Home > Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity > Mandela, Nelson

[JULY 18, 1918–]

Anti-apartheid peace activist; former president of South Africa

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born in 1918 in Quno, a village near Umtata in the province of Transkei on the southeastern coast of South Africa, near the Indian Ocean. A scion of the Madiba tribal clan, he belonged to the Thembu people, his great-grandfather having been a Thembu king. Nelson's father, Gadla Henry Mphakayiswa Mandela, was chief counselor to the paramount chief of Thembuland. He had four wives and thirteen children, but died in 1927. Young Mandela then became the ward of the chief and was groomed for the chieftainship. An African teacher at the local primary school gave the young Mandela the English name Nelson, but he was affectionately known as Madiba by his friends. He attended Healdtown Methodist Boarding School and matriculated for a bachelor's degree at Fort Hare University, where he completed two years before leaving for Johannesburg in 1940. He received his degree, completed articles of clerkship, and met Walter Sisulo, who introduced him to the law firm Witkin, Sidelsky, and Eidelman. He attended the University of Witwatersrand and became a lawyer.

Struggle against Apartheid

In 1943 Mandela joined the African National Congress (ANC). Founded in 1912, the goal of the ANC was to end white domination and create a multiracial South Africa. At this time he made friends with the leaders of the Indian community, who were protesting against new legislation restricting their right to purchase land. Mandela observed their practice of peaceful resistance and learned about the philosophy of nonviolent disobedience advocated by the Indian lawyer Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi spent twenty-one years in South Africa helping the Hindu population defend their human rights.

In 1944 Mandela, together with Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu, formed the Youth League of the African National Congress. The Youth League was impatient with the slow pace of progress and was determined to make the ANC an activist organization. Also in 1944 Mandela married Evelyn Mase, a nursing student who had grown up in Thembuland. He had three children with Mase. They divorced in 1957 and a year later he married Winnie Madikiyela, a social worker from Pondoland. She bore him two daughters, Zenani and Zindzi.

In 1948 the white National Party came to power under Daniel Malan, whose platform was called apartheid, or "apartness." Although racial laws and land dispossession had already been known during the colonial period, the National Party enacted new laws providing for racial segregation, including the Separate Representation of Voters Act and the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act.

In 1949 the ANC Youth League drafted a program of action calling for mass strikes, boycotts, and passive resistance. As a response, the National Party passed the Suppression of Communism Act, the Population and Registration Act, and the Group Areas Act, aimed at enforcing apartheid policies and crushing any mass resistance movement.

As a member of the ANC executive committee from 1949, Mandela organized the Defiance Campaign in 1952, a nonviolent mass resistance movement against apartheid laws. Also in 1952 Mandela and Tambo opened a law firm in downtown Johannesburg, the first black law firm in South Africa, specializing in defending black South Africans from the injustices associated with apartheid laws, particularly the so-called pass laws that restricted freedom of residence and movement.

White rule in South Africa meant that some 5 million whites governed over a population of 25 million blacks, Indians, and other ethnicities. As an alternative to apartheid, Mandela offered a plan for a multiracial society, in which majority black rule would guarantee the welfare of all South Africans, black and white alike. As early as June 1955 he drafted an idealistic program, the "Freedom Charter," containing principles of coexistence and reconciliation.

Mandela also struggled against the so-called Bantustan policy launched by the government of prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd in 1959, a program that aimed at forcibly resettling parts of the black population into larger reservations or ghettos, called "homelands," frequently separating the work force from their families. This partly implemented policy of resettlement constituted a crime against humanity according to the Nuremberg judgment, which condemned Nazi demographic manipulations, including mass deportations, population transfers, and internal displacements carried out during World War II. These acts of war affected nearly one million Poles, who were expelled from the Warthegau into eastern Poland, and more than 100,000 French Alsatians expelled into Vichy, France.

Conflict and Imprisonment

While the African National Congress vigorously condemned the 1959 Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act, which fragmented the black African population into eight separate black homelands, some tribal leaders accepted the policy and cooperated with the apartheid government. Mandela's vocal opposition to the Bantustan policy exacerbated tensions with the government, and he was repeatedly arrested and harassed, ultimately being charged with high treason and subjected to the treason trial, which dragged on for several years.

In a climate of escalating violence, demonstrations in March 1960 culminated in a massacre at Sharpeville, a town southwest of Johannesburg, in which sixty-nine protesters were killed by the white police. The government declared a state of emergency and banned the ANC. Mandela was again arrested and kept for five months at the prison center known as Pretoria Local. Quite unexpectedly, when the treason trial ended in March 1961, he was found not guilty.

Facing the reality that peaceful overtures were met with force, in the summer of 1961 Mandela endorsed the necessity of armed struggle and formed the Umkhonto we Sizwe ("the Spear of the Nation") or MK, the military wing of the ANC, which mainly targeted government offices, economic installations, and symbols of apartheid.

Early in 1962 Mandela illegally left South Africa for a period of six months, to canvas in London and elsewhere for financial support for the armed struggle. He took military training in Ethiopia and addressed the Conference of the Pan African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa in Addis Ababa. Upon his return to South Africa in August 1962 he was arrested, charged with illegal exit and incitement to strike, tried, and sentenced to five years' imprisonment. He was first held in Pretoria and then transfered to the maximum security prison at Robben Island, some four miles off the coast of Cape Town. Although already imprisoned, he was newly indicted on charges of sabotage and attempting to overthrow the government by violence. Mandela's statements from the dock at his trial in Rivonia, a suburb of Johannesburg, constitute classics in the history of resistance movements:

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 opportunities. 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 (Meredith, 1998, p. 268).

Mandela escaped capital punishment, but was sentenced to life imprisonment. In all, he spent twentyseven years in prison, including eighteen at Robben Island as prisoner number 466/64, where he worked in a lime quarry until he was transferred in March 1982 to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town. In December 1988 he was transferred to the Victor Verster Prison near Paarl, from which he was released on February 11, 1990.

Peacemaker and Renowned Leader

Decades of international condemnation of apartheid, accompanied by severe economic sanctions, denial of bank loans, widespread disinvestment in South Africa, and international ostracism, including exclusion from the United Nations General Assembly and from participation in the work of international organizations, persuaded the South African government that the price of maintaining the apartheid system was too high, even for the white South African population. Thus, in February 1990 president Frederik Willem de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC and paved the way for a nonviolent departure from apartheid.

In 1991, at the first national conference of the ANC held inside South Africa, Mandela was elected president of the ANC. In 1992 president de Klerk and Mandela signed a Record of Understanding and established an elected constitutional assembly to develop a new democratic constitution for South Africa. Later they developed the idea of "truth commissions" aimed at reconciliation of white and black in the post-apartheid period.

In 1992 Mandela separated from Winnie, who had become a controversial figure in South Africa. They divorced in March 1996 and on his eightieth birthday, in 1998, Mandela married Graca Machel, the widow of the former president of neighboring Mozanbique.

Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Price in 1993, together with de Klerk. Mandela was the second opponent of apartheid to win the prize; in 1984 archbishop Desmond Tutu had been honored for his efforts to end apartheid in South Africa.

From April 26 to April 29, 1994, the first all-races election took place in South Africa on the basis of the one-man/one-vote principle. Mandela was elected president, the ANC won 252 of the 400 seats in the national assembly, and de Klerk became deputy president.

On May 10, 1994, Mandela took office as the first democratically elected president of South Africa and served one term until June 1999. His generosity of spirit and unwillingness to take revenge won him the respect of his white South African adversaries. Mandela's legacy is a new South Africa that enjoys greater racial harmony than ever before and a quality of reconciliation that remains an example for other conflict-ridden societies.

SEE ALSO Apartheid; South Africa

Alfred de Zayas