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Nelson Mandela was a leader of the struggle against apartheid, South Africa's system of racial segregation enforced by law, and spent 27 years in prison, from 1962 to 1990. In 1994, after the country's first election open to people of all races, he became the first president of a democratic South Africa.

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Mandela, born in 1918, trained as a lawyer and became a leader of the African National Congress (ANC). When peaceful protest was met with bans and violence, he co-founded the ANC's armed wing in 1961, which carried out sabotage. He was arrested on 5 August 1962 and, at the Rivonia Trial, gave a three-hour speech from the dock known as “I Am Prepared to Die”. On 12 June 1964 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He spent 18 years on Robben Island, off Cape Town, then was held at Pollsmoor and Victor Verster prisons. President F. W. de Klerk freed him on 11 February 1990, and the two men negotiated the end of apartheid, sharing the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. Mandela served a single term as president and stepped down in 1999.

Türkçe oku
Nelson Mandela, Güney Afrika'da ırk ayrımını yasayla dayatan apartheid rejimine karşı mücadelenin önderlerinden biriydi ve 1962'den 1990'a kadar 27 yıl hapis yattı. 1994'te ülkenin bütün ırklara açık ilk seçimlerinin ardından demokratik Güney Afrika'nın ilk cumhurbaşkanı oldu.

1918'de doğan Mandela hukuk okuyup avukat oldu ve Afrika Ulusal Kongresi'nin (ANC) önde gelen isimlerinden biri hâline geldi. Barışçıl protestolar yasaklarla ve şiddetle bastırılınca 1961'de ANC'nin sabotaj eylemleri düzenleyen silahlı kanadını kuranlar arasında yer aldı. 5 Ağustos 1962'de tutuklandı. Rivonia Davası'nda mahkemede üç saat süren ve “Ölmeye hazırım” sözüyle bilinen bir savunma yaptı; 12 Haziran 1964'te ömür boyu hapse mahkûm edildi. Cezasının 18 yılını Cape Town açıklarındaki Robben Adası'nda, kalanını Pollsmoor ve Victor Verster cezaevlerinde geçirdi. Cumhurbaşkanı F. W. de Klerk onu 11 Şubat 1990'da serbest bıraktı. İki lider apartheid rejimine son vermek için masaya oturdu ve 1993 Nobel Barış Ödülü'nü paylaştı. Mandela cumhurbaşkanlığını tek dönem sürdürdü ve 1999'da görevi bıraktı.

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WonderHistory

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built for the pharaoh Khufu around 2600 BC. When the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about it, around 450 BC, it was already more than 2,000 years old.

The pyramid was the tomb of Khufu, whom the Greeks called Cheops, a king of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty. Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 BC, was told that 100,000 men had worked on it in three-month shifts: ten years to build the causeway for hauling the stone, and twenty for the pyramid itself. He even reports an inscription recording what was spent on radishes, onions and garlic for the workers. Modern digs tell a different story. Workers' settlements at Giza, and a workers' cemetery found there in 1990, point to thousands of conscripted labourers rather than slaves. In 2013, at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast, archaeologists found the Diary of Merer, the logbook of an inspector whose crew of about 40 men shipped limestone from the Tura quarries to Giza. It is the oldest known papyrus with writing on it.

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WonderHistory

Woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean off north-eastern Siberia, until about 4,000 years ago. By then Egypt's Great Pyramid had already stood for several centuries.

On the mainland, the last woolly mammoths died out around 10,000 years ago, as the Ice Age ended and the cold grasslands they lived on shrank. Two island populations held on much longer: one on St Paul Island in Alaska until about 5,600 years ago, and one on Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago, around 2000 BC. Rising seas had cut Wrangel off from Siberia, leaving some 300 to 1,000 animals alone there for thousands of years. These dates come from radiocarbon dating of bones and tusks, which measures how much of a slowly decaying form of carbon is left in them. Genetic studies show that the population was inbred but stayed stable for thousands of years, so its end seems to have come suddenly. What finally killed the last mammoths is still unknown.

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WonderHistory

Oxford was teaching students more than three centuries before the Aztec Empire existed. Teaching there is recorded from 1096; the empire began around 1428, when three city-states in the Valley of Mexico, Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, joined forces as the Triple Alliance.

Oxford has no founding date. There is evidence of teaching there in some form by 1096, and it grew quickly after 1167, when Henry II barred English students from the University of Paris. In 1209, after clashes with the townspeople, some scholars left for Cambridge and started the university there. The popular claim that Oxford is older than the Aztecs usually uses 1325, the year the Mexica people founded Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco, where Mexico City stands today. But the Mexica became an imperial power only in 1428, when, together with Texcoco and Tlacopan, they defeated Azcapotzalco, the city that had dominated the valley. The empire lasted less than a century: Hernán Cortés and his Indigenous allies took Tenochtitlan in 1521.

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WonderHistory

In AD 476 the Germanic general Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor in the West. The Eastern Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, lasted almost a thousand years longer, until the Ottomans took the city in 1453.

Romulus Augustulus was a boy, put on the throne by his father, the general Orestes, and he reigned for only ten months. Odoacer did not name a new emperor. He made himself king of Italy and sent the symbols of the western emperor's office to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople, as if to say that one emperor, in the East, was now enough. The eastern empire kept Roman law and government, and its people called themselves Romans (Rhomaioi) to the end; the name “Byzantine Empire” came into wide use only after it had fallen. Its neighbours saw it the same way. Arabs and Turks called its people Rum, “Romans”, and the Ottoman name for the Balkans, Rumeli, “land of the Romans”, comes from the same word. The army of Mehmed II took Constantinople on 29 May 1453.

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WonderHistory

Around 1259 BC, Ramesses II of Egypt and the Hittite king Hattusili III made peace after generations of rivalry over Syria. Egypt carved its copy on temple walls, the Hittites kept theirs on clay tablets, and both survive.

The rivalry peaked in 1274 BC at the Battle of Kadesh, on the Orontes River in today's Syria, where neither side won outright. About fifteen years later came the treaty, sometimes called the Treaty of Kadesh, although it never mentions the battle. Both kings promised not to attack each other, to help each other against outside enemies and rebels, and to hand back each other's political refugees. The Egyptian version is carved in hieroglyphs at Karnak and the Ramesseum in Thebes. The Hittite version, written in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the day, was found in 1906 at Hattusa, the Hittite capital, near today's Boğazkale in Çorum province. Two of its tablets are in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, and a copy hangs at United Nations headquarters in New York.

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Next card in the archiveHuman history is not a straight line of progress. Around 1200 BC the palace kingdoms of Bronze Age Greece collapsed, and writing disappeared there for some 400 years, until the Greeks adopted a new alphabet from the Phoenicians.Read next →