NELSON MANDELA,South Africa’s first black president and an enduring icon of the struggle against racial oppression, died on Thursday the government announced, leaving the nation without its moral center at a time of growing dissatisfaction with the country’s leaders.
Mr. Mandela spent 27 years in prison after being convicted of treason by the white minority government, only to forge a peaceful end to white rule by negotiating with his captors after his release in 1990.
He led the African National Congress, long a banned liberation movement, to a resounding electoral victory in 1994, the first fully democratic election in the country’s history.
Mr. Mandela served just one term as South Africa’s president and had not made a public appearance since 2010, when the nation hosted the World Cup.
But his decades in prison and his insistence on forgiveness over vengeance made him a potent symbol of the struggle to end his country’s brutally codified system of racial domination, and of the power of peaceful resolution in even the most intractable conflicts.
Years after he retreated from public life, his name still resonated as an emblem of his effort to transcend decades of racial division and create what South Africans called a Rainbow Nation.
READ MORE: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/world/africa/nelson-mandela.html?emc=edit_na_20131205
