Cape Town — Nelson Mandela, the civil-rights leader and former South African president, signed an agreement today with Oxford University Press in South Africa that will expand the work of a foundation that provides university scholarships to African students.

The agreement will give the Mandela Rhodes Foundation, whose purpose is to educate young African leaders, a 25.1-percent stake in the South African arm of the scholarly publisher.

The Mandela Rhodes Foundation’s chairman, Jakes Gerwel, said he hoped the agreement would enable the foundation to support 100 scholarships per year by 2012.

The deal is also intended to fulfill the publisher’s obligation to help expand the participation of black South Africans in the nation’s economy, under a policy known as Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment, which has seen many companies that operate in South Africa sell off shares to black investors. —Megan Lindow