Mandela, Nelson

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Mandela, Nelson 1918–

Rolihlahla Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, in the village of Mvezo, a Thembu tribal area that was part of the Xhosa nation in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. At the age of seven he was given the name “Nelson” by an African teacher who insisted on English nomenclature, thereby establishing a moniker that was to surpass in world renown the English naval officer after whom he was named. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was to become the leader of the African National Congress (ANC), the world’s most famous political prisoner (1962–1990), and the overseer (along with F. W. de Klerk) of the political and constitutional negotiations that ended apartheid in South Africa.

The acknowledged “father” of the “new” South Africa, Mandela became president of the country (1994– 1999) following its first democratic elections in 1994, when the ANC won 62 percent of the vote. For their role in helping to dismantle South Africa’s racial formations, Mandela and de Klerk won the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize. Mandela’s achievements in encouraging both a peaceful transition to nonracialism and an acceptance of black majority rule will prove his lasting legacy.

Mandela had a relatively privileged upbringing as a minor member of a royal household. His father died when Mandela was nine years old, and he was brought up under the guardianship of Chief Dalindyebo, Regent of the Thembu people. The Grand Palace in Mqhekezweni was next to a Methodist Mission School, where the young boy excelled under what was, for the time, the very best of education available to Africans. While at school, Mandela converted to Methodism, and he was encouraged to challenge the boundaries that colonialism and apartheid imposed on South Africans. He encountered a number of people who seemed to exemplify this challenge to the status quo, being taught, for example, by the first female African graduate, Gertrude Ntlabathi.

Around 1937, Mandela went on to attend the University of Fort Hare (originally known as the South African Native College), which was established in 1916 as the first university for black South Africans. But his experience there only served to impress upon him some of the paradoxes of apartheid. The widening of educational and socioeconomic opportunities to a small African elite made him aware of how further development for blacks was restricted by race laws, while simultaneously heightening his awareness of the gulf between him and the rest of the African population. This awareness radicalized Mandela, ultimately forcing his expulsion from Fort Hare for organizing student protests.

After leaving Fort Hare, Mandela moved to Johannesburg—partly to escape a traditional tribal arranged marriage—and he found work as a guard at a mine (he was suited to this work because he was also an amateur boxer). He then drifted into law, not on the basis of formal qualifications but as a result of assisting miners to negotiate their way through apartheid’s iniquities. Mandela eventually entered a law firm as a clerk, during which time he obtained a law degree by correspondence. He then went on to study law further at the University of Witwatersrand.

While practicing law, Mandela became involved with the African National Congress (ANC), which had been established in 1912, and he helped to reinvigorate the organization. There was a sense among many younger radicals that the ANC needed to expand recruitment and broaden the base of its coalition to include Communists and community opposition groups, who were themselves mobilizing against the progressive creep of apartheid’s restrictions to Indian and Colored peoples. In addition, many of these radicals thought the group was misguided in putting its faith in white trusteeship, whereby blacks relied on the paternalism of liberal whites to assist them. Under such a system, blacks unwittingly endorsed subservience to white leadership. In 1943, the newly formed ANC Youth League was at the vanguard of these challenges, with Oliver Tambo as secretary, Walter Sisulu as treasurer, and Mandela as a member of its National Executive. The broadening nonracial coalition within the ANC was reinforced in the 1950s by the imposition of even more repressive legislation following the victory of the Afrikaans National Party in the 1948 election. This legislation deepened the level of suffering and intensified the effects of racial discrimination in the country, and it led to the famous Freedom Charter of 1955, a declaration of human and civil rights established by political opposition and community groups in South Africa, deliberately couched in terms redolent of the American Declaration of Independence, outlining the case for freedom and political liberty for South Africans irrespective of race. Despite opposition from radicals who wished to continue with an exclusive form of African nationalism, which would lead eventually to the formation of the rival Pan African Congress, Mandela helped maintain the ANC’s historic commitment to nonracialism.

Periods of detention and arrest followed for Mandela, including a long period spent out on bail, along with 194 other defendants, for the charge of high treason. While he was eventually found not guilty, Mandela was temporarily detained under emergency powers imposed in response to growing political unrest, and he decided to go on the run in 1960 after the ANC was banned. In November 1961 the ANC decided to establish an armed wing, Umkhonto we Siswe (Spear of the Nation), or MK for short, with Mandela as its leader. Mandela would later admit that he never fired a gun in anger, so making him the leader of an armed struggle seems, in retrospect,

an odd choice. Indeed, the relative ineffectiveness of MK’s sabotage campaign between 1961 and 1962 lies in part in Mandela’s reluctance to commit the organization to terror. Nevertheless, the threat of such actions ensured that massive energy was expended in an attempt to arrest him, and Mandela was eventually captured in August 1962. He later ridiculed the speculation that the CIA tipped off the South African police, admitting to having become lax about his own security.

In July 1963 most of the prominent ANC leaders were captured near Rivonia, and the suburb of Johannesburg lent its name to their treason trial, in which Mandela was also a defendant. Those still at large fled overseas (Tambo escaped to London to lead the ANC in exile) or went so deep underground that the ANC essentially had no presence inside the country until at least after the 1976 Soweto uprising. Mandela went to Robben Island, to be freed on February 11, 1990, nine days after the ANC was reinstated as a political entity. He refused early release in 1985, insisting that his freedom had to be part of a comprehensive freeing of the country from racism, one part of which had to be the legalization of the ANC.

Mandela’s commitment to the twin pillars of nonracialism and nonviolence did much to slow the descent into conflict that occurred between 1990 and 1994. There was a political vacuum during this period, and the number of deaths due to political violence was greater than during the worst apartheid years. Mandela’s role in keeping the violence from escalating even further won him respect around the world. He came to be revered as a peacemaker, and he involved himself in many peace processes and issues of conscience throughout the ensuing years. Life-long personal commitments affected other parts of the new South African government’s policies as well, for Mandela resisted economic policies that were anticapitalist or anti-Western, ensuring that tight monetary and fiscal policies would prevent the massive redistribution of wealth that seemed to cripple the economies of other postcolonial societies in Africa. The legitimacy of the man among many white South Africans—founded ironically on the stoicism and dignity with which he bore twenty-eight years of imprisonment imposed in their name—did much to ensure the acceptance of black control of the political system. Likewise, his position as the unrivalled leader of the campaign against apartheid did much to help Africans reconcile themselves to lowered expectations of economic redistribution from the new ANC government. As the figurehead for a moral cause against apartheid, Mandela served as a beacon that shone light around the world and into the hearts of most South Africans. His charisma and steadfastness guided the country during its most difficult period of transition.