Nelson Mandela
Lawyer, saboteur, prisoner, negotiator, president.
Full detail, evidence and debate
Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison for leading the armed wing of the African National Congress, walked out in 1990 to negotiate with the government that jailed him, and served a single term as South Africa's first democratically elected president. The settlement he brokered averted the civil war most observers expected and deferred the economic questions that dominate South African politics today.
- Lived
- 1918 – 2013
- Thembu name
- Rolihlahla; clan name Madiba
- Imprisoned
- 1962 – 1990; 18 years on Robben Island
- Rivonia Trial
- 1963–64; life sentence, April 1964
- Nobel Peace Prize
- 1993, shared with F. W. de Klerk
- President
- 1994 – 1999, one term by choice
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Before prison
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Born in 1918 into a Thembu royal family in the Transkei, Mandela was sent to mission schools and Fort Hare, left after a student protest, fled an arranged marriage to Johannesburg, and qualified as a lawyer. With Oliver Tambo he opened the country's first Black law partnership in 1952, handling the endless caseload the pass laws generated. He helped found the ANC Youth League in 1944, pushing the older organisation towards mass action, and was central to the 1952 Defiance Campaign and the drafting of the Freedom Charter in 1955. He was tried for treason from 1956 and acquitted in 1961 — a five-year prosecution that failed.
The turn to armed struggle
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The Sharpeville massacre of March 1960, in which police killed 69 people at a peaceful pass-law protest, and the banning of the ANC that followed, ended the case for exclusively non-violent methods. In 1961 Mandela co-founded uMkhonto we Sizwe, Spear of the Nation, and became its first commander. Its initial campaign was sabotage of installations rather than attacks on people, chosen explicitly as the least violent option that might still force negotiation. He went underground, trained abroad, and was arrested in August 1962. At the Rivonia Trial in 1964, facing the death penalty, he did not deny the charges: he made a four-hour statement from the dock setting out why a lawyer had turned to sabotage, ending with the passage about a democratic and free society as an ideal he was prepared to die for. He got life instead.
Twenty-seven years
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Eighteen years on Robben Island — hard labour in a lime quarry that damaged his eyes, letters restricted to two a year, visits of thirty minutes — then Pollsmoor and Victor Verster. Prison was also a political education: the island held a generation of activists who studied, taught and argued there, and it became known as the university. Mandela studied law by correspondence, negotiated with warders over conditions, and learned Afrikaans, on the explicit reasoning that you have to understand your opponent. From 1985 he began talking to government representatives on his own initiative, without the ANC's authorisation and at considerable risk to his standing, judging that someone had to open a channel. He refused conditional release the same year, sending a message read out by his daughter: prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
The negotiation
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He was released on 11 February 1990, nine days after the ANC was unbanned. What followed was four years of negotiation conducted against a backdrop of severe violence — over 14,000 people died in political killings between 1990 and 1994, much of it fuelled by a state 'third force' whose existence the government denied. The talks collapsed twice. After Chris Hani's assassination in April 1993 the country came closer to general insurrection than at any point in the transition, and Mandela, not the president, went on television to hold it together. The interim constitution was agreed at the end of 1993, and on 27 April 1994 South Africans voted in the first universal election, queueing in lines that ran for miles.
President, and the limits of the settlement
Several incompatible readings exist. We present the disagreement rather than resolving it for you.
As president from 1994 to 1999 he prioritised holding the country together: a government of national unity including the National Party, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission chaired by Desmond Tutu offering amnesty in exchange for full disclosure, and a constitution widely regarded as among the most progressive in the world, with an independent Constitutional Court. Housing, water, electricity and clinic programmes reached millions. But the negotiated settlement had protected existing property rights and adopted an orthodox macroeconomic framework, and land ownership, mining ownership and the structure of the economy were left substantially intact. Mandela himself later conceded that the ANC had underestimated the difficulty of addressing economic inequality. He served one term and stepped down, which in the context of the continent's post-independence record was itself a decision of consequence.
Against the sanitised version
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The globally circulated Mandela — a gentle old man who forgave everyone — removes the politics that made him effective. He founded a guerrilla army and never renounced the armed struggle retrospectively; he refused for years to renounce violence as a condition of release; he remained an ally of Castro and Gaddafi because they had supported the ANC when Western governments called it terrorist, and said so bluntly when asked; he was on the United States terrorism watch list until 2008. He was also a disciplined negotiator who conceded real things to get a settlement, and a man whose family life was substantially destroyed by his commitments, as he acknowledged. Taking him seriously means holding the strategist and the symbol together.
What is argued about
Several incompatible readings exist. We present the disagreement rather than resolving it for you.
The central argument in South Africa concerns the 1994 bargain: whether the protection of property rights and the deferral of redistribution were the necessary price of a peaceful transition, or a capitulation whose costs are being paid by the generation born since. Land reform, mining ownership, and the persistence of some of the world's highest measured inequality are the substance of that argument. A second debate concerns the TRC: whether amnesty for disclosure delivered accountability or purchased peace with impunity. Both are live, and both are conducted by people who overwhelmingly still regard Mandela as the reason the country exists in its current form at all.
Legacy
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Mandela left office in 1999, campaigned on HIV/AIDS after his son died of the disease — a rebuke to his successor's denialism — mediated in Burundi, and founded the Elders. He died in December 2013. Mandela Day on 18 July asks for 67 minutes of service, one for each year of his public life. The more durable legacy is institutional: a constitution and a court that have repeatedly ruled against the governing party, and a precedent of a liberation leader leaving power voluntarily.
Where to go next
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
The apartheid entry covers the system he fought and the transition in more detail; Miriam Makeba the cultural campaign in exile; Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness movement in the Conquest & Resistance book. The South Africa country profile covers the state today.
Sources
- General History of Africa, Volumes IX–XI (ongoing)African source
UNESCO · 2013–
https://www.unesco.org/en/general-history-africa - Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late ColonialismAfrican source
Mahmood Mamdani · 1996
Follow the thread
Apartheid
Racial hierarchy written into statute.
For forty-six years South Africa ran a legal system that classified every person by race and used that classification to control where they could live, work, study, travel, love and be buried. It was bureaucratic, deliberate, meticulously recorded by its own administrators — and it was resisted continuously, from mass campaigns and strikes to armed struggle and global sanctions, until it fell in 1994.
South AfricaIndependence
1957–1975: the fastest political transformation of the century.
From Libya in 1951 and Ghana in 1957 through to Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa's 1994 election, Africa dismantled formal colonial rule in a single generation. In some places it was negotiated in conference rooms; in others it took decades of war. What the new states inherited — borders, economies and administrations designed for someone else's purposes — shaped everything that followed.
ContinentalMiriam Makeba
Mama Africa, exiled for thirty-one years.
Miriam Makeba carried South African music to the world for three decades of exile after her passport was revoked for testifying against apartheid at the United Nations. She was a major recording artist, the first African woman to win a Grammy, and a political figure whose career was repeatedly damaged by the positions she refused to abandon.
South Africa