Nelson Mandela, who led the emancipation of South Africa from white minority rule and served as his country’s first black president, becoming an international emblem of dignity and forbearance, died Thursday night. He was 95.
The South African president, Jacob Zuma, announced Mandela’s death.
Mandela had long declared he wanted a quiet exit, but the time he spent in a Pretoria hospital in recent months was a clamor of quarreling family, hungry news media, spotlight-seeking politicians and a national outpouring of affection and loss. Mandela ultimately died at home at 8:50 p.m., local time, and will be buried, according to his wishes, in the village of Qunu, where he grew up. The exhumed remains of three of his children were reinterred there in early July under a court order, resolving a family squabble that had played out in the news media.
© 2013, The New York Times News Service
Nelson Mandela
AN EDUCATION IN PRISON
Mandela was 44 when he was manacled and put on a ferry to the Robben Island prison. He would be 71 when he was released.
Robben Island, in shark-infested waters about seven miles off Cape Town, had over the centuries been a naval garrison, a mental hospital and a leper colony, but it was most famously a prison. For Mandela and others, Robben Island was a university. He honed his skills as a leader, negotiator and proselytizer, and not only the factions among the prisoners but also some of the white administrators found his charm and iron will irresistible.
Perhaps because Mandela was so revered, he was singled out for gratuitous cruelties by the authorities. Friends say his experiences steeled his self-control and made him, more than ever, a man who buried his emotions deep, who spoke in the collective “we” of liberation rhetoric.
Still, Mandela said prison tempered any desire for vengeance by exposing him to sympathetic white guards, and to moderates within the National Party government who approached him in hopes of opening a dialogue. Above all, prison taught him to be a master negotiator.
Mandela’s decision to begin negotiations with the white government was one of the most momentous of his life, and he made it without consulting his comrades, knowing full well that they would resist. In the last months of his imprisonment, as the negotiations gathered force, he was relocated to Victor Verster Prison outside Cape Town, where he lived in a warden’s bungalow.
