Twenty years ago, on 11 February 1990, I watched Nelson Mandela’s release on a small TV in our rented house in Isidingo Road in Yeoville, Johannesburg. I had moved from Cape Town to Johannesburg in 1989, with my wife Nike Romano to work for an NGO called Planact. I remember getting highly irritated with SATV reporter Clarence Kayter’s seemingly inane remarks (”The sun is not just for the growing of grapes but the sun is shining on South Africa.”) while he tried to fill the time before Mandela eventually emerged from Victor Verster Prison. I watched with pride as Cape Town became the first city to welcome a free Mandela as he spoke to the world from the small balcony of the City Hall in front of a massive crowd on the Grand Parade.
A few days later, it was our turn in Johannesburg, as we went to the Soccer City Stadium near Soweto with 100 000 others to welcome Mandela, Walter Sisulu and the other political leaders. Having endured, with so many other South Africans, a decade of detention, banning, living underground during the State of Emergency and friends and comrades dying in detention or going into exile, it was one of the most euphoric periods of my life.
The huge crowd at Soccer City waits expectantly for Mandela's arrival
A shaft from the West Reef gold mine provides a backdrop to the packed crowd
The moment we had all been waiting for - Mandela and his comrades do a lap of honour
Nike and I savour the moment
"An occasion to be remembered by everyone". My brother Jeremy gets into the swing of the celebrations
Twenty years on, as we reflect on the changes that have taken place in South Africa, and in our own lives, I would like to echo the words of Njabulo Ndebele in a recent Sunday Times article, Long Walk Remains: “So, as we recall Mandela walking out of prison, we must contemplate how he walked not only out of a physical prison, but also out of many emotional and conceptual prisons, and took us along with him… This thought allows us to attempt to identify prisons we must walk out of 20 years after Mandela left the prison of apartheid – those that we carry deep within ourselves and which hold us back.”
Njabulo concludes, and I agree with him: “South Africa desperately needs new politics in which the actors understand the full implications of abundant new opportunities for people to rediscover one another and to build the country. Today we know that diversity in thinking is a national asset.”
