What problems did Nelson Mandela faced in South Africa by white minorities
Answers
Answer:
who led the struggle to replace the apartheid regime of South Africa
Explanation:
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in South African prisons and was released in 1990 at the age of 71. Photo: South African Consulate
A wreath of flowers sits near his picture at the South African embassy in Beijing. Photo: AP
World
Nelson Mandela's struggle for freedom inspired the world
Anti-apartheid icon and South Africa's first black president, who died aged 95, used his moral force to help heal scars of a torn nation
Nelson Mandela's long walk from apartheid prisoner to South African president remade a country and inspired the world. Mandela died peacefully at home in Johannesburg on Thursday, aged 95, after having spent months in critical condition following medical treatment for a lung infection. His body will lie in state from December 11, before a state burial on December 15.
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
Twenty-three years earlier, on February 11, 1990, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela emerged, greying but unbowed, from 27 years' detention for opposing the white-minority apartheid regime.
It was a defining moment of the 20th century. In freeing the world's most famous political prisoner, President F. W. de Klerk sent an unequivocal message: after centuries of subjugation, millions of other black South Africans would soon be free too.
"I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all," a 71-year-old Mandela said in his first public speech in 27 years. "I stand here before you not as a prophet, but as a humble servant of you, the people." Devoid of self-pity, he reached out to the same people who had jailed him and who had brutalised fellow blacks to preach "true reconciliation" in what was, and remains, a deeply scarred country.
"He came out a far greater person than the man who went in," said the former archbishop Desmond Tutu. Four years after his release - and just a year after he received the Nobel Peace Prize - South Africans would vote in droves to elect Mandela the country's first black president. As that rarest of politicians, a leader imbued with moral force, Mandela was never likely to lose. But his task in office was immense, nothing less than preventing a civil war. "We enter into a covenant that we shall build a society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity - a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world," he declared on being sworn in. He succeeded in preventing serious racial violence in part through his easy manner and mastery of symbolism. Perhaps two of Mandela's finest moments as a reconciler came when he had tea with the widow of apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd and when he donned the Springbok rugby jersey to congratulate the mainly white team's victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Until the end of his life, Mandela remained a unifying symbol in a country still riven by racial tensions and deep inequality. "Mandela, in a sense, was a once-in-a-hundred-year phenomenon," said Frans Cronje of the Institute for Race Relations. "Thinking that South Africa would maintain that level or that standard of governance, of attitude, of role in international politics, I think was expecting too much." Born in the village of Mvezo in one of South Africa's poorest regions, the Transkei, on July 18, 1918, Rolihlahla Dalibhunga Mandela was the great-grandson of a Tembu king. He was given his English name "Nelson" by a teacher at his school. An activist since his student days at the University of Fort Hare, Mandela opened the first black law firm in Johannesburg in 1952, along with fellow activist Oliver Tambo. He became commander-in-chief of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the armed underground wing of the African National Congress, in 1961.