NELSON ROLIHLAHLA MANDELA

Rolihlahla Mandela: 18 July 1918 – 5 December 2013) was a South African Anti Apathies activist and politician who served as the First President of south India from 1994 to 1999. He was the country’s first black head of state and the first elected in a Fully Repressive democratic election. His government focused on dismantling the legacy of Apathies by fostering racial reconciliation Ideologically an African nationalist and socialist, he served as the president of the Africa National Congress (ANC) party from 1991 to 1997.

A Xhosa Mandela was born into the Thembu royal family in Mvezo, South Africa. He studied law at the University of fort hare and the University of Witwatersrand before working as a lawyer in Johannesburg. There he became involved in anti-colonial and African nationalist politics, joining the ANC in 1943 and co-founding its youth league in 1944. After the National Party’s white only government established apartheid, a system of Racial serration that privileged Whites, Mandela and the ANC committed themselves to its overthrow. He was appointed president of the ANC’s branch, rising to prominence for his involvement in the 1952 Defiance campaign and the 1955 Congress of the people. He was repeatedly arrested for steadies’ activities and was unsuccessfully prosecuted in the 1956 treason trial. Influenced by Marxism, he secretly joined the banned South Africa communist party (SACP). Although initially committed to non-violent protest, in association with the SACP he co-founded the militant Umkhonto We Sizwe in 1961 that led a Sabotage campaign against the apartheid government. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1962, and, following the Rhinoviral, was sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiring to overthrow the state.

Mandela served 27 years in prison, split between Robben Island, Pollsmoor Prison and Victor Verster Prison. Amid growing domestic and international pressure and fears of racial civil war, President F. W. de Klerk released him in 1990. Mandela and de Klerk led efforts to negotiate an end to apartheid, which resulted in the 1994 multiracial general election in which Mandela led the ANC to victory and became president. Leading a broad coalition government which promulgated a new constitution, Mandela emphasized reconciliation between the country’s racial groups and created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate past human rights abuses. Economically, his administration retained its predecessor’s liberal framework despite his own socialist beliefs, also introducing measures to encourage land reform, combat poverty and expand healthcare services. Internationally, Mandela acted as mediator in the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing trial and served as secretary-general of the Non-Aligned Movement from 1998 to 1999. He declined a second presidential term and was succeeded by his deputy, Thabo Mbeki. Mandela became an elder statesman and focused on combating poverty and HIV/AIDS through the charitable Nelson Mandela Foundation.

Mandela was a controversial figure for much of his life. Although critics on the right denounced him as a communist terrorist and those on the far left deemed him too eager to negotiate and reconcile with apartheid’s supporters, he gained international acclaim for his activism. Globally regarded as an icon of democracy and social justice, he received more than 250 honours, including the Nobel Peace Prize. He is held in deep respect within South Africa, where he is often referred to by his Thembu clan name, Madiba, and described as the “Father of the Nation”.

Mandela was born on 18 July 1918, in the village of Mvezo in Umtata, then part of South Africa’s Cape Province.^[2] He was given the forename Rolihlahla, [^a] a Xhosa term colloquially meaning “troublemaker”,^[5] and in later years became known by his clan name, Madiba. [^6] His patrilineal great-grandfather, Ngubengcuka, was ruler of the Thembu Kingdom in the Transkei and Territories of South Africa’s modern Eastern Cape province.^[7] One of Ngubengcuka’s sons, named Mandela, was Nelson’s grandfather and the source of his surname.^[8] Because Mandela was the king’s child by a wife of the Ixhiba clan, a so-called “Left-Hand House”, the descendants of his cadet branch of the royal family were morganatic, ineligible to inherit the throne but recognised as hereditary royal councillors.^[9]

Nelson Mandela’s father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa Mandela, was a local chief and councillor to the monarch; he was appointed to the position in 1915, after his predecessor was accused of corruption by a governing white magistrate.^[10] In 1926, Gadla was also sacked for corruption, but Nelson was told that his father had lost his job for standing up to the magistrate’s unreasonable demands.^[11] A devotee of the god Qamata,^[12] Gadla was a polygamist with four wives, four sons and nine daughters, who lived in different villages. Nelson’s mother was Gadla’s third wife, Nosekeni Fanny, daughter of Nkedama of the Right Hand House and a member of the amaMpemvu clan of the Xhosa.^[13]

Mandela later stated that his early life was dominated by traditional Xhosa custom and taboo.^[15] He grew up with two sisters in his mother’s kraal in the village of Qunu, where he tended herds as a cattle-boy and spent much time outside with other boys.^[16] Both his parents were illiterate, but his mother, being a devout Christian, sent him to a local Methodist school when he was about seven. Baptized a Methodist, Mandela was given the English forename of “Nelson” by his teacher. [^17] When Mandela was about nine, his father came to stay at Qunu, where he died of an undiagnosed ailment that Mandela believed to be lung disease.^[18] Feeling “cut adrift”, he later said that he inherited his father’s “proud rebelliousness” and “stubborn sense of fairness”.^[19]

Mandela’s mother took him to the “Great Place” palace at Heezen, where he was entrusted to the guardianship of the Thembu regent, Chief Jongintaba Delineator. Although he did not see his mother again for many years, Mandela felt that Jong Intaba and his wife No England treated him as their own child, raising him alongside their children.^[20] As Mandela attended church services every Sunday with his guardians, Christianity became a significant part of his life.^[21] He attended a Methodist mission school located next to the palace, where he studied English, Xhosa, history and geography.^[22] He developed a love of African history, listening to the tales told by elderly visitors to the palace, and was influenced by the anti-imperialist rhetoric of a visiting chief, Joyi.^[23] Nevertheless, at the time he considered the European colonizers not as oppressors but as benefactors who had brought education and other benefits to southern Africa.^[24] Aged 16, he, his cousin Justice and several other boys travelled to Tyhalarha to undergo the ulwaluko circumcision ritual that symbolically marked their transition from boys to men; afterwards he was given the name Dalibunga. 

Clarkebury, Healdtown, and Fort Hare: 1934–1940

Intending to gain skills needed to become a privy councillor for the Thembu royal house, Mandela began his secondary education in 1933 at Clarkebury Methodist High School in Engcobo, a Western-style institution that was the largest school

for black Africans in Thembuland.[26] Made to socialise with other students on an equal basis, he claimed that he lost his “stuck up” attitude, becoming best friends with a girl for the first time; he began playing sports and developed his lifelong love of gardening.[27] He completed his Junior Certificate in two years,[28] and in 1937 he moved to Healdtown, the Methodist college in Fort Beaufort attended by most Thembu royalty, including Justice.[29] The headmaster emphasised the superiority of European culture and government, but Mandela became increasingly interested in native African culture, making his first non-Xhosa friend, a speaker of Sotho, and coming under the influence of one of his favourite teachers, a Xhosa who broke taboo by marrying a Sotho.[30] Mandela spent much of his spare time at Healdtown as a long-distance runner and boxer, and in his second year he became a prefect.

In 1939, with Jongintaba’s backing, Mandela began work on a BA degree at the University of Fort Hare, an elite black institution of approximately 150 students in Alice, Eastern Cape. He studied English, anthropology, politics, “native administration”, and Roman Dutch law in his first year, desiring to become an interpreter or clerk in the Native Affairs Department.[32] Mandela stayed in the Wesley House dormitory, befriending his own kinsman, K. D. Matanzima, as well as Oliver Tambo, who became a close friend and comrade for decades to come.[33] He took up ballroom dancing,[34] performed in a drama society play about Abraham Lincoln,[35] and gave Bible classes in the local community as part of the Student Christian Association.[36] Although he had friends who held connections to the African National Congress (ANC) who wanted South Africa to be independent of the British Empire, Mandela avoided any involvement with the nascent movement,[37] and became a vocal supporter of the British war effort when the Second World War broke out.[38] At the end of his first year he became involved in a students’ representative council (SRC) boycott against the quality of food, for which he was suspended from the university; he never returned to complete his degree

• Arriving in Johannesburg: 1941–1943
  Returning to Mqhekezweni in December 1940, Mandela found that Jongintaba had arranged marriages for him and Justice; dismayed, they fled to Johannesburg via Queenstown, arriving in April 1941.[40] Mandela found work as a night watchman at Crown Mines, his “first sight of South African capitalism in action”, but was fired when the induna (headman) discovered that he was a runaway.[41] He stayed with a cousin in George Goch Township, who introduced Mandela to realtor and ANC activist Walter Sisulu. The latter secured Mandela a job as an articled clerk at the law firm of Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman, a company run by Lazar Sidelsky, a liberal Jew sympathetic to the ANC’s cause.[42] At the firm, Mandela befriended Gaur Radebe—a Hlubi member of the ANC and Communist Party—and Nat Bregman, a Jewish communist who became his first white friend.[43] Mandela attended Communist Party gatherings, where he was impressed that Europeans, Africans, Indians, and Coloureds mixed as equals. He later stated that he did not join the party because its atheism conflicted with his Christian faith, and because he saw the South African struggle as being racially based rather than as class warfare.[44] To continue his higher education, Mandela signed up to a University of South Africa correspondence course, working on his bachelor’s degree at night.

Earning a small wage, Mandela rented a room in the house of the Xhosa family in the Alexandra township; despite being rife with poverty, crime and pollution, Alexandra always remained a special place for him. [^46] Although embarrassed by his poverty, he briefly dated a Swazi woman before unsuccessfully courting his landlord’s daughter.^[47] To save money and be closer to downtown Johannesburg, Mandela moved into the compound of the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, living among miners of various tribes; as the compound was visited by various chiefs, he once met the Queen Regent of Basutoland.^[48] In late 1941, Jong Intaba visited Johannesburg—there forgiving Mandela for running away—before returning to Thembuland, where he died in the winter of 1942.^[49] After he passed his BA exams in early 1943, Mandela returned to Johannesburg to follow a political path as a lawyer rather than become a privy councilor in Thembulan