Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela is one of the world's great moral and political leaders, an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the center of the most compelling political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement, he helped move the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is revered as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality. The foster son of a Thembu chief, Mandela was raised in the traditional tribal culture of his ancestors, but at an early age learned the modern, inescapable reality of what came to be called apartheid, one of the most powerful systems of oppression ever conceived. In clear and engaging prose, he tells of his early years as an impoverished student and law clerk in a Johannesburg firm, of his slow political awakening, and of his pivotal role in the rebirth of a stagnant ANC and the formation of its Youth League in the 1950s. He describes the struggle to reconcile his political activity with his devotion to his family, the anguished breakup of his first marriage, and the painful separations from his children. He brings vividly to life the escalating political warfare in the fifties between the ANC and the government, culminating in his dramatic activities as an underground leader and the Rivonia Trial of 1964, at which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Here he recounts the surprisingly eventful twenty-seven years in prison and the complex, delicate negotiations that led both to his freedom and to the beginning of the end of apartheid. Finally he provides the inside account.