South Africa commemorates Mandela’s historic release
Cape Town, South Africa (PANA) – South Africa on Tuesday commemorated the 30th anniversary of the day Nelson Mandela was released from jail.
On 2 February 1990, President F.W. de Klerk stunned the world by announcing that he would release the world’s most famous prisoner and unban the African National Congress, Pan Africanist Congress, the South African Communist Party and other liberation movements.
On the afternoon of 11 February, 1990, Mandela walked out of Victor Verster prison in the Western Cape with a global television audience of hundreds of millions witnessing the moment.
Thousands of people lined the streets as the convoy made its way to the Cape Town City Hall where he addressed the world for the first time since he received a life sentence for treason in 1963.
He was joined by current President Cyril Ramaphosa who will deliver a speech from the same balcony on Tuesday afternoon.
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and his wife Leah, who housed Mandela that night, have paid tribute to the prisoner-turned-world-statesman, saying "thirty years ago, Nelson Mandela emerged from prison to dazzle South Africa and the world with his warmth and human values… we miss him".
The Nelson Mandela Foundation said it will host three events in Cape Town that will highlight the "new prisons of Africa".
It said these ranged from “physical prisons that were the site of high levels of incarceration and the failures of restorative justice to the effective prisons that defined people's lives”.
Mandela and De Klerk were the joint recipients of the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize. Tutu, who won the same award in 1984, and Mandela both lived in Vilikaze Street in Soweto which is the only road in the world which has hosted two Nobel Laureates.
Mandela swept into power on a ticket of racial reconciliation in 1994. He died in 2013.
-0- PANA CU/MA 11Feb2020
