Nelson Mondela

Mandela of South Africa Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa in 1994. He is the country's first black president. He was elected by the country's National Assembly. The Assembly had been chosen in South Africa's first elections in which the country's blacks were allowed to vote. Blacks won a majority of the Assembly seats, and the Assembly selected Mandela as president. These developments marked the beginning of a new era in South Africa. They resulted in blacks gaining control of the government after a long period of domination by the white minority. Since 1991, Mandela had served as president of the African National Congress (ANC), a largely black group that opposed the South African government's policy of rigid racial segregation called apartheid(Connolly 2000, 45). He had long been a leader of protests against apartheid and was imprisoned in 1962 on charges of conspiring to overthrow the white-minority government. While in prison, he became a symbol of the struggle for ra...