POLITICS & IMPRISONMENT

When Mandela returned home, an arranged marriage was thrown onto him. Unready for such a commitment at this point in his life, Mandela ran away from home and moved to Johannesburg where worked many jobs high positioned jobs as well as odd jobs, and completed his bachelor's degree on the side.

Mandela, leader of the African National Congress
(ANC) in the 1950s before his imprisonment.
(Wikispaces).

Afterwards, he went on to study law at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. This is where he became actively involved in the anti-apartheid movement. He joined the African National Congress in 1942 and within the ANC, he was a part of a small group of young Africans who called themselves the African National Congress Youth League. 

The ANCYL wanted to transform the ANC into a mass movement, with the hopes of being backed up by the millions of people who had no voice under the apartheid regime. In 1948, the apartheid regime grew in strength as the National Party, the party of the apartheid, came into power. In 1949, the ANC officially adopted the Youth League's methods of boycott, strike, civil disobedience, and non-cooperation, with policy goals of full citizenship, redistribution of land, trade union rights, and free and compulsory education for all children. In 1952, the ANC launched the campaign for Defiance of Unjust Laws. Nelson Mandela traveled around South Africa as the youth leader of this campaign and this is when the apartheid regime first took note of him. They restricted him from working in this campaign and forced him to stay in Johannesburg. The government banned him from meetings for six months. Around this time, he established a law firm with a Fort Hare student, Oliver Tambo, that provided free and inexpensive counsel to unrepresented blacks. After some time, Mandela realized they could not rely on nonviolent acts of defiance alone to make the apartheids listen. The ANC soon incorporated armed resistance into their methods.

Mandela wearing his
prison number.
(Wikispaces).

In 1956, Mandela and 150 others were arrested and charged with treason for their political advocacy. At the same time, the ANC was being challenged by Africanists, new black activists who believed that the ANC's method were too ineffective. Africanists broke off from the ANC and formed the Pan-Africanist Congress. This caused the ANC to lose a large portion of its support by 1959.

In 1961, tactics changed and Mandela began to believe that armed struggle was the only way to achieve change. He then co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe, (MK), an armed offshoot of the ANC dedicated to sabotage and guerilla war tactics to end apartheid. That same year, he organized a three-day national workers' strike and was sentenced five years in jail for forming the strike. In 1963, Mandela was tried again, along with 10 other ANC leaders, and they were all sentenced to life in prison for their political offenses.

Mandela's release from
prison makes the news
world-wide. (Wikispaces).

Nelson Mandela and his wife Winnie after his release from
prison (1990). (Photo courtesy of Corbis.)

Nelson Mandela spent eighteen years (out of the 27) in prison at Robben Island. On the outside of his prison walls though, tension between the civil rights activists and the South African government increased. Mandela became one of the most significant symbols of black resistance. In fact, several organizations around the world started demanding his release from prison. They're support amplified the power and esteem Mandela held globally. After the constant global political pressure pushing down on the South African government, in 1985, the current president of South Africa, P.W. Botha, tried negotiating Mandela's release from jail if she ceased his protest movements. He refused to agree. In the end, his insistence paid off because after more outside pressure in the years that followed and more futile attempts at agreements from his government, they announced his release on February 11, 1990. The ANC was renounced by law, as all restrictions and suspensions on political opposition groups were lifted.