Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you
can use to change the world.”
… was born in 1918, to one of the royal families of Transkei,
the eldest son of a Temba chief. He ran away from home to
escape an arranged marriage, and went to Johannesburg.
There he studied for an arts degree by correspondence,
enrolled for a law degree in the University of Witwatersrand,
and was later articled to a firm of white attorneys. He became
a close friend of Walter Sisulu’s (then Secretary General of the
African National Congress, ANC), and was increasingly
involved in the liberation struggle. Very quickly his ability and
magnetism made him a focus for the organisation; he was involved in the Defiance
Campaign in 1952, and was in the dock at the Treason Trials of 1956. In 1961 he
was forced underground, becoming known as the Black Pimpernel. His charisma and
planning underpinned everything the ANC did in the crucial years up to 1963 when
he was betrayed, arrested, tried and imprisoned. Nelson Mandela was released on 11 February 1990 and was elected president of the ANC.
In a life that symbolises the triumph of the human spirit over man’s inhumanity to man, he accepted the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of all South Africans who suffered and sacrificed so much to bring peace to the country.He was inaugurated as the first democratically elected State President of South Africa on 10 May 1994. Nelson Mandela retired from public life in June 1999 and currently resides in his birth place.
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