[The Point] On 10 May 1994, South Africa held celebrations to mark the inauguration of the first president it had ever chosen through nonracial elections. The new president was Nelson Mandela, a 75-year-old black man who decades earlier had initiated an armed struggle against the white-controlled apartheid regime and spent 10,000 days in prison for his revolutionary activities. His release from this long captivity in February 1990 marked the beginning of the end of apartheid. This memoir is Mandela's own story, tracin
