JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Nelson Mandela, who ran away from an arranged tribal marriage and grew up to become his country's first black president, said farewell on Friday to the parliament that formally dismantled South African apartheid.
Mandela, 80, will retire in June after the country's second democratic election and will hand over power to his ruling party's favored candidate for president, Thabo Mbeki.Mbeki, South Africa's deputy president, has been in charge of the day-to-day running of the country since he took over as party leader in December 1997.
"I will count myself amongst the aged of our society . . . as a citizen of the world committed, as long as I have the strength, to work for a better life for all people everywhere," Mandela said in his farewell address to parliament.
Mandela was born in 1918 in the rural southern village of Qunu, tending his father's cattle after mornings in a mud-hut school until he ran away to study law and enter politics rather than assent to a marriage arranged by his family.
He endured 27 years in jail for fighting apartheid only to suffer the loneliness of a broken heart when his wife, Winnie, betrayed him with another man after his release from jail in 1990, leading to divorce.
On his 80th birthday in July last year, however, he married Graca Machel, widow of Mozambican President Samora Machel, who told Reuters in a recent interview Mandela would divide his time in retirement between Qunu, Johannesburg and the Mozambican capital of Maputo.
Mandela was among the first to advocate armed resistance to apartheid in 1960 but was quick to preach reconciliation and forgiveness when the country's ruling white minority began to ease its grip on power 30 years later.
"I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities," Mandela told the court that found him guilty in 1964 of the capital offense of trying sabotage.
"It is an ideal I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."
The court sentenced him to life in jail, and he was taken to Robben Island penal colony, where he spent 18 years before being moved to mainland prisons prior to his release at the age of 71.
The decision by former President F.W. de Klerk to release Mandela and legalize his African National Congress was a watershed that meant the coming of majority rule was only a matter of time.
In April 1994, Mandela led the ANC to a crushing victory in the first all-race election and became president the next month.
In the trying process of governing a wounded and divided country, he opened himself to criticism that he was authoritarian, woolly on foreign policy, and, in later years, sometimes eccentric.
His aides will want to forget his suggestion that 14-year-olds should be allowed to vote or his characterization of U.S aid as "peanuts," but he will bow out with a reputation as one of the world's greatest statesmen.