SOOMO PUBLISHING history.webtexts Nelson Mandela NARRATOR: Against overwhelming odds, he achieved his dream of equality for all South Africans. Nelson Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, in a small South African village. His father, a tribal chief, gave his son the name Rolihlahla. At the age of seven, he began his British education, and his teacher gave him the name Nelson. When his father died, Nelson was sent to live with the leader of the Thembu people. He groomed Nelson for leadership, letting him sit in on council meetings, sending him to the finest schools. During a break from college, Nelson ran away to Johannesburg in order to avoid a prearranged marriage. It was 1941, and for the first time Nelson came face to face with the brutal reality of a racially divided South Africa. ABOSEDE GEORGE, Professor, Barnard College / Columbia University: By entering the city as kind of an anonymous black person, he gets a firsthand experience of what black life is like for urban black South Africans at that time. And he gets a kind of immediate confrontation with the white apartheid racist state. YVETTE CHRISTIANSË, Professor, Fordham University: I think that he had two languages. He had a deep, historical language from his own learning, his own training within his tribal background, but I also think that he had a language of the law. He had a completely contemporary language, and he brought those two together in the language of human rights. NARRATOR: He began attending meetings of the African National Congress, an organization that aimed to establish a democratic government. During this time, he married his first wife, Evelyn. ABOSEDE GEORGE: The apartheid regime really begins to be kind of – it builds up after 1948, when the National Party comes into power, and they were the party of apartheid. NARRATOR: A year later, the ANC adopted nonviolent civil disobedience as official policy. In 1952, they launched the campaign for the defiance of unjust laws, and Nelson traveled South Africa in support of that effort. The National Party government took steps to restrict Nelson’s movements, banning him from attending any gatherings, and confined him to Johannesburg. YVETTE CHRISTIANSË: He was made the chief volunteer of the youth league’s national defiance campaign, and that’s when the authorities began to notice him. The government knew that they had someone that they
Posted on: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 17:08:30 +0000
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