After ten years of being confined to Johannesburg he went on a tour of the country to organise a nation-wide stay-at-home strike for May 1961. The newspapers named him The Black Pimpernel. The government brought in the army to frighten people, so that they would not take part. After the strike the people were even more unhappy and Mandela stepped up the campaign, sending out a message to the people saying,
"I shall fight the government side by side with you...only through hardship, sacrifice and militant action can freedom be won. The struggle is my life. I will continue fighting for freedom until the end of my days."
He formed the Spear of the Nation and used violence and sabotage to protest. He went around lots of African states getting support. He also went to Algeria and Britain to see what life without apartheid was like and then went back to South Africa.
On 5 August 1962 Mandela was arrested when he was driving north from Durban. He was sent to prison in the Fort at Johannesburg and given five years. In prison he had a strict routine of exercises. He had to get up before daytime and spent the day sewing mailbags. After a year in prison he was tried for planning guerrilla warfare and organising armies from abroad to invade South Africa. On 11 June 1964 Mandela was found guilty and sent to prison for life and was sent to Robben Island Maximum Security Prison.
The prison is on a small island off the coast of Cape Town. Mandela was put in a special block of single cells. He was dressed in prison clothes and had to eat maize with soup and coffee. In prison he worked as a labourer with a pick and shovel in a lime quarry. The only contact was a letter every six months. After a long time, he was allowed to have a visitor and Winnie went to see him. They were not allowed to talk about prison conditions or anything in the outside world. Mandela made friends with the prisoners and managed to get a bit of information from outside. Winnie went to jail for 49 weeks. When she came out she was put under house arrest. In April 1982 Mandela was sent to Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison in the valley past Table Mountain. He stayed there until 1988 when he had to be sent to hospital with Tuberculosis. When he was better he was sent to Victor Verster prison they looked after him until he was set free.
A campaign during the 1980s for Mandela’s release worked out in 1990. President FW de Klerk un-banned the ANC. He also stopped the restrictions on political groups and set free Nelson Mandela. Mandela asked foreign countries to keep up their pressure on South Africa for constitutional reform. He was elected president of the ANC in 1991 and organised mass action campaigns and general strikes against state-supported violence. He was separated from Winnie in 1992 because of evidence that she was involved in some murders and kidnappings. On 3 of June 1993 a date was put forward for South Africa's first national, non-racial, one-person-one-vote election. It was to be held on 27th April 1994. In 1993 Nelson Mandela shared the Nobel Peace Prize with De Klerk for helping to scrap apartheid. The election, was the first that allowed the black majority to vote to elect their own leaders. The ANC got 62.6 % of the vote, giving them 252 of the 400 seats in the new national assembly. Mandela was made president of South Africa on 10th May 1994. The first thing he did was to release all young people from jail. In February 1995 President Nelson Mandela joined 1,300 fellow former political prisoners in a reunion at Robben Island jail. Today Mandela does not get involved as president. His deputy Thabo Mbeki chairs the cabinet. Mandela is divorced from Winnie. He has a new woman in his life Graca Machell, widow of the former president of Mozambique. The mood in South Africa is currently one of frustration and the lack of progress. The people want a younger president. Mandela’s reputation has been damaged by the trial of his ex-wife Winnie and claims that he was supposed to be involved in the abduction of a witness.
The meaning of the apartheid system is the segregation of racial group e.g. whites and coloureds. The main features of the system were the exclusion of the black majority from voting and participating in central government because of the colour of their skin. The effects of apartheid were violence because of sanctioning that brought discrimination which made living their lives difficult because they were a different race. The whites were given the good things in life and the black just had to live with. Blacks were normally banned from having a skilled job but if they did have a skilled job there wage would be a one-eighth of a whites wage that meant that blacks had to live in townships outside and sight of the towns. Blacks had to travel to work each day unless they had special permission to live in the town or city.
There were many pressures involving the apartheid system like the protests /violence from the anti-apartheid organisations which brought in police with heavy padded clothes and loaded army rifles to intimidate the civilians but the police did not work and many people got hurt or shot, lots died. After these incidents the government claimed for a state of emergency but that also failed the organisations just got bigger and bigger. Worse things began to happen like attacks on squatter villages, for example, the attack on the squatter village just outside Johannesburg at midnight and over forty people were killed. So the states of emergency failed and on the out side of the country trades and sports were being boycotted which meant that there was a cut on income and investments. There was also pressure for the economy because of the United Nations condemnation. South Africa had money troubles because America threatened to withdraw its money and S.A were having a war with their neighbour Angola that they lost in 1988 and the old president was replaced.
Mandela was released in 1990 on February the 11th because De Klerk replaced President Botha. The government tried to release the pressure off them from the protesters and other countries but the government did not want too end the apartheid system. The other reason was that they did not have any other choice but to release Mandela. But before the release much negotiation had to take place to avoid a civil war. When Mandela was released he made a speech saying,
“ I stand before you, not as a prophet but as a humble servant. The factors that necessitated armed struggle still exist. We hope that a climate conductive to negotiated settlement will exist soon”
This speech involved modesty “ I stand here before you, not as a prophet but as humble servant”. There is also a bit telling the people of the problems remaining “the factors which necessitated armed struggle still exist”. At the end of Mandela speech he showed his belief of progress with the apartheid system “we hope that a climate conductive to negotiated settlement will exist soon”. This speech was very significant because Mandela did not want to blow everything that the ANC had worked for that’s why Mandela was cautious.
Before the election in 1994 De Klerk and Mandela both agreed to repeal repressive laws, release political prisoners and create an appropriate climate for negations. In August 1990 Mandela persuaded the ANC to suspend the armed struggle. Because of this in September the government lifted the state of emergency. In 1991 the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) was formed. Its task was to negotiate for a new constitution but black and white extremist groups boycotted it because they did not want a new constitution. Then in 1992 the referendum delivered a two-thirds majority in favour of negations. The extremists launched a bombing campaign to try and stop the election by scaring off the voters but this did not work and the extremists were in a minority and “millions waited patiently for hours to vote for the first time. The elections finally took place on April 27th 1994. The results of the election were The ANC with 62.65%, 42.65% and 170 seats more than the National Party. The election took place despite the violence because blacks and whites wanted to put a stop to the apartheid system. Mandela was now given the position of the new president.
After the election Mandela and his associates faced many problems. After the apartheid system had been abolished in South Africa the major problem was with the economy and the lack of support from other countries. Other countries had boycotted trading with South Africa because of apartheid and so companies that relied on trading with other companies in the world went out of business and had to sack their people. Lack of money and jobs, meant the people had no money for food and clothing and they turned to crime, and their children did not go to school. It also meant that crime increased and murders were six times more likely in South Africa than in any other country. Many people lived in squatter camps because of the lack of houses and these squatter camps did not have drinking water, toilets and no electricity.
The truth and reconciliation commissions were the people that tried to clean up and help South African forget their past but they couldn’t do all this because they either didn’t have enough money.
The end of the apartheid was brought around by the election of the ANC into power in 1994. After South Africa lost the war with Angola and President Botha was forced to resign. De Klerk was then elected as president of South Africa. He believed that Mandela was wrongly imprisoned and so he set him free. He also thought that Apartheid was wrong and so the un-banned the ANC and De Klerk worked together with Mandela to abolished Apartheid system. After the apartheid system had been abolished De Klerk admitted that Mandela was difficult to work with and then resigned.
President De Klerk was important in negotiating the end of apartheid because he was influenced by the two-thirds majority in the referendum to get rid of the apartheid system. So Mandela and De Klerk were both important in that they worked together to bring about the end of apartheid. There were also many other associations apart from the ANC and foreign pressures to support and abolish the apartheid system
Mandela has made an impact as president by helping to abolish Apartheid. The past has been confronted but the results of Apartheid are still around. There are still many South African coloureds living in bad conditions, but most of them do have electricity and better water supplies. It will take a long time for the people to forget how they were treated and to get over the things that were a part of being a coloured person. They are still trying to become a rainbow nation where everyone is treated as an equal. Mandela played an important role since his release trying to make his country a better place to live for all the people of South Africa. There is still racial discrimination in South Africa but in general the human rights of the people have improved by disallowing the death penalty and looking into land reform. The economic difficulties have definitely changed because the government holds a firm hand on the economy by working with industry to train people and by crediting schemes to tackle unemployment and to cut crime. The young black and white South Africans stand hopeful and proud to belong to their own ethnic groups and to be part of that rainbow nation.
Course work written and checked by
Luke Jones 10MT
