Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our
time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight
against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize
and the presidency of his country. Since his triumphant release in 1990
from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at
the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the
world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South
Africa's anti-apartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the
nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is revered
everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial
equality. The foster son of a Thembu chief, Mandela was raised in the
traditional, tribal culture of his ancestors, but at an early age
learned the modern, inescapable reality of what came to be called
apartheid, one of the most powerful and effective systems of oppression
ever conceived. In classically elegant and engrossing prose, he tells of
his early years as an impoverished student and law clerk in
Johannesburg, of his slow political awakening, and of his pivotal role
in the rebirth of a stagnant ANC and the formation of its Youth League
in the 1950s. He describes the struggle to reconcile his political
activity with his devotion to his family, the anguished breakup of his
first marriage, and the painful separations from his children. He brings
vividly to life the escalating political warfare in the fifties between
the ANC and the government, culminating in his dramatic escapades as an
underground leader and the notorious Rivonia Trial of 1964, at which he
was sentenced to life imprisonment. Herecounts the surprisingly eventful
twenty-seven years in prison and the complex, delicate negotiations that
led both to his freedom and to the beginning of the end of apartheid.
Finally he provides the ultimate inside account of the unforgettable
events since his release that pro
