To the very end, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, though frail and somewhat forgetful, remained the Father of the Nation for South Africans. He was a cultural symbol of freedom and equality. Nelson Mandela (born July 18, 1918, Mvezo, South Africa-died December 5, 2013, Johannesburg) was a Black nationalist and the first Black president of South Africa (1994-99). He negotiated in the early 1990s with South African Pres. F.W. de Klerk to help end the country’s apartheid system of racial segregation and ushered in a peaceful transition to majority rule. Mandela and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1993 for their efforts.
Nelson Mandela in 1994
It could even be said that, in the several trips he’s made to the hospital over the past two years, he was, in his own way, preparing his family-biological and extended-for his final return home. The renowned South African writer Zakes Mda once told me, “In our indigenous languages, we reserved the equivalent words of ‘death’ only for animals. For humans, we say ‘She has left us,’ ‘He had passed,’ ‘She’s gone home,’ ‘He’s gone to join the ancestors.’ ” It seemed as if Madiba-that is Mandela’s Xhosa clan name-had delayed his departure long past that of many of his contemporaries and comrades-in-arms so that his family, both near and national, could simply mourn him, without the sense that his loss might throw the country into a crisis.
Fathers can make themselves felt through their absence; Mandela did, by walking away from power after his term as President was up. By that he meant that his father possessed “a proud rebelliousness, a stubborn sense of fairness, that I recognize in myself.” Mandela’s own father passed away from tuberculosis when Mandela was nine, though historical evidence shows it must have been later, most likely 1930. And yet, Mandela has written, “I defined myself through my father.”
Early Life and Education
Rolihlahla Mandela was born into the Madiba clan in the village of Mvezo, in the Eastern Cape, on 18 July 1918. His mother was Nonqaphi Nosekeni and his father was Nkosi Mphakanyiswa Gadla Mandela, principal counsellor to the Acting King of the Thembu people, Jongintaba Dalindyebo. After his father’s death, young Nelson was raised by Jongintaba, the regent of the Tembu. In 1925 - Mandela begins primary school near his home village of Qunu. Mandela’s mother took him to the "Great Place" palace at Mqhekezweni, where he was entrusted to the guardianship of the Thembu regent, Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo.
Read also: Cape Town Accommodation Guide
No one in my family had ever attended school ... On the first day of school my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education. That day, Miss Mdingane told me that my new name was Nelson. Mandela later stated that his early life was dominated by traditional Xhosa custom and taboo. 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. Both his parents were illiterate, but his mother, being a devout Christian, sent him to a local Methodist school when he was about seven.
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. In 1941, He ran away to Johannesburg instead, arriving there in 1941. 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. 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. 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. Mandela attended Communist Party gatherings, where he was impressed that Europeans, Africans, Indians, and Coloureds mixed as equals. Mandela began studying law at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was the only black African student and faced racism.
Political Awakening and Activism
Mandela would be the first to admit that he did a lousy job as the biological father of six children, by two different wives. He was married first and foremost to the movement-to the liberation of his people from the vicious, stifling bondage of a white minority who saw themselves as superior, who forcibly removed blacks and other people of color to isolated townships that often lacked running water and indoor plumbing, and which the regime could easily encircle in case of trouble.
In 1944 he joined the African National Congress (ANC), a Black-liberation group, and became a leader of its Youth League. That same year he met and married Evelyn Ntoko Mase. Mandela subsequently held other ANC leadership positions, through which he helped revitalize the organization and oppose the apartheid policies of the ruling National Party. In 1952 in Johannesburg, with fellow ANC leader Oliver Tambo, Mandela established South Africa’s first Black law practice, specializing in cases resulting from the post-1948 apartheid legislation. Also that year, Mandela played an important role in launching a campaign of defiance against South Africa’s pass laws, which required nonwhites to carry documents (known as passes, pass books, or reference books) authorizing their presence in areas that the government deemed “restricted” (i.e., generally reserved for the white population). He traveled throughout the country as part of the campaign, trying to build support for nonviolent means of protest against the discriminatory laws. In 1955 he was involved in drafting the Freedom Charter, a document calling for nonracial social democracy in South Africa.
Nelson Mandela: The Rivonia Trial
Mandela wrote about the difficulties of his first marriage, to Evelyn Mase, in his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom”:
Read also: Mandela and African Economic Change
My devotion to the ANC and the struggle was unremitting. This disturbed Evelyn …. I patiently explained to her that politics was not a distraction but my lifework, that it was an essential and fundamental part of my being.
After the massacre of unarmed Black South Africans by police forces at Sharpeville in 1960 and the subsequent banning of the ANC, Mandela abandoned his nonviolent stance and began advocating acts of sabotage against the South African regime. He went underground (during which time he became known as the Black Pimpernel for his ability to evade capture) and was one of the founders of Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), the military wing of the ANC. In 1962 he went to Algeria for training in guerrilla warfare and sabotage, returning to South Africa later that year.
Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo
In October 1963 the imprisoned Mandela and several other men were tried for sabotage, treason, and violent conspiracy in the infamous Rivonia Trial, named after a fashionable suburb of Johannesburg where raiding police had discovered quantities of arms and equipment at the headquarters of the underground Umkhonto we Sizwe. Mandela’s speech from the dock, in which he admitted the truth of some of the charges made against him, was a classic defense of liberty and defiance of tyranny. On June 12, 1964, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, narrowly escaping the death penalty.
As Mandela said, in a statement released in June, 1961:
Read also: The Story of Mandela Foods
I have had to separate myself from my dear wife and children, from my mother and sisters, to live as an outlaw in my own land. I have had to close my business, to abandon my profession, and live in poverty and misery, as many of my people are doing.
He was posing as a chauffeur when he was finally caught and arrested (thanks, it is widely believed, to information that the C.I.A. or MI6 intelligence agents gave to South African authorities). In court, Mandela defiantly wore the traditional outfit of a Xhosa chief-a leopard-skin kaross with one bare shoulder exposed, and beads around his neck. He accused the government of “behav[ing] in a way no civilized government should dare behave when faced with a peaceful, disciplined, sensible, and democratic expression of the views of its own population.”
The Rivonia Trial Speech
Mandela, known as Accused No. 1, was undeterred. Given a chance to address the court, he spoke for four hours, talking passionately about the desire of the black majority to have “a just share in the whole of South Africa,” as well as “equal political rights.” He insisted that “the violence we chose to adopt was not terrorism,” and that the A.N.C. was committed to “nonviolence and negotiations.”
And then he spoke words that captured the attention not only of those in the courtroom but of people all over the world. They remain to this day among his most memorable-and are the only words of his captured on audio for almost three decades:
During my lifetime, I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunity. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.
The sentence was not death but life in prison.
Imprisonment and International Pressure
For the next two and a half decades, Mandela was the invisible man. He and other political prisoners were first confined on Robben Island, two square miles of land surrounded by the waters off Cape Town. While they managed to create an atmosphere that was referred to as Mandela University, where the younger prisoners were encouraged to study, prison life took its toll. Mandela was forced to dig in a lime quarry, day in and day out, without protection for his eyes from the sun and dust, and suffered such lasting damage to them that, even after his release, he could not abide the flashing lights from journalists’ cameras. And, in time, he also developed tuberculosis, which made him vulnerable to problems with his lungs that continued until his death.
Aerial view of Robben Island
After eighteen years, he was moved, along with Walter Sisulu, Raymond Mhlaba, and Andrew Mlangeni, to Pollsmoor Prison, near Cape Town, which is where I was when I first went to South Africa, in 1985, when the country was in yet another state of emergency. Mandela, I had been told, busied himself with a garden he had planted; I stood on a nearby hillside and tried in vain to catch a glimpse of it or of him, but I had been followed by security police and so couldn’t linger long.
I found that children in every black township knew his name, and not only his. One day, walking up to a small group of teen-agers dancing in a circle and singing in Zulu, I asked what the words meant, and they told me breathlessly, “We want Mandela to be released, and Walter Sisulu, Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni, Govan Mbeki, and all the other political prisoners.”
But his daughter Zindzi was only eighteen months old when her father was sent to prison, and, along with her mother and sister, Zenani, endured night raids from security forces, along with banishment to a remote town. In 1985, young Zindzi stood before a crowd of thousands at Jabulani Stadium, in Soweto, and read a letter from her father that had been smuggled out of prison, his first public statement in twenty-one years. She began, “My father says …” and went on to read his refusal of an offer of conditional release that involved renouncing violence. It ended with the resounding words “Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts …. Your freedom and mine cannot be separated. I will return.”
Release and Transition to Democracy
The speech invigorated the movement. But in time, and on his own, Mandela began discussions with the apartheid regime about how to bring about a peaceful transition. Five years and a day later, on February 11, 1990, to the surprise of even his comrades, both inside and outside the country, Mandela was released. He was seventy-one. He had been in prison for twenty-seven years.
And, in the ensuing months, before he actually became President of the country, he spent time not only embracing the children of the movement but extending an olive branch to the whites who had never reached out to them or to him. He seemed to many to go out of his way to reassure whites that he believed in the words he had long ago spoken-that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white. It wasn’t obvious to everyone in his own ranks that he should be so welcoming, so inclusive. It was obvious to Mandela. It also earned him and the Afrikaner President who freed him, F. W. de Klerk, the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1993, the year before Mandela replaced de Klerk.
Mandela further solidified his credentials as Father of the Nation, the whole nation, when he pitched up at a rugby match wearing the team cap. The Springboks team had been all-white, and blacks associated them with apartheid, but when the game was over, and the team had won the 1995 Rugby World Cup, a broadly smiling Mandela walked onto the field, shook the team captain’s hand, and encouraged the entire nation to “get behind our boys.”
Nelson Mandela with Francois Pienaar during 1995 Rugby World Cup
Presidency and Legacy
On 10 May 1994 he was inaugurated as South Africa’s first democratically elected President. True to his promise, Mandela stepped down in 1999 after one term as President. His administration focused on dismantling the legacy of apartheid by fostering racial reconciliation and a multiracial democracy. Mandela emphasised 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.
When his eldest son died of an AIDS-related illness, the country saw Mandela as a grieving father, one who also stood up and told the nation-his nation-that there was no shame in being H.I.V.-infected, and that people living with H.I.V. should not be stigmatized. It was a dramatic departure from the position of Thabo Mbeki, his successor and the President at the time, who had dismissed the connection between H.I.V. and AIDS.
In his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom,” published in 1994, the year he assumed the Presidency, Mandela wrote:
To be the father of a nation is a great honor, but to be the father of a family is a greater joy. But it was a joy I had far too little of.
And so Mandela wasted no time in trying to locate the father he had not been to his biological children, their children, and those of his third wife, Graça Machel.
Mandela never wavered in his devotion to democracy, equality and learning. Despite terrible provocation, he never answered racism with racism.
And now I am reminded of something else I learned during my years in the country-which is probably why South Africans, though sad now that the Father of the Nation has closed his eyes forever, will not be desolate. It is the tradition that takes South Africans to the gravesite of a departed one to speak about whatever problems they may be having, in the belief that wisdom will come from one who is now an ancestor, and who lives forever.
Key Facts About Nelson Mandela
| Fact | Details |
|---|---|
| Birth Name | Rolihlahla Mandela |
| Born | July 18, 1918, Mvezo, South Africa |
| Died | December 5, 2013, Johannesburg, South Africa |
| Known For | Ending apartheid, first Black president of South Africa |
| Political Party | African National Congress (ANC) |
| Imprisonment | 27 years (1964-1990) |
| Nobel Prize | 1993 (shared with F.W. de Klerk) |
Popular articles:
tags: #Africa
