Mandela, Nelson 1918—

Nelson Mandela 1918—

Social and political activist

At a Glance…

Became Political Activist

ANC Banned

Sentenced to Life in Prison

Freed at Last

Hopes for South Africa’s Future

Selected writings

Sources

Nelson Mandela has spent a lifetime fighting for the rights of black South Africans, enduring trial and incarceration for his principles. A political prisoner in his native South Africa for more than twenty-seven years, the eloquent and statesman-like Mandela became the human embodiment of the struggle against government-mandated discrimination. His courage and determination through decades of imprisonment galvanized not only South African blacks, but also concerned citizens on every continent. Since his release from prison on February 11, 1990, Mandela has reclaimed his position in the once-banned African National Congress and has fought tirelessly for democratic reform in his troubled homeland.

With his magnetic personality and calm demeanor, Mandela is widely regarded as the last best hope for conciliating a peaceful transition to a South African government that will enfranchise all of its citizens. “For whites,” wrote John F. Burns in the New York Times, “a man once presented to them as a threat to everything they prize is now widely viewed as the best hope for a political settlement that will guarantee them a future. For blacks, Mr. Mandela has achieved a legendary stature, towering above most other leaders in the way that Lenin dominated the revolutionary cause in Russia, and Churchill the fight for England’s survival in World War II.”

Time magazine contributor Richard Lacayo Characterized Mandela as a figure who is “unique among heroes because he is a living embodiment of black liberation.… His soft-spoken manner and unflappable dignity bespeak his background as a lawyer, a single-minded political organizer and a longtime prisoner still blinking a bit in the spotlight.” Lacayo continued: “For the many blacks who have begun to call themselves African Americans, [Mandela] is a flesh-and-blood exemplar of what an African can be. For Americans of all colors, weary of their nation’s perennial racial standoffs, [he] offers the opportunity for a full-throated expression of their no less perennial hope for reconciliation.”

Nelson Mandela could have lived a relatively comfortable life in obscurity had he wished. He was born in 1918 in rural Umtata in what is now the black homeland of Transkei, the son of a highly placed tribal adviser. As a youth Mandela spent his days farming and herding cattle.

At a Glance…

Full name, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela; born in 1918 in Umtata, Transkei, South Africa; son of Henry (a Tembu tribal chief) Mandela; married Evelyn Ntoko Mase (a nurse), divorced; married Nomzamo Winnie Madikileza (a social worker and political activist), June 14, 1958; children: (first marriage) Thembi (a son; deceased), Makgatho (son), Makaziwe (daughter); (second marriage) Zenani (daughter), Zindziswa (daughter). Education: Attended University College of Fort Hare and Witwatersrand University; University of South Africa, law degree, 1942.

Lawyer, political activist, and leader of the African National Congress, 1944—. Joined African National Congress, 1944, became secretary and president of the Congress Youth League, 1944, and president of the Youth League, 1951-52; helped to draft ANC’s Freedom Charter, 1955. Appointed honorary secretary of the All-African National Action Council, 1961; became head of Umkonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), an underground paramilitary wing of the ANC, 1961.

Sentenced to five years in prison for inciting Africans to strike and for leaving South Africa without a valid travel document, 1962; sentenced to life imprisonment for sabotage and treason, 1964; incarcerated in various penal institutions in South Africa, including Robben Island and Pollsmoor prison, 1962-90. Released February 11, 1990.

Awards: Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding from the government of India, 1980; Bruno Kreisky Prize for Human Rights from the government of Austria, 1981; Simon Bolivar International Prize from UNESCO, 1983; Nobel Peace Prize nomination, 1987.

Addresses: Office—c/o African National Congress of South Africa, 801 Second Ave., New York, NY 10017.

After the death of his father in 1930, the twelve-year-old was sent to live with the chief of the Tembu tribe. There he impressed his elders with his quick intelligence and maturity. Many thought he would someday become chief himself.

Became Political Activist

Mandela’s tribal name, Rolihlahla, means “one who brings trouble upon himself.” It is therefore quite descriptive of the difficult path the young man chose when he reached adulthood. In his late teens Mandela renounced his hereditary right to the tribal chiefdom and entered college in pursuit of a law degree. He became a political activist in short order and in 1940 was expelled from University College at Fort Hare for leading a student strike. Soon thereafter he moved closer to the commercial capital of Johannesburg, where he worked in the gold mines and studied law by correspondence course. He earned his law degree from the University of South Africa in 1942.

Mandela was twenty-four when he joined the African National Congress, a group that sought to establish social and political rights for blacks in South Africa. In 1944 Mandela and several friends founded a sub-group, the Congress Youth League, and adopted a platform calling for nonviolent protest and black African self-reliance and self-determination. The country Mandela and his Youth League comrades lived in was then, as it is now, populated primarily by blacks but governed completely by whites. Black citizens were legally discriminated against in housing, education, and economic opportunity; they could not vote and were subjected to numerous white-authored laws and restrictions. The Youth League responded to this racist political climate by calling for civil disobedience—nonviolent strikes and “stay-at-home” days in protest of no less than six hundred racist laws.

From his position as a leader of the Youth League, Mandela helped to coordinate labor strikes and campaigns to defy the unjust laws. Unfortunately, ANC protest rallies were often repulsed by police brutality. In 1950 eighteen blacks were killed during a labor walkout, and again in 1952 a great number of protesters—including Mandela—were beaten and jailed for opposing the South African government. On that occasion Mandela received a nine-month suspended jail sentence and was ordered to resign from the ANC leadership. Mandela refused to resign and moved into underground work because he was forbidden to attend public meetings.

By the time Mandela reappeared in public in 1955, apartheid —meaning “apartness” in the Afrikaans language—had been taken to extreme ends in South Africa. The government continued to tighten restrictions on its black non-citizens, creating segregated townships and “homelands” where blacks were forced to settle. Late in 1956, Mandela was arrested with 155 other anti-apartheid leaders and was charged with treason under a convenient anti-Communist statute. Freed on bail, Mandela mounted his own defense and practiced law on the side as the infamous “Treason Trial” dragged on and on. Although he was again banned from political activity, he persisted in his efforts for the cause of the African National Congress. He also found time to marry his second wife, a social worker named Nomzamo Winnie Madikileza. She too was a dedicated activist who supported her husband’s efforts to end apartheid.

ANC Banned

Early in 1960, a demonstration in the Johannesburg suburb of Sharpeville turned violent when police killed sixty-nine unarmed protesters. The massacre sparked nationwide outrage, and the government acted quickly to ban the African National Congress and some of its splinter groups. Mandela once again found himself detained by police without being charged with a crime. Sickened by the failure of the nonviolent protests, he quietly decided that more extreme measures needed to be taken against the white supremacist government. In a 1961 speech before the Pan-Africanist Conference in Ethiopia, he said: “Peace in our country must be considered already broken when a minority government maintains its authority over the majority by force and violence.”

Meanwhile, the Treason Trial entered its final stages and proved to be an effective forum for Mandela’s views. As his own defense attorney, Mandela mounted a spirited justification of the ANC’s goals and methods. He insisted that his organization sought the franchise and equal rights for South Africans of all races, and he maintained that nonviolent disruptive tactics were the only means by which South African blacks could air their discontent. Mandela and his co-defendants were acquitted in 1961, but their African National Congress had been declared illegal. Although he was free to go about his business, Mandela realized that he could no longer conduct his “business” without breaking the law.

Forced underground, Mandela founded a new group, Umkonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), a guerrilla organization that directed sabotage actions against government installations and other symbols of apartheid. Mandela travelled throughout Africa seeking funds for his cause, at every turn eluding capture by South African security police. The hardships he faced affected his family as well, as Winnie Mandela remembered in People magazine. “He told me to anticipate a life physically without him, that there would never be a normal situation where he would be head of the family,” Mrs. Mandela said. “He told me this in great pain. I was completely shattered.”

Sentenced to Life in Prison

Mass protests continued in South Africa, and the Spear of the Nation claimed responsibility for more than seventy acts of sabotage. On August 4, 1962, Mandela was arrested by South African police and charged with organizing illegal demonstrations. Once again he used his courtroom appearance as an opportunity to challenge the legality of South Africa’s minority rule. His defense was masterful and eloquent, but he was nevertheless convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. While he was serving this sentence, the police connected him to Spear of the Nation and charged him with the more serious crimes of treason and sabotage. After yet another trial, he was sentenced to life in prison in June of 1964.

Mandela was sent to Robben Island, a prison seven miles off the coast of Cape Town. There he endured years of hard labor quarrying limestone and harvesting seaweed, while his wife faced almost constant police harassment at home. In the eyes of the South African government, Nelson Mandela had effectively ceased to exist. Mere discussions of his views or questions about his health were illegal, and he was allowed no contact with the outside world and few visitors. Mandela never lost faith in his cause, however—and the black people of South Africa never forgot their fearless hero. As his years of imprisonment dragged on, he assumed the mantle of martyrdom and became a symbol of the government’s desperate efforts to maintain minority rule.

In 1982 Mandela was moved from Robben Island to the maximum security Pollsmoor Prison outside Cape Town. The authorities offered official administrative reasons for the move, but most observers agree that Mandela was simply exerting a powerful influence over the other inmates of Robben Island. Mandela spent much of the next six years in solitary confinement, bolstered by a weekly thirty-minute visit with his wife. He was offered a conditional freedom in 1984—provided that he would settle in the black “homeland” of Transkei—but absolutely refused this option, affirming his allegiance to the African National Congress.

Inevitably, Mandela’s health deteriorated. In 1988 he was hospitalized with tuberculosis. After he recovered he returned to prison, but under somewhat more benign circumstances. By the late 1980s, social conditions in South Africa had become even more desperate, with frequent violent confrontations between young blacks and government forces. The international tide was also turning against South Africa. Many private enterprises and national governments withdrew financial support for the beleaguered nation, and the resulting economic downturn literally forced the South African government to reconsider its dedication to apartheid. Finally, after twenty-seven years, the white leadership heeded the calls of citizens of numerous nations to release the most important political prisoner of the late twentieth century, Nelson Mandela.

Freed at Last

The whole world watched on February 11, 1990, as Mandela—thin and gray, but unbowed—walked out of Verster Prison. Cheering crowds met him at every turn. He told People: “I was completely overwhelmed by the enthusiasm. It is something I did not expect.” Mandela quickly assumed a leadership position in the African National Congress, restored to legal status by the government. Within weeks he and his wife were travelling across their nation, calling for a truce in the armed struggle and open negotiations toward equal rights in South Africa. In July of 1990 Mandela brought his message to the United States when he toured a series of big cities, raising funds for his cause. He also asked the American government to continue imposing economic sanctions against South Africa until apartheid is completely dismantled.

Mandela and the ANC continue to face enormous problems in South Africa, some of which involve murderous feuds between black factions and terrorist actions in the townships. Time correspondent Michael S. Serrill noted that the violence in his nation has forced Mandela to face a sobering reality: “He may have wielded more moral authority as the world’s most famous prisoner than he does as a political leader in his… freedom.” Serrill continued: “To some South African blacks,… Mandela out of prison has become an irrelevant figurehead, a dignified gentleman with Utopian socialist ideas that have little to do with their daily lives…. Mandela’s damaged stature has achieved an important aim of [the] white government: to demystify the A.N.C. and make clear that Mandela is only one of many black players.” The role Mandela takes in a more enlightened South Africa may depend on the degree of cooperation he can muster among the country’s black majority.

Hopes for South Africa’s Future

Now in his mid-seventies with several grown children, Mandela remains ever zealous in his pursuit of rights for all South Africans. He is still a revolutionary who counts as allies anyone who supports his cause—including Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, Libya’s Colonel Muammar Kaddafi, and the Palestine Liberation Organization. In Newsweek, Tom Masland claimed that Mandela “hasn’t renounced the use of violence, he wants to nationalize at least some industries, and he remains willing to take help from anyone and return the favor.”

This attitude only illustrates the persistent state of concern Mandela and the ANC feel about social conditions in South Africa. Since 1955, when it published its Freedom Charter, the group’s aims have changed little. Its political objectives include a unified South Africa with no artificial homelands, a black representation along with all other races in a central parliament, and a one-man, one-vote democracy in a multi-party system.

In a speech in New York City during the summer of 1990, Mandela thanked the American people for taking such an interest in him and his struggle. “You, the people, never abandoned us,” he said. “From behind the granite walls, political prisoners could hear loud and clear your voice of solidarity…. We are winning because you made it possible.”

Selected writings

No Easy Walk to Freedom, Basic Books, 1965.

The Struggle Is My Life, Pathfinder Press, 1986.

Sources

Books

Benson, Mary, Nelson Mandela: The Man and the Movement, Norton, 1986.

Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches From “Contemporary Authors,” Gale, 1989.

Mandela, Nelson, No Easy Walk to Freedom, Basic Books, 1965.

Mandela, Nelson, The Struggle Is My Life, Pathfinder Press, 1986.

Mandela, Winnie, Part of My Soul Went With Him, Norton, 1985.

Periodicals

Newsweek, September 9, 1985; July 2, 1990.

New York Times, May 12, 1980; February 2, 1985; August 16, 1985; November 24, 1985; December 1, 1985; February 1, 1986; February 12, 1986; February 4, 1990; February 11, 1990.

Observer, April 22, 1973.

People, February 26, 1990.

Time, January 6, 1986; January 5, 1987; April 9, 1990; July 2, 1990.

—Anne Janette Johnson