Nelson Mandela

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born in Mvezo, Transkei, on the eighteenth of July 1918, the son of a Thembu chief. He read law at the University of Fort Hare and the University of Witwatersrand, and in 1944 co-founded the African National Congress Youth League. After 1948 — when the National Party imposed full apartheid — he became the principal organizer of the ANC's mass-mobilization wing and, after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, the founding commander of its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe.

He was arrested at a farmhouse outside Howick on the fifth of August 1962, tried at the Rivonia Trial of 1963 to 1964, and sentenced to life imprisonment. His statement from the dock at Rivonia — "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" — became one of the political documents of the century.

He spent the next twenty-seven years in prison, eighteen of them on Robben Island. He refused four separate offers of conditional release. The apartheid regime negotiated his release because they could not govern without him: by the late 1980s every African state, every European government, and almost every multilateral institution had refused to engage South Africa while he was imprisoned.

He walked free on the eleventh of February 1990 at the age of seventy-one. He led the negotiations that produced South Africa's first democratic elections four years later. He was sworn in as the first democratically elected President of South Africa on the tenth of May 1994. He served one five-year term and stepped down voluntarily — a precedent that has shaped African political transitions since.

He died in Johannesburg on the fifth of December 2013, age ninety-five.

He is honored here as the moral statesman of the late twentieth century.