Former South African President and anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela died on the evening of Thursday, December 5 at age 95 in his Johannesburg home with his family by his side. Mandela died after a prolonged lung infection, and several other ailments which included a term on dialysis. The lung infection had plagued him since his days as a political prisoner at Robben Island.
Time magazine named the Person of the Year in 2011 “The Protestor” in reference to the Arab Spring, but no one evoked so much positive change in our lifetime as one of South Africa’s apartheid protestors, Nelson Mandela. He began his political endeavors in 1942 after being expelled for joining a student protest from the University of Fort Hare. Mandela joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1944 and helped form the ANC Youth League. He was jailed numerous times prior to his 1964 life sentence to Robben Island.
On February 2, 1990 the South African government lifted the ANC ban and on February 11, Mandela and his fellow Ribonia comrades were released. He said, “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.” And in 1991 he was elected ANC president and worked with the last South African apartheid president Frederik Willem de Klerk, jointly winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.
Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa’s first democratically elected president on May 10, 1994 and kept his promise of being a one-term president, stepping down in 1999. de Klerk said that uniting South Africa was Mandela’s greatest accomplishment.
We can only hope to have more people like Mandela in the world.
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