Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela, born in
1918, South African activist, winner of the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize, and the
first black president of South Africa (1994-1999). Born in Umtata, South Africa,
in what is now Eastern Cape province, Mandela was the son of a Xhosa-speaking
Thembu chief. He attended the University of Fort Hare in Alice where he became
involved in the political struggle against the racial discrimination practiced
in South Africa. He was expelled in 1940 for participating in a student
demonstration. After moving to Johannesburg, he completed his course work by
correspondence through the University of South Africa and received a bachelor’s
degree in 1942. Mandela then studied law at the University of Witwatersrand in
Johannesburg. He became increasingly involved with the African National Congress
(ANC), a multiracial nationalist movement which sought to bring about democratic
political change in South Africa. Mandela helped establish the ANC Youth League
in 1944 and became its president in 1951.
The National Party (NP) came to power in South Africa in
1948 on a political platform of white supremacy. The official policy of
apartheid, or forced segregation of the races, began to be implemented under NP
rule. In 1952 the ANC staged a campaign known as the Defiance Campaign, when
protesters across the country refused to obey apartheid laws. That same year
Mandela became one of the ANC’s four deputy presidents. In 1952 he and his
friend Oliver Tambo were the first blacks to open a law practice in South
Africa. In the face of government harassment and with the prospect of the ANC
being officially banned, Mandela and others devised a plan. Called the “M” plan
after Mandela, it organized the ANC into small units of people who could then
encourage grassroots participation in antiapartheid struggles.
By the late 1950s Mandela, with Oliver Tambo and others,
moved the ANC in a more militant direction against the increasingly
discriminatory policies of the government. He was charged with treason in 1956
because of the ANC’s increased activity, particularly in the Defiance Campaign,
but he was acquitted after a five-year trial. In 1957 Mandela divorced his first
wife, Evelyn Mase; in 1958 he married Nomzamo Madikizela, a social worker, who
became known as Winnie Mandela.
In March 1960 the ANC and its rival, the Pan-Africanist
Congress (PAC), called for a nationwide demonstration against South Africa’s
pass laws, which controlled the movement and employment of blacks and forced
them to carry identity papers. After police massacred 69 blacks demonstrating in
Sharpeville (see Sharpeville Massacre), both the ANC and the PAC were
banned. After Sharpeville the ANC abandoned the strategy of nonviolence, which
until that time had been an important part of its philosophy. Mandela helped to
establish the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), in
December 1961. He was named its commander-in-chief and went to Algeria for
military training. Back in South Africa, he was arrested in August 1962 and
sentenced to five years in prison for incitement and for leaving the country
illegally.
While Mandela was in prison, ANC colleagues who had been
operating in hiding were arrested at Rivonia, outside of Johannesburg. Mandela
was put on trial with them for sabotage, treason, and violent conspiracy. He was
found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1964. For the next 18
years he was imprisoned on Robben Island and held under harsh conditions with
other political prisoners. Despite the maximum security of the Robben Island
prison, Mandela and other leaders were able to keep in contact with the
antiapartheid movement covertly. Mandela wrote much of his autobiography
secretly in prison. The manuscript was smuggled out and was eventually completed
and published in 1994 as Long Walk to Freedom. Later, Mandela was moved
to the maximum-security Pollsmoor Prison near Cape Town. Mandela became an
international symbol of resistance to apartheid during his long years of
imprisonment, and world leaders continued to demand his release.
In response to both international and domestic pressure,
the South African government, under the leadership of President F. W. de Klerk,
lifted the ban against the ANC and released Mandela in February 1990. Soon after
his release from prison he became estranged from Winnie Mandela, who had played
a key leadership role in the antiapartheid movement during his incarceration.
Although Winnie had won international recognition for her defiance of the
government, immediately before Mandela’s release she had come into conflict with
the ANC over a controversial kidnapping and murder trial that involved her young
bodyguards. The Mandelas were divorced in 1996.
Mandela, who enjoyed enormous popularity, assumed the
leadership of the ANC and led negotiations with the government for an end to
apartheid. While white South Africans considered sharing power a big step, black
South Africans wanted nothing less than a complete transfer of power. Mandela
played a crucial role in resolving differences. For their efforts, he and de
Klerk were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. The following year South
Africa held its first multiracial elections, and Mandela became president.
Mandela sought to calm the fears of white South Africans
and of potential international investors by trying to balance plans for
reconstruction and development with financial caution. His Reconstruction and
Development Plan allotted large amounts of money to the creation of jobs and
housing and to the development of basic health care. In December 1996 Mandela
signed into law a new South African constitution. The constitution established a
federal system with a strong central government based on majority rule, and it
contained guarantees of the rights of minorities and of freedom of expression.
Mandela, who had announced that he would not run for reelection in 1999, stepped
down as party leader of the ANC in late 1997 and was succeeded by South African
deputy president Thabo Mbeki. Mandela's presidency came to an end in June 1999,
when the ANC won legislative elections and selected Mbeki as South Africa's next
president.
Nelson Mandela's Inaugural Address
Nobel Peace Prize winner and former political prisoner, Nelson
Mandela, was elected president of the Republic of South Africa in April 1994 in
the country’s first multiracial elections. Previously, South Africa had been
ruled under the restrictions of apartheid, a policy of racial
segregation. Mandela delivered the following inaugural address on May 10, 1994,
in Pretoria, South Africa, in front of more than 100,000 people.
Nelson Mandela's Inaugural Address
Your majesties, your royal highnesses, distinguished
guests, comrades and friends:
Today, all of us do, by our presence here, and by our
celebrations in other parts of our country and the world, confer glory and hope
to newborn liberty.
Out of the experience of an extraordinary human disaster
that lasted too long must be born a society of which all humanity will be
proud.
Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce
an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity's belief in
justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul, and
sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all.
All this we owe both to ourselves and to the peoples of
the world who are so well represented here today.
To my compatriots, I have no hesitation in saying that
each one of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country
as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the
bushveld. Each time one of us touches the soil of this land, we feel a sense of
personal renewal. The national mood changes as the seasons change.
We are moved by a sense of joy and exhilaration when the
grass turns green and the flowers bloom.
That spiritual and physical oneness we all share with
this common homeland explains the depth of the pain we all carried in our hearts
as we saw our country tear itself apart in terrible conflict, and as we saw it
spurned, outlawed, and isolated by the peoples of the world, precisely because
it has become the universal base of the pernicious ideology and practice of
racism and racial oppression.
We, the people of South Africa, feel fulfilled that
humanity has taken us back into its bosom, that we, who were outlaws not so long
ago, have today been given the rare privilege to be host to the nations of the
world on our own soil.
We thank all our distinguished international guests for
having come to take possession with the people of our country of what is, after
all, a common victory for justice, for peace, for human dignity.
We trust that you will continue to stand by us as we
tackle the challenges of building peace, prosperity, nonsexism, nonracialism,
and democracy.
We deeply appreciate the role that the masses of our
people and their democratic, religious, women, youth, business, traditional, and
other leaders have played to bring about this conclusion. Not least among them
is my second deputy president, the Honorable F. W. de Klerk.
We would also like to pay tribute to our security
forces, in all their ranks, for the distinguished role they have played in
securing our first democratic elections and the transition to democracy, from
bloodthirsty forces which still refuse to see the light.
The time for the healing of the wounds has come. The
moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come. The time to build is upon
us. We have, at last, achieved our political emancipation. We pledge ourselves
to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation,
suffering, gender, and other discrimination.
We succeeded to take our last steps to freedom in
conditions of relative peace. We commit ourselves to the construction of a
complete, just, and lasting peace. We have triumphed in the effort to implant
hope in the breasts of the millions of our people. We enter into a covenant that
we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white,
will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their
inalienable right to human dignity—a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the
world.
As a token of its commitment to the renewal of our
country, the new interim government of national unity will, as a matter of
urgency, address the issue of amnesty for various categories of our people who
are currently serving terms of imprisonment.
We dedicate this day to all the heroes and heroines in
this country and the rest of the world who sacrificed in many ways and
surrendered their lives so that we could be free. Their dreams have become
reality. Freedom is their reward.
We are both humbled and elevated by the honor and
privilege that you, the people of South Africa, have bestowed on us, as the
first president of a united, democratic, nonracial, and nonsexist South Africa,
to lead our country out of the valley of darkness.
We understand it still that there is no easy road to
freedom. We know it well that none of us acting alone can achieve success. We
must therefore act together as a united people, for national reconciliation, for
nation building, for the birth of a new world.
Let there be justice for all. Let there be peace for
all. Let there be work, bread, water, and salt for all. Let each know that for
each the body, the mind, and the soul have been freed to fulfill
themselves.
Never, never, and never again shall it be that this
beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer
the indignity of being the skunk of the world. The sun shall never set on so
glorious a human achievement. Let freedom reign. God bless Africa.
Source: 1995 Collier’s Year Book.