Mandela, Nelson (1918–)

Nelson Mandela was born Rolihlahla Dalibhunga Mandela on July 18, 1918, in the small village of Mbhashe in the Umtata district of the Transkei province in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. As a result of his skillful leadership, personal and political integrity, and charisma, Mandela emerged as the key figure in the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa, ultimately becoming president after the country's first multiracial elections in 1994.

Born into a royal family, Mandela's father was the principal councilor to the acting paramount of Tembuland, and his great-grandfather had been a Tembu king. He credits his early interest in liberation politics to the stories he was told by his elders about the freedom, self-determination, and quality of life they enjoyed before the arrival of white settlers.

When Nelson was 9 years old, his father died; thereafter, paramount chief Jongitaba Dalindyebo became his guardian and raised him in the Tembu royal household, alongside his own children. Growing up in the center of power in Tembuland exposed the young Mandela to the inner workings of its political culture and royal court. There he learned much about diplomacy and leadership. As part of his formal training to become a councilor to the Tembu king, he was sent by Dalindyebo to Clarkesbury Institute, a Methodist boarding school. There he developed his first close cross-racial relationship with the school's headmaster, Reverend Cecil Harris, who took Mandela under his wing. In the mid-1930s he attended Healdtown, a Methodist college, where he developed an early sense of Pan-African kinship with the students he met there.

In 1938, with the continued support of Dalindyebo, Mandela enrolled in the University College of Fort Hare, which was South Africa's premier institution of higher learning for Africans. The outbreak of World War II served to politicize many of Fort Hare's students, including Mandela. In 1941, he was expelled from the university after protesting the outcome of what he regarded as an unfair student council election.

Shortly after returning to Tembuland from Fort Hare, he was informed that an arranged marriage had been contracted on his behalf by Dalindyebo. Faced with the unhappy prospect of marrying a woman he described as fat and dignified, Mandela escaped to Johannesburg, where he briefly found employment as a night watchman at Crown Mines before working as an estate agent for a year. During his first year in Johannesburg, he was befriended by Walter Sisulu, a well-known community leader, who became his mentor and lifelong friend. Sisulu helped him secure employment as an articled clerk with the liberal law firm Witkin, Sidelsky, and Eidelman. There he quickly developed ties with a broad range of political actors, including radical whites and members of the Communist Party.

Mandela's experiences working at the law firm coupled with his well-developed interest in politics pushed him to complete his B.A. and to enroll at the Afrikaans University of Witwatersrand, becoming the first black student ever admitted to its law school. There he studied alongside white and Indian students, was exposed to a range of radical ideas, and significantly made enduring friendships with Joe Slovo, Ruth First, and Bram Fischer, three of South Africa's leading white Marxists.

...