Who was Nelson Mandela?
Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) was the South African anti-apartheid leader who spent twenty-seven years in prison for opposing white-minority rule, then became the country’s first Black president in 1994 — guiding the transition from apartheid to democracy without the civil war the world expected.
Last updated: October 2026
His choice of reconciliation over revenge — embodied in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — made him a global moral icon and earned him the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize. He remains the most universally admired political figure of the late 20th century.
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born on 18 July 1918 in the village of Mvezo, in the Transkei region of what is now South Africa’s Eastern Cape. His father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa, was a chief of the Thembu people and a counsellor to the Thembu king, and the young Mandela grew up in a world of African royalty, customary law and cattle herding. His first name, Rolihlahla, means pulling the branch of a tree in Xhosa, and is colloquially understood as troublemaker. The name Nelson was given to him by a schoolteacher, following the custom of giving African children English names. When his father died, Mandela became the ward of the Thembu regent, Jongintaba Dalindyebo, who raised him alongside his own sons and prepared him, he later recalled, for a life of counsel and leadership.
Mandela attended the University of Fort Hare, the leading institution of higher education for Black South Africans, where he studied for a Bachelor of Arts degree. He was expelled in 1940 for joining a student protest over the quality of the food, a small rebellion that foreshadowed larger ones. Rather than accept an arranged marriage chosen by the regent, he fled to Johannesburg in 1941, where he worked as a night watchman and a clerk and completed his degree by correspondence through the University of South Africa. In Johannesburg he met Walter Sisulu, who would become a lifelong friend and comrade, and through Sisulu he met the leaders of the African National Congress, the organisation to which he would devote his life.
In Johannesburg, Mandela also studied law, first at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was one of very few Black students, and later through articles with a law firm. In 1944, with Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and others, he founded the ANC Youth League, which pushed the older ANC leadership toward mass action, strikes and boycotts rather than polite petitions. In 1952, with Tambo, he opened South Africa’s first Black law firm, in Johannesburg, offering affordable legal help to Black South Africans who could not otherwise afford a lawyer. The same year he led the ANC’s Defiance Campaign, a campaign of deliberate disobedience to apartheid laws, for which he received a suspended prison sentence. He was becoming the most visible face of a movement that the state was determined to crush.
The apartheid system that Mandela opposed was a formal regime of racial segregation and white minority rule. It classified South Africans by race, restricted where Black people could live, work and travel, denied them the vote, and reserved the best land, schools and jobs for the white minority. The ANC had long opposed it by nonviolent means. The turning point came on 21 March 1960, when police opened fire on unarmed protesters at Sharpeville, killing 69 people, most of them shot in the back as they fled. The massacre shocked the world, the government banned the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress, and Mandela concluded that nonviolent protest alone would no longer be enough.
Mandela co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation, the ANC’s armed wing, in 1961, and became its first commander. Its strategy was sabotage against government installations, deliberately aimed at property rather than people, in an attempt to force the government to negotiate without descending into the civil war Mandela feared. Mandela travelled abroad to seek support and military training, visiting several African countries and London, before returning to South Africa, where he was arrested in 1962 and sentenced to five years in prison for leaving the country illegally and inciting strikes. While he was serving that sentence, police raided the underground movement’s headquarters at Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, near Johannesburg, and seized documents that led to the Rivonia Trial of 1963 to 1964.
In the dock at Rivonia, Mandela and his co-accused faced the death penalty for sabotage and conspiracy. Mandela’s statement from the dock, in which he explained his commitment to a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities, became one of the most famous speeches of the twentieth century. The court spared the accused the death penalty and sentenced Mandela and seven others to life imprisonment. As he left the courtroom, Mandela knew that he might never be free again. He was forty-six years old.
Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years in prison on Robben Island, a windswept island off Cape Town that had served for centuries as a place of exile. Prisoners were kept in small cells, forced to break rocks in a lime quarry under the sun, fed meagre rations, and allowed only a few letters and visits a year. Mandela, prisoner number 46664, slept on a straw mat on the floor of a cell barely wider than his body. Yet the prison became, in the words of those who were there, a university: prisoners studied, debated, taught one another, and smuggled in news of the outside world. Mandela, who had begun studying law by correspondence, continued his education behind bars, and he became the acknowledged leader of the ANC prisoners, negotiating with the warders and maintaining discipline among men who had every reason to despair.
Over the decades, Mandela became the most famous political prisoner in the world. The campaign to free him grew into one of the great moral causes of the age, and the pressure of international sanctions, boycotts and divestment campaigns isolated the apartheid regime. Inside South Africa, resistance grew, and the country slid toward ungovernability. In the 1980s, while Mandela was still in prison, the government began secret contacts with him, and he was moved from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town and later to the Victor Verster Prison near Paarl, where he lived in a warder’s house in relative comfort and conducted the negotiations that would lead to his release. Through it all, he refused offers of conditional freedom that would have required him to renounce the armed struggle, insisting that only a free man could negotiate.
On 11 February 1990, Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison a free man, holding the hand of his then wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, before a crowd of thousands and a global television audience. He was seventy-one years old and had spent more than a quarter of his life in prison. In his first public speech he committed himself to peace and to negotiations with the government of President F. W. de Klerk, and he called on his supporters to lay down their weapons. The negotiations that followed were long and difficult, and the country several times came close to civil war, but they produced an interim constitution, a democratic election, and a peaceful transfer of power.
In April 1994, South Africa held its first democratic election in which people of all races could vote. The ANC won decisively, and on 10 May 1994 Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the country’s first Black president. His government faced a country scarred by decades of injustice: a deeply unequal society, a distrustful security establishment, and a white minority that feared retribution. Mandela’s answer was reconciliation. His government pursued the Reconstruction and Development Programme, which aimed to provide housing, water, electricity, education and health care to the millions who had been denied them, and it created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, which offered amnesty to those who fully confessed to politically motivated crimes, and a public hearing to victims. The commission was imperfect, and many felt it delivered too little justice, but it allowed the country to confront its past in public rather than bury it.
Mandela’s presidency became a symbol of reconciliation in gestures as much as in policy. In 1995, wearing the green jersey of the Springboks, the rugby team long associated with white South Africa, he presented the World Cup trophy to the victorious South African captain, Francois Pienaar, after the team’s victory over New Zealand. The moment, watched by millions, became a symbol of a country trying to imagine itself as one nation. In 1993, before his election, Mandela had shared the Nobel Peace Prize with F. W. de Klerk for their work in bringing apartheid to a negotiated end, and after his presidency he became a global elder statesman, campaigning against HIV/AIDS, mediating conflicts, and founding The Elders, a group of former leaders devoted to peace and human rights.
Mandela retired from the presidency in 1999 after a single term, keeping a promise that surprised a continent where leaders often clung to power for life. He was succeeded by his deputy, Thabo Mbeki. In his later years he withdrew gradually from public life, and he died on 5 December 2013 in Johannesburg, at the age of ninety-five. South Africa gave him a state funeral, and world leaders travelled to pay their respects. Mandela’s legacy is debated, as all legacies are: his government’s economic record, its handling of HIV/AIDS, and the persistence of inequality in South Africa are all subjects of serious criticism. But the central fact of his life is beyond dispute. He led a country out of a system of racial tyranny without the race war that almost everyone expected, and he did it by insisting that his jailers, and the people who had voted for them, belonged in the new South Africa too.
- NobelPrize.org, “Nelson Mandela — Biographical.”
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Nelson Mandela.”
- Mandela, Nelson, Long Walk to Freedom (Little, Brown, 1994).
- Sampson, Anthony, Mandela: The Authorised Biography (Knopf, 1999).