Profile of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

Nelson Mandela's greatest pleasure, his most private moment, is watching the
sun set with the music of Handel or Tchaikovsky playing.

Locked up in his cell during daylight hours, deprived of music, both these
simple pleasures were denied him for decades. With his fellow prisoners,
concerts were organised when possible, particularly at Christmas time, where
they would sing. Nelson Mandela finds music very uplifting, and takes a keen
interest not only in European classical music but also in African choral music
and the many talents in South African music. But one voice stands out above all
- that of Paul Robeson, whom he describes as our hero.

The years in jail reinforced habits that were already entrenched: the
disciplined eating regime of an athlete began in the 1940s, as did the early
morning exercise. Still today Nelson Mandela is up by 4.30am, irrespective of
how late he has worked the previous evening. By 5am he has begun his exercise
routine that lasts at least an hour. Breakfast is by 6.30, when the days
newspapers are read. The day s work has begun.

With a standard working day of at least 12 hours, time management is critical
and Nelson Mandela is extremely impatient with unpunctuality, regarding it as
insulting to those you are dealing with.

When speaking of the extensive travelling he has undertaken since his release
from prison, Nelson Mandela says: I was helped when preparing for my release by
the biography of Pandit Nehru, who wrote of what happens when you leave jail. My
daughter Zinzi says that she grew up without a father, who, when he returned,
became a father of the nation. This has placed a great responsibility of my
shoulders. And wherever I travel, I immediately begin to miss the familiar - the
mine dumps, the colour and smell that is uniquely South African, and, above all,
the people. I do not like to be away for any length of time. For me, there is no
place like home.

Mandela accepted the Nobel Peace Prize as an accolade to all people who have
worked for peace and stood against racism. It was as much an award to his person
as it was to the ANC and all South Africa s people. In particular, he regards it
as a tribute to the people of Norway who stood against apartheid while many in
the world were silent.

We know it was Norway that provided resources for farming; thereby enabling
us to grow food; resources for education and vocational training and the
provision of accommodation over the years in exile. The reward for all this
sacrifice will be the attainment of freedom and democracy in South Africa, in an
open society which respects the rights of all individuals. That goal is now in
sight, and we have to thank the people and governments of Norway and Sweden for
the tremendous role they played.

Personal Tastes

• Breakfast of plain porridge, with fresh fruit and fresh milk.
  
• A favourite is the traditionally prepared meat of a freshly slaughtered
  sheep, and the delicacy Amarhewu (fermented corn-meal).

Biographical Details

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 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.

The Programme of Action had been drawn up by a sub-committee of the ANCYL
composed of David Bopape, Ashby Mda, Nelson Mandela, James Njongwe, Walter
Sisulu and Oliver Tambo. To ensure its implementation 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
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. He opened a practice in
Johannesburg, in partnership with Oliver Tambo. 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.

A Brief Biography

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).

He was born at Qunu, near Umtata on 18 July 1918.

His father, Henry Mgadla Mandela, was chief councillor to Thembuland's acting
paramount chief David Dalindyebo. When his father died, Mandela became the
chief's ward and was groomed for the chieftainship.

Mandela matriculated at Healdtown Methodist Boarding School and then started
a BA degree at Fort Hare. As an SRC member he participated in a student strike
and was expelled, along with the late Oliver Tambo, in 1940. He completed his
degree by correspondence from Johannesburg, did articles of clerkship and
enrolled for an LLB at the University of the Witwatersrand.

In 1944 he helped found the ANC Youth League, whose Programme of Action was
adopted by the ANC in 1949.

Mandela was elected national volunteer-in-chief of the 1952 Defiance
Campaign. He travelled the country organising resistance to discriminatory
legislation.

He was given a suspended sentence for his part in the campaign. Shortly
afterwards a banning order confined him to Johannesburg for six months. During
this period he formulated the "M Plan", in terms of which ANC branches were
broken down into underground cells.

By 1952 Mandela and Tambo had opened the first black legal firm in the
country, and Mandela was both Transvaal president of the ANC and deputy national
president.

A petition by the Transvaal Law Society to strike Mandela off the roll of
attorneys was refused by the Supreme Court.

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.

During the 'seventies he refused the offer of a remission of sentence if he
recognised Transkei and settled there.

In the 'eighties he again rejected PW Botha's offer of freedom if he
renounced violence.

It is significant that shortly after his release on Sunday 11 February 1990,
Mandela and his delegation agreed to the suspension of armed struggle.

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.