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).
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 was 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.
To ensure the implementation of the Programme of Action, 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 the 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. By
1952 Mandela and Tambo had opened the first black legal firm
in the country. 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.
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.
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.
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.