Person

Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela

South African anti-apartheid leader, lawyer, and statesman (1918–2013); a founder of the African National Congress’s armed wing, imprisoned for 27 years, and the country’s first democratically elected president (1994–1999).

Mandela trained as a lawyer and rose to prominence in the 1950s as a leader of the ANC’s campaign against apartheid, co-founding its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, at the start of the 1960s. Arrested in 1962 and sentenced at the 1964 Rivonia Trial, he spent 27 years in prison — much of it on Robben Island — before his release in 1990 and his election as president in 1994 at the head of a negotiated transition that averted a widely feared civil war. His presidency and its politics of reconciliation made him a global symbol of the peaceful end of white-minority rule; he shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with F. W. de Klerk. His long second marriage, to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, was lived almost entirely across a prison wall and became the subject of Winnie and Nelson, Jonny Steinberg’s dual biography.

In the wiki

  • Jonny Steinberg on South African Crime and Punishment, the Mandelas' Marriage, and the Post-Apartheid Era — Jonny Steinberg reads Mandela as a sequence of deliberate masks, each matched to what the political moment required: the expensively tailored Black lawyer of the 1950s, understanding the charge of that image under apartheid; the Castro-styled military man after the ANC was banned; the martyr of the 1964 trial; and, in the 1990s, an avuncular figure radiating joy and cheerfulness that was the deliberate opposite of a deep, raging private grief he judged too dangerous to bring into the politics of a country on the brink of war. Steinberg’s account of the prison letters traces a man making his wife the centre of meaning in his life precisely as everything else fell away — coronating a woman he loved fiercely but, increasingly, barely knew, since she was living her own life outside.

See also