Nelson Mandela
The ANC leader who spent 27 years in prison and then negotiated the end of apartheid instead of the civil war everyone expected.
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison, walked out at 71, and then talked the people who had jailed him into handing over the country. The second part is the achievement. South Africa in 1990 had a well-armed white minority government, a security establishment that expected to fight, an armed liberation movement, and a township war that would kill roughly 14,000 people before the first free election. Almost every comparable transition has ended in civil war or a new dictatorship. South Africa held an election.
He was born in 1918 in the Transkei into a Thembu chiefly family, ran away to Johannesburg to escape an arranged marriage, qualified as a lawyer, and in 1952 opened the country's first Black law firm with Oliver Tambo. He joined the African National Congress in 1944 and pushed it toward mass defiance. After police shot 69 protesters at Sharpeville in 1960 and the government banned the ANC, he concluded that nonviolence had run out of road and co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing, in 1961. Its first campaign targeted power pylons and government buildings, chosen deliberately to avoid killing people.
Prison
He was arrested in 1962 and tried for sabotage at Rivonia in 1963. Expecting a death sentence, he used his statement from the dock to describe the nonracial democracy he wanted and finished by saying it was an ideal for which he was prepared to die. He got life instead, and went to Robben Island, where he broke rocks in a lime quarry, was allowed one visitor and one letter every six months, and studied law by correspondence.
Prison made him. He learned Afrikaans and read Afrikaner history so he could argue with his guards in their own terms. He held the political prisoners together and negotiated small concessions relentlessly. In 1985 President P. W. Botha offered him release if he renounced violence. He refused, and had his daughter read the answer out at a rally: only free men can negotiate. By then he had already opened secret talks with the government from his cell, without telling the exiled ANC leadership, which was a considerable gamble with his own legitimacy.
The deal
He was released on 11 February 1990. The four years that followed were not a love story. Talks collapsed twice. In 1993 Chris Hani, the most popular figure in the movement after Mandela, was assassinated, and the country came within days of exploding. Mandela went on state television and asked for calm, which is generally reckoned the moment he became president in practice. Much of the violence of those years was stoked by elements of the security services who wanted exactly that outcome.
The settlement traded political power for economic continuity. White South Africans kept their property, their pensions, and their jobs in the civil service. The ANC got the vote and the state. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission under Desmond Tutu offered amnesty in exchange for full public confession, which meant getting the truth and giving up prosecution.
Mandela was president from 1994 to 1999 and left after a single term, which in the context of postcolonial Africa was as significant as anything else he did. He wore the Springbok jersey, the emblem of Afrikaner rugby, to hand over the 1995 World Cup, and it worked.
The criticism is about the economics. The deal left land ownership and corporate wealth almost untouched, and South Africa is still among the most unequal countries on earth, with unemployment near a third of the workforce and a governing party that turned out to be corruptible. His defenders answer that the alternative on the table in 1993 was a war nobody was sure of winning. Both things are true, and the argument between them is now South Africa's central political question.