Cartas da prisão de Nelson Mandela pdf

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela ( 18 July 1918 – 5 December 2013) was a South African anti-apartheid activist who served as the first president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. He was the country's first black head of state and the first elected in a fully representative democratic election. His government focused on dismantling the legacy of apartheid by fostering racial reconciliation. Ideologically an African nationalist and socialist, he served as the president of the African National Congress (ANC) party from 1991 to 1997.
A Xhosa, Mandela was born into the Thembu royal family in Mvezo, Union of South Africa. He studied law at the University of Fort Hare and the University of Witwatersrand before working as a lawyer in Johannesburg. There he became involved in anti-colonial and African nationalist politics, joining the ANC in 1943 and co-founding its Youth League in 1944. After the National Party's white-only government established apartheid, a system of racial segregation that privileged whites, Mandela and the ANC committed themselves to its overthrow. He was appointed president of the ANC's Transvaal branch, rising to prominence for his involvement in the 1952 Defiance Campaign and the 1955 Congress of the People. He was repeatedly arrested for seditious activities and was unsuccessfully prosecuted in the 1956 Treason Trial. Influenced by Marxism, he secretly joined the banned South African Communist Party (SACP). Although initially committed to non-violent protest, in association with the SACP he co-founded the militant uMkhonto we Sizwe in 1961 and led a sabotage campaign against the government. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1962, and, following the Rivonia Trial, was sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiring to overthrow the state.

Cartas da prisão de Nelson Mandela pdf by Nelson Mandela

Preso em 1962, quando o regime do apartheid na África do Sul intensificava a sua campanha brutal contra os opositores políticos, o advogado e ativista do Congresso Nacional Africano Nelson Mandela, então com quarenta e quatro anos, não fazia a menor ideia de que passaria os vinte e sete anos seguintes na prisão. Durante os seus 10 052 dias de encarceramento, o futuro líder da África do Sul escreveu uma imensa quantidade de cartas às inflexíveis autoridades prisionais, a companheiros ativistas, a responsáveis governamentais e, acima de tudo, à sua corajosa mulher, Winnie, e aos cinco filhos.
Agora, no centenário do seu nascimento, 255 dessas cartas, muitas das quais nunca antes tornadas públicas, são compiladas num volume que as organiza cronologicamente, dividindo-as pelas quatro instituições prisionais por onde passou até à sua libertação, a 11 de fevereiro de 1990.
Ilustrado com reproduções de alguns dos seus escritos, este é um documento de um valor excecional para o conhecimento desta que foi uma das figuras mais inspiradoras do século XX, revelando-o como pai e marido extremoso, como um lutador incansável pelos direitos humanos e, acima de tudo, como homem de uma coragem imperturbável, que se recusou a comprometer os seus valores mesmo quando confrontado com um enorme sofrimento.