Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his winning release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's antiapartheid movement, he was involved in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is respected everywhere as a very important force in the fight for human rights and racial equality. Long Walk to Freedom is his moving and exciting autobiography. In this book, for the first time, Nelson Mandela tells the extraordinary story of his life, an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph, which has, until now, been practically unknown to most of the world. Mandela was raised in the traditional, tribal culture of his ancestors, but at an early age learned the modern, bound to happen reality of what came to be called apartheid, one of the most powerful and effective systems of oppression ever conceived. He tells of his early years as an impoverished student and law clerk in Johannesburg, of his slow political awakening, and of his pivotal role in the rebirth of a stagnant ANC and the formation of its Youth League in the 1950s. He describes the struggle to reconcile his political activity with his devotion to his family, the anguished breakup of his first marriage, and the painful separations from his children. He brings vividly to life the escalating political warfare in the fifties between the ANC and the government, culminating in his dramatic escapades as an underground leader and the notorious Rivonia Trial of 1964, at which he was sentenced to life imprisonment.