The son of a Thembu tribal chief, after graduating from law school M. worked as a lawyer in defence of the rights of the people subjected to the apartheid regime. He was one of the founders (1944) of the African National Congress (ANC) youth league and became its national president in 1950. A member of the ANC's national executive since 1949, he was its vice-president in 1951-52, marking a turning point in its radical direction. He advocated armed struggle against racist power and in 1961 set up the underground organisation Umkhonto we sizwe ("Spear of the Nation"). Repeatedly imprisoned since 1952, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964. Released in February 1990 and from July 1991 again president of the ANC, M. conducted lengthy negotiations with the government for the democratisation of the regime. In May 1994 he was elected President of the Republic. M.'s efforts during his presidency concentrated on three central issues for the political life of the Republic of South Africa: national reconciliation, the response to the extreme poverty of a large part of the black population, the new international position of the country. In this context, M. promoted the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995-98), which took on an extremely important role also because of its symbolic value. It was tasked with drawing up a list of those who had been subjected to violence during the apartheid regime, both among the black and white population, to identify the perpetrators of the crimes and to amnesty them if they made a full confession and proved that the crime had been committed for political and not personal reasons. By allowing an entire country to reflect on its recent past, the commission enabled the victims not to feel forgotten and to consider that their suffering had been cancelled out by the policy of institutional compromise with the former regime, and at the same time channelled many tensions and tears into the area of admission of guilt, recognition of the victims and consensual moral condemnation. When his presidential term expired in 1999, M. decided not to run again, thus expressing once again his conviction that only the overcoming of a personalistic vision of power was the premise to continue a real process of democratisation. In the years that followed, M. continued both in his international commitment to strengthen the link between the Republic of South Africa and the area of western countries, and in his mediation work to resolve the various conflicts that marked the political life of Africa. His long imprisonment, but above all his constant struggle for the abolition of apartheid and for the recognition of the political rights of blacks, earned him international respect and notoriety and made him a symbol of the struggle against all forms of racism. In 1993 he received the Nobel Peace Prize together with F. W. de Klerk.
