Today, millions of South Africans still live in deep poverty, without running water or electricity. Whites still largely control the economy. Blacks speak openly about the “economic apartheid” in the country.
Mr. Mandela understood that he would perhaps never see the South Africa he had envisioned the day he stepped out of prison, but he sought until his last days to achieve that vision.
“When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and oppressor both,” Mr. Mandela wrote at the end of his memoir, “A Long Walk to Freedom.” “The truth is that we are not yet free. . . . We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
A born ‘troublemaker’
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born July 18, 1918, in the village of Mvezo in Transkei, a region bordering the Indian Ocean. His mother was Nosekeni Fanny, the third of four wives of Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa, chief of Mvezo and counselor to two successive Xhosa kings.
Mr. Mandela’s tribal name, Rolihlahla, carried the colloquial meaning “troublemaker” — perhaps a portent, he mused later. He grew up amid the deeply traditional customs, rituals and taboos of the Xhosas, including communication with ancestors.
Shortly after his birth, his family was plunged into poverty when a British colonial magistrate deposed his father as chief. The family moved to Qunu, a village where Mr. Mandela maintained a home until the day he died.
When Mr. Mandela was 9, he was sent, upon his deceased father’s instructions, to live at the Great Place at Mqhekezweni, the seat of the regent of the Thembu people. There, among tribal aristocracy, he was groomed for leadership.
He also was steeped in the severities of a Methodist mission education and discipline. He attended a Methodist boarding school called Clarkebury in the town of Engcobo and later Healdtown, a Wesleyan school in Fort Beaufort.
At 21 and wearing his first suit, Mr. Mandela entered the University of Fort Hare, the region’s only institution of higher education for blacks. At Fort Hare, Mr. Mandela met Oliver Tambo, who would become leader of the ANC, and other young activists. Mr. Mandela studied law at Fort Hare but was expelled because of his activism.
To escape a marriage being arranged for him, he sneaked off to Johannesburg, where he encountered Walter Sisulu, who would become his comrade, confidant, alter ego and fellow prisoner at Robben Island. At first, Mr. Mandela worked as a mine policeman. He took correspondence courses from the University of South Africa. And with Sisulu’s recommendation smoothing the way, he clerked in a liberal white law firm. Mr. Mandela completed his bachelor’s degree in 1942 and enrolled the following year to study law at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
In 1943, Mr. Mandela joined the ANC, which exposed him to a multiracial group of liberation theorists, communists and Africanists who would help shape his political and social views. Five years later, formal apartheid began in South Africa; the National Party came to power and imposed its racist theories about separate development.