Theodore Roosevelt (October 27, 1858–January 6, 1919) was born in New York into one of the old Dutch families which had settled in America in the seventeenth century. At eighteen he entered Harvard College and spent four years there, dividing his time between books and sport and excelling at both. After leaving Harvard he studied in Germany for almost a year and then immediately entered politics. He was elected to the Assembly of New York State, holding office for three years and distinguishing himself as an ardent reformer.

In 1884, because of ill health and the death of his wife, Roosevelt abandoned his political work for some time. He invested part of the fortune he had inherited from his father in a cattle ranch in the Badlands of Dakota Territory, expecting to remain in the West for many years. He became a passionate hunter, especially of big game, and an ardent believer in the wild outdoor life which brought him health and strength. In 1886 Roosevelt returned to New York, married again, and once more plunged into politics.

President Harrison, after his election in 1889, appointed Roosevelt as a member of the Civil Service Commission of which he later became president. This office he retained until 1895 when he undertook the direction of the Police Department of New York City. In 1897 he joined President McKinley's administration as assistant secretary of the Navy. While in this office he actively prepared for the Cuban War, which he saw was coming, and when it broke out in 1898, went to Cuba as lieutenant colonel of a regiment of volunteer cavalry, which he himself had raised among the hunters and cowboys of the West. He won great fame as leader of these «Rough-Riders», whose story he told in one of his most popular books.

Elected governor of the state of New York in 1898, he invested his two-year administration with the vigorous and businesslike characteristics which were his hallmark. He would have sought reelection in 1900, since much of his work was only half done, had the Republicans not chosen him as their candidate for the second office of the Union. He held the vice-presidency for less than a year, succeeding to the presidency after the assassination of President McKinley on September 14, 1901. In 1904 Roosevelt was elected to a full term as president.

In 1902 President Roosevelt took the initiative in opening the Intemational Court of Arbitration at The Hague, which, though founded in 1899, had not been called upon by any power in its first three years of existence. The United States and Mexico agreed to lay an old difference of theirs, concerning the Pious Foundations of California, before the Hague Tribunal. When this example was followed by other powers, the arbitration machinery created in 1899 was finally called into operation. Roosevelt also played a prominent part in extending the use of arbitration to international problems in the Western Hemisphere, concluding several arbitration treaties with European powers too, although the Senate refused to ratify them.

In 1904 the Interparliamentary Union, meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, requested Roosevelt to call another international conference to continue the work begun at The Hague in 1899. Roosevelt responded immediately, and in the autumn of 1904 Secretary of State John Hay invited the powers to meet at The Hague. Russia, however, refused to participate in a conference while engaged in hostilities with Japan. After the peace of 1905, the matter was placed in the hands of the Russian government, which had taken the initiative in convening the first Hague Conference.

In June, 1905, President Roosevelt offered his good offices as mediator between Russia and Japan, asking the belligerents to nominate plenipotentiaries to negotiate on the conditions of peace. In August they met at Portsmouth, New Hamsphire, and after some weeks of difficult negotiations concluded a peace treaty in September, 1905.

Roosevelt's candidate for president, William Howard Taft, took office in 1909. Dissatisfied with Taft's performance, Roosevelt bolted the regular Republican Party in 1912 and accepted the presidential nomination by the Progressive Party. He outpolled Taft, but Woodrow Wilson outpolled each of them. In 1917 Wilson refused his offer to raise and command a division to fight in World War I.

Roosevelt was an historian, a biographer, a statesman, a hunter, a naturalist, an orator. His prodigious literary output includes twenty-six books, over a thousand magazine articles, thousands of speeches and letters.

In 1919, at the age of sixty, he died in his sleep.

Sir Joseph Austen Chamberlain (October 16, 1863-March 17, 1937) was the eldest son of Joseph Chamberlain, the great British statesman known as the «Empire-builder» he was a half-brother of Neville Chamberlain, prime minister from 1937 to 1940. Like William Pitt the Younger, son of a famous father a hundred years earlier, he was trained for statesmanship. It was said of Austen that he did not choose a career, he accepted one. Having completed his boyhood schooling at Rugby and his university studies at Cambridge, he spent nine months at the École des Sciences Politiques in Paris and twelve months in Berlin. When he returned to Birmingham in 1887, he became, in effect, his father's private secretary. Consequently, in 1892, when Austen Chamberlain was twenty-nine years old, he was well equipped to take a seat in the House of Commons, representing East Worcestershire, a constituency near the family home in Birmingham. Upon his father's death in 1914, Austen became the member for West Birmingham, holding this seat until his own death in 1937.

Austen Chamberlain's forty-five year career in the House of Commons may be divided into two periods: the first from his entry into the House in 1892 to 1922 when Lloyd George resigned as prime minister; and the second from 1922 to his death in 1937. In the first period he was concerned primarily with domestic questions; in the second, with international questions.

Chamberlain made his mark quickly. His maiden speech in 1893 was praised by William Gladstone; from 1895 to 1900 he was civil lord of the Admiralty; from 1900 to 1902, financial secretary to the Treasury; for one year, 1902-1903, the postmaster general; from 1903 to 1906, he was chancellor of the Exchequer.

In the wartime coalition government formed by Herbert Asquith in 1915, Chamberlain accepted the position of secretary of state for India, resigning in 1917. When David Lloyd George formed a coalition government after the election of 1918, he made Chamberlain his chancellor of the Exchequer. Chamberlain filled this post from 1919 to 1921 with distinction, paying the enormous debts accumulated during the war, maintaining a stable currency, and strengthening the national credit.

Upon Bonar Law's retirement from the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1921, Chamberlain succeeded him for eighteen months. By this time Lloyd George's coalition was tottering and the rank and file of the Conservative Party wanted to break away from it. When Chamberlain stood by the prime minister, the party, withdrawing from the coalition, first placed Bonar Law in the prime ministry and then Stanley Baldwin.

In the Baldwin government of 1924 to 1929, Chamberlain was secretary of state for foreign affairs. His brilliant tenure in office reflected the brilliant qualities he brought to it. In establishing policy, he was philosophically realistic and morally fearless; in pursuing a course of action he was patient, determined, resourceful; in personal negotiation he was linguistically fluent, faultlessly polite, charming in manner and elegant in appearance.

His first important act as foreign secretary shocked some diplomatic circles. In 1925 on behalf of his government he rejected the proposed Geneva Protocol in a speech to the Council of the League of Nations, not so much because it required compulsory arbitration of international disputes as because it was the Council which was to decide what action member states should take to enforce the authority of the League in time of crisis. He tempered the effect of this rejection by suggesting that the best way in theory to deal with situations as they arose was to «supplement the Covenant by making special arrangements in order to meet special needs».

The road to Locarno now lay open. Gustav Stresemann, the German foreign minister, and Aristide Briand, the French foreign minister, were willing to travel the road with him. After meticulous preparation during the summer of 1925, representatives of seven powers - Great Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Poland, and Czechoslovakia - met at Locarno in southern Switzerland on October 5, 1925. On Chamberlain's birthday, October 16, the foreign ministers initialed the documents known as the Locarno Agreements. Eight treaties or agreements in all, they included the Rhine Guarantee Pact (or «Locarno Pact») with Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain, and Italy as signatories; individual treaties of arbitration between Germany and former enemy nations; guarantee treaties involving France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia; and a collective note on the entry of Germany into the League of Nations.

Upon his return to London after the triumph at Locarno, Chamberlain was given an immense ovation, was made Knight of the Garter, and a year later, along with Stresemann and Briand, his two companions in diplomacy, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In his later years in the foreign office Chamberlain dealt with vexing questions in China and Egypt. He displayed what firmness he could in defending British interests against encroachments of the Chinese Nationalists, but, lacking full cooperation from the United States and Japan, could forge no long-range solutions. To provide some permanent pattern for Anglo-Egyptian relations, Chamberlain drew up a draft of a treaty in 1927 which anticipated the treaty signed in the mid-thirties.

Out of office in his last years, partly because he chose to provide opportunity for the young men in Parliament, Chamberlain still spoke with a commanding voice in the Commons. He was among the first to see potential danger in Hitler; he favored both the imposition of sanctions against Italy during the Abyssinian crisis and their removal when they failed to prevent an Italian victory.

During these years he was also writing with a graceful pen. His Down the Years is part reminiscence, part character studies of great men he had known, part familiar essays. His Politics from Inside consists chiefly of letters he wrote to his stepmother from 1906 to 1914 to keep his ailing father informed of governmental and diplomatic events.

On March 17, 1937, Austen Chamberlain died of apoplexy, the same affliction that had killed his father a month before World War I began.

Albert Schweitzer (January 14, 1875-September 4, 1965) was born into an Alsatian family which for generations had been devoted to religion, music, and education. His father and maternal grandfather were ministers; both of his grandfathers were talented organists; many of his relatives were persons of scholarly attainments.

Schweitzer entered into his intensive theological studies in 1893 at the University of Strasbourg where he obtained a doctorate in philosophy in 1899, with a dissertation on the religious philosophy of Kant, and received his licentiate in theology in 1900. He began preaching at St. Nicholas Church in Strasbourg in 1899; he served in various high ranking administrative posts from 1901 to 1912 in the Theological College of St.Thomas, the college he had attended at the University of Strasbourg. In 1906 he published The Quest of the Historical Jesus, a book on which much of his fame as a theological scholar rests.

Meanwhile he continued with a distinguished musical career initiated at an early age with piano and organ lessons. Only nine when he first performed in his father's church, he was, from his young manhood to his middle eighties, recognized as a concert organist, internationally known. From his professional engagements he earned funds for his education, particularly his later medical schooling, and for his African hospital. Musicologist as well as performer, Schweitzer wrote a biography of Bach in 1905 in French, published a book on organ building and playing in 1906, and rewrote the Bach book in German in 1908.

Having decided to go to Africa as a medical missionary rather than as a pastor, Schweitzer in 1905 began the study of medicine at the University of Strasbourg. In 1913, having obtained his M.D. degree, he founded his hospital at Lambaréné in French Equatorial Africa, but in 1917 he and his wife were sent to a French internment camp as prisoners of war. Released in 1918, Schweitzer spent the next six years in Europe, preaching in his old church, giving lectures and concerts, taking medical courses, writing On the Edge of the Primeval Forest, The Decay and Restoration of Civilization, Civilization and Ethics, and Christianity and the Religions of the World.

Schweitzer returned to Lambaréné in 1924 and except for relatively short periods of time, spent the remainder of his life there. With the funds earned from his own royalties and personal appearance fees and with those donated from all parts of the world, he expanded the hospital to seventy buildings which by the early 1960's could take care of over 500 patients in residence at any one time.

At Lambaréné, Schweitzer was doctor and surgeon in the hospital, pastor of a congregation, administrator of a village, superintendent of buildings and grounds, writer of scholarly books, commentator on contemporary history, musician, host to countless visitors. The honors he received were numerous, including the Goethe Prize of Frankfurt and honorary doctorates from many universities emphasizing one or another of his achievements. The Nobel Peace Prize for 1952, having been withheld in that year, was given to him on December 10, 1953. With the $33,000 prize money, he started the leprosarium at Lambaréné.

George Catlett Marshall (December 31, 1880-October 16, 1959), America's foremost soldier during World War II, served as chief of staff from 1939 to 1945, building and directing the largest army in history. A diplomat, he acted as secretary of state from 1947 to 1949, formulating the «Marshall Plan», an unprecedented program of economic and military aid to foreign nations.

Marshall's father owned a prosperous coal business in Pennsylvania, but the boy, deciding to become a soldier, enrolled at the Virginia Military Institute from which he was graduated in 1901 as senior first captain of the Corps of Cadets. After serving in posts in the Philippines and the United States, Marshall was graduated with honors from the Infantry-Cavalry School at Fort Leavenworth in 1907 and from the Army Staff College in 1908. The young officer distinguished himself in a variety of posts in the next nine years, earning an appointment to the General Staff in World War I and sailing to France with the First Division. He achieved fame and promotion for his staff work in the battles of Cantigny, Aisne-Marne, St. Mihiel, and Meuse-Argonne. After acting as aide-de-camp to General Pershing from 1919 to 1924, Marshall served in China from 1924 to 1927, and then successively as instructor in the Army War College in 1927, as assistant commandant of the Infantry School from 1927 to 1932, as commander of the Eighth Infantry in 1933, as senior instructor to the Illinois National Guard from 1933 to 1936, and as commander, with the rank of brigadier general, of the Fifth Infantry Brigade from 1936 to 1938. In July, 1938, Marshall accepted a post with the General Staff in Washington, D. C., and in September, 1939, was named chief of staff, with the rank of general, by President Roosevelt. He became general of the army in 1944, the year in which Congress created that five-star rank.

In his position as chief of staff, Marshall urged military readiness prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, later became responsible for the building, supplying, and, in part, the deploying of over eight million soldiers. From 1941 he was a member of the policy committee that supervised the atomic studies engaged in by American and British scientists. The war over, Marshall resigned in November, 1945.

But Marshall could not resign from public service; his military career ended, he took up a diplomatic career. He had been associated with diplomatic events while chief of staff, for he participated in the conference on the Atlantic Charter (1941-1942), and in those at Casablanca (1943), Quebec (1943), Cairo-Teheran (1943), Yalta (1945), Potsdam (1945), and in many others of lesser import. In late 1945 and in 1946, he represented President Truman on a special mission to China, then torn by civil war; in January, 1947, he accepted the Cabinet position of secretary of state, holding it for two years. In the spring of 1947 he outlined in a speech at Harvard University the plan of economic aid which history has named the «Marshall Plan».

For one year during the Korean War General Marshall was secretary of defence, a civilian post in the U. S. Cabinet. Having resigned from this post in September, 1951, three months before his seventy-first birthday, he retired from public service, thereafter performing those ceremonial duties the public comes to expect of its famous men.

Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family's long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from 1960 until his death Martin Luther acted as co-pastor. Martin Luther attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Negro institution of Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had been graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. With a fellowship won at Crozer, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, completing his residence for the doctorate in 1953 and receiving the degree in 1955 In Boston he met and married Coretta Scott, a young woman of uncommon intellectual and artistic attainments. Two sons and two daughters were born into the family.

In 1954, Martin Luther King accepted the pastorale of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. He was ready, then, early in December, 1955, to accept the leadership of the first great Negro nonviolent demonstration of contemporary times in the United States, the bus boycott described by Gunnar Jahn in his presentation speech in honor of the laureate. The boycott lasted 382 days. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. During these days of boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, he was subjected to personal abuse, but at the same time he emerged as a Negro leader of the first rank.

In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream", he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.

At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated

Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Macedonia, on August 27, 1910. Her family was of Albanian descent. At the age of twelve, she felt strongly the call of God. She knew she had to be a missionary to spread the love of Christ. At the age of eighteen she left her parental home in Skopje and joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India. After a few months' training in Dublin she was sent to India, where on May 24, 1931, she took her initial vows as a nun. From 1931 to 1948 Mother Teresa taught at St. Mary's High School in Calcutta, but the suffering and poverty she glimpsed outside the convent walls made such a deep impression on her that in 1948 she received permission from her superiors to leave the convent school and devote herself to working among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta. Although she had no funds, she depended on Divine Providence, and started an open-air school for slum children. Soon she was joined by voluntary helpers, and financial support was also forthcoming. This made it possible for her to extend the scope of her work.

On October 7, 1950, Mother Teresa received permission from the Holy See to start her own order, "The Missionaries of Charity", whose primary task was to love and care for those persons nobody was prepared to look after. In 1965 the Society became an International Religious Family by a decree of Pope Paul VI.

Today the order comprises Active and Contemplative branches of Sisters and Brothers in many countries. In 1963 both the Contemplative branch of the Sisters and the Active branch of the Brothers was founded. In 1979 the Contemplative branch of the Brothers was added, and in 1984 the Priest branch was established.

The Society of Missionaries has spread all over the world, including the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. They provide effective help to the poorest of the poor in a number of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and they undertake relief work in the wake of natural catastrophes such as floods, epidemics, and famine, and for refugees. The order also has houses in North America, Europe and Australia, where they take care of the shut-ins, alcoholics, homeless, and AIDS sufferers.

The Missionaries of Charity throughout the world are aided and assisted by Co-Workers who became an official International Association on March 29, 1969. By the 1990s there were over one million Co-Workers in more than 40 countries. Along with the Co-Workers, the lay Missionaries of Charity try to follow Mother Teresa's spirit and charism in their families.

Mother Teresa's work has been recognised and acclaimed throughout the world and she has received a number of awards and distinctions, including the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize (1971) and the Nehru Prize for her promotion of international peace and understanding (1972). She also received the Balzan Prize (1979) and the Templeton and Magsaysay awards.

1931: March 2, born, Privolnoye, Krasnogvardeisky District, Stavropol territory in the North Caucasus, to a peasant family in a small village, his father an agricultural mechanic on a collective farm.
1942: German army occupies the Privolnoye area.
1945: Begins work as assistant to combine harvest operator.
1949: Awarded Order of Red Banner of Labour.
1950: Enrolled in Faculty of Law, Moscow University.
1952: After having been a member of Komsomol (Communist Youth Organisation), now joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
1955: Marries Raisa Maximovna Titorenko, philosophy student. Receives degree in law.
1955-60: Appointed First Secretary, Komsomol Territorial Committee, then moves up to higher posts, finally becoming top Komsomol official in Stavropol.
1956: Daughter Irina born.
1961: Delegate from Stavropol to 22nd Communist Party Congress in Moscow.
1962: Appointed to key position in Stavropol Communist Party, responsible for personnel in administration, farms and industry.
1964-67: Studies for second degree at Stavropol Agricultural Institute.
1970: Appointed First Secretary for Stavropol territory, governing an area of 2.4 million people.
1971: Member CPSU Central Committee.
1978: Moves to Moscow as Secretary of Agriculture in Central Committee.
1980: Becomes youngest full member of Politburo.
1985: March, Elected by Central Committee as General Secretary of CPSU.
1989: Elected by new parliament as Executive President of Soviet Union.
1991: August, abortive coup of hardliners, resigns as General Secretary of CPSU, dissolves Central Committee.
1991: December 25, resigns as President when Soviet Union disintegrates.
1992: Head of Foundation for Social, Economic and Political Research, think-tank founded after August coup.

His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, is the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetan people. He was born in a small village called Takster in northeastern Tibet. Born to a peasant family, His Holiness was recognized at the age of two, in accordance with Tibetan tradition, as the reincarnation of his predecessor the 13th Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lamas are the manifestations of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, who chose to reincarnate to serve the people. Dalai Lama means Ocean of Wisdom. Tibetans normally refer to His Holiness as Yeshin Norbu, the Wish-fulfilling Gem, or simply, Kundun, meaning The Presence.

Education in Tibet

He began his education at the age of six and completed the Geshe Lharampa Degree (Doctorate of Buddhist Philosophy) when he was 25. At 24, he took the preliminary examination at each of the three monastic universities: Drepung, Sera and Ganden. The final examination was held in the Jokhang, Lhasa, during the annual Monlam Festival of Prayer, held in the first month of every year. In the morning he was examined by 30 scholars on logic. In the afternoon, he debated with 15 scholars on the subject of the Middle Path, and in the evening, 35 scholars tested his knowledge of the canon of monastic discipline and the study of metaphysics. His Holiness passed the examinations with honours, conducted before a vast audience of monk scholars.

Leadership Responsibilities

In 1950, at 16, His Holiness was called upon to assume full political power as Head of State and Government when Tibet was threatened by the might of China. In 1954 he went to Peking to talk with Mao Tse-Tung and other Chinese leaders, including Chou En-Lai and Deng Xiaoping. In 1956, while visiting India to attend the 2500th Buddha Jayanti, he had a series of meetings with Prime Minister Nehru and Premier Chou about deteriorating conditions in Tibet. In 1959 he was forced into exile in India after the Chinese military occupation of Tibet. Since 1960 he has resided in Dharamsala, aptly known as "Little Lhasa", the seat of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile.

In the early years of exile, His Holiness appealed to the United Nations on the question of Tibet, resulting in three resolutions adopted by the General Assembly in 1959, 1961 and 1965. In 1963, His Holiness promulgated a draft constitution for Tibet which assures a democratic form of government. In the last two decades, His Holiness has set up educational, cultural and religious institutions which have made major contributions towards the preservation of the Tibetan identity and its rich heritage. He has given many teachings and initiations, including the rare Kalachakra Initiation, which he has conducted more than any of his predecessors.

His Holiness continues to present new initiatives to resolve the Tibetan issues. At the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in 1987 he proposed a Five-Point Peace Plan as a first step towards resolving the future status of Tibet. This plan calls for the designation of Tibet as a zone of peace, an end to the massive transfer of ethnic Chinese into Tibet, restoration of fundamental human rights and democratic freedoms and the abandonment of China's use of Tibet for nuclear weapons production and the dumping of nuclear waste, as well as urging "earnest negotiations" on the future of Tibet and relations between the Tibetan and Chinese people. In Strasbourg, France, on June 15, 1988, he elaborated on this Five-Point Peace Plan and proposed the creation of a self-governing democratic Tibet, "in association with the People's Republic of China." In his address, the Dalai Lama said that this represented "the most realistic means by which to re-establish Tibet's separate identity and restore the fundamental rights of the Tibetan people while accommodating China's own interests." His Holiness emphasized that "whatever the outcome of the negotiations with the Chinese may be, the Tibetan people themselves must be the ultimate deciding authority."

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born in Transkei, South Africa on July 18, 1918. His father was Chief Henry Mandela of the Tembu Tribe. Mandela himself was educated at University College of Fort Hare and the University of Witwatersrand and qualified in law in 1942. He joined the African National Congress in 1944 and was engaged in resistance against the ruling National Party's apartheid policies after 1948. He went on trial for treason in 1956-1961 and was aquitted in 1961.

After the banning of the ANC in 1960, Nelson Mandela argued for the setting up of a military wing within the ANC. In June 1961, the ANC executive considered his proposal on the use of violent tactics and agreed that those members who wished to involve themselves in Mandela's campaign would not be stopped from doing so by the ANC. This led to the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe. Mandela was arrested in 1962 and sentenced to five years' imprisonment with hard labour. In 1963, when many fellow leaders of the ANC and the Umkhonto we Sizwe were arrested, Mandela was brought to stand trial with them for plotting to overthrow the government by violence. His statement from the dock received considerable international publicity. On June 12, 1964, eight of the accused, including Mandela, were sentenced to life imprisonment. From 1964 to 1982, he was incarcerated at Robben Island Prison, off Cape Town; thereafter, he was at Pollsmoor Prison, nearby on the mainland.

During his years in prison, Nelson Mandela's reputation grew steadily. He was widely accepted as the most significant black leader in South Africa and became a potent symbol of resistance as the anti-apartheid movement gathered strength. He consistently refused to compromise his political position to obtain his freedom.

Nelson Mandela was released on February 18, 1990. After his release, he plunged himself wholeheartedly into his life's work, striving to attain the goals he and others had set out almost four decades earlier. In 1991, at the first national conference of the ANC held inside South Africa after the organization had been banned in 1960, Mandela was elected President of the ANC while his lifelong friend and colleague, Oliver Tambo, became the organisation's National Chairperson.