nelson mandela hero essay

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Early life and work

Underground activity and the rivonia trial.

• Incarceration
• Presidency and retirement

When and where was Nelson Mandela born?

When did nelson mandela die, what is nelson mandela known for, to whom was nelson mandela married, what publications did nelson mandela write.

Nelson Mandela

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• Official Site of the Nelson Mandela Foundation
• The Elders - Nelson Mandela
• South African History Online - Biography of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
• The Nobel Prize - Biography of Nelson Mandela
• Nelson Mandela - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• Nelson Mandela - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
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Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, also known as Madiba, was born Rolihlahla Mandela on July 18, 1918, in Mvezo, South Africa; the name Nelson was later added by one of his teachers. His father, the chief of the Madiba clan of the Xhosa -speaking Tembu people, died when Nelson was still young, and he was raised by Jongintaba, the regent of the Tembu. Although Nelson had a claim to the chieftainship, he renounced it in order to become a lawyer.

Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013, in Johannesburg . He was 95 years old. After his death was announced, his life was remembered and celebrated in South Africa as well as around the world. Numerous memorial services were held, including one by the South African government on December 10. He was laid to rest at Qunu, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, on December 15.

Nelson Mandela is known for several things, but perhaps he is best known for successfully leading the resistance to South Africa’s policy of apartheid in the 20th century, during which he was infamously incarcerated at Robben Island Prison (1964–82). He won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1993, along with South Africa’s president at the time, F.W. de Klerk , for having led the transition from apartheid to a multiracial democracy. Mandela is also known for being the first black president of South Africa, serving from 1994 to 1999.

Nelson Mandela had three wives: Evelyn Ntoko Mase (1944–58); Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (1958–96), who was also a noteworthy anti- apartheid champion; and Graça Machel (1998–2013), who was the widow of Samora Machel , former president of Mozambique (1975–86), and was Mandela’s wife at the time of his death in 2013.

Nelson Mandela’s writings included I Am Prepared to Die (1964; rev. ed. 1986); No Easy Walk to Freedom (1965; updated ed. 2002); The Struggle Is My Life (1978; rev. ed. 1990); In His Own Words (2003); and Long Walk to Freedom (1994), which chronicles his early life and years in prison. Dare Not Linger: The Presidential Years (2017), released posthumously, is the unfinished draft of his second volume of memoirs; it was completed by Mandla Langa.

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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). His negotiations in the early 1990s with South African Pres. F.W. de Klerk helped 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 was the son of Chief Henry Mandela of the Madiba clan of the Xhosa-speaking Tembu people. After his father’s death, young Nelson was raised by Jongintaba, the regent of the Tembu. Nelson renounced his claim to the chieftainship to become a lawyer. He attended South African Native College (later the University of Fort Hare) and studied law at the University of the Witwatersrand; he later passed the qualification exam to become a lawyer. 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.

Mandela’s antiapartheid activism made him a frequent target of the authorities. Starting in 1952, he was intermittently banned (severely restricted in travel, association, and speech). In December 1956 he was arrested with more than 100 other people on charges of treason that were designed to harass antiapartheid activists. Mandela went on trial that same year and eventually was acquitted in 1961. During the extended court proceedings, he divorced his first wife and married Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela ( Winnie Madikizela-Mandela ).

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. On August 5, shortly after his return, Mandela was arrested at a road block in Natal ; he was subsequently sentenced to five years in prison.

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 . (His speech garnered international attention and acclaim and was published later that year as I Am Prepared to Die .) On June 12, 1964, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, narrowly escaping the death penalty .

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Why I Admire Nelson Mandela Essay Guide and Example

Why I Admire Nelson Mandela Essay Guide and Example:

The essay titled “Why I Admire Nelson Mandela” presents a unique opportunity to delve into the life and legacy of one of the most iconic figures in the struggle for human rights and racial equality. Nelson Mandela , known affectionately as Madiba , was not just South Africa’s first black president but also a symbol of resilience, leadership, and peace worldwide. This guide aims to outline the key elements and considerations for crafting a compelling essay that explores personal admiration for Mandela’s life, values, and contributions to society.

• Describe Mandela’s early life, including his birth in 1918 in Mvezo, his education, and his early involvement in the anti-apartheid movement.
• Highlight his role in the African National Congress (ANC) and his dedication to combating institutionalised racism, leading to his arrest and 27-year imprisonment.
• Examine Mandela’s leadership qualities, focusing on his time in prison, where despite harsh conditions, he continued to be a beacon of hope and resistance for his followers.
• Emphasise his resilience in the face of adversity, reflecting on his ability to maintain his principles of non-violence and reconciliation.
• Discuss Mandela’s presidency, noting his efforts to dismantle the apartheid system, foster racial reconciliation, and promote social and economic justice in South Africa.
• Mention his role in establishing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and his Nobel Peace Prize win in 1993 as recognition of his efforts to bring peace to a divided nation.
• Reflect on Mandela’s enduring legacy, not just within South Africa but globally, as an advocate for peace, equality, and human dignity.
• Include personal reflections on how Mandela’s life and teachings have influenced the writer’s views on justice, leadership, and forgiveness.

Conclusion: Summarise the key points made in the essay, reinforcing why Nelson Mandela is admired for his unwavering commitment to justice, his resilience in the face of oppression, and his contributions to peace and reconciliation. End with a personal note on what lessons the writer takes from Mandela’s life and how they can be applied to today’s challenges in striving for a better world.

Essay Writing Tips:

• Use specific examples from Mandela’s life t o support your points, such as his Rivonia Trial speech or his actions upon release from prison.
• Incorporate quotes from Mandela to illustrate his philosophy and ideals.
• Maintain a balanced tone , acknowledging Mandela’s human flaws while focusing on his extraordinary achievements.
• Engage the reader with personal reflections on Mandela’s impact, making the essay not just informative but also deeply personal and reflective.

Example Essay: Why I Admire Nelson Mandela

Introduction

Nelson Mandela’s legacy is a beacon of hope and resilience in a world rife with injustice. Known as Madiba, his journey from a small village in Mvezo to becoming South Africa’s first black president embodies the virtues of perseverance, leadership, and compassion. This essay explores the myriad reasons why Nelson Mandela is a figure of immense admiration, focusing on his struggle against apartheid, his unyielding resilience, his presidential tenure focused on reconciliation, and his enduring global impact.

Early Life and Struggle Against Apartheid

Nelson Mandela’s early life laid the foundation for his relentless fight against racial segregation. Born into the Thembu royal family, Mandela’s trajectory was significantly altered by the apartheid regime, leading him to join the African National Congress (ANC) . His commitment to dismantle apartheid was evident through his involvement in both peaceful protests and armed resistance, which ultimately resulted in a 27-year imprisonment. Despite the harsh conditions of his confinement, Mandela’s spirit remained unbroken, symbolising a powerful stand against institutionalised racism.

Leadership and Resilience

Mandela’s leadership and resilience are perhaps most remarkable during his years of incarceration. In the face of relentless adversity, he maintained dignity, hope, and a steadfast commitment to his cause. His ability to inspire others, even from within the confines of a prison cell, speaks volumes about his character. Mandela once said, “The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” This philosophy underpinned his approach to leadership, demonstrating an unparalleled resilience that continued to fuel the anti-apartheid movement.

Presidency and Contributions to Peace

Upon his release in 1990, Mandela’s transition from prisoner to president was symbolic of the country’s broader journey towards freedom and equality. His presidency was marked by efforts to reconcile a country divided by decades of racial strife. Through the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission , Mandela sought to heal the nation’s wounds by uncovering the truth about past injustices and promoting forgiveness over revenge. His receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 , alongside F.W. de Klerk, was a testament to his dedication to dismantling apartheid through peace and dialogue.

Legacy and Global Impact

Nelson Mandela’s influence extends far beyond the borders of South Africa. He emerged as a global symbol of peace, embodying the struggle for human dignity and equality. Mandela’s legacy is a reminder of the power of resilience and forgiveness. Personally, Mandela’s teachings have profoundly impacted my views on justice and leadership. His life is a testament to the fact that individuals have the power to change the course of history, inspiring me to advocate for positive change within my community.

In admiring Nelson Mandela, we celebrate a man who dedicated his life to the service of humanity. His fight against apartheid, unwavering resilience, efforts towards reconciliation, and enduring global impact are qualities that resonate deeply with those who aspire to make the world a more just and compassionate place. Nelson Mandela’s life teaches us that with courage, perseverance, and a heart full of forgiveness, it is possible to overcome even the most insurmountable challenges. As Mandela himself once said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” This essay is not just a reflection of my admiration for Mandela but a call to embody his values in our daily lives, striving towards a future marked by equality, peace, and unity.

Conclusion: Writing an essay on “Why I Admire Nelson Mandela” offers a profound way to explore and celebrate the life of a man who changed the course of history. By focusing on Mandela’s resilience, leadership, contributions to peace, and enduring legacy, writers can convey their admiration for his unparalleled impact on the world.

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Nelson Mandela Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on nelson mandela.

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born on 18 July 1918 in the Transkei village close Umtata. Nelson Mandela was sent to Healdtown, a Wesleyan secondary school with some reputation where he enrolled after getting a primary education at a local mission school. He then registered for the Bachelor of Arts degree at Fort Hare University College where he was appointed to the Representative Council of the Student. Also, he was suspended for joining a protest boycott from college. He went to Johannesburg where, by correspondence, he finished his BA, took clerkship papers and began studying for his LLB . The Nelson Mandela essay is an insight into the life and works of the great man.

The greatest pleasure of Nelson Mandela, his most private moment, is to watch the sunset playing with the music of Händel or Tchaikovsky.

During daylight hours locked up in his cell, deprived of music, he was denied these two simple pleasures for centuries. Concerts were organized with his fellow inmates as far as possible, especially at Christmas time, where they would sing.

Nelson Mandela finds music very uplifting and is interested in European classical music as well as African choral music and the many talents in South African music. But above all, one voice stands out – Paul Robeson’s, whom he defines as our hero.

The years in prison strengthened already engraved practices: athlete’s disciplined eating system started in the 1940s, as did the early morning practice. Nelson Mandela is still up by 4.30am today, regardless of how late he worked last night.

He started his exercise routine by 5 am, which lasts for at least an hour. Breakfast is at 6.30 when newspapers are read during the days. With a normal working day of at nearly 12 hours, time management is critical and Nelson Mandela is highly impatient with impunctuality, considering it to be insulting to those with whom you deal.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Life of Nelson Mandela

He has conducted comprehensive traveling since his release from prison when he spoke. Nelson Mandela claims: “The biography of Pandit Nehru helped me prepare for my discharge. Who wrote about what’s going on when you leave prison.

My daughter Zinzi claims she grew up without a dad who became the nation’s dad when he came back. This has put on my shoulders a huge burden.

And wherever I travel, I instantly start missing the familiar–the mine dumps, the uniquely South African color and smell, and especially the individuals. I don’t like being away for a long moment. There’s no place like home for me.

Mandela accepted the Nobel Peace Prize as a tribute to all those who worked for peace and opposed racism. This individual has been awarded as much as it has been to the ANC and all the individuals of South Africa.

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Nelson Mandela

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 29, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009

The South African activist and former president Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) helped bring an end to apartheid and has been a global advocate for human rights. A member of the African National Congress party beginning in the 1940s, he was a leader of both peaceful protests and armed resistance against the white minority’s oppressive regime in a racially divided South Africa. His actions landed him in prison for nearly three decades and made him the face of the antiapartheid movement both within his country and internationally. Released in 1990, he participated in the eradication of apartheid and in 1994 became the first Black president of South Africa, forming a multiethnic government to oversee the country’s transition. After retiring from politics in 1999, he remained a devoted champion for peace and social justice in his own nation and around the world until his death in 2013 at the age of 95.

Nelson Mandela’s Childhood and Education

Nelson Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, into a royal family of the Xhosa-speaking Thembu tribe in the South African village of Mvezo, where his father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa (c. 1880-1928), served as chief. His mother, Nosekeni Fanny, was the third of Mphakanyiswa’s four wives, who together bore him nine daughters and four sons. After the death of his father in 1927, 9-year-old Mandela—then known by his birth name, Rolihlahla—was adopted by Jongintaba Dalindyebo, a high-ranking Thembu regent who began grooming his young ward for a role within the tribal leadership.

Did you know? As a sign of respect, many South Africans referred to Nelson Mandela as Madiba, his Xhosa clan name.

The first in his family to receive a formal education, Mandela completed his primary studies at a local missionary school. There, a teacher dubbed him Nelson as part of a common practice of giving African students English names. He went on to attend the Clarkebury Boarding Institute and Healdtown, a Methodist secondary school, where he excelled in boxing and track as well as academics. In 1939 Mandela entered the elite University of Fort Hare, the only Western-style higher learning institute for Black South Africans at the time. The following year, he and several other students, including his friend and future business partner Oliver Tambo (1917-1993), were sent home for participating in a boycott against university policies.

After learning that his guardian had arranged a marriage for him, Mandela fled to Johannesburg and worked first as a night watchman and then as a law clerk while completing his bachelor’s degree by correspondence. He studied law at the University of Witwatersrand, where he became involved in the movement against racial discrimination and forged key relationships with Black and white activists. In 1944, Mandela joined the African National Congress (ANC) and worked with fellow party members, including Oliver Tambo, to establish its youth league, the ANCYL. That same year, he met and married his first wife, Evelyn Ntoko Mase (1922-2004), with whom he had four children before their divorce in 1957.

Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress

Nelson Mandela’s commitment to politics and the ANC grew stronger after the 1948 election victory of the Afrikaner-dominated National Party, which introduced a formal system of racial classification and segregation—apartheid—that restricted nonwhites’ basic rights and barred them from government while maintaining white minority rule. The following year, the ANC adopted the ANCYL’s plan to achieve full citizenship for all South Africans through boycotts, strikes, civil disobedience and other nonviolent methods. Mandela helped lead the ANC’s 1952 Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws, traveling across the country to organize protests against discriminatory policies, and promoted the manifesto known as the Freedom Charter, ratified by the Congress of the People in 1955. Also in 1952, Mandela and Tambo opened South Africa’s first Black law firm, which offered free or low-cost legal counsel to those affected by apartheid legislation.

On December 5, 1956, Mandela and 155 other activists were arrested and went on trial for treason. All of the defendants were acquitted in 1961, but in the meantime tensions within the ANC escalated, with a militant faction splitting off in 1959 to form the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). The next year, police opened fire on peaceful Black protesters in the township of Sharpeville, killing 69 people; as panic, anger and riots swept the country in the massacre’s aftermath, the apartheid government banned both the ANC and the PAC. Forced to go underground and wear disguises to evade detection, Mandela decided that the time had come for a more radical approach than passive resistance.

Nelson Mandela and the Armed Resistance Movement

In 1961, Nelson Mandela co-founded and became the first leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), also known as MK, a new armed wing of the ANC. Several years later, during the trial that would put him behind bars for nearly three decades, he described the reasoning for this radical departure from his party’s original tenets: “[I]t would be wrong and unrealistic for African leaders to continue preaching peace and nonviolence at a time when the government met our peaceful demands with force. It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle.”

Under Mandela’s leadership, MK launched a sabotage campaign against the government, which had recently declared South Africa a republic and withdrawn from the British Commonwealth. In January 1962, Mandela traveled abroad illegally to attend a conference of African nationalist leaders in Ethiopia, visit the exiled Oliver Tambo in London and undergo guerilla training in Algeria. On August 5, shortly after his return, he was arrested and subsequently sentenced to five years in prison for leaving the country and inciting a 1961 workers’ strike. The following July, police raided an ANC hideout in Rivonia, a suburb on the outskirts of Johannesburg, and arrested a racially diverse group of MK leaders who had gathered to debate the merits of a guerilla insurgency. Evidence was found implicating Mandela and other activists, who were brought to stand trial for sabotage, treason and violent conspiracy alongside their associates.

Mandela and seven other defendants narrowly escaped the gallows and were instead sentenced to life imprisonment during the so-called Rivonia Trial, which lasted eight months and attracted substantial international attention. In a stirring opening statement that sealed his iconic status around the world, Mandela admitted to some of the charges against him while defending the ANC’s actions and denouncing the injustices of apartheid. He ended with the following words: “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.”

Nelson Mandela’s Years Behind Bars

Nelson Mandela spent the first 18 of his 27 years in jail at the brutal Robben Island Prison, a former leper colony off the coast of Cape Town, where he was confined to a small cell without a bed or plumbing and compelled to do hard labor in a lime quarry. As a Black political prisoner, he received scantier rations and fewer privileges than other inmates. He was only allowed to see his wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (1936-), who he had married in 1958 and was the mother of his two young daughters, once every six months. Mandela and his fellow prisoners were routinely subjected to inhumane punishments for the slightest of offenses; among other atrocities, there were reports of guards burying inmates in the ground up to their necks and urinating on them.

These restrictions and conditions notwithstanding, while in confinement Mandela earned a bachelor of law degree from the University of London and served as a mentor to his fellow prisoners, encouraging them to seek better treatment through nonviolent resistance. He also smuggled out political statements and a draft of his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom,” published five years after his release.

Despite his forced retreat from the spotlight, Mandela remained the symbolic leader of the antiapartheid movement. In 1980 Oliver Tambo introduced a “Free Nelson Mandela” campaign that made the jailed leader a household name and fueled the growing international outcry against South Africa’s racist regime. As pressure mounted, the government offered Mandela his freedom in exchange for various political compromises, including the renouncement of violence and recognition of the “independent” Transkei Bantustan, but he categorically rejected these deals.

In 1982 Mandela was moved to Pollsmoor Prison on the mainland, and in 1988 he was placed under house arrest on the grounds of a minimum-security correctional facility. The following year, newly elected president F. W. de Klerk (1936-) lifted the ban on the ANC and called for a nonracist South Africa, breaking with the conservatives in his party. On February 11, 1990, he ordered Mandela’s release.

Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa

After attaining his freedom, Nelson Mandela led the ANC in its negotiations with the governing National Party and various other South African political organizations for an end to apartheid and the establishment of a multiracial government. Though fraught with tension and conducted against a backdrop of political instability, the talks earned Mandela and de Klerk the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1993. On April 26, 1994, more than 22 million South Africans turned out to cast ballots in the country’s first multiracial parliamentary elections in history. An overwhelming majority chose the ANC to lead the country, and on May 10 Mandela was sworn in as the first Black president of South Africa, with de Klerk serving as his first deputy.

As president, Mandela established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate human rights and political violations committed by both supporters and opponents of apartheid between 1960 and 1994. He also introduced numerous social and economic programs designed to improve the living standards of South Africa’s Black population. In 1996 Mandela presided over the enactment of a new South African constitution, which established a strong central government based on majority rule and prohibited discrimination against minorities, including whites.

Improving race relations, discouraging Blacks from retaliating against the white minority and building a new international image of a united South Africa were central to President Mandela’s agenda. To these ends, he formed a multiracial “Government of National Unity” and proclaimed the country a “rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.” In a gesture seen as a major step toward reconciliation, he encouraged Blacks and whites alike to rally around the predominantly Afrikaner national rugby team when South Africa hosted the 1995 Rugby World Cup.

On his 80th birthday in 1998, Mandela wed the politician and humanitarian Graça Machel (1945-), widow of the former president of Mozambique. (His marriage to Winnie had ended in divorce in 1992.) The following year, he retired from politics at the end of his first term as president and was succeeded by his deputy, Thabo Mbeki (1942-) of the ANC.

Nelson Mandela’s Later Years and Legacy

After leaving office, Nelson Mandela remained a devoted champion for peace and social justice in his own country and around the world. He established a number of organizations, including the influential Nelson Mandela Foundation and The Elders, an independent group of public figures committed to addressing global problems and easing human suffering. In 2002, Mandela became a vocal advocate of AIDS awareness and treatment programs in a culture where the epidemic had been cloaked in stigma and ignorance. The disease later claimed the life of his son Makgatho (1950-2005) and is believed to affect more people in South Africa than in any other country.

Treated for prostate cancer in 2001 and weakened by other health issues, Mandela grew increasingly frail in his later years and scaled back his schedule of public appearances. In 2009, the United Nations declared July 18 “Nelson Mandela International Day” in recognition of the South African leader’s contributions to democracy, freedom, peace and human rights around the world. Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013 from a recurring lung infection.

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Nelson Mandela: A Hero of Our Time

Where were you when Mandela passed away? I was in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for the Global Peace Convention 2013.

The trending hashtag #RIPNelsonMandela was the first thing that greeted me. I don’t think I could have been at a better place to commemorate his life at a peace conference with leaders from all over the world.

At the opening plenary session, Dr. Chandaria called Mandela the “heart of Africa.” Dr. Moon describes Mandela as “a figure who carried on the message of true love, even loving thy enemy, to build bridges of peace to heal the wounds of segregation that had separated two races in South Africa.”

Robben Island is near the horizon, the prison where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years. (PHOTO CREDIT: KodachromeFan)

I read A Long Walk to Freedom in my twenties. I remember wondering what plantain loaves tasted like when he talked about surviving on one a day in his early years as a lawyer. I held my breath as he walked deeper into the fight for racial equality. I cried when he was sentenced and cried harder when he was released. I remember walking on air when he recounted the victory of the first interracial election and his presidency.

I think for many of us who have lived through the 80’s, 90’s and early 00’s, he was a looming presence in our personal history. One of those people that you never thought would pass away. An indomitable spirit, a man willing to die for a worthy cause.

What made him so large in our consciousness?

I think every child looks for heroes, people who manifest the noblest characters that we aspire for. I think Mandela is one of those people who walked a path of unbelievable trials, but was victorious. Not just because he was the first African president of South Africa, or that he endured 27 years of imprisonment, or is the icon of non-violent social action, those are all amazing feats. But I think what makes him so enduring are the battles he won first inside himself.

• He walked with conviction, willing to even die for the ideals he was fighting for.
• He forgave those who hate and even sought to kill him.
• He worked with people beyond ideological, racial, religious differences for a universal ideal of peace and prosperity.

He was a hero not because his life was always rosy and he basked in the accolades of the public, but because even in his darkest struggles he chose to embody qualities like humility, resolution, righteousness, courage and love.

There is a poem, Invictus, by William Ernest Henley, that Mandela recited during his 27 years at  Robben Island. I can see what gave him strength. It reads like an affirmation of the principles he stood up for.

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.

Even in the worst situations, be grateful and humble.

In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.

If the cause is right, never give up, be willing to die trying.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid.

To the most hopeless places, bring hope.

It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

No matter what wrongs are done against you, you are the owner of your spirit, given the right by God to determine your attitude and behavior.*

~ by William Ernest Henley.

* commentary inserted by blog author

The world celebrates his life for the first time after his passing on July 18. People are encouraged to invest 67 minutes in service to honor his legacy and life.

As we commemorate individuals such as Mandela, we can also commit to our own personal hero’s quest. The quest, as illustrated in Invictus and his life, is victorious when we choose, as the “captain of my soul,” to uphold moral principles and values in our thoughts and behaviors despite all odds.

Happy Mandela Day.

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Short Essay on Nelson Mandela [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF

Nelson Mandela was a political leader and a former president of South Africa. For his contribution to restoring peace and stability in the region, he is still remembered around the world. In today’s session, you will learn about the life of Nelson Mandela in order to write an essay on this eminent person for your upcoming exam.

Table of Contents

• Short Essay on Nelson Mandela in 100 Words 
• Short Essay on Nelson Mandela in 200 Words 
• Short Essay on Nelson Mandela in 400 Words 

Short Essay on Nelson Mandela in 100 Words

Nelson Mandela was one of the greatest leaders and freedom fighters of South Africa. He was born on 18th July 1918. He studied law and became a successful lawyer. While practising law, he got involved in anti-apartheid, anti-colonial, nationalist movements and soon joined the African National Congress.

South Africa, at that time, was ruled by a white-only government and blacks were discriminated against in their own country. Mandela, along with other revolutionaries, fought against the oppressive rule. Because of their efforts, the white supremacist government was finally overthrown and Nelson Mandela became the first president of a multi-racial democratic South Africa in 1994. He was also the country’s first black president. He died on 5th December 2013, aged 95. He will always be remembered as an icon of democracy and social justice.

Short Essay on Nelson Mandela in 200 Words

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a South African revolutionary leader and freedom fighter who played an important role in ending apartheid in the country. He was born on 18th July 1918 in a village called Mzevo into the Thembu royal family. Although his family was illiterate, he was sent to study in a local school by his mother.

He later studied law and started working as a lawyer in Johannesburg. While he was still studying, he faced racism and saw the terrible political state of his country. Soon, he started getting involved in anti-apartheid, anti-colonial, nationalist movements and joined the African National Congress. 

South Africa, at that time, was ruled by a whites-only government, and blacks were discriminated against in their own country. Mandela, along with other revolutionaries, fought against the oppressive rule and was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned. However, even after spending a total of 27 years in jail, Mandela did not give up and continued with his efforts to end apartheid in the country. 

Finally, after decades of struggle, South Africa rose as a multi-racial democratic country and Nelson Mandela became its first president in 1994. He was also the country’s first-ever black president. He was an advocate of human rights and brought peace and stability to his country. Nelson Mandela was one of the greatest leaders in the world and he will always be remembered as an icon of democracy and social justice. 

Short Essay on Nelson Mandela in 400 Words

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was one of the most important leaders in the history of South Africa as well as the world. He was born on 18th July 1918 in a village called Mzevo into the Thembu royal family. Although his family was illiterate, he was sent to study in a local school by his mother.

He later studied law and started working as a lawyer in Johannesburg. While he was still studying, he came face-to-face with racism and saw the terrible political state of his country. Soon, he started getting involved in anti-apartheid, anti-colonial, nationalist movements and joined the African National Congress. 

South Africa, at that time, was ruled by a whites-only government, and blacks were discriminated against in their own country. Mandela, along with other revolutionaries like Anton Lembede and Oliver Tambo, fought against the oppressive rule and was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned.

However, even after spending a total of 27 years in jail, Mandela did not give up and continued with his efforts to end apartheid in the country. He led defiance campaigns against the government as well as the mass stay-at-home strikes. He also joined hands with anti-apartheid leaders around the world and trained in guerilla warfare. 

Nelson Mandela and his fellow leaders worked hard to end apartheid and bring justice to the millions of black Africans who had been suffering under the white supremacist government. After decades of struggle for freedom and equality, South Africa rose as a multi-racial democratic country in 1994, with the first fully democratic elections held on 27th April 1994.

The African National Congress, under the leadership of Mandela, won the elections by a huge margin and Nelson was sworn as the first president of a democratic South Africa. He held office till 1999 and was focused on national unity and reconciliation. 

Nelson Mandela’s government worked a lot for the betterment of society, granting old-age pensions, free healthcare for young children and pregnant women, building houses, providing electricity and connectivity as well as making proper education available for kids. Even after retiring from the political scene, he continued to work towards rural development, school construction and combating HIV/AIDS. He died on 5th December 2013 after suffering from a respiratory infection. 

Nelson Mandela was an advocate of human rights and brought peace and stability to his country. He was one of the greatest leaders in the world and he will always be remembered as an icon of democracy and social justice. 

That’s all about my presentation on the life of Nelson Mandela. Hopefully, this session has become able to fulfil your requirement.  If you have any doubts regarding this session, kindly let me know through the comment section below. 

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The Life of Nelson Mandela: South Africa’s Hero

Hailing from South Africa, Nelson Mandela is considered one of the greatest peacemakers in history. Here is his life story.

Nelson Mandela stands as one of the most influential politicians of the 20th century. His was a life of hardship and suffering at the hands of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Mandela’s desire for justice gained him fame and notoriety as a leading figure within the African National Congress, as well as bringing international attention to the plight of non-white people in South Africa. His was a face that characterized the struggle to overcome racist policies entrenched in modern society the world over.

From violent resistance to a peaceful transition, South Africa’s first black president was a freedom fighter, a symbol of equality and human rights, and an icon of peace who changed the nature of South Africa and the world forever.

The Early Life of Nelson Mandela

Born into the Madiba clan of the Xhosa people on July 18, 1918, Rolihlahla Mandela was the son of Nonqaphi Nosekeni (mother) and Nkosi Mphakanyiswa Gadla Mandela (father). When he was 12, his father died, and Rolihlahla became the ward of the king of the Thembu people, Jongintaba Dalindyebo, who instilled in young Rolihlahla stories of their ancestors’ valor.

When he first attended school, he was given the name “Nelson” in accordance with the tradition of giving children Christian names in addition to their traditional names (he was named after Admiral Lord Nelson ). Upon finishing school, he attended the University College of Fort Hare in the Eastern Cape province, where he studied for a Bachelor of Arts. He did not finish his degree as he was expelled for participating in a student protest.

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When he returned home, the king was furious and arranged for him to get married, along with his cousin Justice. Unsatisfied with the prospect of an early marriage, Nelson and Justice fled to Johannesburg instead, where Nelson found work as a mine inspector. During his time in Johannesburg, he did his articles with a law firm and also met fellow anti-apartheid activist Walter Sisulu . He finished his degree through correspondence with the University of South Africa, and in 1943, Mandela returned to the University of Fort Hare for his graduation.

Political Activity and the 1940s

In 1943, Nelson Mandela began studying for his LLB at the University of Witwatersrand, where he was the only black student and was thus subjected to racism. His views became increasingly motivated by anger and a sense of justice, and in his early days of political activism, he held the view that black people should not unite with other racial groups in a united front against racism; the struggle for black people was theirs alone.

Nelson Mandela joined the African National Congress in 1943 and helped found the ANC Youth League in 1944, where Mandela served on the Executive Committee. His time in the ANCYL was marked by intense debate over whether to view non-whites as being part of the struggle and the issue of whether communists should be represented within the ANCYL. Nelson Mandela opposed both.

In 1944, Nelson Mandela met and married a nurse, Evelyn Mase, and the two had two children, the second of which died of meningitis nine months after her birth.

In the 1948 South African national election, in which only whites could vote, the openly racist National Party took power. The ANC took a “direct action” approach and resisted apartheid laws through boycotts and strikes. Mandela helped guide the ANC to a more radical and revolutionary path. Because of his devotion to politics, he failed his final year at Witwatersrand University three times, and in December 1949, he was denied his degree.

1950 – 1964

In 1950, Nelson Mandela became the leader of the ANCYL. He continued to voice his opposition to multi-racial opposition to the apartheid regime, but his voice was a minority within the party. This changed, however, as Mandela’s views changed. The Soviet support of wars of liberation led him to rethink his distrust of communism, and he started reading communist literature. This also led him to accept the multi-ethnic resistance against apartheid.

In 1952, Mandela rose in prominence by being one of the leading figures in a non-violent defiance campaign that resulted in a massive increase in ANC membership. At this time, he was elected the leader of the Transvaal chapter of the ANC. Later that year, Mandela was arrested along with 20 others, charged with “statutory communism” under the Suppression of Communism Act, and sentenced to nine months of hard labor. However, his sentence was suspended for two years. He was also forbidden from talking to more than one person at a time, making it very difficult for him to do his job within the ANC.

In 1953, Mandela finally finished his law qualifications and opened a practice with Oliver Tambo to become the first black-owned law firm in the country. His relationship with his wife suffered during this time, and she accused him of adultery. She further shunned his obsession with politics.

In 1955, the ANC organized the Congress of the People, through which people were urged to send in ideas for a post-apartheid South Africa. Upon these ideas, the Freedom Charter was created in which equality and democracy were the core concepts. The Freedom Charter later went on to be the foundation for the current South African constitution.

Throughout the rest of the decade, Nelson Mandela’s life was governed by a long legal battle. He was accused of treason and, after five years, was eventually found not guilty. During this time, his wife finally filed for divorce, taking custody of the children, and Nelson began a new relationship with Winnie Madikizela , a social worker whom he married in 1958.

In the early ‘60s, Mandela co-founded uMkhonto we Sizwe (“The Spear of the Nation”), the armed wing of the ANC which undertook bombing campaigns to damage South African infrastructure. He also left South Africa, traveled to many African countries, and visited London, garnering much international support.

In 1962, after receiving a tip-off from the CIA , the South African Police captured Nelson Mandela. After raiding the Liliesleaf farm where Mandela had been hiding, police found substantial uMkhonto we Sizwe documentation. Mandela was charged with sabotage and attempting to violently overthrow the government. He was initially sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison.

The Imprisonment of Mandela: 1964 – 1990

Nelson Mandela was transferred to the prison on Robben Island, where he spent the next 18 years crushing rocks, working in the lime quarry, and working on his LLB through correspondence. He was permitted one letter and one visit every six months, and, as newspapers were forbidden, he spent much time in solitary confinement for possessing smuggled news clippings.

Mandela also made a point of studying Afrikaans and Afrikaner history, even though it was the language and culture of his captors. For the most part, he spent his time in an eight-by-seven-foot damp cell. Despite having plenty to be angry about (he was not allowed to attend the funerals of his mother or his eldest son), during his time on Robben Island, Mandela was a positive influence on those around him. He struck up a lasting friendship with his prison warden, and his status as a prisoner improved dramatically.

In 1982, Mandela was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town along with a few other inmates who were also struggle icons. During his time in Pollsmoor, the apartheid government struggled to contain violent protests around the country calling for an end to apartheid. It was clear to many that the writing was on the wall for apartheid, and Mandela was able to set up meetings to talk to prominent South African politicians about a way forward for the country.

In 1988, Nelson Mandela started suffering from a serious case of tuberculosis, and he was taken to hospital for treatment. After three months in the hospital, Mandela was transferred to a house in Victor Verster Prison near the town of Paarl. He spent the remaining 14 months of his sentence there until being released on February 11, 1990, due to international and local pressure.

The Early ‘90s and the End of Apartheid

Following his release from prison, Nelson Mandela embarked on an international tour, meeting many world leaders and seeking input about future relations between South Africa and the international community. In May, he led a multi-racial delegation to discuss the future of South Africa with a delegation of 11 Afrikaner men sent by the South African government. He offered a ceasefire and ordered uMkhonto we Sizwe to halt all hostilities. Following this, the ANC held a conference and elected Nelson Mandela as the leader, along with a multi-racial and mixed-gender Executive Committee.

From 1991 to 1992, Nelson Mandela’s relationship with Winnie became increasingly strained. She was on trial for kidnapping and assault, and, unlike Nelson, who had embraced a peaceful, multi-racial ideology, Winnie remained militant . After she was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison, the two separated.

In March 1992, a referendum was held in which only white people could vote. 68.73% of whites voted to end apartheid. The transition of power from the white minority was now inevitable, but how it would happen was far from certain.

South Africa was on the brink of civil war. The early ‘90s were characterized by intense violence between supporters of the Inkatha Freedom Party and supporters of the ANC. Members of the ultra-nationalist, neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) engaged in terrorist activities while Nelson Mandela was constantly initiating dialogue to address the country’s future with the president, FW de Klerk, but also with non-white opposition that opposed the ANC’s plans.

Concessions and compromises were made, and on April 27, 1994, South Africans took to the polls to vote in the first democratic elections. Despite the calls for violence, the process was peaceful. The ANC won the elections, and Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first black president.

Presidency and Later Years

During his five years as president, Nelson Mandela made strides in creating a sense of unity within South Africa. The new government included FW de Klerk (leader of the National Party) and Mangosuthu Buthelezi (leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party).

After many decades of minority rule, however, Nelson Mandela’s primary focus was that of reconciliation. He made great efforts to show respect to the minority that had lost power, allowing many NP officials posts in his new government. He personally met with many of the people who played important parts in the apartheid regime, and he urged black people to support the white-dominated national rugby team (the Springboks) during the 1995 Rugby World Cup , which was hosted and won by South Africa. This event was seen as one of the most significant factors in creating national unity.

Mandela also established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission , which investigated the crimes committed under apartheid from both sides of the political spectrum and granted amnesty to those who would share their stories.

The task of addressing the issue of decades of disenfranchisement of black people was monumental, and the Mandela government drastically increased social spending. The government embarked on large programs to bring housing, electricity, and water to a massive, dispossessed demographic. Despite tremendous progress, the polarization between rich and poor in South Africa is still the biggest in the world.

In 1999, Nelson Mandela handed over the reins of the presidency to Thabo Mbeki and went into a well-deserved retirement, although he still took great interest in making his voice heard. On December 5, 2013, Nelson Mandela died at the age of 95 after a long battle with a respiratory illness. His body was laid to rest in his birthplace of Qunu in the Eastern Cape.

Nelson Mandela’s Legacy

Nelson Mandela had a profound effect on South Africa and the entire world. A peacemaker, fighter, visionary, and martyr, he is seen as the father of democracy in South Africa. Mandela’s talent as a statesman saw South Africa avoid a civil war and transition peacefully into a new era in which South Africa holds friendly relations with every other nation on the planet. His legacy is one that inspires hope, especially due to the fact that in his struggle for freedom against oppression, he actually won. And in doing so, Nelson Mandela gained a victory for all South Africans.

South Africa’s Crime against Humanity: What Was Apartheid?

By Greg Beyer BA History & Linguistics, Journalism Diploma Greg specializes in African History. He holds a BA in History & Linguistics and a Journalism Diploma from the University of Cape Town. A former English teacher, he now excels in academic writing and pursues his passion for art through drawing and painting in his free time.

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Role Model: Nelson Mandela Essay

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Introduction

Summary and conclusion, reference list.

Nelson Mandela was born in 1918 at Qunu. Mandela is widely known for his charismatic leadership skills. His political career ambitions started while at university when he realized the unjust nature in which the African society was. The blacks were denied the due chances both economically and politically. This disappointed Nelson Mandela which triggered his ambitions to join politics to fight for his people.

Thesis Statement

Throughout his leadership period, Nelson Mandela demonstrated excellent leadership skills which went beyond the political role. He committed his whole life fighting for the rights of the South Africans who suffered from discrimination. As a political activist, Nelson Mandela fought for his people which led him to be a political prisoner. Nelson Mandela struggled until he became the first black president of South Africa. These achievements by Nelson Mandela make him qualify to be one of the greatest men who have ever lived in history.

Fight against Apartheid (Discrimination)

Mandela’s early days in politics coincided with very high levels of apartheid in South Africa. Mandela was very disappointed by the system since it was characterized by high levels of discrimination (Glad & Blanton, 1997). Apartheid was the main vice in South Africa which incited Mandela to engage in endless struggles.

Mandela has been imprisoned for about thirty years for opposing apartheid system in South Africa (Ryan, 2011). During the apartheid system, the whites oppressed the blacks through their discriminative policies. In 1944, Nelson Mandela became an active leader of the American National Congress (ANC). This was just his first move to fight for the people’s freedom.

South Africa’s apartheid system was one of the worst racism and discrimination scenarios that have ever taken place in the world. However, Mandela managed to oppose the system courageously and persistently despite of the threats by the white leaders (Lieberfeld, 2003).

Therefore, Mandela has shown excellent and selfless leadership which cannot be found in many leaders. Most leaders are driven by their own benefits but Mandela was determined to undergo any torture for the sake of his people. Through the African National Congress party, Mandela was determined to undergo any form of suffering for the sake of the South Africans blacks who were facing a lot of suffering at the hand of apartheid.

Political Activist (African National Congress)

In most cases, many political parties in Africa which fought for the rights of the blacks were characterized by violent activities. Therefore, it was expected that Mandela’s political party (ANC) would be even more violent bearing in the mind the extent to which apartheid had reached in South Africa. However, Mandela’s movement was characterized by non-violent protests. However, the younger nationalists became discouraged because of lack of progress in the initial stages (Ryan, 2011).

Together with his colleagues, Mandela believed that incorporating violence in their activities would trigger police’s brutality and this would bring suffering to South African blacks (Glad & Blanton, 1997). In case they engaged in violent activities, they new that the white leaders would take that opportunity to finish their people.

This was the main reason why they refrained from engaging themselves in violent demonstrations. According to Lieberfeld (2003), Mandela demonstrated peace in every step he made. His struggle against apartheid in earlier days was characterized by peace.

Mandela was one of those kinds of leaders who never gave up. He was rarely intimidated by any resistance to make his moves. He persistently moved forward. For instance, later on after joining ANC, Mandela decided to join the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) (Ryan, 2011). This is because ANC was making very little progress during that time. Due to his thirst to save his people from the chains of apartheid, Mandela joined this party as it was more vibrant than ANC. This group was composed of the members of ANC who were more militant.

In 1949, ANCYL organized strikes and boycotts across the country (Ryan, 2011). These actions were directed to force for changes in policies which oppressed the Africans in South Africa. In 1951, Nelson Mandela was elected as the head of this political party in the country. Soon after being elected the leader of this group, Mandela initiated a Defiance campaign which was aimed at triggering a massive resistance towards discriminative policies. This was his next move after their initial moves yielded little results.

Due to his perpetual resistance to the prevailing system and organizing of boycotts and strikes, Mandela was arrested in 1952 (Ryan, 2011). However, Mandela won that time as his sentence was suspended some time later.

However, he was neither allowed to attend any public gathering nor attend ANC meetings. These restrictions were aimed at minimizing his interactions with the public to avoid further incitation. However, Mandela’s journey did not stop hear as many would have thought. This encounter just boosted her determination to pursue his goals.

To defend the people who were persecuted in the apartheid system, Mandela opened a law which defended the convicts. Later, Mandela and some other leaders were charged of treason. This case was later dropped. However, most of Mandela’s time was wasted as he was sometimes forced to make many appearances before the court. Despite of these commitments, Mandela still continued to fight four the equality in South Africa.

Underground Movement

On realizing that non-violent resistance was not yielding any positive results, Mandela decided to adopt violence in his fight against apartheid. For instance, sixty nine people were killed while resisting for anti apartheid rule which restricted the movement of the blacks in South Africa.

This incident made Mandela to change his strategy of non-violent resistance to more harsh reaction. This is because the rate of discrimination was rising even after their efforts instead of falling. In connection to this, ANC commenced adopting armed resistance (Ryan, 2011).

After the banning of their party, Mandela with the support of other leaders formed an underground group. Through this group, Mandela and his colleagues targeted any official symbol of Apartheid and the government in their targets through sabotage. On seeing the extent to which apartheid had reached in South Africa, Nelson Mandela decided to travel across the African countries and Europe to seek support as well as learning the tactics of guerilla warfare (Ryan, 2011).

Therefore, Mandela realized the importance of the support from other countries in his struggle against apartheid (Glad & Blanton, 1997). Unfortunately, Mandela was arrested soon after going back to his country after completing his mission. He was charged for his involvements with the underground group and for moving out side the country without a legal prescription. This cost, Mandela five years in prison.

Despite of these sufferings which Mandela underwent during his struggle against discrimination towards the black South Africans, his stand was never shaken. During his trial, Mandela confirmed not to be intimidated by anything from his fight against apartheid (Ryan, 2011). He also explained the main aims of the newly formed group Umkhonto we Sizwe. Mandela together with his group narrowly escaped execution during these trials (Ryan, 2011). However, they were given a life imprisonment.

In 1964, Mandela was sent to Robben Island where he was supposed to spend the rest of his life according to the judgment. Later, he was kept confined alone in fear that he will intimidate his colleagues. All this suffering never shook Mandela’s ambitions. His people went to the extent of referring to him as a silent suffering martyr (Ryan, 2011).

Road to Freedom and Accomplishments

Later in 1984, negotiations for Mandela’s release started on condition that he will allow reallocation of South African blacks to specific places. However, Mandela rejected all these offers. This displays a strong character of determined and selfless leader who was ready to sacrifice himself for the sake of his people. This clearly shows that Mandela was not after any material gain in his struggle for equality.

Under the pressure of the international community and the black South Africans, the head of the National Party F.W. de Klerk softened his stand (Ryan, 2011). Restrictions on ANC were lifted and most laws which were discriminative were dissolved. After continued pressure, Mandela was released in 1990.

Soon after being released, Mandela continued with his fight for freedom. He was engaged in negotiations with de Klerk form ma democratic government. In 1993, Mandela was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize (Ryan, 2011). This was just three years after being released.

Through Mandela’s efforts, South African got the first chance to vote freely without impediments which mostly favored the whites. Mandela was finally elected the president of South Africa in 1994 under the ANC party. On becoming, the president of South Africa, Mandela came up with strategies to unite people and also released those imprisoned during the apartheid system through amnesty (Ryan, 2011).

From there, Mandela has received various awards for his good work to the community. For instance, he received Presidential Medal of Freedom from the former United States president Bush. Mandela was also determined in the fight against AIDs as well as care for the AIDs victims.

From this discussion, it can clearly be seen that Mandela is really a leader to be emulated. Throughout his leadership, he has demonstrated courage, humility, patience, perseverance, and determination, a combination of character traits which is very rare in many leaders. He persistently fought against discrimination in South Africa despite of the difficulties he faced. Mandela faced police brutality and imprisonment for about thirty years but was never discouraged from pursuing his goals.

This discussion has also indicated that Mandela opted for violence after the peaceful demonstrations proved futile. This indicates that he was a humble reader who looked beyond the leadership boundaries. He considered every move he made taking into consideration the end results. Although he had the power to use violence from beginning of his struggle, he avoided that.

Mandela’s leadership teaches us that one should never be discouraged from pursuing his or her goals despite of the conditions through which they pass. We should also not lose hope for whichever time period this may take. Mandela spent many years in jail but he never buried his hope.

Glad, B. & Blanton, R. (1997). F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela: a study in cooperative transformational leadership. Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 27, 1997.

Lieberfeld, D. (2003). ‘Nelson Mandela: Partisan and Peacemaker.’ Negotiation Journal. Volume 19, Number 3, 229-250, DOI: 10.1023/A:1024629628402

Ryan, J. (2011). Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela (Great Neck Publishing) , 1. Web.

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Short Essay & Paragraph On Nelson Mandela For Students

Nelson Mandela was an important leader in South Africa who fought against apartheid. Apartheid was a system that kept non-white people separate from white people. He was born on July 18, 1918, in Umtata, South Africa. Let’s learn more about this remarkable man and his achievements.

Table of Contents

Essay About Nelson Mandela – A Hero of Equality

Education and activism.

Mandela went to school and college at the College of Fort Hare and the University of Witwatersrand. There, he studied law and met other people who wanted to fight against apartheid. He became a leader in the African National Congress (ANC) and followed Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violence approach. But when peaceful protests didn’t work, he started a branch of the ANC that used force to resist apartheid. The South African government called him a terrorist, and he was sent to prison for almost 30 years.

Legacy and Presidency

After his release from prison, Mandela became the first black president of South Africa. He worked hard to improve the lives of black people in the country. He wrote a book called “Long Walk to Freedom” that tells about his struggles and fight for equality. Nelson Mandela Day is celebrated on his birthday, July 18. On this day, people all around the world honor him by helping their communities and making the world a better place.

The Significance of Nelson Mandela Day

Nelson Mandela Day is a special day to remember the great work of Nelson Mandela. People celebrate this day by doing good deeds and acts of kindness for others. They volunteer to help those in need, clean up their neighborhoods, and spread love and hope just like Mandela did.

Apartheid and its Impact

Apartheid was a very unfair system in South Africa. It separated people based on their race, treating non-white citizens unfairly. They couldn’t use the same facilities as white people and had fewer rights. It caused a lot of suffering and division in the country.

Major Accomplishments as President

As South Africa’s president, Mandela worked to unite the country and end apartheid. He created programs to improve housing, education, and healthcare for black people. He also helped South Africa become a democratic country where everyone could vote and have equal rights.

What is apartheid and how did it affect South Africa?

Apartheid was a system of racial segregation that discriminated against non-white people in South Africa. It caused immense suffering and division among the people.

What were some of Nelson Mandela’s major accomplishments as president of South Africa?

As president, Mandela worked to unite the country, end apartheid, and improve the living conditions of black people. He made South Africa a democratic nation with equal rights for all.

What is the significance of Nelson Mandela Day and how is it celebrated?

Nelson Mandela Day is celebrated on July 18th to honor his legacy. People celebrate by doing good deeds and helping others in their communities, spreading love and hope, just like Mandela did.

Nelson Mandela was a true hero who fought against injustice and inequality in South Africa. He spent many years in prison but never gave up on his dream of a united and fair nation. His legacy lives on through Nelson Mandela Day, where people come together to make the world a better place, just as he did.

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• SOCIAL MEDIA

Muhammad Ali was a legend in the boxing ring and a hero to millions. Read his essay on his hero, Nelson Mandela, who fought apartheid. MY HERO thanks Muhammad Ali for contributing this essay to the book My Hero: Extraordinary People on the Heroes Who Inspire Them .

Nelson Mandela by Muhammad Ali

By muhammad ali from united states.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee...

Mandela is my hero because he survived many years of life as a subject of colonialism. As a child in Africa, Mandela was a victim of the European colonial project in that involved "civilizing" indigenous folks by silencing African lifeways in favor of so-called Eurocentric high culture. Perhaps finding his Xhosa name, Rolihlahla, too cumbersome or primitive, a teacher assigned him the decidedly more English "Nelson" when he was a student at a British colonial boarding school.

Mandela is my hero because he embraces all people like brothers and sisters. He is one of the greatest civil rights leaders in world history. Mandela is my hero because his spirit cannot be crushed. Imprisoned for his political views in the early 1960s, Mandela refused to compromise his position, which was equality and justice for all people. He sacrificed his own freedom for the self-determination of all South Africans. He is courageous and uncompromising.

Mandela is my hero because is a man of great personal honor, strength, and integrity, but he was always fighting for something greater than himself, and that was the freedom of an entire nation. It is painful to imagine that this man, who radiates so much love, who espoused so many truths, could have spent so much of his life in prison.

Mandela is my hero because he triumphed over injustice, and not in a small way. Almost unimaginable just a few years before, Nelson Mandela became the first democratically-elected president of South Africa in 1994 and served in that position for five years.

More than anyone in the world, Mandela embodies the hopes and dreams of a true, lasting justice and equality, not just for South Africans but for all people. It is Mandela—through his unselfish and constant presence on the international stage raising awareness about AIDS, peace, debt relief, the environment--who most inspires us to think responsibly of our fellow man and of our planet.

Nelson Mandela has always inspired me to think beyond myself, to think of people in the wider world as part of a common humanity. I am blessed by his friendship. I love him for what he has accomplished, for what he has been through, for his journey forward. He remains a hallmark of what it really means to give of oneself selflessly--which is, indeed, a gift for us all.

Page created on 12/11/2006 12:00:00 AM

Last edited 7/2/2020 6:58:46 PM

Copyright 2005 by The MY HERO Project MY HERO thanks Muhammad Ali for contributing this essay to My Hero: Extraordinary People on the Heroes Who Inspire Them . Thanks to Free Press for reprint rights of the above material.

ON THE BOOKS...

My Hero: Extraordinary People on the Heroes Who Inspire Them

Nelson Mandela Foundation

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Head and Heart: The Lessons of Leadership from Nelson Mandela

For the centenary of Nelson Mandela’s birth, we commissioned Mandla Langa to reflect on Madiba’s legacy five years after his passing. Langa is a renowned author of both fiction and non-fiction, and in 2017 partnered with the Foundation on the book Dare Not Linger: The Presidential Years , an account of Madiba’s 1994-1999 presidency. The essay by him published here interprets Madiba’s life in relation to local and global contexts.

Almost everyone you meet has a story about Mandela; sometimes not so much about what he did as about how he made them feel. He was self-deprecating about his renown, joking, for instance, about meeting a couple in Nassau in 1991 when he was a guest of Chris Blackwell. An overawed cyclist almost fell off his bike when he saw Mandela. Calling his wife over, he said: “Honey, this is Mr Mandela.” Unimpressed, the wife answered, “Yes, I hear that … but what is he famous for?”

The most pertinent question, which remains unasked throughout the appraisal of Nelson Mandela’s life is, what was it about him that endeared him, sometimes to the level of near-hysteria, to people the world over? South Africans say that he made them feel alive; others, even admirers from far and wide, basked in his reflected sunshine and started connecting with the politics of their land because, they maintained, there were suddenly all these possibilities. It was through the world of artists – the poets mentioned previously – that he, Mandela, became even more alive in the public imagination.

Anyone who was lucky enough to have attended the concert to celebrate Mandela's 70 th birthday while he was still in prison, at Wembley Stadium, London, in June 1988, would admit to have been treated to a transcendental moment. I remember the ecstasy among the South African exile and expatriate community, members of the anti-apartheid and solidarity movement and, of course, the thousands of mainly young people in the audience. Of the artists themselves, I remember the stammering pain mixed with joy on the face of the late Whitney Houston when she took the stage, beginning a long friendship with Mandela and South Africa, which would continue when she met him once he had become president at a dinner hosted by Bill Clinton at the White House in October 1994.

“This performance is very special to me,” she said, preparing to sing for guests in the Rose Garden, “because in 1988 I sang in honour of Nelson Mandela the inmate and tonight I sing for elected president, Nelson Mandela.”

While the world – or, according the to the title of one of Kgositsile’s poetry collections, the present – might be a dangerous place blighted by cynicism and selfishness, it can also be stimulated into tapping its hidden reserves of virtuousness. Mandela’s face became the most immediate representation of that undefined energy called “the struggle” raging at home and lent strength to the worldwide anti-apartheid and solidarity movements, which called for sanctions and isolation of the regime. “If there’s one lesson we can learn from the struggle against racism, in our country as well as yours,” Nelson Mandela said about the United States while on a visit there, “it is that racism must be consciously combatted and not discreetly tolerated.”

Artists, a breed renowned the world over for their low threshold for any form of intolerance, heeded the call to isolate South Africa; in the US, thwarting apartheid’s sleight-of-hand to escape international isolation, Steve van Zandt formed United Artists Against Apartheid and in 1985 produced a rock anthem, I Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City , featuring Bruce Springsteen, Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and Gil Scott-Heron.

Not to be outdone, film and stage actors appeared in productions inspired by the South African story. One of the most enduring films is Cry, the Beloved Country , based on the novel by Alan Paton. The veteran actor James Earl Jones, Hollywood’s most distinctive voice, was concerned about how the portrayal of a long-suffering character would go down with a more militant youth. Speaking to the Austin Chronicle in January 1996, he said that he’d read the book a long time ago “and had always wanted to be in [its film version]. But my big question was: How would the gentleness – which I think is the key to my character – how would it go over with young black people? My main concern was that it not appear as something from the past, as a museum piece. I said: ‘When Mandela is freed, we’ll see.’ My character mirrors Mandela’s gentleness. When he was freed, I knew I would make this picture.”

In a word, Mandela freed others to embrace their own freedom. But he knew that this freedom, which for black people involved removing both the physical and mental shackles imposed on them by the white racist regime, would not be complete without the white people – who had been routinely fed on the false diet of racial superiority – shaking off their own shackles. Even though a member of the ANC, in fact, its leader, he knew he had to become a statesman operating above or beyond the constraints imposed by party political loyalties if he were to truly steer his fragmented country on an unswerving path to a non-racial and prosperous democracy. He had once been on stage, playing Creon, the tyrant in Sophocles’ Antigone , on Robben Island and had developed a liking for Greek tragedy and Shakespeare. But this was a different kind of theatre, a theatre of life where, to borrow from James Baldwin again, “a current flowed back and forth between the audience and the actors: flesh and blood corroborating flesh and blood”. It was a theatre of life, real, where missteps could lead to bloodshed and the loss of innocent lives.

Recording artists present the United Artists Against Apartheid record to the Chairman of the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid.

In leadership, the past is prologue

Early in 2018, the centenary year of Nelson Mandela’s birth, South Africans have borne witness to a flurry of political activity that has thrown, rather appropriately, a spotlight on our country’s leadership. At the heart of all this has been a decade-long strain put on our widely admired Constitution. Acts of omission or commission by various people in power have occasioned a series of transgressions typified by corruption and a breach of public trust. The result: one president has resigned, another has taken his place – someone who was instrumental, in fact, in creating our Constitution – and South Africa is gripped by the kind of optimism which, if it doesn’t reach the high-water mark set by Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, at least makes for some sense of much-needed renewal.

While the corruption South Africa has endured could be written off as common to administrations around the world, South Africans feel especially pained by it, mainly because the theft from the public purse diverts resources from the poorest of the poor. Our country’s poorest citizens bear the brunt when it comes to service delivery, which grinds to a halt at the threshold of their desperate dwellings. The grand larceny also distracts us from the much larger debate about the structure of the economy. It leads to silence about the unconscionable levels of inequality here, plus the fact that while the poor – invariably the black majority – are trapped in poverty, the well-resourced – the majority of whom, inescapably, are white – become vocal in decrying corruption, proof positive, so goes the logic, that blacks are incapable of running a modern economy. The ills of the unresolved past and its iniquities give a piquant flavouring to dinner conversations, where the past – a different country that was experienced differently by different people – is either commended or condemned. Common to these conversations, though, is the consensus that the world was a somewhat more tolerable place during the life and times of Nelson Mandela.

Nostalgia for the past – an impulse as prevalent in antiquity as in modern times – comes over people whenever they feel menaced, betrayed or disappointed. As a rule, though, very few people can be nostalgic about periods when they were powerless or set at naught. Dyed-in-the-wool beneficiaries of apartheid plunder, for instance, remember that past fondly; for the majority of black people – and a minority of relatively-committed whites – the return to the inglorious days of apartheid would be as unthinkable as would a return to life on a slave plantation be for African Americans. Paradise, then, could not have been real without the existence of hell. Mandela, a realist, wrote from prison in July 1985: “In my current circumstances, thinking about the past can be far more exacting than contemplating the present and predicting the course of future events.”

Given the all-too-human temptation for blacks to remember the scourge of colonialism and apartheid with an eye on avoiding their rebirth – and for whites to eradicate from living memory the reality of benefitting from the shameful legacy of the sjambok and the pillory, the better to absolve themselves – it would take the commitment of one man to coax our bipolar society into a realistic accommodation of its history. Advising against the principle of retribution, Mandela famously said that “All of us South Africans, both black and white, must build a common sense of nationhood in which all ideas of vengeance and retribution are impermissible.” For him, the moorings of the future were in the present, the now. For us, to know Mandela we must delve back into the past, into the makings of him, which are ineluctably intertwined with the makings of the South Africa we know today.

Nelson Mandela signing the Parliamentary Bible.

Mandela the pacifist, Mandela the warrior: the making of a leader in the field

Voicing an idea that must have roiled in the minds of the multitudes over the last two decades, the late South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile wrote:

I fear the end of peace and I wonder if that is perhaps why our memories of struggle refuse to be erased.

The fear of the end of peace or of its corollary, the beginning of war, had motivated Nelson Mandela long before he had consciously internalised his future role as a champion of peace and reconciliation. The fear was not so much a reflexive shrinking away from the possibility of harm to oneself as a deliberate advocacy of measures to shield the more vulnerable from injury or destruction. In this, Mandela’s disposition is in alignment with an Aristotelian notion of courage. The philosopher argued that the courageous person doesn’t fear death if he or she is committed to a noble cause. Mandela said: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. I felt fear myself more times that I can remember, but I hid it behind a mask of boldness. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

He not only controlled his fear but his temperament. Prisons were designed to break the prisoner’s spirit; the warders’ prime responsibility was to bend the will of their charges. In Mandela they found a person who knew not only the history of places like Robben Island but of the luminaries that had been imprisoned there through the centuries. There were the legendary Makana, “the commander of the Xhosa army” and Autshumayo, the Khoisan chief of the Goringhaicona who managed to escape from the island. A notable inspiration for Mandela was Maqoma, another celebrated commander who ended up there. In a sense, then, Mandela saw himself as part of a heroic fellowship, identifying with kindred spirits and continuing the journey of resistance started by these illustrious ancestors. He knew that the first step towards conquering a bleak place was to call it home.

“Just as the Portuguese colonialists gave a unique place in history to the island of Fernando Po by imprisoning numerous African patriots … so too have the rulers of South Africa determined that Robben Island should live in the memory of our people. Robben Island – one-time leper colony, Second World War naval fortress guarding the entrance to Cape Town harbour – a tiny outcrop of limestone, bleak, windswept and caught in the wash of the cold Benguela current, whose history counts the years of our people’s bondage. My new home.”

Mandela had a fair idea what the white nationalists in power were capable of wreaking. As a lawyer, first, and full-time political activist subsequently, he had had a ringside seat at the bloody drama that played out in the cities, towns and countryside. There was no spot on the landscape that was spared from hideous goings-on. The most vulnerable were the farmworkers and prisoners forced to work on plantations, such as the potato plantations in Bethal, in present-day Mpumalanga. A chilling account by journalist Janet Smith, writing in 2008, typifies a day in the life of a black South African under apartheid in the period that Mandela mounted his challenge:

“What happened in the 1950s in Bethal should never be forgotten. Many of the farmers compelled their workers to dig up the potato harvest with their bare hands, and those who could not keep up, or became exhausted, were beaten unmercifully. The men and women who died, either from the beatings or the cruel manual labour, were mostly buried out in the open fields, with members of their own families sometimes having to load their bodies into the earth.”

With an understanding that repression had to be confronted head on, Mandela became the ANC’s volunteer-in-chief for the Defiance Campaign against unjust laws in 1952. This, it must be remembered, was just four years after the National Party came into power, a period of great repression. Although the laws the campaign singled out were not repealed, its success lay in its being a very effective recruitment tool. “As a result of the campaign,” Mandela writes in Long Walk to Freedom , “our membership swelled to 100 000” and the “ANC emerged as a truly mass-based organization with an impressive corps of experienced activists who had braved the police, the courts and the jails. The stigma usually associated with imprisonment had been removed.”

But the assault by the state continued unabated, with banning orders served on Mandela and other leaders of the ANC, such as Chief Albert Luthuli, its president. This made it difficult to manoeuvre, organise or mount resistance to the ongoing onslaught, including the removals of the communities from Sophiatown and District Six to make way for white progress. And here, Mandela was candid about the mistakes made. For instance, during the removals, the ANC had coined the slogan, “Over Our Dead Bodies”, which Mandela characterised as “dynamic”, but which “proved as much a hindrance as a help”. For, while it “caught the imagination of the people”, it “led them to believe that we would fight to the death to resist the removal. In fact, the ANC was not prepared to do that at all.”

It was becoming increasingly clear to Mandela that in the end he and his compatriots “had no alternative to armed and violent resistance”. The men and women who formed part of the liberation movement had used all the “non-violent weapons in our arsenal … to no avail”. One of his last attempts to get the government’s attention through non-violent methods came with the convening of the Congress of the People, which took place in Kliptown, Johannesburg on 25 and 26 June 1955. In a re-enactment of a seminal event of more than 40 years earlier, the founding convention of the ANC in Bloemfontein in 1912, more than three thousand delegates from the length and breadth of the country, and a host of different organisations, came together to chart a course aimed at changing history. The upshot of this two-day meeting, which was periodically menaced by the thuggish officiousness of Special Branch detectives brandishing sten guns, was the adoption of the Freedom Charter, a document characterised by Mandela as “a great beacon for the liberation struggle”. The Freedom Charter “captured the hopes and dreams of the people and acted as a blueprint for the liberation struggle and the future of the nation”.

Matters came to a head on 21 March 1960. An anti-pass demonstration by the Pan Africanist Congress massing at the Sharpeville police station was fired on by the police, leaving 69 dead and hundreds injured. The majority of the casualties – men, women and children – had sustained gunshot wounds to the back while fleeing. There had been other notable examples of gross dereliction on the part of the state, such as the Coalbrook mine disaster in 1960 where 435 people, mainly black, suffocated or drowned under miles of rock. The Sharpeville Massacre, as it has come to be known, was a more naked form of violence whose effects reverberated across the globe. In South Africa, there were more demonstrations – called “civil unrest” in official euphemese – and resultant deaths and injuries. With liberation movements banned and any peaceful avenue to resolution of the country’s intractable problems effectively closed, there was no alternative but to rethink the strategy of passive resistance.

Finally, on the last weekend in March 1961, just days before the end of the marathon Treason Trial, Mandela popped up in Pietermaritzburg at the All-in Africa Conference. There he was mandated to write to Prime Minister HF Verwoerd about establishing a convention on a non-racial constitution for South Africa and to follow this path rather than hauling South Africa out of the Commonwealth of Nations. Verwoerd ignored the two letters Mandela wrote warning of a three-day stay-at-home for 29, 30 and 31 May. An extreme show of force on the first day and a last-minute turn around by the English press, which had previously promised to support the strike, led to disappointing support and Mandela called it off on day two.

The government’s wilful deafness and utter disregard for the lives of black people were therefore the catalyst towards the formation in June 1961 of Umkhonto weSizwe, the military wing of the ANC, and its launch on 16 December 1961, with Nelson Mandela as its first commander-in-chief. For Mandela, the decision to take up arms was predicated on the actions of the state. “Where the oppressor uses peaceful methods,” he said, “the oppressed will also use peaceful methods, but if the oppressor uses force, the oppressed will also retaliate in force.”

Announcing the first actions of sabotage by Umkhonto weSizwe after its formation, Mandela said: “If the government reaction is to crush by naked force our non-violent struggle, we will have to reconsider our tactics. In my mind we are closing a chapter on this question of a non-violent policy.” This rationale for taking up arms was contained in the leaflets from the ANC, which exhorted the oppressed to rise up.

“The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means within our power in defence of our people, our future and our freedom. The government has interpreted the peacefulness of the movement as weakness; the people’s non-violent policies have been taken as a green light for government violence. Refusal to resort to force has been interpreted by the government as an invitation to use armed force against the people without any fear of reprisals. The methods of Umkhonto weSizwe mark a break with that past.”

By the time these words filtered through the townships and hostels, farms and plantations, factories and schools – words replayed in clandestine radio broadcasts and from the capitals of countries, some of which have now been erased from world maps – the Soviet Union, the Democratic German Republic, Czechoslovakia, Madagascar, Ethiopia, Zambia – Mandela and much of the top leadership of the liberation movement were in prison. His journeys across Africa immediately before his final arrest, his last moments of operating as a free man – moments that told him how thoroughly unfree he had been in his native land – had prepared the ground for the ANC to establish its diplomatic missions abroad and spread the word of liberation.

While Mandela was in shackles, it would be Walter Sisulu, his mentor and one of the world’s most consistent political leaders, who would produce the first Radio Freedom broadcast from the ANC’s underground farm north of Johannesburg, in June 1963. “I speak to you from somewhere in South Africa,” Sisulu announced. “Never has the country, and our people, needed leadership as they do now, in this hour of crisis. Our house is on fire.”

The Sharpeville Massacre, 21 March 1960.

Mandela the prisoner: the making of a leader inside

Nelson Mandela’s story, therefore, is about how he set out to put out the blaze.

In 1969, Mandela’s son died, three months after he had learnt of his wife Winnie Madikizela Mandela’s incarceration. He received a terse telegram informing him of his son’s death in a “motor accident in Cape Town”. The son, Thembekile – which means “the trusted one” – “was then 25, and the father of two small children”. Notwithstanding his pleas, Mandela’s keepers refused him permission to attend his son’s funeral. “As a father,” he said, “it was my responsibility to make sure that my son’s spirit would rest peacefully.”

There was nothing, therefore, in the behaviour of his captors to give Mandela a sense that he was dealing with rational people. Their actions went against anything he had known. Having grown up in the royal family of abaThembu – and being familiar with wars of resistance – he knew the code of conduct among people involved in hostilities. Even armies, who stared at each other from a great gulf, allowed enemies a brief respite to bury their dead. Mandela’s captors were simply not worth saving; unleashing the force of the state, they had heaped indignity upon indignity on their charges; their regime was nothing more than an obscenity.

Not daring to make the first move, however, or leaving the apartheid authorities to their own devices, unchecked on their path to ruin – where they would take the whole country down with them – would have been as equally reckless, as morally questionable as allowing the fire to rage on. Although he knew that his initiative could have ended up in defeat, he could not stand aside, as is evidenced in a passionate letter he wrote to give encouragement to Winnie:

“For one thing those who have no soul, no sense of national pride and no ideals to win can suffer neither humiliation nor defeat; they can evolve no national heritage, are inspired by no sacred mission and can produce no martyrs or national heroes.”

Notwithstanding Mandela’s wariness about the apartheid authorities, he had studied them long enough to see glimpses of humanity in some of them. He would later tell Patti Waldmeir in an interview that one thing he had discovered was that “men are not the same, even when dealing with a community that has a tradition of insensitivity towards human rights”.

There are few places as lonely and as depersonalising as prison. Prison destroys the soul, giving power to warders, who are weighed down by their own impotence in the bigger world. It is here that people are broken. Were it not for the fact that they were handmaidens, the cats’ paws of an inhuman administration, I would personally find the warders worthy of sympathy, for they were confronted by something alien to their upbringing and the teachings of their churches, which they had taken with their mothers’ milk. They’d never confronted black people whose conduct was out of character with what was expected of prisoners. It was on Robben Island that the warders could significantly lose their own freedom and sense of self. Much later, some of them would testify how their friendship with Mandela started to rekindle their connection with humanity.

It was is this realisation, this understanding of one’s role as a force on the inside, that the prisoner slowly takes over – assumes – the moral high ground and wrests legitimacy from the regime and its representatives. It is in the panic that comes over those who experience control slipping from their fingers that starts to arm the prisoner with resolve. During Mandela’s many years of incarceration, according to A Prisoner in the Garden , the authoritative prison archive of Nelson Mandela,

“Prison authorities compiled a detailed record around prisoner 466/64. They carefully recorded, duplicated and filed every piece of paper, relating to Mandela. These included results of medical tests, correspondence with family and friends, formal complaints against prison conditions and early negotiations with his captors. The prison files reveal the extent of the web of surveillance that existed in apartheid South Africa, the depth of paranoia around Mandela and, most strikingly, the power that this Robben Island prisoner wielded in spite of his status as an inmate.”

It was partly this status in prison – for he must have understood the effect of his own personality on his captors – that empowered Mandela to set out on a mission that would entail his release and culminate in his ascendancy to the presidency of the country. While alerting him to his own vulnerability, prison was also a place where he came to terms with himself, his predicament and the conundrum that faced his country.

Fifteen years before his release, in a letter dated 1 February 1975, Mandela wrote to Winnie, who was in Kroonstad women’s prison in the Free State. In the letter he characterised a prison cell as a place that “gives you the opportunity to look daily into your entire conduct, to overcome the bad and develop whatever is good in you”. Although meant for his wife, who certainly needed his support to survive one of the bleakest periods of her incarceration, when she suffered from periodic bouts of claustrophobia, the advice was also directed inwardly – especially the part where he suggested meditation nightly before going to sleep.

It was this sense of discipline that contributed to the peculiar aura of gravitas surrounding Mandela. In his early years on Robben Island, he found himself imprisoned with a cross-section of South African society. There were of course the grand old men of the struggle, like Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki, to name a few. It was, however, the young entrants into the prison population, the adherents of the Black Consciousness movement – firebrands who imagined they would shake Robben Island from its slumber – that further opened Mandela’s eyes to the country’s unique shape.

It was here that he came face to face with the fact that he didn’t have all the answers; and that people could differ with him – in a patently disagreeable manner. He crossed swords with Harry Gwala and countenanced the frustrated belligerence of people like Strini Moodley, who held that the old-timers were too tame. In a wide-ranging interview with Alec Russell of the Financial Times on 7 June 2015, Mac Maharaj, who would spend a substantial time with Nelson Mandela – and who helped smuggle drafts of The Long Walk to Freedom out of Robben Island – remembers exchanges that illustrate Mandela’s way of thinking:

“He understood where I was coming from. He understood that I was committed to the issue of an armed struggle based on mass mobilisation. But he said to me, Mac, in the end … how do you ambush the other side? You have inferior forces, you have inferior weaponry, but how are you going to defeat that chap? […] if you don’t know your opposite, how are you going to get them to respond the way you want … I said, but I’ve read Commando by one of the Afrikaner leaders, Denys Reitz, and other books so I have an idea how they think. Mandela responded that those were specific instances under previous commander. So what must I do? I ask. He says, learn the language. OK, I said, I’ll learn. He says, no, learn their poetry, understand their culture.”

From the personal accounts by late entrants into the prison community, Mandela came to learn, not only of the different approaches that those involved in the Struggle for freedom were taking, but also of the regime’s relentless slaughter of an unarmed populace. The toll was especially high in the aftermath of a series of states of emergency enforced first in 1985. The intensified repression was aimed at countering heightened – and widespread – resistance, which was inspired in the main by the Mass Democratic Movement. Appalled at the level of desperation, Mandela could see the country easily turning into a wasteland.

One of many posters demanding that Nelson Mandela be set free.

Mandela the president: a leader takes power, partly by reading a poem

“A good head and a good heart,” Nelson Mandela wrote, “are always a formidable combination.” There are “few misfortunes in this world,” he said on another occasion, “that you cannot turn into a personal triumph if you have the iron will and the necessary skill”.

It is not often that we can count ourselves lucky for having witnessed the making of history. The official announcement signalling the dismantling of apartheid with the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 is as etched in my mind as could be V-Day, the assassination of JFK or of Martin Luther King, Jr, or – much later – the day the planes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York for a succession of generations.

As there is something ineffable about these moments, and memory is sometimes unreliable, it is always advisable to get them corroborated by other witnesses. Here, the poets who have a licence to dream on behalf of their communities are especially helpful. Nelson Mandela would himself give honour to poetry by reading Ingrid Jonker’s poem, The Child is Not Dead , in its original Afrikaans during his address at the opening of the first democratic parliament on 24 May 1994. He said:

“The time will come when our nation will honour the memory of all the sons, the daughters, the mothers, the fathers, the youth and the children who, by their thoughts and deeds, gave us the right to assert with pride that we are South Africans, that we are Africans and that we are citizens of the world.”

Then he spoke of Jonker, who was “both a poet and a South African”, and who, in the dark days when all seemed hopeless, when many refused to hear her resonant voice, took her own life. “To her and others like her,” Mandela said, “we owe a debt to life itself. To her and others like her, we owe a commitment to the poor, the oppressed, the wretched and the despised.”

Ingrid wrote:

The child is not dead the child lifts his fists against his mother who shouts Africa! ...

The child is not dead Not at Langa nor at Nyanga nor at Orlando nor at Sharpeville nor at the police post at Philippi where he lies with a bullet through his brain ...

the child is present at all assemblies and law-giving the child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers this child who only wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere

the child grown to a man treks on through all Africa the child grown to a giant journeys over the whole world without a pass!

For Mandela, who had always prized children and childhood, it was inevitable that he saw the symbolic connection between the death of one child as an example of a dream deferred. He reasoned, however, that a death must not be in vain but should galvanise all to create a liveable future for all South Africans. He wrote, and said:

“And in this glorious vision, she instructs that our endeavours must be about the liberation of the woman, the emancipation of the man and the liberty of the child.

“It is these things that we must achieve to give meaning to our presence in this chamber and to give purpose to our occupancy of the seat of government.

“And so we must, constrained by and yet regardless of the accumulated effect of our historical burdens, seize the time to define for ourselves what we want to make of our shared destiny.

“The government I have the honour to lead and I dare say the masses who elected us to serve in this role, are inspired by the single vision of creating a people-centred society.”

With these words, and Jonker’s poetry, a restless society, split apart by violence and strife, was steadied by the hand of a man who had learnt to be alone with himself for almost three decades.

It is, however, his five-year presidency that has come under scrutiny, because this was where he was responsible to the totality of the South African citizenry and not just to the ANC. In this period, a blip in the hundreds of years it took to manufacture modern-day South Africa, he must have appreciated that he would become weighed down by the burden of expectation from a populace in need of a quick miracle. In a sense, this country of wilful amnesia and selective nostalgia heaved a sigh of uneasy relief with Mandela’s acclaimed ascendancy to power. He was a ready-made scapegoat and messiah all rolled into one; the tension between these two poles would have led many straight into a madhouse. Mandela couldn’t have been oblivious to his own predicament. He had seen from history how some leaders that might have come to power via a popular mandate were overthrown on the strength of a faltering economy.

Mandela was familiar with the case of the late Chilean socialist president, Salvador Allende, who came to power when the country was in the grip of severe economic crises. To make matters worse, he was trying to build a socialist society through the nationalisation of industries in the face of unemployment, inflation and widespread malnutrition. Mandela’s own flirtation with nationalisation ended soon after the trip to Davos in 1992 where he was told, in no uncertain terms, by leaders from China and Vietnam how such a policy had led to the ruin of many a country’s economy. President Allende, as Mandela would 20 years’ thence, restored diplomatic relations with China, Cuba and various countries deemed undesirable by the Western powers. Notwithstanding Allende’s popularity with the farmers and the man and woman on the street, he had so alienated business and other politicians with his adoption of socialist policies that it was possible for his government to be overthrown in September 1973 by a military coup organised by Henry Kissinger and the CIA.

Aware that the goodwill that derived from the peaceful transition would not last unless leveraged upon – and cognisant of the dire consequences of an underserved public – Mandela knew that the biggest hurdle to overcome was the one of socio-economic transformation. The analysis of the office of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), an integrated socio-economic framework, was that “the South African economy is in deep-seated structural crisis, and as such requires fundamental restructuring”.

Growth and development, Mandela would note, were more than interdependent; they were mutually reinforcing. Addressing inequalities, he maintained, would expand markets at home, open markets abroad and create opportunities to promote representative ownership of the economy. The expansion of the economy would raise state revenues by expanding the tax base, rather than by permanently raising taxes. The success of this approach would entail the government getting into “active partnerships with civil society, and with business and labour … [to] jointly pursue the broader challenges of extending opportunities to the millions of adult South Africans who can currently find no place in the formal economy … Our people elected us because they wanted change.” He further remarked that while “people have high expectations which are legitimate … [and while] the government cannot meet all these needs overnight, we must put firmly into place the concrete goals, time frame and strategies to achieve this change”.

Analysing Mandela’s economic legacy, Matthew Davies, business reporter for BBC News, writes:

“In some senses, Mr Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) inherited an economy that was heading for bankruptcy.”

So, it was to prove a difficult task to create a silk purse of an economy from the pig’s ear that apartheid had left behind. However, many analysts point out that great strides were made in delivering some of the Freedom Charter aspirations in the early years of the new South Africa. Dawie Roodt, chief economist at the Efficient Group, says:

“Many millions of people got running water, electricity, etc.

“But the infrastructure was neglected, and slowly state inefficiency and corruption became serious problems.”

The ANC had once been greatly enamoured of the social democratic model it had seen in various countries, especially Sweden; here, they saw a seamless relationship between government, labour and the private sector, to the extent that the boards of large corporations had trade union representatives. “Our present position on this aspect [of the economy] is the same as that of the Federal Republic of Germany, which contains in its constitution a clause on nationalisation as one of the options the government might employ in case of need. That option has not been exercised in that country for decades.

In truth, however, the complex question facing South Africa today – the economic quandary the country faces today, the runaway unemployment, the unacceptable levels of inequality – simply means that an anomaly in the negotiations became the recessive gene carried in the bloodstream of our democracy. It bespeaks a weakness, perhaps, on Mandela’s side, where he was distracted away from the granular detail of negotiations and concentrated, mainly, on the business of fostering stability and nation-building. He had a handpicked team, which, one believes, was also blindsided when it came to the question of the future implications of the economy. Given the outpourings of international goodwill towards our emergent democracy at the time of negotiations – for instance, the developmental experts and thinkers that could be found in the solidarity movement – Mandela’s team passed up an opportunity to tap into resources which could have strengthened its negotiating strategies.

Delivering the Political Report of the NEC to the 49th National Conference, which was held in Bloemfontein in December 1994, a disappointed Mandela summarised the incipient disaffection among the majority who voted for the ANC. He decried the “tendency for ruling parties is to claim success for each and every step they have taken in government. Let us be honest and say that we would have been satisfied if more people could concretely feel the impact of social change.”

The compromises reached in order to set up building blocks towards the emergent democracy had left the ANC with very little leverage in terms of economic clout. Mandela advised the conference to “admit that, in the process we did also falter”, and lamented that “the reality is that democratic forces in our country have captured only elements of political power”.

Nelson Mandela, as President of South Africa, at World Trade Organization talks in Geneva in May 1998.

Mandela nudges the world towards goodness

The American writer James Baldwin made bold to suggest that “the poets … are finally the only people who know the truth about us”. One such poet was the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, whose oft-quoted ascription of unhappiness to countries in need of heroes was as much a caveat for his troubled country as it is for the rest of today’s troubled world. Brecht’s – or even Baldwin’s – prophetic truth is evidenced in the state of anxiety currently holding the entire global society in thrall.

On 3 January 2018, two events, a birth and a death, took place within minutes of each other. Another prophetic poet, who I mentioned earlier on, was Keorapetse Kgositsile. I had discussed the implications of a July celebration of the centenary of Mandela’s birth with him: he had dedicated a poem to Mandela, which exhorted the listener to “defy the devils who traded in the human Spirit”. Then, suddenly, he was gone, after a short illness. I wondered what he would have made of Mandela’s contested legacy in this centennial year, remembering how my big-hearted, diminutive poet friend routinely made short shrift of the revisionism that flows out of ignorance of the conditions that had informed Mandela’s choices.

The second event was the birth of my grandniece, Chloe. Watching this helpless bundle balanced in the crook of her mother’s arm, I thought of the world, the country that Mandela and now Kgositsile had left and one in which Chloe was now demanding to be fed. Although unhappy at the collapse – or desecration – of most of Mandela’s ideals at the hands of an unprincipled leadership within the African National Congress, Kgositsile was comforted that the structures supporting democracy were still in place. Indeed, an overwhelmingly huge percentage of South Africans derive comfort from the knowledge that Mandela’s bequest – however imperfect – is a far cry from the state of tyranny under apartheid.

Mandela’s unique journey from the day he stepped out of the gates of Victor Verster Prison in 1990 – through his six-year presidency of the ANC from 1991 to 1997, and of the Republic of South Africa in 1994, to the moment he stepped down after one term in 1997 – has been represented in various media, including books, films and stage plays. It is a journey marked by Mandela’s adoption of his own advice for his son:

“To lead an orderly and disciplined life, and to give up the glittering pleasures that attract the average boy, to work hard and systematically in your studies throughout the year, will in the end bring you coveted prizes and much personal happiness.” – Nelson Mandela writing to his son, Makgatho, 28 July 1969

Mandela’s code of discipline, which was underpinned by sacrifice, has also been recorded and published in numerous biographies, and in The Long Walk to Freedom – an autobiography written, in part, to show how his own life experience could serve as an example for others to follow. He was meticulous in ensuring that an archive of his life would be made as accessible and as comprehensively as possible. The collections housed at the Nelson Mandela Foundation, vast as they might be, are by no means able to present him in sum, however, this man who towered above his contemporaries at home and abroad. It is to poetry we must turn for that – to poets like Kgositsile and his confreres, who heralded Mandela’s destiny, filling in the blanks and puncturing the veil of secrecy in times when his image was taboo, giving the world an understanding of the man who, in the words of the Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez, “behaves inside a dungeon as if he already were free”.

His gaolers tried to force the bitter destiny of the Book of Job on him: His remembrance shall perish from the earth and he shall have no name on the street . To no avail. Mandela lived in poetry, which, according to Nadine Gordimer’s foreword to the anthology Halala Madiba , is “the highest literary form of the gift of intense imaginative identification with the subject”. The concluding lines from Departure From the Isle of Torments by the late former South African poet laureate, Mazisi Kunene, capture the essence of that long journey of a man whose intellect and emotion – head and heart – were the essential qualities for the management of a most trying transition. Kunene writes:

Behold the swaying multitudes, the frenzied laughter: You did the nation well by returning!

Doing the nation well was Mandela’s preoccupation from the very start. Proud, authoritative and forthright – attributes that could be sourced to his upbringing as a scion of the royal house of abaThembu – Mandela would find Robben Island and successive prison environments conducive to acquiring leadership skills – skills that didn’t, and don’t, form part of the curricula in leadership academies. For one, the isolation of prison, the enforced hibernation, became a refresher course in survival. It brings to mind Ralph Ellison’s unnamed hero in Invisible Man , who discovers that being invisible can be a source of strength, where covert action becomes a springboard “for more overt action”.

The unintended consequence of the apartheid state’s attempt to render Mandela invisible was unprecedented curiosity – What is he like? people asked – which led to a veritable explosion of his image. The media, print and broadcast, was awash with a face that had become as ubiquitous as spring air – and as revitalising. Old black-and-white pictures flickered across screens: Mandela in a group photo as a 20-year-old student at Healdtown Comprehensive School; in a portrait wearing traditional attire; in 1951, standing next to Ruth First at an ANC conference in Bloemfontein; in 1956, singing among 150 fellow accused at the marathon Treason Trial in Pretoria; a bearded Mandela bulked up by army fatigues, standing with Algerian Army commanders in 1962. Across the globe, television sets beam contrasting images of a youngish Mandela in his jackal-skin kaross worn toga-like as he strides defiantly in slow motion during his 1962 trial for leaving the country without a passport and inciting a strike. He was sentenced on 7 November 1962 to five years in prison. There are many more, a catalogue of the various incarnations he has had to pass through. The most enduring images, however, are of Mandela as a free man, a man who embodied freedom with such assuredness that it became synonymous with his name. In all this, the making of Mandela the symbol can be credited to the regime that threw him in prison.

In 1999 Nelson Mandela handed power to Thabo Mbeki, who served as South Africa's second democratically elected president.

Mandela the symbol: a leader gives power up

Therefore, itself rich in symbolism, one of Mandela’s most memorable gestures, judged counter-intuitive by Professor Njabulo Ndebele, was in 1997 when he stepped down as president of the ANC. The presidency of the ANC is held in high esteem for the simple reason that it confers on the incumbent the stewardship of the National Executive Committee, a council that could, if need be, bring about a resignation of the state president. Paradoxically, giving up power was Mandela’s most powerful moment. In his introduction to the chapter on Mandela in South Africa’s Nobel Laureates , edited by Kader Asmal, David Chidester and Wilmot James, Prof. Ndebele observes that a leader,

“too conscious of having power, and who wields it self-consciously, does not really have it. On the other hand, a leader who works with power, and who discovers the extent of it in the course of confronting situations whose resolution requires inevitable recourse to power, has vast amounts of it.”

Mandela’s action drew muted criticism from some of his superannuated brethren on the continent and far afield, who saw it as an incitement for their domestic masses to start questioning their extended tenure. For Mandela, leadership was mainly about advancing the cause of others, because he understood how they – especially strangers in neighbouring countries who suffered untold misery in sanctions and cross-border raids launched by the South African military – had paid a huge price. He was scathing of leaders, even “erstwhile revolutionaries [who] have easily succumbed to greed, and the tendency to divert public resources for personal enrichment”. He lauded the “universal respect and even admiration for those who are humble and simple by nature, and who have absolute confidence in all human beings irrespective of their social status. These are men and women, known and unknown, who have declared total war against all forms of gross violation of human rights wherever in the world such excesses occur.”

Therefore, when he was in various circumstances required to comment on the leadership in, say, the Southern African Development Community, he stressed the importance of serious planning for regional growth and development. These were not mere words or the rehearsed platitudes that characterise speeches in summits; coming from a generation of hard idealists who had grown up in the principle of a united Africa, Mandela believed that the current crop of leadership could turn the tide against poverty and inequality in the region. This because, as he put it, “our fortunes are so interdependent. None of us can achieve sustainable growth and development, or peace and stability, in isolation.” In this regard, people who acted as gatekeepers that cut off access to him and alienated him from his natural constituencies could get Mandela nettled.

“It sometimes pains me,” he wrote in his diary on 7 January 1998, “when dependable friends who have shared resources with us when we were alone in our fight against apartheid, but who are regarded by the staff as mere strangers bent on disturbing the President.”

Rivonia triallists Ahmed Kathrada, Andrew Mlangeni, Nelson Mandela and Denis Goldberg.

Mandela: cherishing life despite threats of dreadful outcomes

Today, as South Africa and the world gear up to celebrate the centenary of his birth, the inevitable question comes up: What would our country be like if Mandela had not stepped into the breach to assume leadership at a most perilous period of our history? Aligned to this question is the subtext in current debates about the economy, where queries are being raised – oftentimes with a real purpose to elicit knowledge and sometimes with an aim of breaking down what is held to be the mystique around Mandela – about whether the negotiations in the early 1990s were skewed against the black majority. Was the Mandela project a massive sell-out? Behind these unasked questions – one is helplessly forced to conclude – are justifications for the fancied sell-out: the old people were deferential to white counterparts on the negotiation table. They were scared of the white man.

Commentators tend to approach the debacle – the human tragedy – that characterised South Africa from its inception as a colonial construct to the present moment, where it struggles to integrate its discrete pieces into a coherent whole, much the same way sports fans do a post-match analysis. Armed with the advantage of hindsight and instant replay technology, the analyst can reimagine, but never quite empathise with, what took place in the arena. The act of recreating the past is always subverted by the gaps lying between what has been experienced by the flesh-and-blood actors – the gruelling trial that informs their decisions – and our collective grasp of their actions long after the noise of battle has died down.

It is always tempting, when dealing with a venerated figure like Mandela, for commentators who wish to ascribe to him an unassailable saintliness to urge detractors to remember what it was like back then, meaning that, given the overwhelming odds stacked against him, it would be understandable if Mandela capitulated and quailed before his captors. But all evidence points to a man who was single-mindedly steadfast in his quest to create a democratic and non-racial country of the future. The hardship was a temporary inconvenience, a time when he had to do the groundwork for a radical change, especially in the heady 1980s when repression in the country increased, a sign that the regime was losing its grip.

In a conversation with Richard Stengel, his interlocutor and collaborator towards the writing of Long Walk to Freedom , Mandela is asked if the people of his generation “still have a kind of deference towards the white man that will not exist in the younger generation?”. Or, put differently, if there was some residual inferiority to the white man roiling in the mind of leaders like Mandela. Mandela gave an emphatic no, because, he said,

“When you have been in the liberation movement for so long and you have been in and out of jail … you got our people now not to fear repression, to be prepared to challenge it. And if a man can challenge a law and go to jail and come out, that man is not likely to be intimidated, you see, by jail life, generally speaking. And therefore, even in our older generation, there is no inferiority except that it may be said that we are more mature in handling problems.”

We cannot today realistically know what Mandela et al felt when faced with incarceration. We have his word and the testimony of his compatriots. We do know, however, that it was a grim period, which none of us, certainly not the children of the dispossessed, would wish to revisit. The rash of memoirs by some of the principal and minor players of the hideous time puts a gloss on their culpability, where even securocrats like Niël Barnard come up smelling of roses; even the biographies by some of the warders are reminiscent of people striving very hard to put the events of the past through a colander whereby the grainy truth is sifted out and all we are left with is empty sweetness.

What we can take from what we know about Mandela is that he strove to enshroud himself and those around him with dignity that makes it hard for the enemy to unravel. From their arrival in prison, he insisted on being addressed as Mr Mandela. “You must fight the battle for dignity on the first day you go to jail,” he told Oprah Winfrey in an interview. “We put our foot down and insisted on being respected, even though we were prisoners.” This response cannot – by any stretch of the imagination – be credited to someone who is cowed by others, black or white.

Graffiti commemorating the Rivonia Trial, which ran from October 1963 to June 1964.

Mandela: putting words to eloquent silences

Even though privately concerned if his gamble backfired, Mandela’s readiness to face down the generals who spat fire and promised to put the country to the torch was an act of great courage. It is here, also, that his counter-intuitive stance towards leadership proved equal to the task: he defanged the right wing and brought it to be part of the negotiations towards a democratic future. Through the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which allowed for a long cathartic moment, violators of human rights stepped forth and owned up, thus ensuring some form of closure for their victims.

Not all were courageous, some following FW De Klerk in stalling about their culpability during South Africa’s darkest hours. It is here, I believe, that those who have no idea what instability can wreak – who are oblivious of the devastation in the blood-stained corners of the globe – scoff at Mandela’s gestures of reconciliation. As for the troubles South Africa sometimes find itself in, where the restive youth cries for reforms, it should be borne in mind that Mandela’s main preoccupation was to build this foundation on which our democratic society is based. To use a crass metaphor, a father builds a house but cannot be blamed for the incapacity of his children to improve on the dwelling.

He was not a saint, as he has repeatedly reminded us with his immortal quip that “a saint is a sinner who keeps on trying”. He had many transgressions, some of which would convert into virtues, in the scheme of things. Without verbalising it, he embodied what is credited to one-time president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, that leadership is the other side of the coin of loneliness and that, acting alone, the leader must accept everything alone.

Mandela knew fully well that the ANC was viscerally opposed to the idea of talking to the regime. By the time of the 1985 ANC consultative conference in Kabwe, Zambia, there were rumours of people in the ANC engaging in talks with Pretoria. Aware of the hostility to those talks, which were dismissed as enemy manoeuvres, OR Tambo had to steer a cautious course. But the practicalities of the times – the ouster of the ANC from Mozambique, cross-border raids in neighbouring countries and the clamour of Umkhonto weSizwe fighters that they wanted to go home – coalesced into an acceptance of the reality of a negotiated settlement. It would, of course, be accompanied by an intensification of armed actions inside the country.

Isolated from his support network, watching the carnage against defenceless people being played out on the daily news bulletins, Mandela started tentative steps towards brokering a negotiated settlement. He had consulted Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada and Govan Mbeki about this intention – and was told in no uncertain terms that this was a very bad idea. Much later, alone, Mandela went into action.

Mac Maharaj has said that Mandela was a man who took responsibility for his action. Having decided that the time had come for talks to start – an impulse no different from the moment he decided on armed action – Mandela knew he would have to go against the advice of the prison collective. In time, the collective – which also involved Oliver Tambo in Lusaka – accepted the strategy of talking to the enemy. He accepted that, in the event of the plan blowing up in his face, he would carry the can. In his own notes on leadership, Mandela has written that “the leader’s first task is to create a vision.

“His second is to create a following to help him implement the vision and to manage the process through effective teams. The people being led know where they are going because the leader has communicated the vision and the followers have bought into the goal he has set as well as the process of getting there.”

In the year of celebrating Mandela’s centenary, South Africa is still grappling with the process of getting “there”, the idealised destination no different from the Promised Land for the fabled biblical wanderers. Each generation has come up and defined its mission; land and economic transformation, twin imponderables that have been left unaddressed for centuries, stand out and cry for resolution. A new cadre of leaders asks questions and challenges the answers given as being not enough. Sometimes the questions go to the very legitimacy of the Constitution, an enduring irony given the provenance of the Constitution. What is significant is that the country has come to growth. Mandela has left. Many others, poets like Keorapetse Kgositsile, who were part of the generation after Mandela, have also left and many are, to use the poet’s words, in the departure lounge. The youth, dreaming dreams and hoping hopes, strives to carve out a reality that will ensure their own survival. They too will in time grow old and drag their increasingly disgruntled children into meetings and councils, to plan on how to change their lots. And Chloe, my grandniece, will not remember her hour of helplessness and hunger. The world will move on, secure in its moorings. Mauritian friend, Edouard Maunick, expresses the world’s appreciation in these lines:

I much hope to put my step in his And in unbroken eloquent silence Listen along a long long way To the unique and untold saga Of Mandela conquistador of freedom.

There is no doubt that Mandela, a modern titan, was as much the creator of history as he was its product. He could have chosen other routes to usher in the democracy that we now enjoy; he, however, chose alchemy of head and heart, logic and compassion, to coax out of a complex and volatile society, something of value. The recent transition of power that South Africa has seen, in which President Jacob Zuma – our latter-day Ozymandias – gave way to the democratic impulses entrenched in the ANC and embodied by Mandela’s close confidant, Cyril Ramaphosa, is testament to Mandela’s enduring personal triumph.