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Who Was Nelson Mandela?

Nelson Mandela is, in the judgement of most of the world, one of the great moral figures of the twentieth century. He spent twenty-seven years in prison under South Africa's system of apartheid, emerged without bitterness, negotiated a peaceful end to white minority rule, and became his country's first democratically elected president. His life is a story of patience, of principle, and of a refusal to hate that has made him a symbol far beyond South Africa. It is also a story that is more complicated than the symbol suggests. Mandela was, for part of his life, the commander of an armed movement. His presidency was a single term, and the country he left behind remained deeply unequal. This article explains his life, the choices he made, and the debates about his legacy, with the evidence on both sides.

Last updated: 13 November 2026

1. Transkei: a Thembu childhood and a royal education

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born on 18 July 1918 in the village of Mvezo, in the Transkei region of the Eastern Cape, South Africa. His father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa, was a chief of the Thembu people and a counsellor to the Thembu king, and his mother, Nosekeni Fanny, was the third of his father's four wives. Mandela was the first in his family to attend school, and it was a teacher who gave him the English name Nelson, in the custom of the time. He grew up in the village of Qunu, after his father's death, under the guardianship of the Thembu regent, Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo, in whose household he learned the traditions of Thembu leadership: the importance of listening, of consensus, and of speaking last.

He was educated at the Clarkebury Boarding Institute and at Healdtown, a Methodist school, and then at the University of Fort Hare, the university for Black South Africans, where he studied for a Bachelor of Arts degree. He was expelled from Fort Hare in 1940 for joining a student protest, and he moved to Johannesburg, where he worked as a mine policeman and then as a law clerk, and where he completed his degree by correspondence through the University of South Africa. In Johannesburg he met Walter Sisulu, who became his mentor and his lifelong friend, and Oliver Tambo, with whom he would later found a Black-owned law firm in Johannesburg. The Johannesburg of the 1940s was a city of racial segregation, of pass laws, of townships and of political ferment, and it made Mandela a political man.

He joined the African National Congress in 1944, and with Sisulu, Tambo and others he founded the ANC Youth League, which pressed the older generation of the ANC to adopt a more militant programme of mass action. In August 1952 he and Oliver Tambo established their law firm, Mandela & Tambo, in Johannesburg. In the same year he became the ANC's national volunteer-in-chief for the Defiance Campaign, a campaign of civil disobedience against the apartheid laws, and he was arrested and given a suspended sentence. In 1956 he was among the 156 people charged with treason in a trial that lasted until 1961, when all the accused were acquitted. The trial, and the years of banning orders and harassment that accompanied it, were the making of him as a leader: he learned the law, he learned the inside of a courtroom, and he learned patience.

2. Sharpeville, Umkhonto we Sizwe and the turn to arms

The turning point in Mandela's life, and in the history of the anti-apartheid movement, was the Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960, in which South African police shot dead sixty-nine Black demonstrators who were protesting against the pass laws. The ANC was banned, and Mandela, who had been committed to non-violent resistance, concluded that peaceful protest had failed. In 1961 he co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation, the armed wing of the ANC, and became its first commander. The organisation's first actions, on 16 December 1961, were acts of sabotage against government installations — power pylons, post offices, government buildings — carried out at night, with the intention, as Mandela later explained, of avoiding loss of life.

The decision to take up arms is the most debated decision of Mandela's life. His supporters argue that it was a last resort, taken after decades of peaceful protest had been met with violence, after the banning of the ANC, and after the Sharpeville massacre had shown that the government would kill unarmed demonstrators. They point to the care that Umkhonto we Sizwe took, in its early years, to avoid civilian casualties, and to Mandela's own account, in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, that he regarded sabotage as the least violent form of armed struggle. His critics argue that the decision crossed a moral line, that it led, over the following decades, to bombings in which civilians were killed, and that it gave the apartheid government a pretext for the repression that followed. The debate is a genuine one, and it reflects a wider question about political violence: whether there are circumstances in which it is justified, and who gets to decide.

What is not in dispute is the consequence for Mandela himself. In 1962 he was arrested, and in 1964, in the Rivonia Trial, he and seven others were charged with sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government. In his speech from the dock, which became one of the great political speeches of the century, Mandela said that he had fought against white domination and against Black domination, and that he had cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony, an ideal for which he was prepared to die. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and on 12 June 1964 he was taken to Robben Island, the prison island off Cape Town, where he would spend the next eighteen years.

3. Robben Island: twenty-seven years in prison

Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison, from 1962 to 1990, most of it on Robben Island. The conditions were harsh: he worked in a lime quarry, he slept on a straw mat in a small cell, he was allowed one letter and one visit every six months, and for many years he was forbidden to wear long trousers or to receive newspapers. He was, in the early years, classified as the lowest grade of prisoner, and he was subjected to the petty humiliations that the prison system inflicted on its inmates. He endured them with a discipline that became legendary: he exercised, he studied, he wrote, and he kept up the morale of his fellow prisoners.

The prison years changed him, and they changed the movement. On Robben Island, Mandela and his fellow prisoners — Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada and others — formed a kind of university, in which they debated politics, studied languages, and taught each other. Mandela learned Afrikaans, the language of his jailers, because he believed that understanding his opponent was a precondition for negotiating with him. He also, over the years, came to the conclusion that the future of South Africa would have to be negotiated, not won by force, and that the white minority would have to be persuaded, not defeated. The shift was gradual, and it was not shared by all in the movement, but it was the foundation of the settlement that followed.

The outside world did not forget him. The campaign to free Mandela became one of the great international causes of the late twentieth century: the slogan Free Mandela was painted on walls and chanted at concerts around the world, governments imposed sanctions on South Africa, and the apartheid regime became, increasingly, an international pariah. In the 1980s the South African government, under President P. W. Botha, offered Mandela his freedom on condition that he renounce violence, and he refused, in a statement read by his daughter Zindzi to a rally in Soweto in 1985. The refusal made him a symbol of unbending principle, and it increased the pressure on the government to negotiate. In 1989, F. W. de Klerk became president, and in February 1990 he announced the unbanning of the ANC and the release of Mandela. On 11 February 1990, Mandela walked out of the Victor Verster prison, a free man, holding the hand of his wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. He was seventy-one years old.

4. Negotiation and the Nobel Peace Prize

The four years between Mandela's release and the first democratic elections were among the most dangerous in South Africa's history. The country was on the brink of civil war: political violence between supporters of the ANC and of the Inkatha Freedom Party killed thousands of people, the security forces were implicated in the violence, and there were those on both sides — white extremists and Black radicals — who wanted the negotiations to fail. Mandela's role in those years was to hold the process together: to negotiate with de Klerk, to reassure the white minority that they had a future in the new South Africa, and to restrain his own supporters when they demanded revenge.

The negotiations produced an interim constitution, a bill of rights, and an agreement on a Government of National Unity, in which the ANC would govern in coalition with the National Party and the Inkatha Freedom Party. The settlement was a compromise, and it was criticised from both sides: white conservatives said it gave away too much, and Black radicals said it gave away too little. Mandela's defenders argue that the compromise was the price of a peaceful transition, and that without it South Africa would have descended into a war that would have destroyed the country. His critics argue that the compromise left the economic structure of apartheid intact, and that it is the reason for the inequality that persists in South Africa today. Both arguments are made by serious historians, and the debate is one of the central questions in the study of the transition.

In 1993 Mandela and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in ending apartheid and bringing about a peaceful transition. The award was, in part, a recognition of Mandela's achievement, and in part an encouragement to the process: the prize was awarded before the elections had taken place, and it was a signal to the world that the transition was real. Mandela accepted the prize on behalf of the South African people, and he used the occasion to pay tribute to de Klerk, a gesture that was characteristic of his approach to the negotiations: he treated his opponent as a partner, and he gave him credit for the courage to negotiate.

5. President, 1994–1999: reconciliation and reconstruction

On 27 April 1994, South Africans of all races voted in the country's first democratic elections, and the ANC won a decisive victory. On 10 May 1994, Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa's first democratically elected president, in a ceremony attended by leaders and dignitaries from around the world. His inauguration speech promised a new South Africa, a rainbow nation, in which all citizens would be equal, and it set the tone for his presidency: reconciliation, not revenge, would be the guiding principle.

His government faced enormous tasks. It introduced the Reconstruction and Development Programme, which aimed to provide housing, water, electricity and education to the millions of South Africans who had been denied them under apartheid. It established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, which invited the perpetrators and the victims of apartheid-era violence to tell their stories in public, in exchange for amnesty for those who confessed fully. The Commission was an extraordinary experiment in transitional justice, and it has been studied around the world: its supporters argue that it allowed South Africa to face its past without a bloodbath, and its critics argue that it allowed perpetrators to escape punishment and that it did too little for the victims.

Mandela served a single term and did not seek re-election in 1999, handing over to his deputy, Thabo Mbeki. The decision was deliberate: he wanted to establish the principle that power in the new South Africa would change hands peacefully, and he wanted to show that the presidency was an office, not a personal possession. The decision was widely praised, and it is one of the reasons his reputation has endured: in a continent where leaders often clung to power, Mandela gave it up voluntarily, and he did so at the moment when he was at the height of his popularity.

6. The elder statesman and the criticisms

After leaving office, Mandela became a global elder statesman. He worked on the fight against HIV/AIDS, a cause that was personal to him — his son Makgatho died of the disease in 2005, and Mandela spoke openly about it at a time when the subject was still stigmatised in South Africa. He founded the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund and The Elders, a group of former world leaders who work on peace and human rights. He intervened in conflicts, he spoke out against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and he remained, until his health failed, one of the most respected voices in the world.

His reputation has not been without criticism. The most serious criticism, made by many on the South African left, is that the negotiated settlement left economic power in white hands, and that his government's economic policies — which accepted the framework of the market, privatised some state assets and maintained fiscal discipline — did too little to transform the lives of the Black majority. The critics argue that the political victory of 1994 was not matched by an economic victory, and that the inequality that persists in South Africa today is the consequence of the compromises of the transition. Mandela's defenders reply that the settlement was the best that could be achieved without a war, that the government's social programmes did improve the lives of millions of people, and that the responsibility for the failures of the years after his presidency lies with his successors, not with him.

A second criticism concerns his personal life, in particular his marriage to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. The couple separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996, after Winnie was implicated in the violence of the late 1980s, including the murder of the young activist Stompie Seipei. Mandela's handling of the divorce, and his public statements about his wife, have been debated, and they are a reminder that his life, like any life, contained pain and failure as well as triumph. The debate does not diminish his public achievement, but it is part of the full picture, and it is recorded here as part of it.

7. Why he matters: the man who chose reconciliation

Nelson Mandela matters because he showed that a country could change without a war. South Africa in the early 1990s was, by most measures, on the verge of a civil war, and the peaceful transition to democracy is one of the great political achievements of the twentieth century. Mandela was not the only person responsible for it — de Klerk, the negotiators on both sides, and the millions of ordinary South Africans who voted in 1994 all played their part — but he was the person without whom it would not have happened. His moral authority, earned in twenty-seven years of prison, was the asset that made the compromise credible, and his willingness to forgive was the example that made reconciliation possible.

He also matters as a model of leadership. He listened before he spoke, he treated his opponents with respect, he gave up power voluntarily, and he admitted his mistakes. In an age of leaders who shout, who divide, and who cling to office, his example is a rebuke, and it is one that is cited around the world whenever a country faces a transition. His autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, published in 1994, is one of the great political memoirs, and it is read by leaders and students in every country.

He died on 5 December 2013, in Johannesburg, at the age of ninety-five, and his funeral was attended by leaders from around the world. The mourning was worldwide, and it was genuine: he was mourned not only in South Africa but in every country where his story had been followed. The biography on this site gives the verified facts of his life. The judgement of his legacy is, for the reader, a matter of weighing the achievement of the transition against the unfinished work of equality, and of deciding what weight to give to each. What is not in doubt is that he changed his country, and that he changed the world's idea of what a leader could be.

Frequently asked questions

When was Nelson Mandela born and when did he die?

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born on 18 July 1918 in the village of Mvezo, in the Transkei, South Africa, and died on 5 December 2013 in Johannesburg, at the age of 95. (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica.)

How long was Nelson Mandela in prison?

He spent 27 years in prison, from 1962 to 1990, most of it on Robben Island. He was released on 11 February 1990, and four years later he became South Africa's first democratically elected president. (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica.)

What was Umkhonto we Sizwe?

Umkhonto we Sizwe, meaning Spear of the Nation, was the armed wing of the African National Congress, founded in 1961. It carried out sabotage against government installations. Mandela was its first commander. Supporters argue that it was a last resort after decades of peaceful protest had been met with violence; critics argue that it crossed a moral line, and that it caused civilian deaths. (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica.)

Did Nelson Mandela win the Nobel Peace Prize?

Yes. In 1993 he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with F. W. de Klerk, the last president of apartheid South Africa, for their work in ending apartheid and bringing about a peaceful transition to democracy. (Source: Nobel Prize.)

What did Mandela do as president?

He was president from 1994 to 1999, a single term, and he did not seek re-election. His government introduced the Reconstruction and Development Programme, established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and began the long work of building a democratic South Africa. (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica.)

What is Nelson Mandela's legacy?

He is widely regarded as one of the great moral figures of the twentieth century, and as the man who prevented a civil war in South Africa. Critics, including some on the South African left, argue that the negotiated settlement left economic inequality largely untouched, and that his government's compromises on economic policy limited the transformation of the country. The debate continues among historians. (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica.)