Nelson Mandela Died in Prison in the 1980s

He died once, in 2013, aged 95, after retirement from public life. He was imprisoned for 27 years, from 1962 to 1990, mostly on Robben Island. He was released, was elected president of South Africa in 1994, served one term, and then lived two decades more as the most globally respected statesman of his era. The 'died in prison' Mandela effect appears to be a confusion of several real events: the death of Steve Biko in 1977 (a prominent anti-apartheid activist who did die in police custody), various funeral imagery from anti-apartheid news coverage in the 1980s, and the general fade of Mandela from international news during much of his imprisonment. People who 'remember' the 80s funeral are remembering somebody else's funeral, or the constant news of South African deaths during the apartheid struggle, or, most likely, nothing in particular and pattern-matching from secondhand cultural cues. Mandela's actual story is well documented, the dates are firm, and the 'two deaths' framing is a memory illusion. He became the namesake of the entire memory-misalignment phenomenon because the misremembering was so widespread and so hard to shake.