Mandela Born: Anti-Apartheid Icon and Reconciliation Leader

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, in the village of Mvezo in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, the son of a Thembu chief. His given name, Rolihlahla, means "pulling the branch of a tree" in Xhosa, colloquially translated as "troublemaker." A teacher gave him the English name Nelson on his first day of school, following the colonial convention of assigning British names to African children. He studied law at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, joined the African National Congress, and co-founded its Youth League in 1944. He initially advocated nonviolent resistance to apartheid, but after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, in which police shot sixty-nine unarmed Black protesters, he concluded that peaceful methods alone were insufficient and helped establish Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC. He was arrested in 1962 and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964 for sabotage; the prosecution had requested the death penalty. He spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years in prison on Robben Island, breaking limestone in a quarry under conditions that permanently damaged his eyes and lungs. He used his imprisonment to study law and Afrikaans, learning the language of his jailers so he could understand their culture and eventually negotiate with them. He was released on February 11, 1990, at the age of seventy-one. He spent the next four years negotiating the dismantlement of apartheid while preventing the racial civil war that many observers considered inevitable. He was elected president in 1994, served one term, and voluntarily stepped down, refusing to use his moral authority to consolidate power. He died on December 5, 2013, at ninety-five.