Nelson Mandela was born into a continent colonized and in servitude to European powers in July 1918. Only Ethiopia and Liberia were independent. But Germany's defeat in the first world war brought about a reworking of the colonial order with its possessions in what are now Tanzania, Cameroon, Togo, Burundi and Rwanda distributed among the war's victors — Britain, France and Belgium. German South West Africa, now Namibia, fell under South African control.
Mandela was a citizen of a new country: South Africa had been born eight years earlier with the unification of four British colonies, including the two former Afrikaner republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, taken over after the Boer war.
The Boer struggle was widely seen as the first anti-colonial fight of the 20th century against the British Empire.