South Africa celebrates Nelson Mandela's birth centenary

Pretoria, July 18: July 18, 2018 marks former South African president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nelson Mandela's centenary. South Africa is observing Mandela Day on July 18 to celebrate the life and legacy of the leader.

Mandela served 27 years in prison, split between Robben Island, Pollsmoor Prison, and Victor Verster Prison. Amid growing domestic and international pressure, and with fears of a racial civil war, President F. W. de Klerk released him in 1990.

On 10 May 1994, he was inaugurated as South Africa's first democratically elected President. True to his promise, Mandela stepped down in 1999 after one term as President. He continued to work with the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund he set up in 1995 and established the Nelson Mandela Foundation and The Mandela Rhodes Foundation. Mandela died on December 5, 2013 at the age of 95.

Top quotes by Nelson Mandela:

• Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
• There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children.
• To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.
• As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.
• Our human compassion binds us the one to the other - not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.
• There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.
• A good leader can engage in a debate frankly and thoroughly, knowing that at the end he and the other side must be closer, and thus emerge stronger. You don't have that idea when you are arrogant, superficial, and uninformed.
• Money won't create success, the freedom to make it will.

Courtesy: BrainyQuotes