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| Sunday, 13 February 2005 |
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Junior Observer |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Nelson Mandela : Liberator of his people
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born in a village near Umtata in the Transkei in South Africa on July 18, 1918. His father was the principal councillor to the Acting Paramount Chief of Thembuland. After his father's death, the young Mandela became the Paramount Chief's ward, to be groomed to assume high office in the future. However, influenced by the cases that came before the Chief's Court, he determined to become a lawyer. Hearing elders' stories of his ancestors' bravery during the wars to defend their fatherland, he dreamed also of making his own contribution to the freedom struggle of his people. After receiving his primary education at a local mission school, Mandela was sent to Healdtown, a Wesleyan secondary school. He then enrolled at the University College of Fort Hare for the Bachelor of Arts Degree, where he was elected to the Student's Representative Council. He was suspended from college for joining in a protest boycott. He then went to Johannesburg where he completed his BA by correspondence, and commenced studying for his LLB. He entered politics in a serious manner while studying in Johannesburg by joining the African National Congress (ANC) in 1942. At the height of the Second World War, a small group of young Africans, members of the African National Congress, banded together under the leadership of Anton Lembede and Mandela was among them. Starting out with 60 members, these young people set themselves upon the task of transforming the ANC into a mass movement. The ANC launched its Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws in 1952 and Mandela was elected its National Volunteer-in-Chief. For his part in this campaign, he was convicted of violating the Suppression of Communism Act and given a suspended prison sentence. Shortly after the campaign ended, he was prohibited from attending gatherings and confined to Johannesburg for six months. During this period when his movements were restricted, Mandela wrote the attorneys' admission examination and was admitted to the profession. In recognition of his outstanding contribution during the Defiance Campaign, Mandela was elected to the presidency of both the Youth League and the Transvaal region branch of the ANC at the end of 1952, thus becoming a deputy president of the ANC. During the fifties, Mandela was the victim of various forms of repression. He was banned, arrested and imprisoned. For much of the latter half of the decade, he was one of the accused in the Treason Trial, which hampered both his legal practice and his political work. After the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the ANC was outlawed, and Mandela, still on trial, was detained. Forced to live apart from his family, moving from place to place to evade detection by the government's informers and police spies, Mandela had to adopt a number of disguises. His successful evasion of the police earned him the title of the Black Pimpernel. In 1962 Mandela left the country unlawfully and travelled abroad for several months. He was convicted and sentenced to a life imprisonment and started his prison years in the notorious Robben Island Prison, a maximum security prison on a small island, 7Km off the coast near 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 . In prison, Mandela never compromised his political principles and was always a source of strength for the other prisoners. He was released on February 11, 1990. In a life that symbolises the triumph of the human spirit over man's inhumanity to man, Nelson Mandela accepted the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of all South Africans who suffered and sacrificed so much to bring peace to their country. He was inaugurated as the first democratically elected State President of South Africa on May 10, 1994 and continued his term till June 1999, when he retired from public life. ############## Florence Nightingale : The lady with the lamp
Named after the Italian city in which she was born to British parents, Florence Nightingale had a privileged and cultured upbringing in England. She enjoyed a thorough education in almost all academic areas, from science to music. She was great friends with her father, who valued her for her companionship. He had campaigned against slavery throughout his adult life, so perhaps, this is where Florence got some of her inspiration for her actions later on in life. Her mother however was a rather domineering figure, and tended to be swayed by the popular opinions of the day. The only thing she had in mind for her daughter was marriage. But Nightingale had other ideas. She claimed to have felt a spiritual calling from God in her teenage years. After rejecting several offers of marriage, she shocked her family, especially her mother, by declaring she wished to become a nurse. It was not only the fact that she wished to take up a full time profession that dismayed the family; nurses of the time were from the working class, and were said to be rather lacking in good social habits. Nightingale eventually received some formal training in nursing in her early thirties. Within a few years, she had risen through the ranks, and had become a leading authority on the state and running of hospitals in England. Because of her expertise, in 1854 she was allowed to travel with a team of 38 trained nurses, to Scutari in Turkey, where British soldiers were fighting in the Crimean War. Conditions in the military hospitals of the time were known to be bad, but nothing could have prepared the nurses for the sight of the filthy wards and decaying men. Nightingale set about drawing up plans to restructure and reform the hospitals. The male surgeons of the time weren't happy at what they saw as a meddling woman, but backed by a newspaper campaign in Britain, highlighting the disgraceful conditions, she was soon able to make a start, aided by her team of nurses who were known as the 'Handmaidens Of The Lord'. By the time the war ended, she had greatly improved sanitation and nutrition in the hospitals, effectively counteracting diseases. Her habit of working late resulted in her being nicknamed 'The Lady With The Lamp'. While tending to the wounded of the Crimean War, Nightingale contracted Crimean fever; from which she never really recovered. After returning to Britain, she became an invalid. However, this didn't prevent her from continuing her pioneering work in the world of medicine. In 1859, she helped to found the Visiting Nurses Association, and a year later, established a school that became a model for nursing. Her reputation as a nurse had spread throughout the world, leading to her being used in an advisory capacity by the United States, during the country's civil war. She was also the first woman to receive the British Order of Merit, and in her very last years, was recognised as a pioneer of the Red Cross Movement. A remarkable woman who believed that God had empowered her, especially to help the injured and improve their facilities, Florence Nightingale helped to pull hospitals from the Middle Ages into the modern world. 'The Lady With The Lamp' died peacefully, aged 90 in 1910. |
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| Politics | Produced by Lake House |
When one talks about freedom struggles carried out in countries around
the world, a name that immediately springs to mind is Nelson Mandela.
Mandela is synonymous with South Africa's freedom struggle and was
instrumental in freeing his people, the majority population of the
country, from the white minority which had governed them for many years.
There is no doubt that the most famous nurse in the history of the
profession is Florence Nightingale. She initiated an enormous amount of
reforms in the medical world, especially in the field of military health,
through tireless work during her entire career.
