He founded modern South Africa. The boy who grew up herding
cattle in the hills of the rural Transkei area and attended a
Methodist missionary school where he was given the name "Nelson"
has dedicated his adult life to opposing the racist and
segregationist policy of apartheid. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela at
first advocated peaceful opposition to white rule in early work
with the African National Congress, a liberation movement. But
the stubbornness of the apartheid regime increasingly frustrated
him, until he turned to armed struggle shortly after the
Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 in which police killed some 69
black protesters, shooting many of them in the back. Shortly
after the protest the regime banned the African National
Congress and another liberation movement, the Pan Africanist
Congress. In 1964, Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment
for carrying out acts of sabotage. In prison he became an
international symbol of opposition to apartheid. Over the
decades that followed, as the movement against whi