Free at last ... yes, Mandela is free at last!

The UMass Times (Special), Monday, February 12, 1990

NKOSI SIKELEL' I AFRIKA

      PAARL, South Africa (FEB. 12)  Black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela walked out of Victor Verster prison a free man Sunday (yesterday) opening a new chapter in South African political history and ending a 27-year confinement for advocating the violent overthrow of the white minority government.

     Mandela, 71, jailed in August 1962 and sentenced to life in prison in 1964 for sabotage, was driven to the prison gate in a car and then walked to freedom hand-in-hand with his wife, Winnie.

     A crowd gathered outside the prison chanted and cheered and waved the green, black and yellow flags of the African National Congress.

     Mandela, dressed in a dark business suit, smiled and then raised his hands over his head in apparent jubilation.  Winnie Mandela gave a clenched fist salute to the crowd.

     Police, anxious to control enthusiastic crowds and protect Mandela from threatened violence, had to set up road blocks a mile and a half from the gates of the prison outside Cape Town, forcing hundreds of jubilant spectators to abandon their cars and form a festive parade on foot down a road lined with grape vineyards.

     When Mandela emerged through the prison gates, police cleaned a path with a team of motorcycle outriders as helicopters swirled overhead.

     Mandela has been living in a former warden's cottage at the Victor Verster facility since December 1988, after moving from the maximum security Robbin Island prison off Cape Town coast.

     Immediately following his release, the silver-haired Mandela was scheduled to be driven into Cape Town for a news conference and rally in the heart of the city.

     President Frederik de Klerk announced Saturday that Mandela would be released from prison unconditionally, paving the way for negotiations to end the country's grinding racial conflict.

     Mandela was sentenced on June 12, 1964, to life in prison for acts of sabotage against the white-dominated government of South Africa.  He had previously refused several offers of freedom, turning down government demands that he renounce violence as a condition of his release.

     Marshals with armbands ringed the gate of the prison and linked arms to keep the gathering crowds back from the main entrance as Mandela, giving a clenched fist blackpower salute, emerged.  Many of those in the crowd were not even born when Mandela was captured in 1962. 

     The Sunday Times, a nationally circulated broadsheet, devoted its entire front page entirely Sunday to a photo of de Klerk and Mandela, topped by the banner headline "Here he is." 

     The photograph, released Saturday, is the first published photo in 24 years of the nationalist hero, whose name is synonymous with the fight against racial inequality but whose aging face has been virtually unknown except for family members, ministers and lawyers allowed to visit with him.

     On the eve of Mandela's release into a volatile political atmosphere, violence broke out in two townships east of Johannesburg, where eight people were reported killed and 45 injured by police who fired to break up mobs of blacks hurling stones and petrol bombs.

     Spontaneous celebrations erupted across the country after de Klerk's Saturday announcement, including in the black city of Soweto near Johannesburg, where about 500 youths and women danced outside the Mandela family home.

     "I came to the conclusion that he  is committed to a peaceful process," de Klerk said of Mandela, who was the world's most celebrated political prisoner and a powerful symbol of the resistance to white rule by South Africa's 28 million black majority.

     De Klerk's announcement failed to meet Mandela's demands that the government lift in its entirety a 43-month-old state of emergency, release all political prisoners and clarify amnesty for exiles returning to the country.

     De Klerk said, however, the issue of the exiles and political prisoners could be discussed in further negotiations.  Lifting the emergency would depend on the "situation on the ground," saying that an absence of the political strife and violence would lay the groundwork for canceling the emergency declaration.

     Activists who met Mandela Friday afternoon said the symbolic leader of the African National Congress would break apartheid laws "every hour of the day" until the emergency is lifted and all political prisoners are freed.

-- The UMass Times,
Wilmot Max Ramsay,
Editor-in-Chief,
UMass/Boston.