Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela was born in 1918 in the village of Mvezo in South Africa's Transkei, into a cadet branch of the Thembu royal house of the Xhosa people; his given name meant "troublemaker." After his father's early death he was taken in as a ward by the tribal regent and raised amid the twin influences of a traditional court and mission schools. This upbringing gave him a sense of order and dignity, and made him aware from very early on that the land beneath his feet was being torn apart by an unjust system.

As a student he was expelled from the University of Fort Hare over a protest, then fled to Johannesburg to escape an arranged marriage, working as a mine security guard and a law-firm clerk while studying law. It was in this city that he met activists such as Walter Sisulu and gradually awakened politically. In 1944 he helped found the ANC Youth League, and together with Oliver Tambo opened South Africa's first black-owned law firm, moving from lawyer to the front line of the struggle.

After the National Party came to power in 1948 and systematically imposed apartheid, tensions steadily sharpened. Mandela first led the peaceful "Defiance Campaign," but after the Sharpeville massacre and the banning of the ANC, the peaceful road was blocked; he went underground and led the founding of the armed wing "Umkhonto we Sizwe." In 1962 he was arrested, and two years later the Rivonia Trial sentenced him to life imprisonment — in court he left behind his famous declaration that he was "prepared to die" for his ideal.

For about twenty-seven years thereafter he was held in prisons including Robben Island, doing hard labour in the quarries, yet he consistently refused release conditioned on abandoning the struggle, holding to his principles. The prison walls did not break him; instead they made him a global symbol of anti-apartheid, and as international sanctions intensified and a "Free Mandela" wave swept the world, the South African government at last began secret contacts with the prisoner.

In 1990 he was released and immediately threw himself into constitutional negotiations with the de Klerk government. He clear-headedly chose reconciliation over revenge, sharing the Nobel Peace Prize with de Klerk; in 1994 South Africa held its first non-racial universal election, and he was sworn in as the first democratically elected black president. In office he promoted the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, trading the exposure of truth for forgiveness, and voluntarily stepped down after a single term, setting an example of the peaceful transfer of power for the newborn democracy.

After leaving office he devoted himself to charity and the fight against AIDS, even publicly disclosing that a relative had died of AIDS to dispel the stigma, until his death in 2013 at the great age of ninety-five, mourned around the world. People honour him as "Madiba," remembering not only a fighter who toppled apartheid, but a man who, having won, knew how to choose forgiveness. As he said, courage is not the absence of fear but the triumph over it — and his whole life proved it.