It would not be wrong if consider Nelson Mandela as an ambassador of promoting social justice all over the world by setting his own example and bearing all the hardships to spread the message which has had been serving humanity since early nineties. Mandela has left the world crying in 2013 but his persona and his message both will always be remembered in golden worlds.
Dying at the age of 95, Mandela has left many questions for the minds who want to learn more about this personality. If you are still shocked about the title of this article, here is a point of consideration for you. Mandela, though died a natural death as a result of a lung disease, has suffered more than a pain caused by a murder in his life. Here are some of the miserable incidents and sufferings from the life of Nelson Mandela.
Nelson Mandela-in a tough childhood
Mandela was born on 18 July 1918 in the village of Mvezo in Umtata, then a part of South Africa’s Cape Province. Life gave him his first shake at the age of 9 in 1927 when his father died and he was adopted by Jongintaba Dalindyebo who was a high-ranking Thembu regent.
Mandela was dismissed from University of Fort Hare
His mother, though illiterate, made Mandela learn and sent him to receive formal education from a local missionary school. He proved himself as a great student, sportsman and leader in his secondary school which resulted in letting him enter the elite University of Fort Hare, the only Western-style higher learning institute for South African blacks at the time. The following year, he was sent home for participating in a boycott against university policies.
It was the first time probably that Mandela got his political jerk in life.
No stable career initially
Mandela started working as a night watchman and then as a law clerk while completing his bachelor’s degree by correspondence. He studied law at the University of Witwatersrand, where he became involved in the movement against racial discrimination and forged key relationships with black and white activists.
Marriage Failure
He met and married his first wife, Evelyn Ntoko Mase (1922-2004), with whom he had four children but unfortunately, the marriage failed completely and resulted in a divorce in 1957.
Arrested and Trialed
On December 5, 1956, Mandela and 155 other activists were arrested and went on trial for treason. The next year, police opened fire on peaceful black protesters in the township of Sharpeville, killing 69 people; as panic, anger and riots swept the country in the massacre’s aftermath, the apartheid government banned both the ANC and the PAC
Turning Radical
After the chain incidents of 1956, Mandela was forced to go underground and wear disguises to evade detection, Mandela decided that the time had come for a more radical approach than passive resistance.
Nelson Mandela’s Years Behind Bars
For his radical moves later on, Mandela was imprisoned in Robben Island Prison, a former leper colony off the coast of Cape Town, where he was confined to a small cell without a bed or plumbing and compelled to do hard labor in a lime quarry. Mandela and his fellow prisoners were routinely subjected to inhumane punishments for the slightest of offenses; among other atrocities, there were reports of guards burying inmates in the ground up to their necks and urinating on them.
Mandela-House Arrested
In 1988, he was placed under house arrest on the grounds of a minimum-security correctional facility.
Mandela-Over Burdened as President of South Africa
After attaining his freedom, Nelson Mandela led the ANC in its negotiations with the governing National Party and various other South African political organizations for an end to apartheid and the establishment of a multiracial government. On April 26, 1994, more than 22 million South Africans turned out to cast ballots in the country’s first multiracial parliamentary elections in history. An overwhelming majority chose the ANC to lead the country, and on May 10 Mandela was sworn in as the first black president of South Africa, with de Klerk serving as his first deputy.
Mandela Died
Treated for prostate cancer in 2001 and weakened by other health issues, Mandela grew increasingly weak in his later years and scaled back his schedule of public appearances. Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013 from a recurring lung infection.
Though it is apparently a natural death but this soul has for sure suffered a lot at the hands of people of his own.
May his soul rest in peace,
Wishes
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