BREAKING NEWS: Nelson Mandela Finally Gave Up The Ghost, Dies At 95

Nelson Mandela, South Africa's first black president and an endurin icon of the struggle against racial oppression, died on Thursday, the government announced, leaving the nation without its moral center at a time of growing dissatisfaction with the country's leaders.

Mr. Mandela spent 27 years in prison after being convicted of treason by the white minority government, only to forge a peaceful end to white rule by negotiating with his captors after his release in 1990.
He led the African National Congress, long a banned liberation
movement, to a resounding electoral victory in 1994, the first fully
democratic election in the country's history.

Mr. Mandela served just one term as South Africa's president and had
not been seen in public since 2010, when the nation hosted the soccer
World Cup. But his decades in prison and his insistence on forgiveness
over vengeance made him a potent symbol of the struggle to end this
country's brutally codified system of racial domination, and of the
power of peaceful resolution in even the most intractable conflicts.

Years after he retreated from public life, his name still resonated as
an emblem of his effort to transcend decades of racial division and
create what South Africans called a Rainbow Nation.

Liberator and Statesman Nelson Mandela, the leading emancipator of
South Africa and its first black president, died on Thursday.

Yet Mr. Mandela's death comes during a period of deep unease and
painful self-examination for South Africa.

In the past year and a half, the country has faced perhaps its most
serious unrest since the end of apartheid, provoked by a wave of
wildcat strikes by angry miners, a deadly response on the part of the
police, a messy leadership struggle within the A.N.C.and the deepening
fissures between South Africa's rulers and its impoverished masses.

Scandals over corruption involving senior members of the party have
fed a broader perception that Mr. Mandela's near saintly legacy from
the years of struggle has been eroded by a more recent scramble for
self-enrichment among a newer elite.

After spending decades in penurious exile, many political figures
returned to find themselves at the center of a grab for power and
money. President Jacob Zuma was charged with corruption before rising
to the presidency in 2009, though the charges were dropped on largely
technical grounds. He has faced renewed scrutinyin the past year over
$27 million spent in renovations to his house in rural Zululand.

Graphic cellphone videos of police officers abusing people they have
detained have further fueled anger at a government seen increasingly
out of touch with the lives of ordinary South Africans.

Mr. Mandela served as president from 1994 to 1999, stepping aside at
the age of 75 to allow his deputy, Thabo Mbeki, to run and take the
reins. Mr. Mandela spent his early retirement years focused on
charitable causes for children and later speaking out about AIDS,
which has killed millions of Africans, including his son Makgatho, who
died in 2005.

Mr. Mandela retreated from public life in 2004 at the age of 85,
largely withdrawing to his homes in the upscale Johannesburg suburb of
Houghton and his ancestral village in the Eastern Cape, Qunu.



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