Nelson Rolihlahla MANDELA
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Profile of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
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.
A Brief Biography
Mandela's words, "The struggle is my life," are not to be taken lightly.
Nelson Mandela personifies struggle. He is still leading the fight against
apartheid with extraordinary vigour and resilience after spending
nearly three decades of his life behind bars. He has sacrificed his
private life and his youth for his people, and remains South Africa's
best known and loved hero.
Mandela has held numerous positions in the ANC: ANCYL secretary (1948); ANCYL
president (1950); ANC Transvaal president (1952); deputy national
president (1952) and ANC president (1991).
He was born at Qunu, near Umtata on 18 July 1918.
His father, Henry Mgadla Mandela, was chief councillor to Thembuland's
acting paramount chief David Dalindyebo. When his father died,
Mandela became the chief's ward and was groomed for the
chieftainship.
Mandela matriculated at Healdtown Methodist Boarding School and then started
a BA degree at Fort Hare. As an SRC member he participated in a
student strike and was expelled, along with the late Oliver Tambo, in
1940. He completed his degree by correspondence from Johannesburg,
did articles of clerkship and enrolled for an LLB at the University
of the Witwatersrand.
In 1944 he helped found the ANC Youth League, whose Programme
of Action
was adopted by the ANC in 1949.
Mandela was elected national volunteer-in-chief of the 1952 Defiance
Campaign. He travelled the country organising resistance to
discriminatory legislation.
He was given a suspended sentence for his part in the campaign. Shortly
afterwards a banning order confined him to Johannesburg for six
months. During this period he formulated the "M Plan", in
terms of which ANC branches were broken down into underground cells.
By 1952 Mandela and Tambo had opened the first black legal firm in the
country, and Mandela was both Transvaal president of the ANC and
deputy national president.
A petition by the Transvaal Law Society to strike Mandela off the roll
of attorneys was refused by the Supreme Court.
In the 'fifties, after being forced through constant bannings to resign
officially from the ANC, Mandela analysed the Bantustan policy as a
political swindle. He predicted mass removals, political persecutions
and police terror.
For the second half of the 'fifties, he was one of the accused in the
Treason Trial. With Duma Nokwe, he conducted the defence.
When the ANC was banned after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, he was
detained until 1961 when he went underground to lead a campaign for a
new national convention.
Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the ANC, was born the same year.
Under his leadership it launched a campaign of sabotage against
government and economic installations.
In 1962 Mandela left the country for military training in Algeria and to
arrange training for other MK members.
On his return he was arrested for leaving the country illegally and for
incitement to strike. He conducted his own defence. He was convicted
and jailed for five years in November 1962. While serving his
sentence, he was charged, in the Rivonia trial, with sabotage and
sentenced to life imprisonment.
A decade before being imprisoned, Mandela had spoken out against the
introduction of Bantu Education, recommending that community
activists "make every home, every shack or rickety structure a
centre of learning".
Robben Island, where he was imprisoned, became a centre for learning, and
Mandela was a central figure in the organised political education
classes.
In prison Mandela never compromised his political principles and was
always a source of strength for the other prisoners.
During the 'seventies he refused the offer of a remission of sentence if he
recognised Transkei and settled there.
In the 'eighties he again rejected PW Botha's offer of freedom if he
renounced violence.
It is significant that shortly after his release on Sunday 11 February
1990, Mandela and his delegation agreed to the suspension of armed
struggle.
Mandela has honorary degrees from more than 50 international universities and
is chancellor of the University of the North.
He was inaugurated as the first democratically elected State President
of South Africa on 10 May 1994 - June 1999
Nelson Mandela retired from Public life in June 1999. He currently resides
in his birth place - Qunu, Transkei.
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