Biography of Nelson Mandela, 1918–2013

Government of South Africa

Early Years 

A young Nelson Mandela during his days as a lawyer.

ROLIHLAHLA MANDELA was born in Mvezo, a village near Mthatha in the Transkei, on July 18, 1918, to Nonqaphi Nosekeni and Henry Mgadla Mandela. His father was the principal councillor to the Acting Paramount Chief of the Thembu royal house.

Rolihlahla literally means “pulling the branch of a tree.” After his father’s death in 1927, the young Rolihlahla became the ward of Jongintaba Dalindyebo, the Paramount Chief, to be groomed to assume high office.

Mandela: Madiba is gone – The struggle continues

Nelson Mandela addresses a jubilant mass rally of 100,000 people in Soweto, February 13, 1990, two days after his release from 27 years of political imprisonment by the racist apartheid regime of South Africa, his freedom the result of sustained political action and armed struggle in South Africa.

By ISAAC SANEY

Historic march by 20,000 women in Pretoria against the racist pass laws, August 9, 1956, today commemorated as Women’s Day in South Africa. The women chanted the phrase “wathinth’ abafazi, wathinth’ imbokodo” which translates as “you strike a woman, you strike a rock.”

TML (Dec. 7) – ON THURSDAY EVENING DECEMBER 5, Nelson Mandela died at his home in Johannesburg, South Africa. The life of the man known to the anti-apartheid movement as Madiba spanned almost the entire existence of the African National Congress (ANC). The ANC was founded under British colonial rule in January 1912 and it was within it that Madiba would play many leadership roles. The ANC provided the umbrella under which all those opposed to white minority rule, from revolutionary communists to trade union activists to dispossessed township youth, came together and worked out a program of struggle aimed at achieving black majority rule.

Symposium Announcement – Africa’s Unknown War: Apartheid Terror, Cuba & Southern Africa Liberation

September 27 & 28, 2013,

University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Africa: Battleground for NATO’s 21st century Strategic Concept

By RICK ROZOFF*, Stop NATO

(May 20, 2011) – THE WAR by major North Atlantic Treaty Organization member states against Libya is in its third month and has been conducted under the official auspices of NATO for the past fifty days.

According to the military bloc’s daily online tally [1], Alliance military aircraft have flown over 7,200 missions and more than 2,800 combat flights since NATO inaugurated so-called Operation Unified Protector on March 31.

The world’s only military alliance stands to match or exceed the 78-day duration of its air war against Yugoslavia in 1999 if not to deploy troops in Libya in what could expand into protracted combat and occupation roles like those in Afghanistan and adjoining nations where the Pentagon and NATO will mark the tenth anniversary of their invasion this October 7.

Recently Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko “Pointed out that the operation in Libya is becoming the first actual litmus test for NATO’s new strategic concept,” [2] a reference to the latest Strategic Concept adopted by the 28-nation alliance at its summit in Lisbon, Portugal last November, the first in this century and since that endorsed at the Washington summit in 1999 when NATO was waging its first war (against Yugoslavia) and incorporating its first post-Cold War recruits (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland).

The war against Libya was also the test case for U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), the first overseas military command launched by the Pentagon since the end of the Cold War (its predecessor, Central Command, was created in 1983), whose Joint Task Force Odyssey Dawn was in charge of bombing runs and cruise missile attacks in and a naval blockade of Libya from March 19-30.

Stop the warmongers! Reject the Halifax Chronicle Herald’s call for the invasion of Africa!

By TONY SEED

IN AN editorial published on April 21st, the day before Easter Friday and Earth Day, the editors of the Halifax Herald Ltd. demanded that the United States escalate the war of aggression against Libya: “The only way forward is to use more force. The sooner NATO comes to this conclusion, the better.”