Black History Facts: Nelson (Rolihlahla) Mandela

Nelson (Rolihlahla) Mandela Biography (1918 – )

South African statesman and president (1994-99). Born Rolihlahla Mandela on July 18, 1918 in Transkei, South Africa. Mandela’s father had four wives and Mandela’s mother, Nosekeni Fanny, was the third. He spent most of his childhood with his mother’s family and was the first member to attend school. It was there that a Methodist teacher gave him the name Nelson, finding Rolihlahla too difficult to pronounce. Nelson’s father died when he was nine, and the boy was adopted by the Regent Jongintaba and groomed to assume high office. As Thembu royalty, Nelson attended Wesleyan mission school, Clarkebury Boarding Institute and Wesleyan college. He studied at Fort Hare University but was asked to leave after boycotting against university policies.

Fleeing an arranged marriage, Mandela ran away to Johannesburg, where he worked a variety of jobs, including guard and clerk, while completing his bachelor’s degree via correspondence. He then enrolled at the University of Witwatersrand to study law. He became actively involved in the anti-apartheid movement and joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1942.

Within the ANC, a small group of young Africans banded together calling themselves the African National Congress Youth League. Their goal was to transform the ANC into a mass grassroots movement, deriving strength from millions of rural peasants and working people who had no voice under the current regime. Specifically, the group believed that the ANC’s old tactics of polite petitioning were ineffective. In 1949, the ANC officially adopted the Youth League’s methods of boycott, strike, civil disobedience and non-cooperation with policy goals of full citizenship, redistribution of land, trade union rights, and free and compulsory education for all children, among others.

For 20 years, Mandela directed a campaign of peaceful, non-violent defiance against the South African government and its racist policies, including the 1952 Defiance Campaign and the 1955 Congress of the People. He founded the law firm Mandela and Tambo to provide free and low-cost legal counsel to unrepresented blacks.

In 1956, Mandela and 150 others were arrested and charged with treason for their political advocacy, though they were eventually acquitted. Meanwhile, the ANC was being challenged by the Africanists, a new breed of Black activists who believed that the pacifist method of the ANC was ineffective. By 1959, the ANC lost much of its militant support when the Africanists broke away to form the Pan Africanist Congress.

In 1961, Mandela, who was formerly committed to non-violent protest, began to believe that armed struggle was the only way to achieve change. He co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe, also known as MK, an armed offshoot of the ANC dedicated to sabotage and guerilla war tactics to end apartheid. He orchestrated a three-day national workers strike in 1961 for which he was arrested in 1962. He was sentenced to five years in prison for the strike, and then brought to trial again in 1963. This time, he and 10 other ANC leaders were sentenced to life imprisonment for political offenses, including sabotage.

Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island for 18 of his 27 years in prison. As a black political prisoner, he received the lowest level of treatment. However, he was able to earn a Bachelor of Laws through a University of London correspondence program while incarcerated. Mandela continued to be such a potent symbol of black resistance that a coordinated international campaign for his release was launched. A 1981 memoir by South African intelligence agent Gordon Winter described a plot by the South African government to plan Mandela’s escape so as to shoot him during the recapture. The plot, which was foiled by British intelligence, exemplified the power and esteem Mandela had in the global political community.

In 1982, Mandela and other ANC leaders were moved to Pollsmoor Prison, allegedly to enable contact between them and the South African government. In 1985, President P.W. Botha offered Mandela’s release in exchange for renouncing armed struggle; the prisoner flatly rejected the offer. With increasing local and international pressure for his release, the government participated with several talks with Mandela over the years, but no deal was ever made. It wasn’t until Botha suffered a stroke and was replaced by Frederik Willem de Klerk that Mandela’s release was announced in February 1990. De Klerk unbanned the ANC, removed restrictions on political groups, and suspended executions.

Upon his release, Mandela immediately urged foreign powers not to reduce their pressure on the South African government for constitutional reform. While he stated his commitment to work toward peace, he declared that the ANC’s armed struggle would continue until the black majority received the right to vote.

Mandela was elected president of the African National Congress in 1991 with lifelong friend and colleague, Oliver Tombo, serving as National Chairperson. Mandela continued to negotiate with President F.W. de Klerk toward the country’s first multi-racial elections. The negotiations were often strained, and news of violent eruptions, including the assassination of ANC leader Chris Hani, continued throughout the country.

Negotiation prevailed, however, and on April 27, 1994, South Africa held its first democratic elections. Mandela was inaugurated at age 77 as the country’s first black president on May 10, 1994 with de Klerk as his first deputy. In 1993, Mandela shared the Nobel Prize for Peace with de Klerk for their work towards dismantling apartheid, and in 1995 he was awarded the Order of Merit.

Mandela retired from active politics at the 1999 general election but maintained a busy schedule, raising money for his Mandela Foundation to build schools and clinics in South Africa’s rural heartland and serving as a mediator in Burundi’s civil war. He was diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer in 2001 and in June 2004, at age 85, he announced his formal retirement from public life.

On July 18, 2007, Mandela convened a group of world leaders, including Graca Machel, Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Ela Bhatt, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Jimmy Carter, Li Zhaoxing, Mary Robinson and Muhammad Yunus to address the world’s toughest issues. Named “The Elders,” the group is committed to working publicly and privately to find solutions to problems around the globe. Mandela is also committed to the fight against AIDS, a disease that killed his son, Makgatho Mandela, in 2005.

Mandela was married three times: to Evelyn Ntoko Mase from until 1944-1957, they had four children; to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (1958-1996), they had two daughters; and to Graça Machel in 1998.

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