Nelson Mandela

(1918 - 2013)

Born into the Thembu royal family in Mvezo, South Africa, Nelson Mandela cofounded uMkhonto we Sizwe, the militant wing of the African National Congress, after the police killed sixty-nine anti-apartheid protestors at a 1961 demonstration in Sharpeville. “Nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy,” he wrote in his 1994 autobiography. “There is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.” He was sentenced in 1964 to life imprisonment for sabotage, treason, and violent conspiracy. Four years after his release from prison in 1990, Mandela was elected South Africa’s first black president.