Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela is a selfless hero because he helps his country and he does what he needs to do. The reason I thinks he’s a hero is because he spent most of his life in prison and he was the first black President of South Africa. I think that is impressive. The reason I picked him is because I saw him in the newspaper and I wondered who he was. I found out he was a good man to his country and his family. Mandela’s country loved him. Thirty million people were standing outside when he was released.

Nelson Mandela was born in Transkei, South Africa on July 18, 1918. Nelson Mandela spent 27 years as a political prisoner in South Africa before becoming the country's first black president. His father died when Mandela was nine. He joined the African National Congress in 1943.

He married his first wife, Evelyn Mase, in 1944. They were divorced in 1957 after having three children. Mr. Mandela qualified as a lawyer and in 1952 opened a law practice in Johannesburg with his partner, Oliver Tambo. Nelson Mandela was released on February 11, 1990. In the winter of 1964 he was sentenced to life in prison. In the space of 12 months between 1968 and 1969, Mr Mandela's mother died and his eldest son was killed in a car crash but he was not allowed to attend the funerals. After his release, he plunged himself wholeheartedly into his life's work, striving to attain the goals he and others had set out almost four decades earlier.

In 1991, at the first national conference of the ANC held inside South Africa after the organization had been banned in 1960, Mandela was elected President of the ANC while his lifelong friend and colleague, Oliver Tambo, became the organization's National Chairperson.

Nelson Mandela did a lot of good things for his country and his family. He's a good man. The Nelson Mandela Foundation has just published a booklet recording a Human Rights Lecture and Roundtable Discussion held in conjunction with the South African Human Rights Commission and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on December 10, 2007. That is my story on Nelson Mandela.