Nelson Mandela
President of South Africa
1918–2013 · South Africa
Helped dismantle apartheid and guided South Africa through a historic transition to multiracial democracy.
The Full Profile
Nelson Mandela, President of South Africa, helped dismantle apartheid and guided South Africa through a historic transition to multiracial democracy. Nelson Mandela was an anti-apartheid organizer, lawyer, political prisoner, negotiator, and later president. After 27 years in prison, he helped negotiate South Africa's democratic transition and became the country's first Black president in 1994. His legacy includes both resistance to racial rule and an emphasis on negotiated political settlement. He spent 27 years in prison refusing every offer of conditional release, then negotiated apartheid's end without the civil war the world predicted; in 1994 he cast the first vote of his life and became South Africa's first democratically elected president.