Nelson Mandela was a revolutionary man of pacification and had a decisive role in the fall of the regime of South Africa, as for a long time he was one of the leaders of the anti-apartheid but he spent most of the years of anti-segregation in prison.
He was born on July 18, 1918 in the village of Mvezo in Umtata, then part of the Cape Province of South Africa. Father Gadla, was a local chief and advisor to the monarch; he was appointed to office in 1915, after his predecessor was accused of corruption.
He began his law studies at the University College of Fort Hare. Mandela was involved in the opposition to the South African minority regime, which denied political, social and civil rights to the black South African majority, which cost him expulsion from the academic institution. Joining the African National Congress in 1942, two years later he founded the Youth League youth association.
He is a symbol of the equality and anti-racism and won a Nobel prize, Lenin prize for peace and the Sakharov prize for freedom of thought.
After the the electoral victory of 1948 he took over from Xuma’s nation executive of the ANC in march 1950, and the same year he was elected national president of the Youth League of the ANC
He was arrested along with 150 other people on December 5, 1956 on charges of treason. An aggressive trial followed, which lasted from 1956 to 1961, at the end of which all the defendants were acquitted.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s he was also a member of the South African Communist Party. While in prison, Mandela managed to send a manifesto to the ANC, published on June 15, 1980. The text read:
“Come together! Mobilize! Fight! Between the anvil of mass actions and the hammer of the armed struggle we must annihilate apartheid! ” (Nelson Mandela)
During his 27 years of imprisonment, Mandela read many texts, poems, lyric poems, including the poem Invictus which managed to inspire him during his time in prison.