Brief description of Nelson Mandela?
Answers
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela is one of the most quoted – and misquoted – people in the world. This is ironic given that for much of his adult life he could not be quoted at all.
In South Africa, quoting Mandela carried with it the threat of a criminal record and a possible prison sentence. Under the apartheid regime, people who were banned or imprisoned could not be quoted, and Mandela was successively banned from December 1952 and was in custody from 5 August 1962 until 11 February 1990.
Of course the words of an accused uttered in open court were exempt from this restriction, and the words he spoke at his October–November 1962 trial and his famous speech from the dock at the Rivonia Trial on 20 April 1964 were quoted in the media.
Despite this exemption, people still feared quoting him. The final words in his four-and-a-half-hour-long speech at the Rivonia Trial have become the stuff of legend in the history of the struggle against apartheid:
During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. 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.
These words characterise the essence of Mandela and his comrades’ courage, commitment and leadership in the struggle to end apartheid.
In the quarter-century following the end of the trial on 12 June 1964, a silence born out of fear more or less hung over the name Nelson Mandela within South Africa.
For decades it was uttered virtually only in secret or in defiance of the increasingly repressive tactics of the apartheid regime and its agents. Some of his words were smuggled out of prison and released by the African National Congress (ANC) in exile, but Mandela had effectively been silenced.
The silence was broken when, speaking from the balcony of the Cape Town City Hall on Sunday 11 February 1990, the newly released Mandela addressed a crowd of thousands of supporters, who had gathered on the Grand Parade to hear his voice, and an audience of millions through television and radio:
Friends, comrades and fellow South Africans, I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all. I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people. Your tireless and heroic sacrifices have made it possible for me to be here today. I therefore place the remaining years of my life in your hands.
This time the whole world heard and read his words and he continued to be widely quoted. His words were publicised internationally: during the period in which he was locked in negotiations alongside his comrades for an end to white minority rule; when he was campaigning for South Africa’s first democratic vote; upon his election and inauguration as president; during his travels through South Africa, Africa and the world; when he was carrying out his charity work; and upon his various retirements.
Even long after his official ‘retirement from retirement’ announcement on 1 June 2004, when he famously said, “Don’t call me, I’ll call you”, we, at the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory, still process thousands of requests for the authentication of quotations.
We found that many of these, often lifted from websites purporting to contain accurate information about Mandela, were not correct. One of the main ‘quotes’ by which Mandela is misquoted contains, in actual fact, the words of American author Marianne Williamson from her book A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles. She wrote: “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” This quote, and especially Williamson’s closing words, “As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others”, are often incorrectly credited to Mandela.
Our aim in producing this book, therefore, was firstly to provide an accurate and extensive resource for the public and secondly to document in one collection a significant range of Mandela’s quotes. The result is a collection of more than sixty years of quotations. In editing this book we were struck as much by the gravitas of his words – expressed when he was facing the death sentence in 1964 and in struggles against apartheid – as by their simplicity.
We were moved by the way in which his words directly link to his values and principles and these are what make Nelson Mandela one of the most loved and admired individuals of the twenty-first century. He chooses his words deliberately, he means what he says and he wants his audience to easily grasp their meaning. As he said on 14 July 2000:
Answer:
The anti apartheid movement was launched by the blacks of South Africa to fight against . This movement was led by Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress. Nelson Mandela sent to prison for 27 years by the South African government for leading the anti apartheid movement.
Nelson Mandela and his wife Winnie after he was released from prison in 1990.