guerrilla warfare in Ethiopia before being recalled to South Africa.

In August 1962 Mandela was captured, reportedly after a tip to police, and was first convicted of inciting strikes and leaving the country illegally, receiving a five-year sentence. In 1963 police raided a farm used by Umkhonto we Sizwe, uncovering documents that implicated Mandela further. The resulting Rivonia Trial saw him and his co-accused charged with sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government. Mandela used his defence speech to explain and justify the movement's turn to sabotage rather than to plead innocence, and in June 1964 he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Mandela spent the first eighteen years of his sentence on Robben Island, held in a small cell and forced into hard labour breaking rocks and working in a lime quarry, which permanently damaged his eyesight. He pursued a law degree by correspondence at night, faced strict censorship and periods of solitary confinement, and helped organise fellow political prisoners into informal structures for shared leadership and self-education, nicknamed the University of Robben Island. Contact with his family was severely restricted; he was not allowed to attend the funerals of his mother or his eldest son, both of whom died during his imprisonment.

As international pressure grew, prison conditions gradually eased. Mandela was moved to Pollsmoor Prison in 1982 and later to Victor Verster Prison in 1988, where he was held in relatively comfortable quarters and permitted more visitors. The government under President P. W. Botha offered him conditional release in 1985 if he renounced violence, which he refused, insisting that only free organisations could negotiate. Secret talks with government officials began later in the 1980s, laying groundwork for his eventual release.

Botha's successor, F. W. de Klerk, moved to dismantle apartheid legislation, legalising the ANC and other banned parties and ordering Mandela's unconditional release on 11 February 1990, an event broadcast live around the world. In the speech that followed, Mandela affirmed his commitment to peace and negotiation while stating that the ANC's armed struggle would continue until the government agreed to talks. He then undertook an international tour, meeting political and religious leaders across multiple continents to build support for the transition ahead.

Mandela led ANC negotiations with the government through the early 1990s, a period marked by violent unrest between rival political factions alongside painstaking constitutional talks. He and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. In April 1994 South Africa held its first fully democratic election, which the ANC won decisively, and Mandela was inaugurated as the country's first Black president in Pretoria in May 1994, an event watched by an estimated billion people worldwide.

As president, Mandela prioritised racial reconciliation, forming a coalition government that included his former adversaries and establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Desmond Tutu, to investigate abuses committed under apartheid by all sides. He worked to reassure the white minority of their place in the new South Africa, famously appearing in a Springbok rugby jersey at the 1995 Rugby World Cup final. His government expanded access to healthcare, electricity, and welfare grants, though it also faced criticism for slow progress on the HIV/AIDS epidemic and persistent poverty and crime.

Mandela declined to seek a second term, stepping down as ANC president in 1997 and retiring from the presidency in 1999, succeeded by his deputy Thabo Mbeki. In retirement he remained active through the Nelson Mandela Foundation, campaigned publicly against HIV/AIDS after years of acknowledging he had not done enough on the issue during his presidency, and helped mediate international disputes, including the trial over the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing. He married Graça Machel on his eightieth birthday in 1998, having earlier divorced Winnie Mandela in 1996. He gradually withdrew from public life after 2004 and died at his home in Houghton on 5 December 2013, at the age of 95, prompting national mourning and a state funeral in Qunu.