At 19, Mandela heads off to school and acquires a taste for free thinking and a clearer picture of the plight of the African people.

He studies law while attending a Wesleyan secondary school and later the University College of Fort Hare, a "rather elitist" place Mandela described as "Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, all rolled into one."

It is there that Mandela experiences his first brush with politics when he organizes a protest against the college House of Commons after learning that freshmen and residents are not represented. He lobbies his fellow freshmen to rise up and protest this "odd and undemocratic" political structure. The rag-tag group forms a House Committee to deal with the issue and defeats the upperclassmen, much to their dismay. It has started.

Mandela's involvement in the African National Congress (ANC) -- an organization dedicated to uniting the African people, and the one he would lead to victory decades later -- begins at age 22.

Three years later, he founds the ANC Youth League with the goal to organize mass support for the ANC and turn it into a grassroots activist organization. His increasingly public condemnation of the South Africa government is also beginning to catch the attention of police.

Growing increasingly involved with political life, Mandela walks away from university without his law degree in 1948. He later finishes a two-year law diploma which, in combination with his BA, allows him to open South Africa’s first black law firm in 1952, alongside partner Oliver Tambo.

The men’s law office -– Mandela and Tambo -- serves a hub for various political meetings and legal cases linked to the 1952 Defiance Campaign, which encouraged black people to break the country’s racial separation laws, keeping them out of such places as rail stations and post offices.

Read Part 3: His trial