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Nelson Mandela
| (born July 18, 1918) |
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| Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was the first President of
South Africa to be elected in fully-representative democratic elections.
Before his presidency he was a prominent anti-apartheid activist who,
while imprisoned for 27 years, was involved in the planning of
underground armed resistance activities. The armed struggle was, for
Mandela, a necessary last resort; he had remained steadfastly committed
to non-violence. Through his 27-year imprisonment, much of it spent in a
cell on Robben Island, Mandela became the most widely-known figure in
the struggle against South African apartheid. Although the apartheid
regime and nations sympathetic to it considered him and the ANC to be
communists and terrorists, the armed struggle was an integral part of
the overall campaign against apartheid. The switch in policy to that of
reconciliation, which Mandela pursued upon his release in 1990,
facilitated a peaceful transition to fully-representative democracy in
South Africa. |
Early life
A young Nelson Mandela.Mandela was born to a Thembu family in the small village
of Mvezo in the Mthatha district, capital of the Transkeian Territories of the
Cape Province of the Union of South Africa. Mandela's father, Gadla Henry
Mphakanyiswa, was a councillor to the Thembu king (a position he was groomed for
from his birth and which Mandela was also destined to inherit). Mandela's father
was instrumental in the ascension to the Thembu throne of Jongintaba Dalindyebo,
who would later return this favour by informally adopting Mandela upon Gadla's
death. In total, Mandela's father had four wives, with whom he fathered a total
of thirteen children (four boys and nine girls). Mandela was born to Gadla's
third wife ('third' by a complex royal ranking system), Nosekeni Fanny in whose
umzi or homestead Mandela spent much of his childhood.
At seven years of age, Rolihlahla Mandela became the first member of his family
to attend a school, where he was given the name "Nelson", after the British
admiral Horatio Nelson, by a Methodist teacher. His father died of tuberculosis
when Rolihlahla was nine, and the Regent, Jongintaba, became his guardian.
Mandela attended a Wesleyan mission school next door to the palace of the
regent. Following Thembu custom, he was initiated at age sixteen, and attended
Clarkebury Boarding Institute, learning about Western culture. He completed his
Junior Certificate in two years, instead of the usual three.
At age nineteen, in 1937, Mandela moved to Healdtown, the Wesleyan college in
Fort Beaufort, which most Thembu royalty attended, and took an interest in
boxing and running. After matriculating, he started to study for a B.A. at the
Fort Hare University, where he met Oliver Tambo, and the two became lifelong
friends and colleagues.
At the end of his first year, he became involved in a boycott of the Students'
Representative Council against the university policies, and was asked to leave
Fort Hare. Shortly after this, Jongintaba announced to Mandela and Justice (the
Regent's own son and heir to the throne) that he had arranged marriages for both
of them. Both young men were displeased by this and rather than marry, they
elected to flee the comforts of the Regent's estate to the only place they
could: Johannesburg. Upon his arrival in Johannesburg, Mandela initially found
employment as a guard at a mine. However, this was quickly terminated after the
employer learned that Mandela was the Regent's runaway adopted son. He then
managed to find work as an articled clerk at a law firm thanks to connections
with his friend and fellow lawyer Walter Sisulu. While working, he completed his
degree at the University of South Africa (UNISA) via correspondence, after which
he started with his law studies at the University of Witwatersrand. During this
time Mandela lived in a township called Alexandra.
Political activity
At a South African Communist Party rally with Joe Slovo.After the 1948 election
victory of the Afrikaner-dominated National Party with its apartheid policy of
racial segregation, Mandela was prominent in the ANC's 1952 Defiance Campaign
and the 1955 Congress of the People, whose adoption of the Freedom Charter
provided the fundamental program of the anti-apartheid cause. During this time,
Mandela and fellow lawyer Oliver Tambo operated the law firm of Mandela and
Tambo, providing free or low-cost legal counsel to many blacks who would
otherwise have been without legal representation.
Initially committed to non-violent mass struggle, Mandela was arrested with 150
others on 5 December 1956, and charged with treason. The marathon Treason Trial
of 1956–61 followed, and all were acquitted. From 1952–59 the ANC experienced
disruption as a new class of Black activists (Africanists) emerged in the
townships demanding more drastic steps against the National Party regime. The
ANC leadership of Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu felt not only
that events were moving too fast, but also that their leadership was being
challenged. They consequently bolstered their position by alliances with small
White, Coloured and Indian political parties in an attempt to appear to have a
wider appeal than the Africanists. The 1955 Freedom Charter Kliptown Conference
was ridiculed by the Africanists for allowing the 100,000-strong ANC to be
relegated to a single vote in a Congress alliance, in which four
secretary-generals of the five participating parties were members of the
secretly reconstituted South African Communist Party (SACP), the most slavish of
all communist parties to the Moscow line.
In 1959, the ANC lost its most militant support when most of the Africanists,
with financial support from Ghana and significant political support from the
Transvaal-based Basotho, broke away to form the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC)
under Robert Sobukwe and Potlako Leballo. Following the massacre of PAC
supporters at Sharpeville, in March 1960, and the subsequent banning of PAC and
ANC, the ANC/SACP followed the African Resistance Movement (renegade liberals)
and PAC into armed resistance. Luthuli, criticised for inertia, was
peripheralised, and the ANC/SACP used the All-In African Conference of 1961,
where all parties met to decide a joint strategy, for Mandela to issue a
dramatic call to arms, announcing the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe, modeled on
the Jewish guerrilla movement, Irgun, and commanded by Mandela with SACP Jewish
activists Denis Goldberg, Lionel "Rusty" Bernstein, and Harold Wolpe.
Mandela then left the country secretly and met African leaders in Algeria and
elsewhere. Startled to discover the depth of support for the PAC and the
widespread belief that the ANC was a small Xhosa tribal association manipulated
by White communists, Mandela returned to South Africa determined to reassert the
African nationalist element in the Congress Alliance. It is widely suspected
that a heated discussion with the communist leaders over this issue led to his
subsequent betrayal and arrest near Howick. Mandela glossed over these events in
his autobiography but at least one prominent SACP activist associated with him
at that time was cold-shouldered on his return to South Africa
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