Every year on 18 July, communities across the world observe Nelson Mandela International Day, dedicating 67 minutes of service to others, one minute for each year Mandela devoted to the struggle for justice. But before becoming South Africa’s first democratically elected president, Nelson Mandela was a lawyer, underground organizer, revolutionary and political prisoner whose name became synonymous with resistance to apartheid. For millions across the world, Mandela remains not simply a statesman, but a symbol of defiance against colonialism, racial oppression and injustice.

Mandela’s political journey began inside the African National Congress (ANC), a liberation movement founded in 1912 to challenge racial discrimination and secure political rights for Black South Africans. Joining the ANC Youth League in 1944 alongside Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu, Mandela helped transform the organization from one centred on petitions into a mass resistance movement built on strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience and popular mobilization. As apartheid laws intensified after 1948, Black South Africans were stripped of fundamental rights through legislation governing where they could live, work, travel and own land, while peaceful protest was increasingly met with arrests, bannings and state violence.

The turning point came after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, where police killed 69 unarmed demonstrators protesting apartheid’s pass laws. Concluding that peaceful avenues had been systematically closed by the apartheid regime, Mandela helped establish Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”) in 1961, becoming one of the principal architects of the ANC’s armed struggle. The movement adopted sabotage against government infrastructure, deliberately seeking to avoid civilian casualties while challenging a state sustained through institutionalized racial violence. Mandela later argued that the apartheid government had left South Africans with no alternative but resistance.

That resistance culminated in the 1964 Rivonia Trial, where Mandela transformed the courtroom into a political platform. Rejecting any apology for opposing apartheid, he declared:

“I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Mandela and seven of his comrades were sentenced to life imprisonment. He would spend the next 27 years behind bars, most of them on Robben Island. Rather than extinguishing the liberation movement, his imprisonment elevated him into the international face of anti-apartheid resistance. Campaigns demanding his release spread across continents, while his name became inseparable from the broader struggle against colonialism and racial domination.

Mandela walked free on 11 February 1990 after nearly three decades in prison, raising a clenched fist as he emerged from Victor Verster Prison, an image that came to symbolize the resilience of the liberation struggle. Four years later, South Africans of all races voted together in the country’s first fully democratic election, and Mandela was inaugurated president on 10 May 1994, marking the formal end of apartheid after decades of organized resistance.

Although remembered for leading South Africa’s democratic transition, Mandela consistently maintained that freedom had been won through collective struggle. The anti-apartheid struggle combined multiple forms of resistance, from mass mobilisation and underground organisation to armed struggle and international solidarity, which the Nelson Mandela Foundation identifies as the movement’s four key pillars. Mandela embodied each of these dimensions, helping forge a liberation movement that ultimately dismantled one of the twentieth century’s most entrenched systems of racial segregation.

More than a decade after his death in 2013, Mandela’s legacy extends far beyond South Africa. His image and words continue to be invoked by liberation movements, anti-colonial struggles and campaigns for racial justice across the world. For many, he remains not only South Africa’s first democratic president, but one of history’s defining symbols of organized resistance against oppression.