was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, political leader, and philanthropist who served

as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. He was the country's first black head

of state and the first elected in a fully representative democratic election. His government

focused on dismantling the legacy of apartheid by tackling institutionalised racism and fostering

racial reconciliation. Ideologically an African nationalist and socialist, he served as President

of the African National Congress (ANC) party from 1991 to 1997.

A Xhosa, Mandela was born to the Thembu royal family in Mvezo, British South Africa. He

studied law at the University of Fort Hare and the University of the Witwatersrand before

working as a lawyer in Johannesburg. There he became involved in anti-colonial and African

nationalist politics, joining the ANC in 1943 and co-founding its Youth League in 1944.

After the National Party's white-only government established apartheid, a system of racial

segregation that privileged whites, he and the ANC committed themselves to its overthrow.

Mandela was appointed President of the ANC's Transvaal branch, rising to prominence for

his involvement in the 1952 Defiance Campaign and the 1955 Congress of the People. He was

repeatedly arrested for seditious activities and was unsuccessfully prosecuted in the 1956

Treason Trial. Influenced by Marxism, he secretly joined the banned South African Communist

Party (SACP). Although initially committed to non-violent protest, in association with

the SACP he co-founded the militant Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1961 and led a sabotage campaign

against the government. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1962, and subsequently sentenced

to life imprisonment for conspiring to overthrow the state following the Rivonia Trial.

Mandela served 27 years in prison, split between Robben Island, Pollsmoor Prison, and Victor

Verster Prison. Amid growing domestic and international pressure, and with fears of

a racial civil war, President F. W. de Klerk released him in 1990. Mandela and de Klerk

led efforts to negotiate an end to apartheid, which resulted in the 1994 multiracial general

election in which Mandela led the ANC to victory and became President. Leading a broad coalition

government which promulgated a new constitution, Mandela emphasised reconciliation between

the country's racial groups and created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate

past human rights abuses. Economically, Mandela's administration retained its predecessor's

liberal framework despite his own socialist beliefs, also introducing measures to encourage

land reform, combat poverty, and expand healthcare services. Internationally, he acted as mediator

in the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing trial and served as Secretary-General of the Non-Aligned

Movement from 1998 to 1999. He declined a second presidential term, and in 1999 was

succeeded by his deputy, Thabo Mbeki. Mandela became an elder statesman and focused on combating

poverty and HIV/AIDS through the charitable Nelson Mandela Foundation.

Mandela was a controversial figure for much of his life. Although critics on the right

denounced him as a communist terrorist and those on the radical left deemed him too eager

to negotiate and reconcile with apartheid's supporters, he gained international acclaim

for his activism. Widely regarded as an icon of democracy and social justice, he received

more than 250 honours—including the Nobel Peace Prize—and became the subject of a

cult of personality. He is held in deep respect within South Africa, where he is often referred

to by his Xhosa clan name, Madiba, and described as the "Father of the Nation".

== Early life ==

=== Childhood: 1918–1934 === Mandela was born on 18 July 1918 in the village

of Mvezo in Umtata, then part of South Africa's Cape Province. Given the forename Rolihlahla,

a Xhosa term colloquially meaning "troublemaker", in later years he became known by his clan

name, Madiba. His patrilineal great-grandfather, Ngubengcuka, was king of the Thembu people

in the Transkeian Territories of South Africa's modern Eastern Cape province. One of Ngubengcuka's

sons, named Mandela, was Nelson's grandfather and the source of his surname. Because Mandela

was the king's child by a wife of the Ixhiba clan, a so-called "Left-Hand House", the descendants

of his cadet branch of the royal family were morganatic, ineligible to inherit the throne

but recognised as hereditary royal councillors.Nelson Mandela's father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa

Mandela, was a local chief and councillor to the monarch; he was appointed to the position

in 1915, after his predecessor was accused of corruption by a governing white magistrate.

In 1926, Gadla was also sacked for corruption, but Nelson was told that his father had lost

his job for standing up to the magistrate's unreasonable demands. A devotee of the god

Qamata, Gadla was a polygamist with four wives, four sons and nine daughters, who lived in

different villages. Nelson's mother was Gadla's third wife, Nosekeni Fanny, daughter of Nkedama

of the Right Hand House and a member of the amaMpemvu clan of the Xhosa.

Mandela later stated that his early life was dominated by traditional Thembu custom and

taboo. He grew up with two sisters in his mother's kraal in the village of Qunu, where

he tended herds as a cattle-boy and spent much time outside with other boys. Both his

parents were illiterate, but being a devout Christian, his mother sent him to a local

Methodist school when he was about seven. Baptised a Methodist, Mandela was given the

English forename of "Nelson" by his teacher. When Mandela was about nine, his father came

to stay at Qunu, where he died of an undiagnosed ailment which Mandela believed to be lung

disease. Feeling "cut adrift", he later said that he inherited his father's "proud rebelliousness"

and "stubborn sense of fairness".Mandela's mother took him to the "Great Place" palace

at Mqhekezweni, where he was entrusted to the guardianship of the Thembu regent, Chief

Jongintaba Dalindyebo. Although he did not see his mother again for many years, Mandela

felt that Jongintaba and his wife Noengland treated him as their own child, raising him

alongside their son, Justice, and daughter, Nomafu. As Mandela attended church services

every Sunday with his guardians, Christianity became a significant part of his life. He

attended a Methodist mission school located next to the palace, where he studied English,

Xhosa, history and geography. He developed a love of African history, listening to the

tales told by elderly visitors to the palace, and was influenced by the anti-imperialist

rhetoric of a visiting chief, Joyi. At the time he nevertheless considered the European

colonialists not as oppressors but as benefactors who had brought education and other benefits

to southern Africa. Aged 16, he, Justice and several other boys travelled to Tyhalarha

to undergo the ulwaluko circumcision ritual that symbolically marked their transition

from boys to men; afterwards he was given the name Dalibunga.

=== Clarkebury, Healdtown, and Fort Hare: 1934–1940 ===

Intending to gain skills needed to become a privy councillor for the Thembu royal house,

in 1933 Mandela began his secondary education at Clarkebury Methodist High School in Engcobo,

a Western-style institution that was the largest school for black Africans in Thembuland. Made

to socialise with other students on an equal basis, he claimed that he lost his "stuck

up" attitude, becoming best friends with a girl for the first time; he began playing

sports and developed his lifelong love of gardening. He completed his Junior Certificate

in two years, and in 1937 moved to Healdtown, the Methodist college in Fort Beaufort attended

by most Thembu royalty, including Justice. The headmaster emphasised the superiority

of English culture and government, but Mandela became increasingly interested in native African

culture, making his first non-Xhosa friend, a speaker of Sotho, and coming under the influence

of one of his favourite teachers, a Xhosa who broke taboo by marrying a Sotho. Mandela

spent much of his spare time at Healdtown as a long-distance runner and boxer, and in

his second year he became a prefect.With Jongintaba's backing, in 1939 Mandela began work on a BA

degree at the University of Fort Hare, an elite black institution in Alice, Eastern

Cape, with around 150 students. There he studied English, anthropology, politics, native administration,

and Roman Dutch law in his first year, desiring to become an interpreter or clerk in the Native

Affairs Department. Mandela stayed in the Wesley House dormitory, befriending his own

kinsman, K. D. Matanzima, as well as Oliver Tambo, who became a close friend and comrade

for decades to come. He took up ballroom dancing, performed in a drama society play about Abraham

Lincoln, and gave Bible classes in the local community as part of the Student Christian

Association. Although he had friends connected to the African National Congress (ANC) who

wanted South Africa to be independent of the British Empire, Mandela avoided any involvement

with the anti-imperialist movement, and became a vocal supporter of the British war effort

when the Second World War broke out. He helped to found a first-year students' house committee

which challenged the dominance of the second-years, and at the end of his first year became involved

in a Students' Representative Council (SRC) boycott against the quality of food, for which

he was suspended from the university; he never returned to complete his degree.

=== Arriving in Johannesburg: 1941–1943 ===

Returning to Mqhekezweni in December 1940, Mandela found that Jongintaba had arranged

marriages for him and Justice; dismayed, they fled to Johannesburg via Queenstown, arriving

in April 1941. Mandela found work as a night watchman at Crown Mines, his "first sight

of South African capitalism in action", but was fired when the induna (headman) discovered

that he was a runaway. He stayed with a cousin in George Goch Township, who introduced Mandela

to realtor and ANC activist Walter Sisulu. The latter secured Mandela a job as an articled

clerk at the law firm of Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman, a company run by Lazar Sidelsky,

a liberal Jew sympathetic to the ANC's cause. At the firm, Mandela befriended Gaur Radebe—a

Xhosa member of the ANC and Communist Party—and Nat Bregman, a Jewish communist who became

his first white friend. Mandela attended Communist Party gatherings, where he was impressed that

Europeans, Africans, Indians, and Coloureds mixed as equals. He later stated that he did

not join the Party because its atheism conflicted with his Christian faith, and because he saw

the South African struggle as being racially based rather than as class warfare. To continue

his higher education, Mandela signed up to a University of South Africa correspondence

course, working on his bachelor's degree at night.Earning a small wage, Mandela rented

a room in the house of the Xhoma family in the Alexandra township; despite being rife

with poverty, crime and pollution, Alexandra always remained a special place for him. Although

embarrassed by his poverty, he briefly dated a Swazi woman before unsuccessfully courting

his landlord's daughter. To save money and be closer to downtown Johannesburg, Mandela

moved into the compound of the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, living among miners

of various tribes; as the compound was visited by various chiefs, he once met the Queen Regent

of Basutoland. In late 1941, Jongintaba visited Johannesburg—there forgiving Mandela for

running away—before returning to Thembuland, where he died in the winter of 1942. Mandela

and Justice arrived a day late for the funeral. After he passed his BA exams in early 1943,

Mandela returned to Johannesburg to follow a political path as a lawyer rather than become

a privy councillor in Thembuland. He later stated that he experienced no epiphany, but

that he "simply found [himself] doing so, and could not do otherwise."

== Revolutionary activity ==

=== Law studies and the ANC Youth League: 1943–1949 ===

Mandela began studying law at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was the only

black African student and faced racism. There, he befriended liberal and communist European,

Jewish, and Indian students, among them Joe Slovo and Ruth First. Becoming increasingly

politicised, in August 1943 Mandela marched in support of a successful bus boycott to

reverse fare rises. Joining the ANC, he was increasingly influenced by Sisulu, spending

time with other activists at Sisulu's Orlando house, including his old friend Oliver Tambo.

In 1943, Mandela met Anton Lembede, an ANC member affiliated with the "Africanist" branch

of African nationalism, which was virulently opposed to a racially united front against

colonialism and imperialism or to an alliance with the communists. Despite his friendships

with non-blacks and communists, Mandela embraced Lembede's views, believing that black Africans

should be entirely independent in their struggle for political self-determination. Deciding

on the need for a youth wing to mass-mobilise Africans in opposition to their subjugation,

Mandela was among a delegation that approached ANC President Alfred Bitini Xuma on the subject

at his home in Sophiatown; the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) was founded

on Easter Sunday 1944 in the Bantu Men's Social Centre, with Lembede as President and Mandela

as a member of its executive committee.

At Sisulu's house, Mandela met Evelyn Mase, a trainee nurse and ANC activist from Engcobo,

Transkei. Entering a relationship and marrying in October 1944, they initially lived with

her relatives until moving into a rented house in the township of Orlando in early 1946.

Their first child, Madiba "Thembi" Thembekile, was born in February 1945; a daughter, Makaziwe,