Mandela's birth name, Rolihlahla, is a Xhosa word loosely meaning troublemaker
The boy from the Thembu royal line was given a name that meant troublemaker, and he lived up to it. Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison for fighting apartheid, then walked out to negotiate its end with the man who freed him, becoming South Africa's first black president in 1994.
Mandela came into the world in Mvezo, a village then within the Cape Province, on 18 July 1918. His great-grandfather ruled the Thembu kingdom, but because his grandfather was born to a junior wife, the family branch could not inherit the throne and served instead as hereditary royal councillors. His father, a local chief, lost his post in 1926; the young Nelson was told it was for defying a white magistrate, though the official charge was corruption. He later studied law at Fort Hare and the University of the Witwatersrand and practised in Johannesburg.
He joined the African National Congress in 1943 and helped found its Youth League the following year. After the white-only National Party government imposed apartheid, he made his name in two protests, the Defiance Campaign of 1952 and, three years later, the Congress of the People, and was acquitted in the 1956 Treason Trial. Initially committed to non-violence, in 1961 he helped found an armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, which he steered into sabotage against the government. Arrested in 1962, he received a life sentence at the Rivonia Trial.
His 27 years behind bars began on Robben Island, followed by Pollsmoor and Victor Verster prisons. Under mounting pressure at home and abroad, and amid fears of racial civil war, he was finally freed in 1990 on the orders of President F. W. de Klerk. The two men negotiated the end of apartheid and organised the multiracial election of 1994. As president, Mandela oversaw a new constitution, stressed reconciliation and created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine past abuses, while largely keeping his predecessor's liberal economic approach despite his own socialist views.
He refused a second term, handing over to Thabo Mbeki in 1999, and devoted his later years to fighting poverty and HIV/AIDS. Critics on the right called him a communist terrorist and some on the left thought him too conciliatory, yet he won more than 250 honours, including the Nobel Peace Prize. South Africans often call him Madiba, his clan name, and the Father of the Nation.
Source: Nelson Mandela
