Nelson Mandela

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (1918–2013) spent twenty-seven years in prison, eighteen of them on Robben Island, for his role in the armed wing of the African National Congress, and emerged in 1990 to negotiate the end of apartheid rather than to avenge it. He became South Africa’s first democratically elected president in 1994 and served a single term by choice. He earned a law degree by correspondence while imprisoned, which gives particular weight to his best-known line about education as the most powerful weapon for changing the world — spoken in Boston in 1990, months after his release.