Nelson Mandela passed away on 5 December 2013, aged 95.

Once the world’s most famous political prisoner, Mandela emerged from a 27-year jail term in 1990 to lead South Africa from apartheid to democracy.

President Jacob Zuma announced his death on the public broadcaster just before midnight.

“He passed on peacefully in the company of his family around 20.50pm on December 5. He is now resting, he is now at peace. Our nation has lost its greatest son.”

“Fellow South Africans, Nelson Mandela brought us together and it is together that we bid him farewell.”

His charisma, generosity of spirit, and an unwavering commitment to the well-being of his fellow humans, earned him love and acclaim across the globe.

It also earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.

Even after he stepped down from the presidency in 1999, he continued as an elder statesman to champion the cause of reconciliation, peace and human rights, speaking out strongly on issues including Aids and armed conflict.

Nelson Rolihlahla Dalibungha Mandela was born in the Transkei on July 18, 1918, and trained as a lawyer. He became a key figure in the African National Congress (ANC) and its decision in 1955 to embark on organised resistance to the newly-elected National Party in the form of the Defiance Campaign.

Going underground after the ANC was banned in 1960, he was arrested and sentenced in 1964 to life imprisonment for plotting the overthrow of the government.

He served the bulk of his time on Robben Island, where he became a symbol of apartheid injustice.

Freed by the reformist head of state FW de Klerk in 1990, he was elected president of the ANC the following year. In May 1994 he was inaugurated president of South Africa by a new non-racial Parliament.

He formally retired from public life in June 2004, just short of his 86th birthday, and only weeks after playing a major role in helping secure the 2010 soccer World Cup for South Africa.

However he continued to lend support to causes such as the 46664 anti-Aids campaign, and to speak out against poverty.

On his 80th birthday in 1998 he married Graca Machel, widow of former Mozambican president Samora Machel.

In his later years Mandela was increasingly frail. He made his last public appearance at the closing ceremony of the World Cup.

In early 2011, fears for his health grew when he battled a serious respiratory infection that would recur in coming years. When he turned 93 a few months later, he retired to his country home in the Eastern Cape.

In December 2012 he was treated again for a lung infection in hospital then was admitted again on March 27, 2013 to be treated for pneumonia.

After his discharge, the public broadcaster televised footage of him on April 27, looking remote, but comfortable in an easy chair at home.

In the early hours of June 8, Mandela was again taken to hospital.

A news report that his ambulance had broken down on the road there was confirmed by the presidency which hastened to add that there was no danger to his health at the time because he had seven doctors, nurses, and a fully equipped ICU in his convoy.

On Sunday night, June 23, the presidency said his condition had changed to critical, and Zuma asked for prayers of support for him, his family, and his medical team.

On Monday 24, family and key government ministers flew into Mthatha for a private meeting in Qunu. The presidency issued another statement, to say Mandela remained critical.

On Wednesday, June 26, the nation held its breath after President Jacob Zuma cancelled a trip to neighbouring Maputo at short notice but the next day he reported that Mandela’s condition had stabilised overnight.

Mandela had six children by two previous marriages, including two daughters with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

MANDELA LEAVES HIS MARK

Nelson Mandela has left his mark on the world with an extraordinary legacy of reconciliation and tolerance.

But he also leaves a more tangible presence in the form of a host of streets and buildings, an aeroplane, a flower, a cosmic particle and even a sea slug that have been named after him.

In South Africa, the Nelson Mandela metropole covers Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage; Mandela Park is a residential area in Cape Town’s black township Khayelitsha; Johannesburg has a Nelson Mandela Bridge, and there are Nelson Mandela streets, roads and avenues in towns and cities across the country.

The thousands of visitors who annually make the pilgrimage to Robben Island, where he spent the bulk of his 27-year jail term. All pass through the Nelson Mandela Gateway complex at Cape Town’s Waterfront.

In 2005 he gave his blessing to the creation on Johannesburg’s Constitution Hill of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and Commemoration, to honour and document his life.

Further afield, London boasts several streets named for Mandela –including the road in Camden in which the anti-apartheid movement had its headquarters — plus at least two housing developments honouring him.

There are thoroughfares bearing his name in a string of other towns and cities in the United Kingdom, in Dakar in Senegal, Banjul in the Gambia, Abuja and Calabar in Nigeria, Dar es Salaam and Tabata in Tanzania, Katse in Lesotho, Windhoek in Namibia, Harare in Zimbabwe, New Delhi in India, Georgetown in Guyana, Cardiff in Wales, San Francisco in California and Shepherdstown in West Virginia.

In 1983, at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle, New York City renamed the square in front of South African mission to the United Nations “Nelson and Winnie Mandela Plaza”.

In 1986 Glasgow, which five years earlier had honoured Mandela with the freedom of the city, followed the Big Apple’s example by renaming the street where the South African consulate was sited, after him.

In Germany, the Nuremberg Platz became the Nelson Mandela Platz; there is a Gallic equivalent in Clayes-sous-Bois in France.

There are Mandela parks in Hull and Leicester in Britain, a Nelson Mandela speaker’s corner in Huddersfield in West Yorkshire, a bronze statue of him in London’s Parliament Square, a monument to him in Dublin, and schools in Germany, the United States and Canada.

His name is attached to the University of Natal’s medical school, to the main lecture theatre at Oxford’s business school, and to rooms at a string of other tertiary institutions.

He will also be remembered in academic circles for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, which sponsors African students to study democracy and governance, and a distinguished annual lecture, while countless thousands of children have reason to be grateful to the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund.

The Mandela Rhodes Foundation was set up in 2002 to — ironically, given Cecil Rhodes’ empire-minded track record on the subcontinent — redress the “profound inequalities that are the legacies of colonialism and racism”.

In 1973 scientists at Leeds University gave his name to what they posited would be the heaviest elementary particle, suggesting the world was being bombarded by Mandelas in the form of cosmic radiation from outer space.

In the 1990s marine biologists who discovered a new species of sea-slug off the Cape Peninsula, which they placed in a completely new scientific family, the Mandeliidae, named it Mandelia microcornata in his honour.

At a ceremony in the Kirstenbosch botanic gardens, a rare strain of dusky yellow strelitzia, the Strelitzia reginae, was named Mandela’s Gold in his honour, and a hybrid Mokara orchid also became a Mandela during his 1997 visit to Singapore.

In 2003, as he turned 85, South African Airways named one of a new fleet of Airbus planes the Nelson Mandela.

Two namings that did not stick were an abortive bid by then Cape Town mayor Peter Marais in 2001 to rename the city’s Adderley Street after Mandela — a move which led to Marais’ ousting from the post.

In the same year, a Cape Town fast food outlet called Nelson’s Chicken and Gravy Land changed its name after protests from the African National Congress and intervention by Mandela’s office.

MANDELA FAMILY NAME TARNISHED

Former president Nelson Mandela’s family name has been tarnished in recent years by in-fighting, legal disputes and business ventures involving his children and grandchildren.

Most recently, it was reported that his daughters Makaziwe Mandela and Zenani Dlamini were suing him for the rights to his artworks and control of his millions.

The Star newspaper reported that the sisters intended fighting an order, made by the High Court in Johannesburg in April 2004, which gave Mandela the right to instruct Ismail Ayob, his former lawyer, to stop managing his financial, personal and legal affairs.

The court order barred Ayob from selling any of the former president’s artwork. It was alleged at the time that Ayob and art publisher Ross Calder cashed in on reproduced copies of Mandela’s limited edition, signed artwork.

The sisters’ lawsuit was reportedly being challenged by Mandela’s current lawyer, Bally Chuene, who filed an affidavit in mid-May.

In April 2013, the sisters, represented by Ayob, launched a court case against several of Mandela’s business associates in a dispute over the control of two companies.

According to papers filed in the High Court in Johannesburg, lawyers George Bizos and Chuene, and Human Settlements Minister Tokyo Sexwale, should not remain directors of the firms Harmonieux Investment Holdings and Magnifique Investment Holdings.

The main purpose of the firms is to channel funds from the sale of handprint artwork by Mandela for the benefit of his family.

The sisters claimed in court documents that the appointments of the three directors were illegal and that the group had refused numerous written requests to resign, made through Ayob. They wanted a court order to have the trio removed.

If the application were to be granted, Makaziwe Mandela and Zenani Dlamini would be the only two directors.

Grandson Mandla Mandela distanced himself from the legal action, despite being listed as one of the 17 family members in court papers.

Bizos rejected the claims.

“We are not hijackers. We don’t hijack things. The public should ask themselves why five years later these allegations are being laid. We are confident we were regularly appointed at the wish of Mr Mandela five years ago,” he told The Star newspaper at the time.

He was quoted as saying that Mandela’s daughters had brought the court application “to further their interests and get their hands on the money”.

He reportedly said Mandela instructed him in 2004 to write several letters to Ayob requesting all information related to the artworks. Chuene contended that Ayob had failed to comply with Mandela’s wishes.

At a meeting in April 2005, Mandela told the women he did not want them involved in his business, the newspaper reported.

Chuene, Bizos and Sexwale asked the court to dismiss the women’s application with costs.

Ayob told the City Press newspaper in May that the rights to Mandela’s name rested with the company Tinancier Investments, whose directors are Makaziwe Mandela and Zenani Dlamini.

He said the company obtained these rights through a contract signed with Mandela in 2001, and claimed it remained valid.

“They [Bizos, Chuene and others] hijacked [the companies] and ignored Tinancier because it was just a shelf company, but they didn’t know that it actually was the one that held the rights [to the Mandela name],” Ayob was quoted as saying.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation, however, is the custodian of the Mandela brand, created to manage and protect it.

According to the City Press report, it holds 66 Mandela-related trademarks, including “Nelson Mandela”, “Mandela’ and “Madiba”.

Companies and intellectual property commission records reportedly show the foundation has wide rights over the term “Nelson Mandela”, including for medals, retail and even scientific and computer equipment.

The foundation reportedly also owns registered trademarks on the name of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Municipality, the Nelson Mandela Square mall in Sandton, Johannesburg, and several names relating to its own work.

While his family have featured prominently in the media, Mandela’s last major public appearance was in July 2010, at the final of the Fifa World Cup at FNB Stadium in Johannesburg.

He increasingly withdrew from the public eye, spending his time between Johannesburg and his ancestral village of Qunu in the Eastern Cape.

Mandela has 17 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.

According to the Associated Press, 16 of his grandchildren issued a statement in April seeking to present a united front regarding the latest court cases and setting the record straight regarding allegations of them being “money-grabbers”.

They said their goal was to safeguard the interests of beneficiaries and shareholders, in line with a trust set up by Mandela to provide for his family.

“Most of us are gainfully employed, work for our own companies and run our own projects,” they said in the statement.

They said it was not about the “money and exploitation of the Mandela name”.

Beeld newspaper reported two months ago that Mandela’s children and grandchildren were currently active in more than 110 companies, according to company information.

Makaziwe Mandela and daughter Tukwini Mandela started the “House of Mandela” wine company in the United States at the end of February.

“The wine movement is growing and more people are experiment[ing] with wine beyond spirit drinks,” Tukwini Mandela told the Sunday Sun at the time.

Two of Mandela’s granddaughters, Zaziwe Dlamini-Manaway and Swati Dlamini, introduced US television viewers to their series titled “Being Mandela” earlier this year.

The sisters are the daughters of Zenani Mandela and Prince Thumbumuzi Dlamini of Swaziland.

The 13-episode first season follows their lives in Johannesburg as they try to carry on the family legacy while juggling motherhood, according to the AP.

“We get asked this question a lot. Is this not going to tarnish the name and is this not going to be bad for the name?” Dlamini told the news agency.

“But our grandparents have always said to us, this is our name too, and we can do what we think is best-fitting with the name, as long as we treat it with respect and integrity.”

Mandla had an unintended brush with the TV business when allegations emerged that he had sold his grandfather’s funeral rights to the SA Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) for R3 million in 2009. He has repeatedly denied the rumours.

In papers submitted to the Mthatha High Court in March last year, Mandla said no such agreement existed, The Times newspaper reported.

“I am not in possession of any written agreement with the SABC, BBC or any other broadcasting company or corporation for the broadcast rights to Mr Mandela’s funeral, as such an agreement does not exist and I do not possess any such rights,” he said in court papers.

Mandela and estranged first wife Tando Mabuna-Mandela are currently in a divorce dispute over their finances. The two apparently married in community of property in 2004. They started divorce proceedings in 2009.

The matter had not yet been finalised because the couple were fighting over assets.

The Times reported that he had attempted to avoid disclosing his affairs to the court. According to legal experts this was because he was trying to avoid them entering the public domain.

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