.Nobel Prize in 1993




Human rights
Son of a Thembu chief, Mandela was born in 1918 in the South African province of Umtata. He studied at Fort Hare, where it is diverted for having participated in a student demonstration, and at the University of Witwatersrand, where he obtained a law degree in 1942. In 1944, Mandela's accession to the African National Congress (ANC). When the "National Party" came to power in 1948, and introduced apartheid, Mandela and the ANC resist the racist policy of the government. In 1956, Mandela was arrested and tried for treason, but he will be acquitted in 1961.

After the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, the ANC and the Pan African Congress are prohibited. Mandela then abandoned the non-violent strategy of the ANC and founded a military organization, Umkhonto we Sizwe. In 1962, he was sentenced to five years' hard labour and in 1963, he was charged with other leaders, sabotage, treason and conspiracy. For these events, he was sentenced in 1964, along with seven other activists, to life imprisonment.
In 1990, after 26 years in prison detention for political reasons (which is a record), the President FW De Klerk removes the ban on the ANC and released Mandela, who was elected president of the ANC in 1991.

The two men then lead the negotiations to end apartheid, what they earn to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. A year later, during the first free elections in the history of South Africa, Nelson Mandela was elected president of the nation of the rainbow ", the seat he held from 1994 1999 . 

  



The Sharpeville massacre: On 21 March 1960, the South African police opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators: 69 people are killed and there are more than 180 wounded. This is a defining moment in the country's history, this senseless killing triggered a wave of protests, both nationally and internationally. 

  

Pan African Congress of political parties in South Africa was founded in 1959 in response to the action of multiracial ANC and the relationship it had with the communists and the Soviets. Banned in 1969, the Zambia neighbouring South Africa, that the exiled leaders are organizing their opposition to the apartheid regime.