Nelson Mandela Dies at 95 - Wall Street Journal

Dec. 5, 2013 4:53 p.m. ET

Nelson Mandela, who rose from militant antiapartheid activist to become the unifying president of a democratic South Africa and a global symbol of racial reconciliation, died at his Johannesburg home following a lengthy stay at a Pretoria hospital, President Jacob Zuma said Thursday. He was 95.

"He passed on peacefully," Mr. Zuma said in a state television address. "This is a moment of our deepest sorrow. Our nation has lost its greatest son."

Mr. Mandela spent nearly three months in the hospital through September, initially to treat a lung infection. It was the latest in a series of increasingly severe ailments South Africa's first black president had battled since contracting tuberculosis during his nearly three decades in prison for opposing the former white-minority regime.

After he was discharged, South African officials had said that Mr. Mandela remained in "critical but stable" condition. But some members of his family acknowledged his precarious state in recent days, even as an admiring nation and well-wishers across the globe started to come to terms with his mortality.

Though Mr. Mandela had stepped down from the presidency in 1999, he remained a father figure for a country going through wrenching economic and political change. South Africa's economy has struggled to grow at a modest 2%, well below government targets of 7%, and unemployment among young people is close to 80%. In recent years, protests in predominantly black townships have erupted over poor public services and a dearth of job opportunities. Many young black South Africans, born after the dawn of democracy in 1994, are channeling their frustration toward the current government, led by Mr. Mandela's African National Congress.

It was as a prisoner that Mr. Mandela first became a rallying point for opponents of apartheid. After he was sentenced to life in prison in 1964, he spent more than a quarter-century behind bars, much of it in a maximum-security prison on Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town.

By the time he was released from a different prison in 1990, the tables had been turned. South Africa had become a pariah nation and Mr. Mandela would lead his country's re-embrace of a world that had spurned its racist government.

With South African President F.W. de Klerk, whom he had met secretly with other apartheid officials in prison, Mr. Mandela would pick apart the machinery of white political domination through painstaking negotiations. Those negotiations laid the groundwork for the election in 1994 of the country's first black president—Mr. Mandela himself.

—Patrick McGroarty and Devon Mayliecontributed to this article.

Write to Peter Wonacott at peter.wonacott@wsj.com