Nelson Mandela

Through much of his life, Mandela was the victim of various forms of repression. He was banned, arrested and imprisoned. For much of the latter half of the decade, he was one of the accused in the mammoth Treason Trial, at great cost to his legal practice and his political work. After the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the African National Congress (ANC) was outlawed, and Mandela, still on trial, was detained.

In 1962, Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment and started his prison years in the notorious Robben Island Prison, a maximum security prison on a small island 7km off the coast near Cape Town.

Released in 1990, Mandela plunged wholeheartedly into his life's work, striving to attain the goals he and others had set out to achieve almost four decades earlier. In 1991, at the first national conference of the ANC held inside South Africa after being banned for decades, Nelson Mandela was elected President of the ANC.

Nelson Mandela has never waivered in his devotion to democracy, equality and learning. Despite terrible provocation, he has never answered racism with racism. His life has been an inspiration, in South Africa and throughout the world, to all who are oppressed and deprived, to all who are opposed to oppression and deprivation. In 1993, Nelson Mandela accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of all South Africans who suffered and sacrificed so much to bring peace to their land.

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