Nelson Mandela

• 1. The Troublemaker

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  Rolihlahla Mandela was born on the 18th of July 1918, in the village of Mvezo, and the name his father chose carried a warning. In Xhosa, Rolihlahla colloquially means "troublemaker". He would spend 27 years in prison and emerge to become the first president of South Africa elected in a fully representative democratic vote. The child raised on cattle herds in Qunu grew into a man the world would know by many names. To the Thembu he was Madiba, his clan name. To the apartheid press he was the "Black Pimpernel". To South Africans he became the "Father of the Nation". How does a boy from a royal cadet branch, ineligible to inherit any throne, end up sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiring to overthrow a state? Why did a man who founded a sabotage campaign walk out of prison preaching reconciliation? And how did a figure once branded a communist terrorist by the right, and too eager to compromise by the far left, come to be regarded as an icon of moral leadership? The answers run through courtrooms, a lime quarry, a rugby final, and a presidency that inherited a nation split in two.

• 2. A Royal Inheritance

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  Ngubengcuka ruled the Thembu Kingdom, and from one of his sons, named Mandela, came Nelson's surname. Because Mandela was the king's child by a wife of the Ixhiba clan, a "Left-Hand House", his descendants were morganatic. They could not inherit the throne, but were recognised as hereditary royal councillors. Nelson's father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa Mandela, was a local chief and councillor to the monarch, appointed in 1915. A devotee of the god Qamata, Gadla was a polygamist with four wives, four sons and nine daughters. Nelson's mother was his third wife, Nosekeni Fanny. When Mandela was about nine, his father came to stay at Qunu and died of an undiagnosed ailment that Mandela believed to be lung disease. Feeling "cut adrift", he later said he inherited his father's "proud rebelliousness" and "stubborn sense of fairness". His mother took him to the "Great Place" palace at Mqhekezweni, placing him under the guardianship of the Thembu regent, Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo. At a Methodist mission school next to the palace, a teacher gave the baptised boy the English forename "Nelson". Aged 16, he travelled to Tyhalarha with his cousin Justice for the ulwaluko circumcision ritual, after which he was given the name Dalibunga.

• 3. From Lawyer To Activist

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  In April 1941, Mandela fled to Johannesburg to escape a marriage that Jongintaba had arranged for him. He found work as a night watchman at Crown Mines, his "first sight of South African capitalism in action", but was fired when the headman discovered he was a runaway. A cousin introduced him to ANC activist Walter Sisulu, who secured him a clerkship at the law firm of Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman. At the University of the Witwatersrand, Mandela studied law as the only black African student and faced racism. He befriended communist and Jewish students including Joe Slovo and Ruth First. He joined the ANC in 1943, and on Easter Sunday 1944 helped found the African National Congress Youth League with Anton Lembede as president. In August 1953, Mandela and his old Fort Hare friend Oliver Tambo opened Mandela and Tambo, the only African-run law firm in the country, popular with black clients facing police brutality. His personal life strained under the work. He married Evelyn Mase in October 1944, but the marriage broke down, and after she left him the divorce was finalised in March 1958. That same year he married a social worker, Winnie Madikizela, in Bizana.

• 4. Spear Of The Nation

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  Inspired by Fidel Castro's the 26th of July Movement in the Cuban Revolution, in 1961 Mandela, Sisulu and Slovo co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe, "Spear of the Nation", abbreviated MK. Mandela became chairman, drawing ideas from the guerrilla-warfare writings of Mao, Che Guevara, and the theorist Carl von Clausewitz. He had come a long way from Lembede's Africanism, which opposed any alliance with communists. By the early 1950s, influenced by Moses Kotane and reading Marx, Lenin and Mao, he had embraced a multi-racial front and the philosophy of dialectical materialism. He once said he was "strongly drawn to the idea of a classless society", which he found similar to traditional African culture "where life was shared and communal". MK planned sabotage to exert maximum pressure with minimum casualties, targeting military installations, power plants and telephone lines at night. Mandela said sabotage was the least harmful action and offered the best hope for racial reconciliation afterwards. The group announced its existence with 57 bombings on Dingane's Day, the 16th of December 1961. In February 1962, Mandela left South Africa in secret to attend a conference in Addis Ababa, met Emperor Haile Selassie I and President Julius Nyerere, and received £5,000 for weaponry from Tunisia's President Habib Bourguiba.

• 5. Prepared To Die

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  On the 5th of August 1962, police captured Mandela along with fellow activist Cecil Williams near Howick. Years later, a former American diplomat, Donald Rickard, revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency, fearing Mandela's communist associations, had informed the South African police of his location. At first he was sentenced to five years for inciting strikes and leaving the country without permission. Then, on the 11th of July 1963, police raided Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia and uncovered paperwork documenting MK's activities. The Rivonia Trial began at Pretoria Supreme Court in October, with Mandela charged with sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government. Chief prosecutor Percy Yutar called 173 witnesses. At the opening of the defence, Mandela delivered his three-hour "I Am Prepared to Die" speech, inspired by Castro's "History Will Absolve Me". The Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer and the British journalist Anthony Sampson had helped polish it. On the 12th of June 1964, Justice De Wet found Mandela and two co-accused guilty on all four charges. Though the prosecution had called for the death sentence, the judge condemned them to life imprisonment instead.

• 6. The University Of Robben Island

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  In 1964, Mandela was transferred to Robben Island, where he would remain for 18 years. Isolated in Section B, he was held in a damp concrete cell measuring 8 ft by 7 ft, with a straw mat for sleeping. The Rivonia prisoners broke rocks into gravel, then in January 1965 were reassigned to a lime quarry, where the glare permanently damaged Mandela's eyesight. He worked on a Bachelor of Laws degree by correspondence with Wolsey Hall, Oxford, though newspapers were forbidden and smuggled clippings landed him in solitary confinement. Mandela turned confinement into a school. He helped start the "University of Robben Island", where prisoners lectured on their own areas of expertise. He studied Islam while attending Christian services, and learned Afrikaans, hoping to win the respect of the warders and convert them to his cause. The losses mounted behind bars. His mother visited in 1968 and died shortly after, and his firstborn son Thembi died in a car accident the following year; Mandela was forbidden from attending either funeral. By 1975 he had become a Class A prisoner, allowing more visits and letters, and he corresponded with figures like Desmond Tutu. In March 1980, journalist Percy Qoboza coined the slogan "Free Mandela!", sparking a campaign that led the UN Security Council to call for his release.

• 7. Only Free Men Can Negotiate

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  In February 1985, President P. W. Botha offered Mandela release if he "unconditionally rejected violence as a political weapon". Mandela spurned it, releasing a statement through his daughter Zindzi: "Only free men can negotiate. A prisoner cannot enter into contracts." From a cell, he had begun reshaping the struggle into a negotiation. In April 1982 he had been moved to Pollsmoor Prison with senior leaders including Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada. He secretly met Minister of Justice Kobie Coetsee in 1987, holding a further 11 meetings over three years. His 70th birthday in July 1988 drew a tribute concert at London's Wembley Stadium, televised to an estimated 200 million viewers. After F. W. de Klerk replaced Botha and the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, de Klerk legalised banned parties in February 1990 and announced Mandela's unconditional release. Leaving Victor Verster Prison on the 11th of February, Mandela held Winnie's hand before the crowds as the event was broadcast live across the world. In Cape Town's City Hall he declared his commitment to peace, while making clear the armed struggle remained "a purely defensive action against the violence of apartheid".

• 8. The Rainbow Nation

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  On the 10th of May 1994, Mandela's inauguration in Pretoria was televised to a billion viewers, with four thousand guests attending. The ANC had won 63% of the vote in the election held on the 27th of April, just short of the two-thirds needed to change the constitution unilaterally. He led a Government of National Unity that included the National Party and Inkatha, with both de Klerk and Thabo Mbeki serving as Deputy President. Reconciliation became the primary task of his presidency. Mandela worked to reassure white South Africans they were protected in "the Rainbow Nation". He met Hendrik Verwoerd's widow, Betsie Schoombee, and laid a wreath by the statue of the Afrikaner hero Daniel Theron. When South Africa hosted the 1995 Rugby World Cup, he wore a Springbok shirt to the final against New Zealand and presented the trophy to captain Francois Pienaar, an Afrikaner. He oversaw the formation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Tutu, which granted amnesties in exchange for testimony and issued its final report in October 1998. The inherited country was deeply unequal. Of 40 million people, around 23 million lacked electricity or adequate sanitation, unemployment stood at 33%, and a third of the population was illiterate. By the 1999 election, the ANC could point to 750,000 houses constructed and 2 million people connected to the electricity grid. By that year, 10% of South Africa's population were HIV positive, an issue Mandela later admitted he had personally neglected, leaving it for Mbeki to deal with.