Word: mandela
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...selected the person, people or thing that, for better or worse, has most significantly influenced the course of world events in the preceding twelve months. In choosing the 59th Man of the Year, the editors considered such headline makers as Mikhail Gorbachev, the vigorous new Soviet leader; Nelson Mandela, the jailed black South African who symbolizes the struggle against apartheid; Bob Geldof, musical fund raiser for African famine relief; and once again, the terrorist. The editors eventually decided to look beyond the day-to-day news and examine a phenomenon with an enormous potential impact on history: China's sweeping...
...than 850 South Africans, almost all of them nonwhite. His words cannot be legally published in the South African press. Only a few intimates even know what he looks like now; he has not been photographed since 1965. Yet from his cell in Pollsmoor Prison near Cape Town, Nelson Mandela, 67, head of the outlawed African National Congress, has become an almost messianic figure, incarnating the aspirations of South Africa's 23.9 million blacks...
From the teeming settlements of the Eastern Cape to the sprawling townships around Johannesburg and on to the outskirts of Cape Town, angry blacks have invoked Mandela's name in demanding an end to the government policies of racial separation. The U.S., Britain, France and scores of other governments have called for Mandela's release as a sign that the white minority government is serious about negotiating with the black majority. Yet in February, when State President P.W. Botha offered to free him if he would forswear political violence, Mandela refused, saying, "Only free men can negotiate; prisoners cannot enter...
...Botha could afford to ignore the demands for Mandela's unconditional release, it was because, for all the anger and unrest, he knew that racial revolution was not imminent: the armed forces and police retain overwhelming power. In July the Botha government imposed a state of emergency in many black districts, sending in waves of police to restore order, break up public meetings, block processions and frighten protesters into submission. Then it effectively banned journalists from covering the unrest in the townships, in the futile hope that the protests would die when the images faded from the world's television...
...Mandela's enforced absence, other leaders spoke out for the country's blacks. Most prominent among them was Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu of Johannesburg, the 1984 Nobel laureate, who took an important role in the drive to control the savagery of some of the violence. In July he saved the life of a black man suspected of being a police informant, after an angry mob had seized the man, set his car ablaze and tried to throw him into the flames. Tutu scolded a crowd of 30,000, threatening to "pack up and leave this beautiful country that I love...