FREEDOM FIGHTER b. 1918
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Nelson Mandella was born in Umutata, Tramskei in 1918. He became interested in politics as a child, listening while the elders decribed the before white people arrived in the land. They told of how they have fought against invasion and the imposition of white supremacy on South Africa. Nelson Mandela vowed then that he too would contribute to the struggle for his peoples freedom.
In Johannesburg he studied law and saw for himself what the colour bar meant for urban blacks: poverty, exclusion from skilled work, and constant harrassment by police, under the pass laws. In 1944 he joined the African National Congress in opposition to this unjust system, and in 1953 was among the leaders of the defiant campaign - a protest in which the laws restricting people because of their colour were activley broken. During the 1950's he consistently spoke out and acted against racial injustice and was repeatedly arrested and tried, and harrassed under banning orders which restricted his freedom. Because Mandela continued to fight, at home and abroad, for a free South Africa, he remained a police target and had to go into hiding, but he was captured in 1962 and sentenced to life imprsonment in june 1964. Nelson Mandela, among thouseands who fight for freedom and justice in South Africa, remains a symbol of the struggle for liberation from the tyranny of apartheid. |