FREE ESSAY ON MANDELA

MANDELA

Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela's greatest achievements were that of turning around the African National
Congress and winning the Nobel Peace prize for his fight to abolish the Apartheid system
in South Africa.
The African National Congress was established in 1912, and in 1919 they organized their
first public action, though unfortunately it resulted in the arrest of several hundred
people. Nelson Mandela joined the African National Congress in 1944, at a time when the
abolishment of the Apartheid was just talk. Also in 1944, in hopes to pull younger people
into the African National Congress the ANC youth league was formed. 
de Klerk unbanned a number of organisations including the ANC and the South Africa
Communist Party in February of that year. 
Nelson Mandela was released, and soon elected president of the ANC who four years later
swept to power with a 63% majority in the first free elections. 
Mandela was elected President of South Africa
Colonial South African Native National Congress (renamed the African National Congress in
1923). They hoped to fight racist laws by building solidarity among South Africa's
diverse and sometimes warring African societies. Seme's speech to the founding
convention, in which he addressed chiefs of royal blood and gentlemen of our race,
suggested the aristocratic nature of the group's original leadership. The ANC intially
fought the color bar through legal and constitutional means, mostly petitions, speeches,
and publicity drives. These efforts accomplished relatively little, but for several years
the ANC membership resisted a more radical approach. In 1930 it expelled its president J.
T. Gunmede because he advocated cooperation with the South African Communist Party. More
an intellectual movement than a political or popular force, the ANC was almost completely
inactive for the next decade.
During the 1940s, a period of unprecedented trade union activism in rapidly
industrializing South Africa, the ANC was revived. Its new president, Dr. Alfred Xuma,
worked with the Communist Party to draft a set of demands, including full political
rights for Africans. He also organized protests against the hated pass laws, but his
overall caution disappointed a new generation of activists. In 1943 young ANC members,
including Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, and Anton Lembede, formed the ANC
Congress Youth League (ANC-CYL). Their passion and political savvy drove the ANC for the
next 50 years.
In 1949, a year after the newly elected National Party government began implementing its
apartheid policies, the CYL took over the ANC leadership. Influenced by the principles of
nonviolent action and passive resistance pioneered by Indian nationalist leader Mohandas
K. Gandhi, in 1952 the ANC drafted the Defiance Campaign against Unjust Laws. The
campaign's strikes, boycotts, and other acts of civil disobedience did not result in any
legislative reforms, but they did help swell ANC membership from about 7000 to 100,000
members within a few months. In addition, the campaign ushered in a new era of
cooperation with antiapartheid groups representing other racial constituencies, such as
the Coloured People's Congress, the South African Indian Congress, and the mostly white
Congress of Democrats.
These groups, together with the ANC, formed the Congress Alliance, which met in 1955 to
draft the Freedom Charter. The Charter called for multiracialism, economic equality, and
full democratic rights for all South Africans, and was adopted by the ANC as its official
program in 1956. Even as the ANC's membership and alliances grew, however, the
organization faced new challenges. Increased harassment by the government resulted in
treason charges against 156 members, and helped provoke the defection of several ANC
leaders, who subsequently founded the more militant, black-only, Pan-Africanist Congress
(PAC) in 1959.
The struggle against apartheid intensified after March 21, 1960, when police opened fire
on a group of unarmed protesters at a PAC anti-pass demonstration in Sharpeville, a black
township south of Johannesburg. Riots ensued, and the government banned both the PAC and
the ANC. Operating underground, Mandela and other ANC leaders concluded that the time had
come to meet government violence with armed resistance. While ANC President Albert
Luthuli refused to renounce pacifism, he gave permission for Mandela, Tambo, and longtime
ANC associate and Communist Party leader Joe Slovo to form a separate paramilitary
organization. Umkhonto we Sizwe, the spear of the nation, was launched in December 1961.
Although Umkhonto primarily committed acts of sabotage against South African industry and
infrastructure, in 1962 its leaders began planning a guerrilla war, hoping to inspire a
popular uprising that would topple the apartheid government. These plans were foiled when
police raided Umkhonto's South African headquarters, at Rivonia. Evidence found there was
used to convict Mandela and others of treason. Mandela, already in prison for inciting
strikes, was given a life sentence and sent to Robben Island. Slovo, out of the country
at the time of the raid, was forced into exile.
With most of its leaders either exiled or imprisoned, in the 1960s the ANC entered a
period of internal turmoil. Factions disputed the role of economic versus political
liberation. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the ANC, now led by Oliver Tambo, was
re-energized by both the student-led Black Consciousness movement and South Africa's
increasingly militant labor unions. The Soweto uprising of 1976, sparked by a police
massacre of protesting students, helped unite disparate antiapartheid elements and heal
the generational rifts that had dogged the ANC. At the same time, the defeat of
white-ruled regimes in Angola and Mozambique brought new hope that the battle against
apartheid could be won.
The government responded to the ANC's growing strength with harassment, detentions,
torture, and assassination. But the crackdown only solidified the ANC's standing as the
most viable alternative to apartheid rule. As international pressure grew in the 1980s,
the South African government began secretly negotiating with Mandela and others. When F.
W. de Klerk succeeded P. W. Botha as president in 1990, he freed Mandela from his
28-year-imprisonment and lifted the ban on the ANC.
Three years later, talks among more than 20 organizations, but dominated by the ANC and
the ruling National Party, led to a transitional government, new constitution, and plans
for the country's first democratic election in April 1994. The electoral power of black
South Africans, exercised for the first time, swept the ANC into a commanding legislative
majority, and Nelson Mandela into the presidency.
Since becoming the nation's ruling party, the ANC has faced the challenge of retaining
and broadening its appeal with considerable success. Under the leadership of Nelson
Mandela, the ANC has crafted an image of pragmatism over militancy that attracts liberal
capitalists and continues to be popular with labor, socialists, and women's groups. Even
potentially damaging testimony about Umkhonto activities before the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, which investigates South Africa's apartheid-era crimes, has
not significantly eroded the ANC's popularity. Most analysts believe it will be
victorious in the 1999 elections, when the likely ANC candidate will be Thabo Mbeki, who
assumed ANC leadership in December 1997.
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