It is 30 years this week since Nelson Mandela was released from prison on 11 February 1990, an historic occasion that everyone remembers – including where they were and what they were doing. Many of you would have watched it on television.
Some of you might have been at the Grand Parade in Cape Town where thousands gathered to hear the first words Mandela spoke publically after 27 years in prison: “Friends, comrades and fellow South Africans, I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all. I stand before you not as a prophet, but as a humble servant of you, the people.” It was heady stuff after decades of apartheid rule and people were ecstatic. Mandela was told only the day before that he would be released from prison. He tried to get the then President FW de Klerk to postpone his release to have time to make plans with the ANC, but De Klerk refused. Mandela wrote later: “At the time, neither of us saw any irony in a prisoner asking not to be released and his jailer attempting to release him.” One of my sisters became a temporary “runner” for a BBC television crew that day, rushing their film to the SABC in Sea Point from where it was beamed to the world. A friend, Kathy Forbes, could not face the crowds so that day went to visit her friend Vanessa Watson in Rondebosch. As she drew near, she saw a roadblock and police cars. “A policeman came up said I must park there, and then said: ‘If you like you can come and visit Mr Mandela down the road.’ I thought I must be dreaming. Mandela was meant to be on the Grand Parade.” She hurried down the road and sure enough, in the middle car she saw Mandela and Winnie. “I was so excited, but thought if I didn’t go and call Vanessa she would never forgive me.” Vanessa came out with her twin babies. “I respectfully knocked on the window and said I was so pleased to see him and asked if I could shake his hand. He said of course. Then he saw the twins and said he had not held a baby for years and asked if he could hold one,” said Kathy. “Simon was passed through the window, but he was in tears, so he was passed back and Danny was passed in and he seemed okay. “We were all so overwhelmed that we didn’t think to ask for his autograph, and no one had a camera, and it was before cell phones. But there was a BBC team filming it and they later interviewed Vanessa,” said Kathy. President Cyril Ramaphosa, who was with Mandela at the Grand Parade, said this week that of all the statements Mandela made that day, the one he remembers is: “The need to unite the people of our country is as important a task now as it always had been.” Ramaphosa added: “It was true then and it remains true three decades later.”
