Nelson Mandela

In the early 1990s, serious observers inside and outside South Africa asked whether the end of apartheid would arrive through an election or through a war. Hostel militias fought township self-defence units on the Reef, KwaZulu-Natal was in a state of low-level civil conflict, white right-wing groups were arming, and elements of the security forces were fuelling the killing. The country had a minority government that controlled a powerful army and a liberation movement that had waged an armed struggle for three decades.

That the transition ended in a peaceful vote on 27 April 1994, followed by a government in which former enemies sat at the same cabinet table, owes a great deal to many people: negotiators on all sides, F.W. de Klerk, church leaders, peace monitors and millions of voters. It owes an outsized share to Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. This profile follows his life in six parts and uses data where the record allows, on prison, on political violence, on the 1994 vote and on what came after. It also sets out where his project fell short.

Mandela arrived on Robben Island on 13 June 1964 and was given the number 466/64: the 466th prisoner admitted in 1964. For the next 17 years and nine months he lived in a small cell in the isolation block, broke lime in the island's quarry, and was allowed very few visits and letters. He was not permitted to attend the funerals of his mother in 1968 or of his eldest son, Thembekile, killed in a car accident in 1969.

The island became known among prisoners as a university. Mandela studied, argued, and learned Afrikaans, and he made a point of understanding the warders and the history of the people who held him. That habit mattered later. In March 1982 he was moved to Pollsmoor Prison in Tokai, and after prostate surgery in 1985 he was held apart from his comrades, which gave him room to open secret contact with the government. In 1988 he was treated for tuberculosis at Tygerberg Hospital and a Constantiaberg clinic, then moved to a warder's house at Victor Verster Prison near Paarl, where he met P.W. Botha in 1989 and F.W. de Klerk later that year.

On 2 February 1990 de Klerk announced the unbanning of the ANC and other organisations. Nine days later, on 11 February, Mandela walked out of the Victor Verster gate and was driven to Cape Town, where he spoke to a vast crowd from the balcony of City Hall on the Grand Parade. He was 71.

More than 19.7 million votes were counted in the election held from 26 to 29 April 1994, a turnout of 86.9 percent of the estimated eligible voters, as there was no voters' roll. The ANC won 62.65 percent and 252 of 400 seats, just short of the two-thirds that would have let it write the constitution alone. Under the interim constitution, any party with 20 seats or more was entitled to cabinet posts. The result was a Government of National Unity in which Mandela was president, de Klerk was one of two deputy presidents, and Buthelezi, whose supporters had been fighting the ANC's for a decade, became Minister of Home Affairs.

Mandela treated reconciliation as a governing task, not a slogan. He kept many apartheid-era civil servants and generals in place, and he made a series of symbolic gestures aimed squarely at white, and especially Afrikaner, anxieties. He went to Orania to take tea with Betsie Verwoerd, widow of the architect of apartheid, and lunched with Percy Yutar, the prosecutor who had sought his conviction at Rivonia. At the 1995 Rugby World Cup final in Johannesburg he walked onto the field in a Springbok jersey, the emblem of a sport long associated with white nationalism, to present the trophy to captain Francois Pienaar.

The institutional work mattered more. The unity government produced a new constitution, adopted in 1996, with a justiciable bill of rights and a Constitutional Court. It created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, which offered amnesty in exchange for full disclosure and handed its report to Mandela in October 1998. The National Party left the unity government in mid-1996, but the constitutional order it had helped build held.

In retirement Mandela worked through his foundations, married Graça Machel on his 80th birthday in 1998, and in 2007 convened The Elders, a group of former leaders working on conflict and human rights. The United Nations declared his birthday, 18 July, Nelson Mandela International Day in 2009. He died at his home in Johannesburg on 5 December 2013, aged 95, and was buried at Qunu in the Eastern Cape.

His political model returned in an unexpected form three decades after the first election. In May 2024 the ANC fell to 40.18 percent of the vote and lost its parliamentary majority for the first time, and a new Government of National Unity was formed from ten parties. The 1994 unity government was imposed by the interim constitution; the 2024 version was forced by arithmetic.

The unfinished business of the transition is also back in public view. In May 2025 President Cyril Ramaphosa established a judicial commission of inquiry, chaired by retired Constitutional Court judge Sisi Khampepe, into allegations that the investigation and prosecution of TRC cases were deliberately stopped. In May 2026 its term was extended to 18 December 2026, and hearings were still under way in Johannesburg in September 2026.