Word: mandelas
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Following De Klerk's election, according to a Cabinet minister, the government's talks with Mandela took on real meaning. In October they worked out the release of eight political prisoners, including Walter Sisulu and other A.N.C. leaders who were convicted along with Mandela in the Rivonia treason trial a quarter-century earlier...
...past three months, Mandela has pressed the government to meet the A.N.C.'s terms for negotiations. "He has told the government that he does not want to leave prison empty-handed," says one of Mandela's lawyers, Dullah Omar. "Otherwise, he would report to A.N.C. headquarters that three years of discussions have been a waste of time...
...Mandela's busy life at Victor Verster contrasts sharply with the years of hard labor he endured on Robben Island, a penal colony across from Cape Town Harbor where he was incarcerated for nearly two decades. For the first ten years he swung a pickax in a limestone quarry, breaking boulders into gravel. But the harsh punishment only strengthened his resolve, and he directed his anger into a crusade for better prison conditions. "To us," says Steve Tshwete, an A.N.C. guerrilla leader imprisoned for 15 years, "he represented the correctness of our cause and the inevitability of our victory...
...Mandela's talent for leadership traces back to his tribal heritage as the son of a royal family of the Thembu tribe of the Xhosa people. After earning a law degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, he joined the A.N.C. With classmate Oliver Tambo, he set up the first black law practice in South Africa in 1952. Defiantly working from a whites-only downtown neighborhood, they specialized in representing blacks who failed to carry the passes that were required of blacks in white neighborhoods...
...Mandela and Tambo helped form the Youth League in 1944, and three years later drew up a program of action calling for strikes, boycotts and acts of civil disobedience. In 1955 they supported the Freedom Charter, an economic credo many considered to be socialist. But Mandela abandoned peaceful methods after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, in which police killed 69 black protesters. When Tambo left to establish a headquarters in exile, Mandela stayed behind to set up the A.N.C.'s underground military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) and launch a campaign of sabotage. After 17 months...