Nelson Mandela. | Photo via wikipedia creative commons
Former South African president Nelson Mandela, a longtime symbol of the country’s struggle against racial segregation and oppression, died at home in Johannesburg Thursday evening. He was 95.
Mandela had been receiving “intense home-based medical care for a lung infection after three months in [the] hospital” at his time of death, according to a BBC news release.
The current South African President, Jacob Zuma, announced Mandela’s death, according to The New York Times.
Born in the rural region of Transkei, South Africa, in 1918, Mandela attended Methodist boarding schools until his enrollment in the University of Fort Hare, then known as the only black university in South Africa.
While there, he began to “rebel against authority and was expelled,” according to BBC. He later completed his degree at Johannesburg’s University of Witwatersrand, where he studied law.
At Witwatersrand in 1943, he joined the resurgent AFC a few years before South African National Party—controlled by Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch and French settlers—came to power on a platform of apartheid, in which the government enforced racial segregation, stripping non-whites of economic and political power, BBC said.
In the early 1950s, Mandela, with other members of the AFC, toured South Africa, organizing “campaigns of mass civil disobedience” in response to the government’s policies.
Apartheid had three main legal pillars, according to BBC: the Race Classification Act, which classified every citizen suspected of not being European according to race; the Mixed Marriages Act, which prohibited marriage between people of different races; and the Group Areas Act, which forced people of certain races to live in specifically-designated areas.
In 1964, Mandela was convicted of treason and sentenced to life in prison by South Africa’s white minority government. After 27 years, however, he was released as South Africa began to move away from strict racial segregation.
In 1993, Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor he shared with F.W. de Klerk, the white Afrikaner leader who freed him from prison three years earlier and negotiated the end of apartheid.
Mandela became South Africa's first democratically-elected black president in 1994, by which point apartheid had been dismantled entirely. He served just one term as South Africa’s president.
He had not been seen in public since 2010, when the nation hosted the soccer World Cup.
“Though he was in power for only five years, Mandela was a figure of enormous moral influence the world over—a symbol of revolution, resistance and triumph over racial segregation,” NBC said.
Mandela went on to play a prominent role on the world stage as an advocate of human dignity in the face of challenges ranging from political repression to AIDS, according to The Chicago Tribune.
BBC reported that Mandela will be buried, according to his wishes, in his ancestral village in the Eastern Cape, Qunu.
Story by Brown and White news writer Becca Bednarz, '15.