Nelson Mandela's Football World Cup moment. Brazilian football legend Pele greets the statesman in 2007.
Everyone knows Nelson Mandela the statesman. Fewer know Rolihlahla the runaway.
This Madiba Month, IOL platforms are running a daily quiz across our platforms, one question a day, building up to Mandela Day on 18 July. Some answers will surprise you. Below, we've unpacked all eight so you can check yourself once you've taken a guess, and dug into our Madiba Archives for more of the man behind the myth.
Before he was Nelson, before he was Madiba, he was Rolihlahla, a Xhosa name his father gave him at birth in Mvezo in 1918. It translates literally as "pulling the branch of a tree," but colloquially it means something closer to "troublemaker." His parents couldn't have known how fitting it would turn out to be. Read more on how Mandela came to be known by so many different names over his lifetime in our feature, Mandela - an icon by any name.
The name most of the world knows him by wasn't given to him by his family at all. On his first day of primary school in 1925, his teacher, Miss Mdingane, handed out English names to her Xhosa pupils, as was customary under colonial-era schooling. She chose "Nelson" for him. Nobody, including Mandela himself in later life, ever established why.
