Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s Liberator as Prisoner and President, Dies at 95
Nelson Mandela, who led the emancipation of South Africa from white minority rule
and served as his country’s first black president, becoming an international emblem of dignity and forbearance, died Thursday night.
Some blacks — including Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Mr. Mandela’s former wife, who cultivated a following among the most disaffected blacks — complained
that he had moved too slowly to narrow the vast gulf between the impoverished black majority and the more prosperous white minority.
Greg Bartley/Camera Press, via Redux
Mandela as Dissident, Liberator and Statesman:
Nelson Mandela, the leading emancipator of South Africa and its first black president, died on Thursday.
“Our nation has lost its greatest son,” said Jacob Zuma, the South African president, about Nelson Mandela.
And then, when his first term of office was up, unlike so many of the successful revolutionaries he regarded as kindred spirits, he declined a second term and cheerfully handed over power to an elected successor, the country still gnawed by crime, poverty, corruption and disease
but a democracy, respected in the world and remarkably at peace.
The South African president, Jacob Zuma, announced Mr. Mandela’s death.
