Profession: Anti-apartheid activist and South African President

Nationality: South African

Why Famous: Often referred to as the father of the nation by South Africans, Nelson Mandela was an anti-apartheid activist and politician who served 27 years in prison. After being freed in 1990 he became the President of the African National Congress (1991-97) before being elected the first black President of his country in a fully multiracial election in 1994. 

For his activism, he received over 250 honours, including the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Soviet Order of Lenin.

Born: July 18, 1918
Birthplace: Mvezo, Umtatu, South Africa

Generation: Greatest Generation
Chinese Zodiac: Horse
Star Sign: Cancer

Died: December 5, 2013 (aged 95)
Cause of Death: Lung infection

Married Life

• 1958-06-14 Nelson Mandela weds Winnie Madikizela
• 1992-04-13 Nelson Mandela announces he will seek divorce from Winnie Madikizela
• 1996-03-19 Winnie Madikizela-Mandela divorces Nelson Mandela after 38 years of marrage
• 1998-07-18 Nelson Mandela marries 3rd wife Graça Machel on his 80th birthday

Events in the Life of Nelson Mandela

• 1952-06-26 Nelson Mandela & 51 others infringe South Africa curfew
• 1956-12-06 Nelson Mandela & 156 others arrested for political activities in South Africa
• 1961-03-29 After a 4½ year trial Nelson Mandela is acquitted of treason in Pretoria
• 1962-08-04 Nelson Mandela captured by South African police
• 1962-08-05 Nelson Mandela arrested for incitement and for illegally leaving South Africa
• 1963-10-20 South Africa begins trial of Nelson Mandela & 8 others on conspiracy

• 1964-06-12 Nelson Mandela is sentenced to life in prison in South Africa
• 1964-07-17 ANC leader Nelson Mandela, recently sentenced to life imprisonment, is awarded the Joliot Curie Gold Medal for Peace
• 1980-06-13 UN Security Council calls for South Africa to free Nelson Mandela
• 1984-05-12 South African prisoner Nelson Mandela sees his wife for 1st time in 22 years
• 1985-01-31 South African President P. W. Bothaoffers to free Nelson Mandela if he denounces violence
• 1988-08-12 Nelson Mandela is treated for tuberculosis at hospital
• 1988-12-06 Nelson Mandela is transferred to Victor Vester Prison, Capetown
• 1989-05-17 Nelson Mandela receives a BA from University of South Africa
• 1989-07-05 South African President P. W. Bothavisits ANC leader Nelson Mandela
• 1990-02-02 South African President F. W. de Klerk promises to free Nelson Mandela & legalizes ANC & 60 other political organisations
• 1990-02-10 South African President F. W. de Klerk announces Nelson Mandela will be freed on Feburary 11th
• 1990-02-11 Nelson Mandela released after 27 years imprisonment in South Africa
• 1990-06-05 South African troops plunder Nelson Mandela’s home
• 1990-06-20 Nelson Mandela lands in NYC to begin a tour of US
• 1990-06-22 Nelson Mandela addresses the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid in New York, saying that nothing has occurred in South Africa to reverse the ANC’s position
• 1990-06-23 African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, on a US tour, receives a tumultuous welcome in Boston
• 1990-06-25 African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela meets with President George H. W. Bush at the White House
• 1990-08-16 South African President F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela hold emergency talks in Pretoria about increasing violence in Soweto
• 1990-12-13 South African President F. W. de Klerk meets with Nelson Mandela to talk of end of apartheid
• 1991-01-29 Nelson Mandela and Mangosuthu Buthelezi meet after 28 years

• 1991-06-26 ANC leader Nelson Mandela addresses congress
• 1991-09-05 Nelson Mandela chosen as president of African National Congress
• 1992-06-30 South African ANC President Nelson Mandela meets with UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali at Dakar
• 1992-07-27 Nelson Mandela says a general strike will go ahead to protest for the removal of South African President F. W. de Klerk from power and for free elections
• 1993-10-15 Nelson Mandela and South African President F. W. de Klerk awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
• 1994-03-07 ANC chief Nelson Mandela rejects demand by white right-wingers for separate homeland in South Africa
• 1994-05-06 Nelson Mandela and the ANC, finally confirmed winners in South Africa’s first post apartheid election
• 1994-05-10 Nelson Mandela sworn in as South Africa’s 1st black president
• 1994-08-15 South African President Nelson Mandela receives Anne Frank Penning
• 1994-10-01 South African President Nelson Mandela visits US
• 1996-07-07 Nelson Mandela steps down as President of South Africa
• 1998-07-12 South African President Nelson Mandela accompanies Queen Elizabeth II on a coach drive through the streets of London
• 1998-08-11 Palestine Liberation Organisation and Palestinian National Authority president, Yasser Arafat, arrives in Cape Town on his first state visit to South Africa at the invitation of President Nelson Mandela
• 2004-07-17 Former South African President Nelson Mandela calls for commitment by the world to take action against AIDS
• 2018-07-17 Barack Obama gives speech honoring Nelson Mandela and warning of “strongman politics” in Johannesburg, South Africa

Quotes by Nelson Mandela

• “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

In 1911, a deadly epidemic spread through China and threatened to become a pandemic. Its origins appeared to be related to the trade in wild animals, but at the time no one was sure. 

Lockdowns, quarantine measures, the wearing of masks, travel restrictions, the mass cremation of victims, and border controls were deployed to try to lower the infection rate. Yet more than 60,000 people died in modern-day northeast China, making it one of the world’s largest epidemics at the time. 

When the disease was eventually brought under control, the Chinese government convened the International Plague Conference in the northerncity of Shenyang — close to the epicenter of the outbreak.

In attendance were virologists, bacteriologists, epidemiologists and disease experts from many of the world’s major powers — the United States, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and France.

Illustration of the Reaper (allegory of Death) above Manchuria, which was published in Le Petit Journal, in France, in 1911

The purpose of the conference was to find the cause of the outbreak, learn which suppression techniques were most effective, discover why the disease had spread so far so fast, and assess what could be done to prevent a second wave. While the conference was not without some finger pointing, it was mostly a genuine attempt to learn.

As the world now faces a pandemic characterized by a lack of a globally co-ordinated response and multilateral effort on the part of political leaders, the collaborative aspects of the 1911 conference in north-eastern China are worth reconsidering. 

Today, the World Health Organization (WHO) appears compromised, the virus has been racialized, major nations are angry with each other and competing for resources and control of the narrative, while poorer countries are left to fend largely for themselves. 

Compared to 1911, we appear a polarized and divided world. 

Marmots and plague

The Great Manchurian Plague that broke out across northeastern China in 1910 was devastating. 

From the autumn of 1910, until the outbreak was finally suppressed the following year, an estimated 63,000 people died. The epidemic hit international headlines when it reached the northeastern city of Harbin, in today’s Heilongjiang province. Harbin was then part of what was known as Manchuria, a vast, agriculturally important but sparsely populated region situated on the juncture of the Chinese, Japanese and Russian spheres of influence. The majority of the territory was Chinese-governed, with Japan controlling the port area around Dalian and Russia running Manchuria’s railways. 

Harbin was an international city, home to many Russians who worked for the China Eastern Railway (CER), which connected the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Japanese-controled port city of Dalian. The city was also home to large communities of Japanese, Americans and Europeans engaged in trades connected to the railway. 

That included the fur trade, and it was from this industry that the disease most likely came.

Tarbagan marmot (Marmota sibirica), a species of rodent in the family Sciuridae, in steppes around Khukh Lake, Mongolia.

The Tarbagan marmot was a species of rodent that lived mostly on the grasslands and steppe of Mongolia and neighboring Manchuria. European, American and Japanese furriers had long purchased sable, mink and otter furs from local hunters, but had never been interested in the coarse fur of the Tarbagan marmot. But new dying techniques at the start of the century allowed marmot fur to pass as an affordable alternative for better-quality furs.

Thousands of nomadic local hunters were tasked by foreign buyers with bringing marmot hides, which soared in value in the years before the virus. Rural hunters had long avoided usingdiseased marmots for food, but did not think to cast aside the hides of sick animals — especially not when they were worth so much.

Pinpointing the initial outbreak of the plague is hard, but it was first officially noted by Russian doctors in Manzhouli, an Inner Mongolian town on the Chinese-Russian border, which had grown up around the CER. The symptoms were alarming — fever followed by haemoptysis (the coughing up of blood). In Manzhouli, the dead were left in the street and railway freight cars were turned into quarantine wards.

A picture of victims of the Great Manchurian Plague.

Just as viruses spread fast along airline routes today, back then the railways facilitated the spread. Fear in Manzhouli meant many people followed the routes the marmot hides had taken along the CER to the Heilongjiang city of Qiqihar, and then on to Harbin.

Cases of the pneumonic plague appeared in major rail termini — Tianjin, Beijing and along the Beijing to Wuhan railway. Even Shanghai, almost 2,000 miles from Manzhouli, reported a case and considered a lockdown of the city to prevent wider infection. In the crowded slums of Harbin, the disease took hold swiftly. By November 8, 1910, Harbin had a death toll of 5,272.

Initial response and debates

The response to the outbreak was rapid, given the logistical constraints at the start of the 20th century. 

Quarantine centers were established, mostly in converted rail freight cars, for people the authorities thought had have come into contact with the disease — relatives of the dead plus those in the fur trapping and trading business.

If the quarantined didn’t show symptoms within five-to-10 days they were released with a wire wristband fastened with a lead seal stating they were plague free. But if symptoms did show, the entire freight car was essentially doomed, given the disease’s staggering near 100% mortality rate. Burials were forbidden; mass cremations were enforced. 

In Harbin, the Chinese authorities’ lead doctor Wu Lien-teh, a Malaysia-born ethnic-Chinese medic educated at Cambridge University, was managing to contain the outbreak.

This photo taken sometime between 1910 and 1915 shows Dr. Wu Lien-teh, a Cambridge-educated Chinese physician who pioneered the use of masks during the Manchurian Plague of 1910-11.

Wu began post-mortem exams of victims and crucially established that the disease was pneumonic plague and not bubonic (the difference between the forms of plague is the location of infection; in pneumonic plague the infection is in the lungs, in bubonic plague, the lymph nodes). He also heavily recommended the wearing of face masks.

By early 1911, China had mobilized doctors and epidemiologists from across China to converge on Harbin. Wu knew there was a big deadline looming. Chinese New Year was officially January 30 and Wu knew that limiting travel would be almost impossible during the annual migration home for so many Chinese people. 

If the infection rate wasn’t brought down, then it risked becoming a nationwide epidemic. 

The response was sometimes harsh — any lodging house where an infection appeared was burnt to the ground. But overall Wu’s anti-plague measures worked. So-called “sanitary zones,” quarantines, lockdowns, isolation, travel restrictions and face masks were all implemented and appear to have brought the infection rate in Harbin down by the end of January. 

Infections had spread, however, along the rail line. By the start of January 1911, Shenyang had over 2,571 deaths. Eventually, quarantining and travel restrictions in Shenyang began to take effect and the infection rate fell. But the rail line extended onwards and several towns close to the major port city of Dalian reported cases.

In Dalian itself, mass inspections of train and ship passengers were instituted, the line was then shut, and ferries from Dalian ordered to remain in port. This meant the plague never reached Dalian. 

Though cases continued to pop up across Manchuria and occasionally beyond, in Harbin, Wu declared the plague suppressed at the end of January 1911, with a final mass cremation of victims. 

It was time to convene an international conference to try to find out why the outbreak had been so severe and widespread — andwhich anti-plague measures had worked best.

A conference in Shenyang

Yale professor William C Summers notes in his 2012 study of the Great Manchurian Plague that: “By the end of January 1911, the momentum for some sort of international consortium of ‘experts’ to come together in China was building rapidly.” 

The conference was not without risk for the Chinese.

China had a Russian-controlled rail line running through a vast swathe of its territory, Japan was ensconced in Dalian and controlling China’s major northern seaport, and the European powers and US had treaty ports up and down the country.

Kitajskaya street in Harbin circa 1932.

Still, they pushed ahead with hosting, which helped China avoid the charge of doing nothing in the aftermath of the epidemic. All attendees pledged that the conference was primarily concerned with scientific investigation, and not with imposing any further controls on China from outside. 

By April 3, 1911, Shenyang’s Shao Ho Yien palace had been turned into a conference center that included meeting rooms, laboratories for experiments and living quarters for the delegates. As well as the principal countries mentioned, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria-Hungary all sent experts. Many were from prestigious institutes. 

The main body of the conference sought to deal with eliminating the bad science and gossip, and getting to the scientific root of the bacteria. It was high-level science for the day — bacterial toxins, surface agglutinins, variant strains. There was also discussion of modes of contagion such as coughing and false theories such as the passing of the bacillus on food. There even was talk of what we would now call asymptomatic patients and super-spreaders. 

Containment was a major theme. What had worked best? Emergency quarantine and travel measures, certainly. Also, the early use of face masks which predated Wu’s discovery of the bacillus as pneumonic. Additionally, the rapid construction of plague hospitals to isolate the infected and potentially infected from ordinary hospital patients.

Harbin Railway Station, taken in about 1900

The conference wrapped on April 28, 1911, with closing remarks by Wu. Ultimately, China’s fears that Russia, Japan or the European powers would use the conference to advance their political aims against China didn’t materialize.

The conference’s conclusions and resolutions dealt with the science of the plague, the need for sanitary improvements, quarantine regulations and the unwitting cause of the epidemic, the Tarbagan marmot. 

Closing the conference Dr Wu urged that: “Every effort should be made to secure effective medical education in China.” 

Global responses

In 1911 there was no WHO. 

The response to the epidemic, the job of trying to limit its spread and suppress it, was left to individual nations, often nations with political antagonisms. 

There were no politicians in Shenyang, only scientists who saw the need for a global intergovernmental response — and a global health organization. That did begin to emerge after the First World War with the League of Nations formed in the wake of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. The League took on matters relating to health through its Health Bureau, formed by an executive section of medical experts. 

The bureau targeted the eradication of leprosy, malaria and yellow fever and successfully helped to contain epidemics of typhus in Russia and various outbreaks of cholera and typhoid in China between the wars. After World War II, the League’s successor, the United Nations, created the WHO.

The Great Manchurian Plague did not ultimately spread in any serious way to the rest of China, Mongolia or Russia. The shutdown of Dalian port stopped the spread out from Manchuria to major destinations in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia.

From there it could have moved by ocean liner to Europe, America and throughout the world. But it didn’t. 

Summers, the historian, said that containment was down to a joined up response.

“Such a conjunction of the right knowledge, the right resources, and the right people has not always been the case in other global challenges of epidemic disease,” he said. 

Measures taken today around the world — specially constructed quarantine hospitals, mask wearing ordinances, enhanced sanitary practices, travel restrictions, grounded planes and dedicated teams of healthcare workers — in many ways replicate those taken 110 years ago in northeastern China. 

However, the major players today — the US, China, the nations of the European Union, and Japan — seemingly have little interest in a coordinated response to the health crisis and prospects of any apolitical conference seem remote.

In 1911, the world’s leading disease experts were eager to get to China.

Perhaps that is what needs to happen at some point after the coronavirus pandemic: the world’s scientists could circumvent the politicians to find a way to meet, share and discuss Covid-19 in an open forum.