Nelson Mandela

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.

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.
Mahatma Gandhi
Revered the world over for his nonviolent philosophy of passive
resistance, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was known to his many
followers as Mahatma, or “the great-souled one.” He began his activism
as an Indian immigrant in South Africa in the early 1900s, and in the
years following World War I became the leading figure in India’s struggle
to gain independence from Great Britain. Known for his ascetic lifestyle –
he often dressed only in a loincloth and shawl–and devout Hindu faith,
Gandhi was imprisoned several times during his pursuit of non-
cooperation, and undertook a number of hunger strikes to protest the
oppression of India’s poorest classes, among other injustices. After
Partition in 1947, he continued to work toward peace between Hindus
and Muslims. Gandhi was shot to death in Delhi in January 1948 by a
Hindu fundamentalist.

Early Life
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, at
Porbandar, in the present-day Indian state of Gujarat. His father was the
dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar; his deeply religious mother was a
devoted practitioner of Vaishnavism (worship of the Hindu god Vishnu),
influenced by Jainism, an ascetic religion governed by tenets of self-
discipline and nonviolence. At the age of 19, Mohandas left home to
study law in London at the Inner Temple, one of the city’s four law
colleges. Upon returning to India in mid-1891, he set up a law practice in
Bombay, but met with little success. He soon accepted a position with an
Indian firm that sent him to its office in South Africa. Along with his wife,
Kasturbai, and their children, Gandhi remained in South Africa for nearly
20 years.

Did you know? In the famous Salt March of April-May 1930, thousands of Indians followed
Gandhi from Ahmadabad to the Arabian Sea. The march resulted in the arrest of nearly 60,000
people, including Gandhi himself.
Gandhi was appalled by the discrimination he experienced as an Indian
immigrant in South Africa. When a European magistrate in Durban asked
him to take off his turban, he refused and left the courtroom. On a train
voyage to Pretoria, he was thrown out of a first-class railway
compartment and beaten up by a white stagecoach driver after refusing
to give up his seat for a European passenger. That train journey served
as a turning point for Gandhi, and he soon began developing and
teaching the concept of satyagraha (“truth and firmness”), or passive
resistance, as a way of non-cooperation with authorities.

The Birth of Passive Resistance

In 1906, after the Transvaal government passed an ordinance regarding
the registration of its Indian population, Gandhi led a campaign of civil
disobedience that would last for the next eight years. During its final
phase in 1913, hundreds of Indians living in South Africa, including
women, went to jail, and thousands of striking Indian miners were
imprisoned, flogged and even shot. Finally, under pressure from the
British and Indian governments, the government of South Africa accepted
a compromise negotiated by Gandhi and General Jan Christian Smuts,
which included important concessions such as the recognition of Indian
marriages and the abolition of the existing poll tax for Indians.

In July 1914, Gandhi left South Africa to return to India. He supported the
British war effort in World War I but remained critical of colonial
authorities for measures he felt were unjust. In 1919, Gandhi launched
an organized campaign of passive resistance in response to Parliament’s
passage of the Rowlatt Acts, which gave colonial authorities emergency
powers to suppress subversive activities. He backed off after violence
broke out–including the massacre by British-led soldiers of some 400
Indians attending a meeting at Amritsar–but only temporarily, and by
1920 he was the most visible figure in the movement for Indian
independence.

Leader of a Movement
As part of his nonviolent non-cooperation campaign for home rule,
Gandhi stressed the importance of economic independence for India. He
particularly advocated the manufacture of khaddar, or homespun cloth, in
order to replace imported textiles from Britain. Gandhi’s eloquence and
embrace of an ascetic lifestyle based on prayer, fasting and meditation
earned him the reverence of his followers, who called him Mahatma
(Sanskrit for “the great-souled one”). Invested with all the authority of the
Indian National Congress (INC or Congress Party), Gandhi turned the
independence movement into a massive organization, leading boycotts of
British manufacturers and institutions representing British influence in
India, including legislatures and schools.

After sporadic violence broke out, Gandhi announced the end of the
resistance movement, to the dismay of his followers. British authorities
arrested Gandhi in March 1922 and tried him for sedition; he was
sentenced to six years in prison but was released in 1924 after
undergoing an operation for appendicitis. He refrained from active
participation in politics for the next several years, but in 1930 launched a
new civil disobedience campaign against the colonial government’s tax
on salt, which greatly affected Indian’s poorest citizens.

A Divided Movement
In 1931, after British authorities made some concessions, Gandhi again
called off the resistance movement and agreed to represent the
Congress Party at the Round Table Conference in London. Meanwhile,
some of his party colleagues–particularly Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a
leading voice for India’s Muslim minority–grew frustrated with Gandhi’s
methods, and what they saw as a lack of concrete gains. Arrested upon
his return by a newly aggressive colonial government, Gandhi began a
series of hunger strikes in protest of the treatment of India’s so-called
“untouchables” (the poorer classes), whom he renamed Harijans, or
“children of God.” The fasting caused an uproar among his followers and
resulted in swift reforms by the Hindu community and the government.

In 1934, Gandhi announced his retirement from politics in, as well as his
resignation from the Congress Party, in order to concentrate his efforts
on working within rural communities. Drawn back into the political fray by
the outbreak of World War II, Gandhi again took control of the INC,
demanding a British withdrawal from India in return for Indian cooperation
with the war effort. Instead, British forces imprisoned the entire Congress
leadership, bringing Anglo-Indian relations to a new low point.

Partition and Death of Gandhi

After the Labor Party took power in Britain in 1947, negotiations over
Indian home rule began between the British, the Congress Party and the
Muslim League (now led by Jinnah). Later that year, Britain granted India
its independence but split the country into two dominions: India and
Pakistan. Gandhi strongly opposed Partition, but he agreed to it in hopes
that after independence Hindus and Muslims could achieve peace
internally. Amid the massive riots that followed Partition, Gandhi urged
Hindus and Muslims to live peacefully together, and undertook a hunger
strike until riots in Calcutta ceased.

In January 1948, Gandhi carried out yet another fast, this time to bring
about peace in the city of Delhi. On January 30, 12 days after that fast
ended, Gandhi was on his way to an evening prayer meeting in Delhi
when he was shot to death by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu fanatic enraged
by Mahatma’s efforts to negotiate with Jinnah and other Muslims. The
next day, roughly 1 million people followed the procession as Gandhi’s
body was carried in state through the streets of the city and cremated on
the banks of the holy Jumna River.