Custom essays on Studying inequality & social activism

Of the huge number of people who have ever lived and are living on the earth, only a few leave their mark in history, by changing the world, making it better. One such person is Nelson Mandela, a Nobel laureate, former president of South Africa. In the struggle against apartheid he spent 28 years in the prisons of his country. Today, his authority in South Africa is comparable, perhaps, only with the authority of the local religion’s God; his party, the African National Congress, is the ruling and most influential political force in the country.
Throughout the world there is no politician, who is more famous and respected than he. And it’s not in the number of stars – Michael Jackson, Naomi Campbell, Elton John, Tina Turner – who have been and are honored to be his friends. The very nature of his fame is unique. Fidel Castro, Muammar Qaddafi, and Bill Clinton are among his friends.
Of course, the main work of his life is done. It was completed in May 1994, when he became the first black president of South Africa. The victory of the ANC (African National Congress) in the first-ever equal South Africa’s elections, in which the party won with more than 60 percent of the votes, finished a long Mandela’s struggle against racial discrimination and its “highest stage” – apartheid.
The son of the tribe leader of Themba, Mandela joined the political struggle for the rights of black people in the early 40’s, being still at college. In 1944 he joined the ANC, where he started the formation of combat, the military branch of Umkhonto We Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”) (Mandela, 1995).
However, success was waiting for him not on partisan, but on political, non-violent way to combat the regime. Mandela swept to victory without leaving solitary confinement in prison on Robben Island near Cape of Good Hope, where he was imprisoned in 1962 for organizing the numerous acts of sabotage and armed resistance of the black population against the government. Campaign for Mandela’s freedom gained unprecedented scale and grew into an international struggle for the abolition of apartheid and the change of political system in South Africa. The country was in complete isolation, sanctions (from comprehensive trade ones to the ban on South African athletes’ participation in international competitions) were destroying the economics of the country (Carlin, 2008).
Authorities began looking for a compromise with half-blind, suffering from tuberculosis Mandela. But he did not go into a deal with the white government, who promised him immediate release in exchange for his exile from South Africa. He said that had to be the last prisoner of apartheid. And so it happened. First, President Botha, then his successor, the last white president of South Africa Frederik de Klerk, started unprecedented in world political history negotiations with the prisoner about the future political structure of the country. They lasted four years – from 1986 and 1990.
Only in February 1990, Mandela has agreed to leave the prison, together with the publication of President’s decree of legalizing the ANC. Another three years passed in negotiations the ANC with the government of South Africa. In fact, only terms of capitulation of the Afrikaner, descendants of Dutch and French settlers who ruled this country throughout its three hundred years history were discussed. White people, who made up one-eighth of the population, had no chance to stay in power after the equal elections.
Apartheid was destroyed. All the rest, what has happened and is happening in this country until the present day, is full of dramatic contradictions, which are addressed to policy-makers after Mandela. Equalizing black citizens in political rights to the descendants of white colonialists, Mandela could not in such a short historical period give them the same economic opportunities.