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.”

When Jan Gehl, world-renowned architect who focuses on ’life between buildings’ visited in 2004, he described pedestrians in Cape Town as a ‘hunted race’. He was right. Thanks to grievous urban planning errors in the 1970s, a six-lane race track called Strand Street intersects with an eight-lane monstrosity called the Heerengracht, creating an urban wasteland in the central of the city, right where tens of thousands of public transport users emerge from the Cape Town Station every day.

Fortunately, some progress has been made during the ensuing five years to shift from a car-dominated to a more people-centred city centre. Strand Street and the Heerengracht are still there, but cars, taxis and buses are slowly being tamed and pedestrians (and cyclists) are beginning to find their rightful places and spaces. And we have been doing it in the way Jan Gehl suggested – by stealth!

Company’s Garden

One of the historic green spaces in Cape Town, the Company’s Garden had by the late 1990s become unsafe and unkempt. A process, led by the City of Cape Town, and supported by a range of stakeholders, has revived the fortunes of the Gardens, which is now a well-used and beautiful green space in the heart of the city.

Company's Garden - a tranquil space (Pic: Ed Suter)

Company's Garden - Part of an expanding Central City pedestrian route

Jetty Square 

Named because of its proximity to the site of the original Cape Town jetty but now part of reclaimed land known as the Foreshore, Jetty Square has been upgraded and adorned with ghostly shark-like creatures to remind us of our marine heritage.

Jetty Square - still undiscovered by most Capetonians, but part of an expanding pedestrian network connecting the Foreshore to St George's Mall via Thibault Square

Shark-like statues in Jetty Square move with the prevailing winds

Children using public space

Church Square

For decades, Church Square near the South African Parliament was little more than a motley car-park. In 2007, cars were removed and the Square was transformed into a people-space.

A new car-free Church Square

Church Square - slowly attracting people out of office buildings and motors vehicles and into public spaces

Goemarati - a series of music performances in Church Square in 2007 to attract public life back into the area. The juxtaposition between the statue of 'Onze Jan' Hofmeyr, founder of the Afrikaner Bond political party in the 1880s, and the Goemarati performance derived from the music of the slaves at the Cape is supremely ironic

Inclusive memorialisation. Slaves in Cape Town between the 1660s and 1800s made up the majority of the city's population but were effectively written out of history books for two centuries. Following a public competition, the City of Cape Town erected a memorial to slaves on the newly-upgraded Church Square

Reflecting on a divided past. Church Square was chosen as the site of a slave memorial because of its proximity to where slaves were previously bought and sold, and to the old Slave Lodge, where slaves of the Company were kept in inhuman conditions.

Grand Parade

It was inevitable that sooner or later, attention would have to be paid to Cape Town’s (and South Africa’s) oldest public space – the Grand Parade. A public place at the center of economic and social life in Cape Town for over 300 years, the Grand Parade had become by the late 1990s a run-down, cluttered and inhospitable space. Following a heritage assessment commissioned by the Cape Town Partnership in 2006, and a public consultation process, the City of Cape Town decided to upgrade the Grand Parade at a cost of R22m.

The Grand Parade - historically a place for soldiers, citizens, circuses and markets

The Grand Parade as scene of Nelson Mandela's first address to the world as a free man in February 1990 and his first address to the nation after his election as President in 1994

Grand Parade as a run-down parking lot (Pic: Ed Suter)

The Grand Parade is the site of South Africa's oldest continous fleamarket (Pic: Ed Suter)

Long term plan for the Grand Parade. Phase one will be completed by the end of 2009

Aerial view of phase one upgrade underway

A new people's space emerges

Homeless World Cup on the Grand Parade in 2006 - inspiration for the 2010 FIFA World Cup Fan Fest in Cape Town

Queen Sonja of Norway today opened an exhibition entitled “Strengths and Convictions: The life and times of the South African Nobel Peace Prize Laureates” at the South African National Galley in the Company’s Gardens, Cape Town. The exhibition, which is curated by Gavin Jantjies, consists of portrait photographs, seven short documentary films and 98 contemporary works of art, set against the background of the laureate’s lives. I was touched when I saw George Hallett’s picture of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and my father, Dr Alex Boraine, talking together during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). They were chairperson and vice-chairperson of the TRC at the time.

More information available from the Nobel Peace Centre and Iziko Museums

Queen Sonja opens the exhibition

Marlene Dumas 'The Next Generation' (detail) 1994-1999

Willie Bester 'For Those Left Behind' 2003

Jackson Nkumando 'Inauguration' 1994

George Hallett 'TRC' series (detail)