Profile of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
18/07/1918 to 17/07/2008
Nelson Mandela's greatest pleasure, his most private moment, is watching the sun set
with the music of Handel or Tchaikovsky playing.
Locked up in his cell during daylight hours, deprived of music, both these simple
pleasures were denied him for decades. With his fellow prisoners, concerts were
organised when possible, particularly at Christmas time, where they would sing.
Nelson Mandela finds music very uplifting, and takes a keen interest not only in
European classical music but also in African choral music and the many talents in
South African music. But one voice stands out above all - that of Paul Robeson, whom
he describes as our hero.
The years in jail reinforced habits that were already entrenched: the disciplined
eating regime of an athlete began in the 1940s, as did the early morning exercise.
Still today Nelson Mandela is up by 4.30am, irrespective of how late he has worked
the previous evening. By 5am he has begun his exercise routine that lasts at least
an hour. Breakfast is by 6.30, when the days newspapers are read. The day s work has
begun.
With a standard working day of at least 12 hours, time management is critical and
Nelson Mandela is extremely impatient with unpunctuality, regarding it as insulting
to those you are dealing with.
When speaking of the extensive travelling he has undertaken since his release from
prison, Nelson Mandela says: I was helped when preparing for my release by the
biography of Pandit Nehru, who wrote of what happens when you leave jail. My
daughter Zinzi says that she grew up without a father, who, when he returned, became
a father of the nation. This has placed a great responsibility of my shoulders. And
wherever I travel, I immediately begin to miss the familiar - the mine dumps, the
colour and smell that is uniquely South African, and, above all, the people. I do
not like to be away for any length of time. For me, there is no place like home.
Mandela accepted the Nobel Peace Prize as an accolade to all people who have worked
for peace and stood against racism. It was as much an award to his person as it was
to the ANC and all South Africa s people. In particular, he regards it as a tribute
to the people of Norway who stood against apartheid while many in the world were
silent.
We know it was Norway that provided resources for farming; thereby enabling us to
grow food; resources for education and vocational training and the provision of
accommodation over the years in exile. The reward for all this sacrifice will be the
attainment of freedom and democracy in South Africa, in an open society which
respects the rights of all individuals. That goal is now in sight, and we have to
thank the people and governments of Norway and Sweden for the tremendous role they
played.
Personal Tastes
Breakfast of plain porridge, with fresh fruit and fresh milk.
A favourite is the traditionally prepared meat of a freshly slaughtered sheep, and
the delicacy Amarhewu (fermented corn-meal).
Biographical Details
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born in a village near Umtata in the Transkei on the
18 July 1918. His father was the principal councillor to the Acting Paramount Chief
of Thembuland. After his father s death, the young Rolihlahla became the Paramount
Chief s ward to be groomed to assume high office. However, influenced by the cases
that came before the Chief s court, he determined to become a lawyer. Hearing the
elders stories of his ancestors valour during the wars of resistance in defence of
their fatherland, he dreamed also of making his own contribution to the freedom
struggle of his people.
After receiving a primary education at a local mission school, Nelson Mandela was
sent to Healdtown, a Wesleyan secondary school of some repute where he matriculated.
He then enrolled at the University College of Fort Hare for the Bachelor of Arts
Degree where he was elected onto the Student's Representative Council. He was
suspended from college for joining in a protest boycott. He went to Johannesburg
where he completed his BA by correspondence, took articles of clerkship and
commenced study for his LLB. He entered politics in earnest while studying in
Johannesburg by joining the African National Congress in 1942.
At the height of the Second World War a small group of young Africans, members of
the African National Congress, banded together under the leadership of Anton
Lembede. Among them were William Nkomo, Walter Sisulu, Oliver R. Tambo, Ashby P. Mda
and Nelson Mandela. Starting out with 60 members, all of whom were residing around
the Witwatersrand, these young people set themselves the formidable task of
transforming the ANC into a mass movement, deriving its strength and motivation from
the unlettered millions of working people in the towns and countryside, the peasants
in the rural areas and the professionals.
Their chief contention was that the political tactics of the old guard' leadership
of the ANC, reared in the tradition of constitutionalism and polite petitioning of
the government of the day, were proving inadequate to the tasks of national
emancipation. In opposition to the old guard', Lembede and his colleagues espoused a
radical African Nationalism grounded in the principle of national
self-determination. In September 1944 they came together to found the African
National Congress Youth League (ANCYL).
Mandela soon impressed his peers by his disciplined work and consistent effort and
was elected to the Secretaryship of the Youth League in 1947. By painstaking work,
campaigning at the grassroots and through its mouthpiece Inyaniso' (Truth) the ANCYL
was able to canvass support for its policies amongst the ANC membership. At the 1945
annual conference of the ANC, two of the League s leaders, Anton Lembede and Ashby
Mda, were elected onto the National Executive Committee (NEC). Two years later
another Youth League leader, Oliver R Tambo became a member of the NEC.
Spurred on by the victory of the National Party which won the 1948 all-White
elections on the platform of Apartheid, at the 1949 annual conference, the Programme
of Action, inspired by the Youth League, which advocated the weapons of boycott,
strike, civil disobedience and non-co-operation was accepted as official ANC policy.
The Programme of Action had been drawn up by a sub-committee of the ANCYL composed
of David Bopape, Ashby Mda, Nelson Mandela, James Njongwe, Walter Sisulu and Oliver
Tambo. To ensure its implementation the membership replaced older leaders with a
number of younger men. Walter Sisulu, a founding member of the Youth League was
elected Secretary-General. The conservative Dr A.B. Xuma lost the presidency to Dr
J.S. Moroka, a man with a reputation for greater militancy. The following year,
1950, Mandela himself was elected to the NEC at national conference.
The ANCYL programme aimed at the attainment of full citizenship, direct
parliamentary representation for all South Africans. In policy documents of which
Mandela was an important co-author, the ANCYL paid special attention to the
redistribution of the land, trade union rights, education and culture. The ANCYL
aspired to free and compulsory education for all children, as well as mass education
for adults.
When the ANC launched its Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws in 1952, Mandela
was elected National Volunteer-in-Chief. The Defiance Campaign was conceived as a
mass civil disobedience campaign that would snowball from a core of selected
volunteers to involved more and more ordinary people, culminating in mass defiance.
Fulfilling his responsibility as Volunteer-in-Chief, Mandela travelled the country
organising resistance to discriminatory legislation. Charged and brought to trial
for his role in the campaign, the court found that Mandela and his co-accused had
consistently advised their followers to adopt a peaceful course of action and to
avoid all violence.
For his part in the Defiance Campaign, Mandela was convicted of contravening the
Suppression of Communism Act and given a suspended prison sentence. Shortly after
the campaign ended, he was also prohibited from attending gatherings and confined to
Johannesburg for six months.
During this period of restrictions, Mandela wrote the attorneys admission
examination and was admitted to the profession. He opened a practice in
Johannesburg, in partnership with Oliver Tambo. In recognition of his outstanding
contribution during the Defiance Campaign Mandela had been elected to the presidency
of both the Youth League and the Transvaal region of the ANC at the end of 1952, he
thus became a deputy president of the ANC itself.
Of their law practice, Oliver Tambo, ANC National Chairman at the time of his death
in April 1993, has written:
To reach our desks each morning Nelson and I ran the gauntlet of patient queues of
people overflowing from the chairs in the waiting room into the corridors... To be
landless (in South Africa) can be a crime, and weekly we interviewed the delegations
of peasants who came to tell us how many generations their families had worked a
little piece of land from which they were now being ejected... To live in the wrong
area can be a crime... Our buff office files carried thousands of these stories and
if, when we started our law partnership, we had not been rebels against apartheid,
our experiences in our offices would have remedied the deficiency. We had risen to
professional status in our community, but every case in court, every visit to the
prisons to interview clients, reminded us of the humiliation and suffering burning
into our people.
Nor did their professional status earn Mandela and Tambo any personal immunity from
the brutal apartheid laws. They fell foul of the land segregation legislation, and
the authorities demanded that they move their practice from the city to the back of
beyond, as Mandela later put it, miles away from where clients could reach us during
working hours. This was tantamount to asking us to abandon our legal practice, to
give up the legal service of our people... No attorney worth his salt would easily
agree to do that, said Mandela and the partnership resolved to defy the law.
Nor was the government alone in trying to frustrate Mandela s legal practice. On the
grounds of his conviction under the Suppression of Communism Act, the Transvaal Law
Society petitioned the Supreme Court to strike him off the roll of attorneys. The
petition was refused with Mr Justice Ramsbottom finding that Mandela had been moved
by a desire to serve his black fellow citizens and nothing he had done showed him to
be unworthy to remain in the ranks of an honourable profession.
In 1952 Nelson Mandela was given the responsibility to prepare an organisational
plan that would enable the leadership of the movement to maintain dynamic contact
with its membership without recourse to public meetings. The objective was to
prepare for the contingency of proscription by building up powerful local and
regional branches to whom power could be devolved. This was the M-Plan, named after
him.
During the early fifties Mandela played an important part in leading the resistance
to the Western Areas removals and to the introduction of Bantu Education. He also
played a significant role in popularising the Freedom Charter, adopted by the
Congress of the People in 1955.
In the late fifties, Mandela s attention turned to the struggles against the
exploitation of labour, the pass laws, the nascent Bantustan policy, and the
segregation of the open universities. Mandela arrived at the conclusion very early
on that the Bantustan policy was a political swindle and an economic absurdity. He
predicted, with dismal prescience, that ahead there lay a grim programme of mass
evictions, political persecutions, and police terror. On the segregation of the
universities, Mandela observed that the friendship and inter-racial harmony that is
forged through the admixture and association of various racial groups at the mixed
universities constitute a direct threat to the policy of apartheid and baasskap, and
that it was to remove that threat that the open universities were being closed to
black students.
During the whole of the fifties, Mandela was the victim of various forms of
repression. He was banned, arrested and imprisoned. For much of the latter half of
the decade, he was one of the accused in the mammoth Treason Trial, at great cost to
his legal practice and his political work. After the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960,
the ANC was outlawed, and Mandela, still on trial, was detained.
The Treason Trial collapsed in 1961 as South Africa was being steered towards the
adoption of the republic constitution. With the ANC now illegal the leadership
picked up the threads from its underground headquarters. Nelson Mandela emerged at
this time as the leading figure in this new phase of struggle. Under the ANC's
inspiration, 1,400 delegates came together at an All-in African Conference in
Pietermaritzburg during March 1961. Mandela was the keynote speaker. In an
electrifying address he challenged the apartheid regime to convene a national
convention, representative of all South Africans to thrash out a new constitution
based on democratic principles. Failure to comply, he warned, would compel the
majority (Blacks) to observe the forthcoming inauguration of the Republic with a
mass general strike. He immediately went underground to lead the campaign. Although
fewer answered the call than Mandela had hoped, it attracted considerable support
throughout the country. The government responded with the largest military
mobilisation since the war, and the Republic was born in an atmosphere of fear and
apprehension.
Forced to live apart from his family, moving from place to place to evade detection
by the government s ubiquitous informers and police spies, Mandela had to adopt a
number of disguises. Sometimes dressed as a common labourer, at other times as a
chauffeur, his successful evasion of the police earned him the title of the Black
Pimpernel. It was during this time that he, together with other leaders of the ANC
constituted a new specialised section of the liberation movement, Umkhonto we Sizwe,
as an armed nucleus with a view to preparing for armed struggle. At the Rivonia
trial, Mandela explained : "At the beginning of June 1961, after long and anxious
assessment of the South African situation, I and some colleagues came to the
conclusion that as violence in this country was inevitable, it would be wrong and
unrealistic for African leaders to continue preaching peace and non-violence 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, and to form Umkhonto we Sizwe...the Government had left us no other
choice."
In 1961 Umkhonto we Sizwe was formed, with Mandela as its commander-in-chief. In
1962 Mandela left the country unlawfully and travelled abroad for several months. In
Ethiopia he addressed the Conference of the Pan African Freedom Movement of East and
Central Africa, and was warmly received by senior political leaders in several
countries. During this trip Mandela, anticipating an intensification of the armed
struggle, began to arrange guerrilla training for members of Umkhonto we Sizwe.
Not long after his return to South Africa Mandela was arrested and charged with
illegal exit from the country, and incitement to strike.
Since he considered the prosecution a trial of the aspirations of the African
people, Mandela decided to conduct his own defence. He applied for the recusal of
the magistrate, on the ground that in such a prosecution a judiciary controlled
entirely by whites was an interested party and therefore could not be impartial, and
on the ground that he owed no duty to obey the laws of a white parliament, in which
he was not represented.
Mandela prefaced this challenge with the affirmation: I detest racialism, because I
regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man.
Mandela was convicted and sentenced to five years imprisonment. While serving his
sentence he was charged, in the Rivonia Trial, with sabotage. Mandela s statements
in court during these trials are classics in the history of the resistance to
apartheid, and they have been an inspiration to all who have opposed it. His
statement from the dock in the Rivonia Trial ends with these words:
I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination.
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.
Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment and started his prison years in the
notorious Robben Island Prison, a maximum security prison on a small island 7Km off
the coast near Cape Town. In April 1984 he was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison in
Cape Town and in December 1988 he was moved the Victor Verster Prison near Paarl
from where he was eventually released. While in prison, Mandela flatly rejected
offers made by his jailers for remission of sentence in exchange for accepting the
bantustan policy by recognising the independence of the Transkei and agreeing to
settle there. Again in the 'eighties Mandela rejected an offer of release on
condition that he renounce violence. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts. Only
free men can negotiate, he said.
Click image for map
Released on 11 February 1990, Mandela plunged wholeheartedly into his life's work,
striving to attain the goals he and others had set out almost four decades earlier.
In 1991, at the first national conference of the ANC held inside South Africa after
being banned for decades, Nelson Mandela was elected President of the ANC while his
lifelong friend and colleague, Oliver Tambo, became the organisation's National
Chairperson.
Nelson Mandela has never wavered in his devotion to democracy, equality and
learning. Despite terrible provocation, he has never answered racism with racism.
His life has been an inspiration, in South Africa and throughout the world, to all
who are oppressed and deprived, to all who are opposed to oppression and
deprivation.
In a life that symbolises the triumph of the human spirit over man s inhumanity to
man, Nelson Mandela accepted the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of all South
Africans who suffered and sacrificed so much to bring peace to our land.
He is the true son of Africa. God bless Mandela, God bless Africa.
Nelson Mandela's greatest pleasure, his most private moment, is watching the sun set
with the music of Handel or Tchaikovsky playing.
Locked up in his cell during daylight hours, deprived of music, both these simple
pleasures were denied him for decades. With his fellow prisoners, concerts were
organised when possible, particularly at Christmas time, where they would sing.
Nelson Mandela finds music very uplifting, and takes a keen interest not only in
European classical music but also in African choral music and the many talents in
South African music. But one voice stands out above all - that of Paul Robeson, whom
he describes as our hero.
The years in jail reinforced habits that were already entrenched: the disciplined
eating regime of an athlete began in the 1940s, as did the early morning exercise.
Still today Nelson Mandela is up by 4.30am, irrespective of how late he has worked
the previous evening. By 5am he has begun his exercise routine that lasts at least
an hour. Breakfast is by 6.30, when the days newspapers are read. The day s work has
begun.
With a standard working day of at least 12 hours, time management is critical and
Nelson Mandela is extremely impatient with unpunctuality, regarding it as insulting
to those you are dealing with.
When speaking of the extensive travelling he has undertaken since his release from
prison, Nelson Mandela says: I was helped when preparing for my release by the
biography of Pandit Nehru, who wrote of what happens when you leave jail. My
daughter Zinzi says that she grew up without a father, who, when he returned, became
a father of the nation. This has placed a great responsibility of my shoulders. And
wherever I travel, I immediately begin to miss the familiar - the mine dumps, the
colour and smell that is uniquely South African, and, above all, the people. I do
not like to be away for any length of time. For me, there is no place like home.
Mandela accepted the Nobel Peace Prize as an accolade to all people who have worked
for peace and stood against racism. It was as much an award to his person as it was
to the ANC and all South Africa s people. In particular, he regards it as a tribute
to the people of Norway who stood against apartheid while many in the world were
silent.
We know it was Norway that provided resources for farming; thereby enabling us to
grow food; resources for education and vocational training and the provision of
accommodation over the years in exile. The reward for all this sacrifice will be the
attainment of freedom and democracy in South Africa, in an open society which
respects the rights of all individuals. That goal is now in sight, and we have to
thank the people and governments of Norway and Sweden for the tremendous role they
played.
Personal Tastes
Breakfast of plain porridge, with fresh fruit and fresh milk.
A favourite is the traditionally prepared meat of a freshly slaughtered sheep, and
the delicacy Amarhewu (fermented corn-meal).
Biographical Details
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born in a village near Umtata in the Transkei on the
18 July 1918. His father was the principal councillor to the Acting Paramount Chief
of Thembuland. After his father s death, the young Rolihlahla became the Paramount
Chief s ward to be groomed to assume high office. However, influenced by the cases
that came before the Chief s court, he determined to become a lawyer. Hearing the
elders stories of his ancestors valour during the wars of resistance in defence of
their fatherland, he dreamed also of making his own contribution to the freedom
struggle of his people.
After receiving a primary education at a local mission school, Nelson Mandela was
sent to Healdtown, a Wesleyan secondary school of some repute where he matriculated.
He then enrolled at the University College of Fort Hare for the Bachelor of Arts
Degree where he was elected onto the Student's Representative Council. He was
suspended from college for joining in a protest boycott. He went to Johannesburg
where he completed his BA by correspondence, took articles of clerkship and
commenced study for his LLB. He entered politics in earnest while studying in
Johannesburg by joining the African National Congress in 1942.
At the height of the Second World War a small group of young Africans, members of
the African National Congress, banded together under the leadership of Anton
Lembede. Among them were William Nkomo, Walter Sisulu, Oliver R. Tambo, Ashby P. Mda
and Nelson Mandela. Starting out with 60 members, all of whom were residing around
the Witwatersrand, these young people set themselves the formidable task of
transforming the ANC into a mass movement, deriving its strength and motivation from
the unlettered millions of working people in the towns and countryside, the peasants
in the rural areas and the professionals.
Their chief contention was that the political tactics of the old guard' leadership
of the ANC, reared in the tradition of constitutionalism and polite petitioning of
the government of the day, were proving inadequate to the tasks of national
emancipation. In opposition to the old guard', Lembede and his colleagues espoused a
radical African Nationalism grounded in the principle of national
self-determination. In September 1944 they came together to found the African
National Congress Youth League (ANCYL).
Mandela soon impressed his peers by his disciplined work and consistent effort and
was elected to the Secretaryship of the Youth League in 1947. By painstaking work,
campaigning at the grassroots and through its mouthpiece Inyaniso' (Truth) the ANCYL
was able to canvass support for its policies amongst the ANC membership. At the 1945
annual conference of the ANC, two of the League s leaders, Anton Lembede and Ashby
Mda, were elected onto the National Executive Committee (NEC). Two years later
another Youth League leader, Oliver R Tambo became a member of the NEC.
Spurred on by the victory of the National Party which won the 1948 all-White
elections on the platform of Apartheid, at the 1949 annual conference, the Programme
of Action, inspired by the Youth League, which advocated the weapons of boycott,
strike, civil disobedience and non-co-operation was accepted as official ANC policy.
The Programme of Action had been drawn up by a sub-committee of the ANCYL composed
of David Bopape, Ashby Mda, Nelson Mandela, James Njongwe, Walter Sisulu and Oliver
Tambo. To ensure its implementation the membership replaced older leaders with a
number of younger men. Walter Sisulu, a founding member of the Youth League was
elected Secretary-General. The conservative Dr A.B. Xuma lost the presidency to Dr
J.S. Moroka, a man with a reputation for greater militancy. The following year,
1950, Mandela himself was elected to the NEC at national conference.
The ANCYL programme aimed at the attainment of full citizenship, direct
parliamentary representation for all South Africans. In policy documents of which
Mandela was an important co-author, the ANCYL paid special attention to the
redistribution of the land, trade union rights, education and culture. The ANCYL
aspired to free and compulsory education for all children, as well as mass education
for adults.
When the ANC launched its Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws in 1952, Mandela
was elected National Volunteer-in-Chief. The Defiance Campaign was conceived as a
mass civil disobedience campaign that would snowball from a core of selected
volunteers to involved more and more ordinary people, culminating in mass defiance.
Fulfilling his responsibility as Volunteer-in-Chief, Mandela travelled the country
organising resistance to discriminatory legislation. Charged and brought to trial
for his role in the campaign, the court found that Mandela and his co-accused had
consistently advised their followers to adopt a peaceful course of action and to
avoid all violence.
For his part in the Defiance Campaign, Mandela was convicted of contravening the
Suppression of Communism Act and given a suspended prison sentence. Shortly after
the campaign ended, he was also prohibited from attending gatherings and confined to
Johannesburg for six months.
During this period of restrictions, Mandela wrote the attorneys admission
examination and was admitted to the profession. He opened a practice in
Johannesburg, in partnership with Oliver Tambo. In recognition of his outstanding
contribution during the Defiance Campaign Mandela had been elected to the presidency
of both the Youth League and the Transvaal region of the ANC at the end of 1952, he
thus became a deputy president of the ANC itself.
Of their law practice, Oliver Tambo, ANC National Chairman at the time of his death
in April 1993, has written:
To reach our desks each morning Nelson and I ran the gauntlet of patient queues of
people overflowing from the chairs in the waiting room into the corridors... To be
landless (in South Africa) can be a crime, and weekly we interviewed the delegations
of peasants who came to tell us how many generations their families had worked a
little piece of land from which they were now being ejected... To live in the wrong
area can be a crime... Our buff office files carried thousands of these stories and
if, when we started our law partnership, we had not been rebels against apartheid,
our experiences in our offices would have remedied the deficiency. We had risen to
professional status in our community, but every case in court, every visit to the
prisons to interview clients, reminded us of the humiliation and suffering burning
into our people.
Nor did their professional status earn Mandela and Tambo any personal immunity from
the brutal apartheid laws. They fell foul of the land segregation legislation, and
the authorities demanded that they move their practice from the city to the back of
beyond, as Mandela later put it, miles away from where clients could reach us during
working hours. This was tantamount to asking us to abandon our legal practice, to
give up the legal service of our people... No attorney worth his salt would easily
agree to do that, said Mandela and the partnership resolved to defy the law.
Nor was the government alone in trying to frustrate Mandela s legal practice. On the
grounds of his conviction under the Suppression of Communism Act, the Transvaal Law
Society petitioned the Supreme Court to strike him off the roll of attorneys. The
petition was refused with Mr Justice Ramsbottom finding that Mandela had been moved
by a desire to serve his black fellow citizens and nothing he had done showed him to
be unworthy to remain in the ranks of an honourable profession.
In 1952 Nelson Mandela was given the responsibility to prepare an organisational
plan that would enable the leadership of the movement to maintain dynamic contact
with its membership without recourse to public meetings. The objective was to
prepare for the contingency of proscription by building up powerful local and
regional branches to whom power could be devolved. This was the M-Plan, named after
him.
During the early fifties Mandela played an important part in leading the resistance
to the Western Areas removals and to the introduction of Bantu Education. He also
played a significant role in popularising the Freedom Charter, adopted by the
Congress of the People in 1955.
In the late fifties, Mandela s attention turned to the struggles against the
exploitation of labour, the pass laws, the nascent Bantustan policy, and the
segregation of the open universities. Mandela arrived at the conclusion very early
on that the Bantustan policy was a political swindle and an economic absurdity. He
predicted, with dismal prescience, that ahead there lay a grim programme of mass
evictions, political persecutions, and police terror. On the segregation of the
universities, Mandela observed that the friendship and inter-racial harmony that is
forged through the admixture and association of various racial groups at the mixed
universities constitute a direct threat to the policy of apartheid and baasskap, and
that it was to remove that threat that the open universities were being closed to
black students.
During the whole of the fifties, Mandela was the victim of various forms of
repression. He was banned, arrested and imprisoned. For much of the latter half of
the decade, he was one of the accused in the mammoth Treason Trial, at great cost to
his legal practice and his political work. After the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960,
the ANC was outlawed, and Mandela, still on trial, was detained.
The Treason Trial collapsed in 1961 as South Africa was being steered towards the
adoption of the republic constitution. With the ANC now illegal the leadership
picked up the threads from its underground headquarters. Nelson Mandela emerged at
this time as the leading figure in this new phase of struggle. Under the ANC's
inspiration, 1,400 delegates came together at an All-in African Conference in
Pietermaritzburg during March 1961. Mandela was the keynote speaker. In an
electrifying address he challenged the apartheid regime to convene a national
convention, representative of all South Africans to thrash out a new constitution
based on democratic principles. Failure to comply, he warned, would compel the
majority (Blacks) to observe the forthcoming inauguration of the Republic with a
mass general strike. He immediately went underground to lead the campaign. Although
fewer answered the call than Mandela had hoped, it attracted considerable support
throughout the country. The government responded with the largest military
mobilisation since the war, and the Republic was born in an atmosphere of fear and
apprehension.
Forced to live apart from his family, moving from place to place to evade detection
by the government s ubiquitous informers and police spies, Mandela had to adopt a
number of disguises. Sometimes dressed as a common labourer, at other times as a
chauffeur, his successful evasion of the police earned him the title of the Black
Pimpernel. It was during this time that he, together with other leaders of the ANC
constituted a new specialised section of the liberation movement, Umkhonto we Sizwe,
as an armed nucleus with a view to preparing for armed struggle. At the Rivonia
trial, Mandela explained : "At the beginning of June 1961, after long and anxious
assessment of the South African situation, I and some colleagues came to the
conclusion that as violence in this country was inevitable, it would be wrong and
unrealistic for African leaders to continue preaching peace and non-violence 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, and to form Umkhonto we Sizwe...the Government had left us no other
choice."
In 1961 Umkhonto we Sizwe was formed, with Mandela as its commander-in-chief. In
1962 Mandela left the country unlawfully and travelled abroad for several months. In
Ethiopia he addressed the Conference of the Pan African Freedom Movement of East and
Central Africa, and was warmly received by senior political leaders in several
countries. During this trip Mandela, anticipating an intensification of the armed
struggle, began to arrange guerrilla training for members of Umkhonto we Sizwe.
Not long after his return to South Africa Mandela was arrested and charged with
illegal exit from the country, and incitement to strike.
Since he considered the prosecution a trial of the aspirations of the African
people, Mandela decided to conduct his own defence. He applied for the recusal of
the magistrate, on the ground that in such a prosecution a judiciary controlled
entirely by whites was an interested party and therefore could not be impartial, and
on the ground that he owed no duty to obey the laws of a white parliament, in which
he was not represented.
Mandela prefaced this challenge with the affirmation: I detest racialism, because I
regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man.
Mandela was convicted and sentenced to five years imprisonment. While serving his
sentence he was charged, in the Rivonia Trial, with sabotage. Mandela s statements
in court during these trials are classics in the history of the resistance to
apartheid, and they have been an inspiration to all who have opposed it. His
statement from the dock in the Rivonia Trial ends with these words:
I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination.
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.
Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment and started his prison years in the
notorious Robben Island Prison, a maximum security prison on a small island 7Km off
the coast near Cape Town. In April 1984 he was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison in
Cape Town and in December 1988 he was moved the Victor Verster Prison near Paarl
from where he was eventually released. While in prison, Mandela flatly rejected
offers made by his jailers for remission of sentence in exchange for accepting the
bantustan policy by recognising the independence of the Transkei and agreeing to
settle there. Again in the 'eighties Mandela rejected an offer of release on
condition that he renounce violence. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts. Only
free men can negotiate, he said.
Click image for map
Released on 11 February 1990, Mandela plunged wholeheartedly into his life's work,
striving to attain the goals he and others had set out almost four decades earlier.
In 1991, at the first national conference of the ANC held inside South Africa after
being banned for decades, Nelson Mandela was elected President of the ANC while his
lifelong friend and colleague, Oliver Tambo, became the organisation's National
Chairperson.
Nelson Mandela has never wavered in his devotion to democracy, equality and
learning. Despite terrible provocation, he has never answered racism with racism.
His life has been an inspiration, in South Africa and throughout the world, to all
who are oppressed and deprived, to all who are opposed to oppression and
deprivation.
In a life that symbolises the triumph of the human spirit over man s inhumanity to
man, Nelson Mandela accepted the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of all South
Africans who suffered and sacrificed so much to bring peace to our land.
He is the true son of Africa. God bless Mandela, God bless Africa.
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