FREE ESSAY ON NELSON MANDELA

NELSON MANDELA

Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an
international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in
South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his
triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has
been at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As
president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's antiapartheid
movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and
majority rule. He is revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights
and racial equality.
Long Walk to Freedom is his moving and exhilarating autobiography, a book destined to
take its place among the finest memoirs of history's greatest figures. Here for the first
time, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela tells the extraordinary story of his life - an epic of
struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph, which has, until now, been
virtually unknown to most of the world.
The foster son of a Thembu chief, Mandela was raised in the traditional, tribal culture
of his ancestors, but at an early age learned the modern, inescapable reality of what
came to be called apartheid, one of the most powerful and effective systems of oppression
ever conceived. In classically elegant and engrossing prose, he tells of his early years
as an impoverished student and law clerk in Johannesburg, of his slow political
awakening, and of his pivotal role in the rebirth of a stagnant ANC and the formation of
its Youth League in the 1950s. He describes the struggle to reconcile his political
activity with his devotion to his family, the anguished breakup of his first marriage,
and the painful separations from his children.
He brings vividly to life the escalating political warfare in the fifties between the ANC
and the government, culminating in his dramatic escapades as an underground leader and
the notorious Rivonia Trial of 1964, at which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He
recounts the surprisingly eventful twenty-seven years in prison and the complex, delicate
negotiations that led both to his freedom and to the beginning of the end of apartheid.
Finally he provides the ultimate inside account of the unforgettable events since his
release that produced at last a free, multiracial democracy in South Africa.
To millions of people around the world, Nelson Mandela stands, as no other living figure
does, for the triumph of dignity and hope over despair and hatred, of self-discipline and
love over persecution and evil. Long Walk to Freedom embodies that spirit in a book for
all time.