Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, in what was then known as
the Union of South Africa, a dominion of the British Empire. Though
the majority of its inhabitants were Black, they were dominated by a
white minority that controlled the land, the wealth, and the government
—a discriminatory social structure that would later be codified in the
country’s legal system and called apartheid.

Over the next 95 years, Mandela would help topple South Africa’s brutal
social order. During a lifetime of resistance, imprisonment, and
leadership, Nelson Mandela led South Africa out of apartheid and into
an era of reconciliation and majority rule.

Early life
Mandela began his life under another name: Rolihlahla Dalibhunga
Mandela. His father was a chief of the Thembu people, a subgroup of
the Xhosa people, who make up South Africa’s second-largest cultural
group. After defying a British magistrate, Mandela’s father had been
stripped of his chieftainship, title, and land. On his first day in a
segregated elementary school, Rolihlahla, too, was stripped of his
identity when his schoolteacher gave every child an English name—a
common practice in a society in which whites “were either unable or
unwilling to pronounce an African name, and considered it uncivilized
to have one,” he wrote in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom.

Apartheid and activism

In Soweto, Mandela became a part-time law student at Wits University
and began to practice law, starting the nation’s first Black law firm. He
joined the African National Congress, a group that agitated for the civil
rights of Black South Africans. In 1948, the segregation that was already
rampant in South Africa became state law when its ruling party formally
adopted apartheid, or apartness. This policy required Black South
Africans to carry identification with them at all times, which they
needed to enter areas designated for whites. They were forced to live in
all-Black zones and forbidden from entering into interracial
relationships. Black people were even removed from the voter rolls and
eventually fully disenfranchised.

At first, Mandela and his fellow members of the ANC used nonviolent
tactics like strikes and demonstrations to protest apartheid. In 1952,
Mandela helped escalate the struggle as a leader of the Defiance
Campaign, which encouraged Black participants to actively violate
laws. More than 8,000 people—including Mandela—were jailed for
violating curfews, refusing to carry identification passes, and other
offenses.
The Defiance Campaign catapulted the ANC’s agenda, and Mandela,
into the public eye as they continued to agitate for Black rights. After
serving his sentence, Mandela continued to lead protests against the
government and, in 1956, he, along with 155 others, was tried for
treason. He was acquitted in 1961 and lived in hiding for 17 months
after the trial.

Over time, Mandela came to believe that armed resistance was the only
way to end apartheid. In 1962, he briefly left the country to receive
military training and gain support for the cause but was arrested and
convicted soon after his return for leaving the country without a permit.
Then, while he was in prison, police discovered documents related to
Mandela’s plan for guerrilla warfare. They charged him and his allies
with sabotage.

Over his 27 years of imprisonment, Mandela became the world’s best-

known political prisoner. His words were banned in South Africa, but
he was already the country’s most famous man. His supporters agitated
for his release and news of his imprisonment galvanized anti-apartheid
activists all over the world.

In the 1960s, some members of the United Nations began to call for
sanctions against South Africa—calls that grew louder in the decades
that followed. Eventually, South Africa became an international pariah.
In 1990, in response to international pressure and the threat of civil
war, South Africa’s new president, F.W. de Klerk, pledged to end
apartheid and released Mandela from prison.
Apartheid did not immediately end with Mandela’s release. Now 71,
Mandela negotiated with de Klerk for a new constitution that would
allow majority rule. Apartheid was repealed in 1991, and in 1994, the
ANC, now a political party, won more than 62 percent of the popular
vote in a peaceful, democratic election. Mandela—who now shares a
Nobel Peace Prize  with de Klerk—became the president of a new nation,
South Africa.

Post-apartheid leadership
Mandela served as president for five years. Among his accomplishments
was South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, designed to
document human rights violations and help victims and violators come
to term with their past. Though its results are contested, the
commission offered the beginnings of restorative justice—a process that
focuses on repair rather than retribution— to a nation still smarting
from centuries of scars.

After leaving office in 1999, Mandela spent the remainder of his life
working to end poverty and raise awareness of HIV/AIDS. He died in
2013 at age 95.
Apartheid 
Although Europeans first colonized what is now the country of South Africa in
the middle of the 17th century, it was not until the 1948 election of the
Afrikaner-led National Party that the system of apartheid—with which the
nation of South Africa came to be so closely associated for the second half of
the 20th century—was formally instated. While this strict system of racial
classification and segregation drew on a variety of existing measures that had
limited the rights of non-whites, the 1950s saw a dramatic expansion of
discriminatory laws.
 
Under apartheid, the South African population was divided into four distinct
racial groups: white (including Afrikaners, who speak a Germanic language
called Afrikaans), black, colored, and Indian. Strict residential, economic, and
social segregation was enforced on the basis of these racial categories. Non-
whites were not allowed to vote in national election. Moreover, apartheid saw
the institution of the "homeland system," in which the government sought to
establish separate states for members of each of the country's many black
ethnic groups. This often involved the forced removal of families from their
original homes to the newly-created "bantustans" (or ethnic states). In other
cases, it meant breaking up interracial and inter-ethnic families. While non-
whites were confined to squalid ghettoes with few decent educational and
employment opportunities, whites were afforded the basic privileges of life in
a democracy.

The End of Apartheid

Apartheid, the Afrikaans name given by the white-ruled South Africa's Nationalist Party in 1948 to the country's harsh,
institutionalized system of racial segregation, came to an end in the early 1990s in a series of steps that led to the
formation of a democratic government in 1994. Years of violent internal protest, weakening white commitment,
international economic and cultural sanctions, economic struggles, and the end of the Cold War brought down white
minority rule in Pretoria. U.S. policy toward the regime underwent a gradual but complete transformation that played
an important conflicting role in Apartheid's initial survival and eventual downfall.

What was Mandela's struggle about?

Mandela fought against apartheid, a system of white supremacy in South Africa. Under
apartheid, everyone was put into one of four racial categories: “white/European,”
“black,” “coloured,” or “Indian/Asian.” Non‐white South Africans were second‐class
citizens with little or no political power. Restrictive laws governed every aspect of
people’s lives, dictating where they could live, work and travel and restricting their
access to education, health care and other social services.

Mandela rose up against apartheid and called upon all South Africans to join him.
Although he was arrested and imprisoned for 27 years for fighting for freedom, Mandela
refused to give up the struggle or give in to hate. Mandela was
fighting against apartheid, but he was also fighting for something: a better world, in
which the freedom, justice and dignity of all were respected. Even before his release in
1990, Mandela began negotiating with the government to end apartheid. Through those
negotiations, he helped prevented a bloody civil war. Mandela went on to become the
country’s first democratically elected president.
Themes
 Bring the whites together and unify the nation
 Took a stand against the apartheid to make a better life for the black people as “apartheid has no future”.