Nelson wasn’t his birth name. Mandela’s father, Chief Henry Mandela of the Xhosa-speaking Tembu people, gave his son the name Rolihlahla. The boy was also known as Madiba, which is the name of his father’s clan. But he was renamed Nelson by a teacher when he attended elementary school.

Mandela’s favorite sport was boxing, and not just as a spectator—he boxed as a young man. “I did not enjoy the violence of boxing so much as the science of it,” he wrote in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. “I was intrigued by how one moved one’s body to protect oneself, how one used a strategy both to attack and retreat, how one paced oneself over a match.” But Mandela was realistic about his chances of turning pro. “I was in the heavyweight division, and I had neither enough power to compensate for my lack of speed nor enough speed to make up for my lack of power,” he wrote.

Last year 14 locations within South Africa that were symbolic of Mandela’s life and the country’s struggle for human rights were collectively designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Nelson Mandela Legacy Sites include the Great Place at Mqhekezweni, where Mandela was raised after his father’s death, and Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, home to a former prison complex that held many political prisoners, including Mandela, who was incarcerated there twice, in 1956 and 1962.