Dynamics of Personality Essay: My favourite influential Personality My favourite personality who I want to be like one day Insha-Allah is Nelson

Mandela. He is hailed as one of the greatest personalities of this era. He devoted his whole life to fight for freedom in South Africa and later succeeded in his struggle. His father was chief councillor. Nelson was brought up with a strong sense of responsibility and tribal pride. "The elders would tell tales," as he later described it, "about the wars fought by our ancestors in defence of the fatherland." This shows his love for his country and nation and that he wanted to be like his ancestors and defend his home land. He was a peace maker. He hated violence but was willing to use it for defending rights. He also won a Nobel Prize for it Although he was born in a backward village, he went to college and studied modern subjects and knowledge. He admired ideologies of freedom, justice, liberty, democracy, equality, and political rights. Nelson Mandela abandoned his claim to the chieftainship and become a lawyer. He could not complete his university education as he was expelled for joining in a student protest but later passed the bar exam to become a lawyer He wanted to implement his new learnings and knowledge in his life and promote these values in his own society. He wanted to remove the backwardness of his nation. The cruel oppression of his people broke his heart. So to do something for his country, he as a student joined the African National Congress (ANC), a small organisation which had been set up on similar lines as the Indian National Congress in India. Within a few years Nelson Mandela became its foremost leader and spokesman. Now he had a platform to work from and gather likeminded people for support. He became black people`s favourite leader but a sign for trouble for the Government of south Africa. He believed in equality of rights of white and the black. Government banned him from ANC meetings etc. to supress and silent him His biggest fight was against racism. Black Africans were legally discriminated against, in all walks of life. ANC under Nelson Mandelas leadership organised labour strikes and nationwide protests and demonstrations against apartheid during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. n 1961, he became the commander of the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. In August of the following year, he was arrested and jailed for five years. In June 1964, he was sentenced again, this time to life imprisonment, for his involvement in planning armed action. He started his prison years in the infamous Robben Island Prison, a maximum security facility on a small island off the coast of Cape Town. In April 1984, he was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town and in December 1988 he was moved to the Victor Verster Prison near Paarl from where he was eventually released. Mandela remained in prison until February 1990, when sustained ANC campaigning and international pressure led to his release. On 2 February

1990, South African President F.W. de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC and other anti-apartheid organisations. Mandela was released from Victor Verster Prison on 11 February 1990. During his imprisonment Mandela learned to speak Afrikaans and learned about Afrikaner history. He was able to converse with his guards in their own language, using his charm and intelligence to reason with them and try to understand the way they thought. This caused the authorities to replace the guards around regularly Mandela as it was felt that they could were becoming too lenient in their treatment of their famous prisoner. He was elected as a President in April 1994 and was accepted by whites as well as blacks. His country's first black president. By the time he became president in his own right, he was already an old man. His struggle for justice and equality was fulfilled. He even tried to stop US IRAQ war. When he could not get through to George Bush, he called his father and asked him to talk to his son to stop the war. He attacked both America and Britain for racist attitudes. They did not criticise Israel for having weapons of mass destruction, he complained, because Israelis were seen as white, while Iraqis were seen as black. Mandela was emerging more clearly as the spokesman for the developing world, rather than the loyal friend of Washington and London. As Bush and Blair prepared for war in Iraq, Mandela believed that neither was taking the UN seriously enough; he reminded Blair that Churchill had supported the creation of the UN as the safeguard of world peace. He passed away on 5 December 2013 of a lung infection at his home in Johannesburg. He was 95 years old.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/people/nelson_mandela http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jan/09/nelson-mandela1918-2013/