Nelson Mandela Struggle With Race Segregation

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Mandela’s Struggle with Racial Segregation
South Africa’s anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela died in 2013 aged 95. Racial segregation occurred in South Africa under an all-white government for a period of about 50 years. Nelson Mandela was a key principle in the fight to end this segregation and unite all people of South Africa. This paper discusses how the world renowned former South African president Nelson Mandela struggled to end racial segregation in his country.
Madiba, the name by which he was known across his country, started his political career in the city of Johannesburg, which had provided him with the opportunity of becoming a lawyer and joining the African National Congress. This is how far Nelson Mandela had come from the small town of Umtata in eastern South Africa where he was born in the year 1918. This man was a boxer prior to launching his crusade against racial segregation. Nelson Mandela has been an inspirational figure to many people worldwide, particularly those who support racial equality and justice. He spent over 40 years, 27 of them in incarceration, as a key figure in the struggle against his country’s restrictive and brutal racial regime known as apartheid (Cason and Fletcher 117). Soon after the fall of apartheid in the year 1994, he was elected the nation’s first black president in a democratic and multiracial election.
Mandela is widely recognized as a symbol of the struggle to end apartheid. Apartheid was a system or policy of racial segregation. It was a social and political system under a minority white rule from the year 1948 until the early 1990s. After the National Party obtained power in the year 1948 in South Africa, the party’s all-white government quickly started to enforce policies of segregation based on race under a system of legislation known as apartheid (Simpson 135). Under this system, nonwhites, who made up most of South Africa’s population, were forced to live in separate regions from white people and utilize separate public facilities. In addition, contact between whites and nonwhites was limited. In spite of consistent and strong opposition to this system both outside of and within the country, apartheid laws still continued to be enforced for roughly five decades (Simpson 136). President F.W. de Klerk’s government in 1991 started to repeal the laws that offered the foundation for apartheid.
Nelson Mandela was instrumental in the ending of apartheid. He founded the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC), namely the Spear of the Nation/Umkhonto we Sizwe, and was put behind bars from the year 1963 until 1990. His incarceration drew attention from different parts of the globe and helped to gather support for ending apartheid in the country. Nelson Mandela’s release from incarceration in 1990 marked the start of the ending of racial segregation that had lasted for many decades and which came to an end on the day in 1994 when Mandela took up the country’s presidency, just 4 years following his release from penitentiary. Democratic elections that were without racial discrimination resulted in ANC’s victory and Mandela became the co...