World Socionics

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a South African lawyer, political activist and Thembu hereditary nobleman who was the most prominent leader of the movement against that country's system of institutionalised racial segregation known as apartheid . He served as South Africa's first president of the post- apartheid period from 1994 to 1999 after having been a political prisoner in 1964-1990. Backround :  Mandela was born in 1918 in what is today the Eastern Cape province, in the core territory of the Xhosa ethnic group; more precisely he belonged to the royal family of the Thembu, a smaller group within the Xhosa. He studied law at Fort Hare, not far from his home town of Qunu, and in 1943 he continued his studies at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Up to this time, as per his own account, Mandela's life experiences had been mostly limited to rural areas where his daily exposure to the social realities of being a black South African were minimal, and his p...

  Gore Vidal (Eugene Luther Gore Vidal) was an American writer of novels, essays, stage plays and scripts for television and cinema, active from the 1940s to the 2000s. Towards the end of his life he became better known as a political polemicist in essays, interviews and speeches, mostly denouncing what he called "the national security state" in the US.  He was on occasion a political candidate, running unsuccessfully as a Democrat in 1960 for Congress in what was then New York's 29th District, and in 1982 in the California primaries for the US Senate. During his 1960 campaign, he actually came up with the concept of what would later become the Peace Corps, introduced by President Kennedy. As a writer, Vidal was best known for such bestselling novels as The City and the Pillar (1948), Julian (1964), Myra Breckingridge  (1968), Burr (1973), Creation (1981) and  Lincoln (1984). His last novel was The Golden Age (2000). In his later years he focused increasingly...