Weekend Argus Reporter
A SHORT boat trip is all that separates Robben Island from Cape Town today, but it was once an unbridgeable chasm for the prison’s inmates. For the most famous of them, the stretch of icy Atlantic that shimmered between him and freedom for most of his 27 years behind bars must have been a torment, but did nothing to sap his spirit.
Nelson Mandela’s much-visited island cell is, today, a part of his rich and vivid legacy in the Cape, and one of the key city landmarks that are testimony to his fortitude as a prisoner and his visionary inspiration as a free man, and a statesman.
One cannot imagine what Mandela must have thought when looking out on the confined view his small cell window offered.
To survive in prison, he later wrote with his signature wisdom in Long Walk To Freedom, “one must develop ways to take satisfaction in one’s daily life”.
“One can feel fulfilled by washing one’s clothes so that they are particularly clean, by sweeping a corridor so that it is free of dust, by organising one’s cell to conserve as much space as possible. The same pride one takes in more consequential tasks outside prison, one can find in doing small things inside prison.”
We know that whatever the inconsequentialities and limits of his Robben Island confinement – and later spells in Pollsmoor and Victor Verster – Mandela’s inner horizons were expansive.
Our first glimpse of that brimming figure, more than ready for his date with destiny on February 11, 1990, was at the gates of the last prison to hold him.
Victor Verster, near Paarl, is on a road that winds its way between the vineyards, linking farms and the countryside communities of the winelands. I drove the route this week with little but my own thoughts to keep me company.
But in the bright summer sunshine of that nearly unthinkable Sunday in 1990, this road was jammed. Every major news agency from around the globe was there, thousands of ecstatic supporters were there. It must have seemed like the centre of the world... and, in a sense, it was when Mandela, taking his first steps as a free man, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela at his side, raised his fisted hand in triumph, grinning that broad, warm grin very few of those present imagined they’d witness.
Driving back from the prison in Paarl to the city centre this week, I stopped at Mandela’s “next stop”, the City Hall in Darling Street, the scene in 1990 of his first, stirring oration, witnessed by a world audience of hundreds of millions.
A short flight of steps leads from the pavement to the balcony where Mandela stood and delivered that famous speech.
Looking down over the Grand Parade today, all is bustle and ordinariness, vendors and workaday routines.
Twenty-four years ago, the Parade was packed with some 80 000 people, a rapt audience thrilled to be addressed by the great man in his first public speech in nearly 30 years as “friends, comrades and fellow South Africans”.
“I stand here before you,” Mandela told the crowd, “not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people. Your tireless and heroic sacrifices have made it possible for me to be here today. I therefore place the remaining years of my life in your hands.”
He concluded, fittingly, with the words he had spoken all those years before, in his trial of 1964, reminding South Africa and the world what he had sacrificed so much for: “I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
It was, in the end, an ideal he lived to see embodied in a new constitution that emerged from one of the 20th century’s most celebrated political settlements.
Not far from the City Hall, at the Parliament building in Plein Street, Mandela would later spend much time and energy on his ideas about a country united in its interests, not afraid of confronting its past, but purposeful in seeking a new path to the future.
Today, before the steps of a Parliament that has become a political battleground, an imposing bust of the great man is a reminder of his inspiring presence there until his retirement in 1999.
Standing in that quiet courtyard this week, I was reminded that it was here, years ago now, that I had the pleasure of meeting Mandela, shaking his big, soft hand and feeling the warmth of his smile.
Across Cape Town, monuments, murals and roads named after Mandela bear testimony to his presence in this city.
There’s Nelson Mandela Boulevard leading out of town to the suburbs, a statue of Mandela with other Nobel Prize winners at the V&A Waterfront, and a blue mural with just his smiling face on a Canterbury Street facade.
These ordinary places remind us today of an extraordinary man’s story and the inspiration of his extraordinary life.
I was in Rio de Janeiro in the first week of December last year when the news broke that Mandela had died.
The next morning, I went to Nelson Mandela Street in the Botafogo beachfront neighbourhood to ask Brazilians their thoughts about my country’s former president.
Everybody had only good things to say. A bunch of flowers, I remember, had been placed on the street sign bearing his name.
The scale of his stature as a world figure has been impressed on me elsewhere in my travels – the Paris park named after the legend, which I stumbled on earlier this year, and the Mandela statue in London, among many others.
Mandela is honoured the world over with similar gestures that call to mind his legacy of compassion and forgiveness.
In our own city, the legacy ingrained in our landscape is all the more poignant, and pressing, for all the evidence of lingering intolerance and bigotry Mandela himself worked so hard and so generously to dispel.