NELSON MANDELA

Born in 1918 in the Eastern Cape, Mandela trained as a lawyer and opened South Africa's first Black law partnership with Oliver Tambo in 1952. As apartheid law hardened, his work moved from the courtroom to the African National Congress and its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe.

At the Rivonia Trial in 1964 he used the dock to state the case directly: a democratic and free society was an ideal he hoped to live for, and if needs be, to die for. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

He spent eighteen of his twenty-seven prison years on Robben Island, breaking limestone in a quarry that damaged his eyes, studying, teaching, and organising. The refusal to accept conditional release in 1985 — freedom in exchange for renouncing armed struggle — made him more consequential imprisoned than the state had anticipated.

Released on 11 February 1990, he led negotiations that produced South Africa's first non-racial election, shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with F. W. de Klerk, and served as president from 1994 to 1999. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission chose public testimony over trials — a decision still argued over, and still studied everywhere a country has to live with its own history.