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Summary
Summary
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 anti-apartheid 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. 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. Herecounts 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 accoun
Author Notes
Nelson Mandela was born Rolihlahla Mandela on July 18, 1918 in Mvezo, South Africa. His teacher later named him Nelson as part of a custom to give all schoolchildren Christian names. He briefly attended University College of Fort Hare but was expelled after taking part in a protest with Oliver Tambo, with whom he later operated the nation's first black law firm. He eventually completed a bachelor's degree through correspondence courses and studied law at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He left without graduating in 1948.
Mandela was part of the African National Congress (ANC) and spent many years as a freedom fighter. When the South African government outlawed the ANC after the Sharpeville Massacre, he went underground to form a new military wing of the organization. In 1964, he was sentenced to life in prison for sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government. Instead of testifying at the trial, he opted to give a speech that was more than four hours long and ended with a defiant statement. While in prison, he received a bachelor's degree in law in absentia from the University of South Africa.
In 1990, Mandela was released from prison after 27 years. He served as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999, and was the first South African president to be elected in a fully representative democratic election. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with former South African President F.W. de Klerk in 1993 for transitioning the nation from a system of racial segregation. After leaving the presidency, Mandela retired from active politics, but continued championing causes such as human rights, world peace and the fight against AIDS. He died on November 5, 2013 at the age of 95.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and the first democratically elected president of South Africa, Mandela began his autobiography during the course of his 27 years in prison. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Gr. 9^-12. Mandela tells the dramatic story of the long struggle against apartheid, his 27 years in prison, and his election as the first black president of a new, democratic South Africa.
Choice Review
Mandela's autobiography would be a significant publishing event even if, as a man and a leader, he had triumphed less signally and dramatically over lengthy incarceration, entrenched white domination, and decades of bitter racial conflict. His book is indeed a testament to those striking victories. But it is also inspirational, in the best sense: Mandela's struggle, his reflections on the complexities of that struggle, and the way in which he now judges his own acts and the acts of antagonistic Afrikaners, is deeply moving. He conveys with great immediacy and feeling how the idiocy of apartheid transformed a comparatively bookish, respectful, bourgeois young African lawyer into a popular leader, an insurgent strategist, and, ultimately, into a gifted statesman. Had Mandela's powerful printed words been absorbed by Afrikaners in the 1950s and '60s, apartheid itself could never have captured the hearts and minds of so many white South Africans. Every library will want this riveting and appealing book. Good photographs and an ample index. R. I. Rotberg; Harvard University
Guardian Review
In an age when every junior minister keeps a diary with an eye to eventual publication, the political memoir has become as dumbed down as the A-level. Nelson Mandela's, however, is the real McCoy, a genuinely uplifting story of one man's unswerving commitment to an ideal that no amount of hardship, brutality or 27 years in prison could destroy. Whether I'd have been as moved without Danny Glover's reading and the occasional burst of emotional patriotic singing, I'm not sure. Glover's authentic pronunciation of African names, complete with the strange tongue clicking that singer Miriam Makeba goes in for, immediately takes you to the heart of the Transkei and the Xhosa, Mandela's homeland and tribe, an aspect of his childhood about which until now I knew nothing. Mandella's was an idyllic childhood (apart from being circumcised with an assegai at 16), and it's tempting to speculate how different history might have been if he had followed family tradition and become a tribal councillor. There are moments that stay with you for ever: the crowd's rapture when Mandela and the others are sentenced to life, not death as everyone expected, and the moment when he is released and you hear the voice of the man himself giving that famous freedom speech. Great man, great memoirs. Caption: article-audio27.2 In an age when every junior minister keeps a diary with an eye to eventual publication, the political memoir has become as dumbed down as the A-level. Nelson Mandela's, however, is the real McCoy, a genuinely uplifting story of one man's unswerving commitment to an ideal that no amount of hardship, brutality or 27 years in prison could destroy. - Sue Arnold.
Kirkus Review
In 1918 Nelson Mandela was born, the son of a tribal chief in the Xhosa nation. In 1994 has was elected the first black president of a South Africa newly free of apartheid. In the 76 intervening years, Mandela's path was the path of his pepole and his country: painful, obstacle-ridden, often seemingly impassable. Here the leader of black South Africans' fight for freedom details each step of that journey. He writes with respect and affection of the traditional culture in which he was raised, even of his ritual circumcision at the age of 16; and he describes with remarkable dispassion the events that aided his growing politicization, such as the failed miners' strike of 1946; his quest for dignity even while imprisoned on Robben Island; and the dramatic negotiations with President F.W. De Klerk that culminated in a peaceful revolution in South Africa. This memoir is remarkably free of polemics, self-pity, and self-aggrandizement. It is the work ofo a man who has led by action and example--a man who is one of the few genuine heroes we have.
Library Journal Review
Mandela's ``long walk'' begins with his youth and moves up to his election as South Africa's president last spring. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
