72. Nelson Mandela Part 2

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

- Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born July 18th, 1918 in Mvezo, Transkei, into the Madiba clan of the Thembu royal house. His father, a chief, was stripped of office by a colonial magistrate for refusing to answer to colonial authority. Raised after his father's death as ward of the Thembu regent, he underwent Xhosa initiation at sixteen and took the name Dalibunga. He was expelled from Fort Hare in 1940 for a student boycott, fled an arranged marriage to Johannesburg, and qualified in law.

He joined the ANC in 1943 and co-founded its Youth League, pushing the organization from petitions toward mass action. He served as Volunteer-in-Chief of the 1952 Defiance Campaign and opened South Africa's first Black law firm with Oliver Tambo. After the 1960 Sharpeville massacre and the banning of the ANC foreclosed legal protest, he went underground and co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe, the movement's armed wing.

Arrested in 1962 and tried at Rivonia, he opened his defense from the dock in 1964, calling a free and democratic society an ideal he was prepared to die for. He received life imprisonment and served 27 years — most of it on Robben Island as prisoner 466/64, breaking limestone in a quarry that permanently damaged his eyes, denied leave to bury his mother and his eldest son. He refused conditional release in 1985, answering that a prisoner cannot negotiate.

Freed in 1990, he steered negotiations through near-civil war, shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with F.W. de Klerk, and became president in May 1994 after the first non-racial election. His single term produced the 1996 Constitution and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He stepped down in 1999, in a region where liberation leaders rarely did.

The unfinished business was economic: the Freedom Charter's redistributive commitments were traded away, land reform stalled, inequality endured. He admitted his government moved too slowly on HIV/AIDS, then spent his last years campaigning on it. He died 5 December 2013, aged 95.

References

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Gordimer, N. (1990). My son's story. Bloomsbury.

Kathrada, A. (2004). Memoirs. Zebra Press.

Lodge, T. (2006). Mandela: A critical life. Oxford University Press.

Madikizela-Mandela, W. (1985). Part of my soul went with him (A. Benjamin & M. Benson, Eds.). W. W. Norton.

Madikizela-Mandela, W. (2013). 491 days: Prisoner number 1323/69. Ohio University Press.

Mandela, N. (1964). Statement from the dock at the opening of the defence case in the Rivonia Trial, Pretoria Supreme Court, 20 April 1964.

Mandela, N. (1994). Long walk to freedom: The autobiography of Nelson Mandela.

Mandela, N. (2010). Conversations with myself. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Mandela, N. (2018). The prison letters of Nelson Mandela (S. Venter, Ed.). Liveright. Meredith, M. (2010). Mandela: A biography (rev. ed.). PublicAffairs.

Sampson, A. (1999). Mandela: The authorised biography. HarperCollins.

Steinberg, J. (2023). Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a marriage. Alfred A. Knopf. Suttner, R. (2008). The ANC underground in South Africa, 1950-1976. Jacana. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. (1998). Report (Vols. 1-5). Juta.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. (1997). Special hearing: Mandela United Football Club, Johannesburg, 24 November - 4 December 1997.

Umkhonto we Sizwe. (1961). Manifesto, 16 December 1961.