Nelson Mandela

How The Times and The Sunday Times told his story

Introduction by Martin Fletcher

Copyright© Times Newspapers Ltd 2013

All rights reserved, not to be copied or reproduced without

permission
 Contents

Introduction by Martin Fletcher

December 12, 1952: Mr Swart's Action in Johannesburg; Attorney Prohibited

January 22, 1953: Last Chances in South Africa

December 7, 1956: Swoop in South Africa

March 22, 1960: 56 Killed In Riot Near Johannesburg

March 16, 1961: South Africa Decides To Leave

May 29, 1961: Lull Descends On S Africa

August 9, 1962: Mandela Arrested in S Africa

August 17, 1962: Jackal Skin Cloak Worn In Court

November 8, 1962: 5-year penalty for Nelson Mandela

October 29, 1963: Sabotage trial opens today

April 21, 1964: Africans Tell Court Why They Chose Violence

June 12, 1964: Eight Found Guilty in South Africa Sabotage Trial

June 13, 1964: Life Imprisonment for African Leaders

June 15, 1964: Mandela Moved To Island Prison

June 15, 1964: 3,000 Protest At Sentences — 'Unions Should Bar S. Africa Goods'

November 9, 1970: Mrs Mandela sees husband

April 5, 1976: Mandela release being considered

April 10, 1976: Mr Mandela to remain imprisoned

June 18, 1976: Death toll rises to 41 in second day of rioting at Soweto

April 27, 1977: A glimpse at the life of prisoners of Robben Island

July 18, 1978: Prayers said for Robben Island prisoner No 466/64

April 21, 1980: Mandela plea by former security chief

December 28, 1981: Why they must free my husband

April 8, 1982: Mandela said to be off Robben Island

September 5, 1984: Sharpeville Sends Another Message

January 29, 1985: Pretoria offers talks to ANC leaders if it abandons violence

February 11, 1985: Mandela rejects release offer but leaves open prospect of negotiations

March 25, 1985: Botha: trapped between reform and repression

June 26, 1985: ANC opens doors to all races and vows to step up armed conflict

August 12, 1985: A free Mandela?

August 16, 1985: Botha offers blacks citizenship but dashes reform hope

October 5, 1985: Shultz tells Pretoria to talk now or face a violent end

May 25, 1986: South Africa — The Enemies Within

June 13, 1986: Mandela 'should be freed'

June 12, 1988: Music to anti-apartheid ears

October 18, 1988: If Mandela goes free

January 28, 1989: Pretoria in freedom talks with Mandela

September 21, 1989: Olive branch in South Africa

January 26, 1990: Mandela secret peace plan revealed

February 3, 1990: South Africa begins trek to democracy

February 12, 1990: Mandela strolls to freedom

February 26, 1990: Mandela orders end to spiral of violence among rival blacks

August 8, 1990: Ceasefire by ANC branded as illegal by right

September 16, 1990: De Klerk's `Iron Fist' cracks down on killing

January 12, 1991: In South Africa's crucible — Arthur Miller meets Mandela

February 2, 1991: New South Africa to arise on ruins of racist laws

December 14, 1991: Sports boycott of South Africa ends

November 18, 1993: South Africa heralds new era

April 25, 1994: Mandela pledges safety for whites to prevent exodus

April 27, 1994: Jubilant Mandela hails `the dawn of our freedom'

May 3, 1994: Triumphant Mandela `free at last'

May 11, 1994: Thousands wait in the sunshine for late swearing-in ceremony

August 18, 1994: Mandela's 100 days' credit

June 25, 1995: One team, one nation, one kick

August 16, 1995: Tea for two at Verwoerd home

July 10, 1996: Queen greets Mandela with warmth and praise

July 17, 1998: Mandela embarks on his long goodbye

June 17, 1999: Mandela takes last step of his long walk

February 11, 2001: Tape of Mandela trial speech found

March 2, 2003: The wonderful world of Mandela — interview by David Dimbleby

January 7, 2005: We must not hide, says Mandela as he weeps for the son killed by Aids

June 21, 2008: His eyes still sparkle, but failing health brings added poignancy to farewell tour

Obituary: Nelson Mandela

 Introduction

by Martin Fletcher, former Foreign News Editor of The Times

There are few incontrovertibly great world leaders in modern history. Winston Churchill would probably
appear on most people's lists, as would Mahatma Gandhi, Franklin Roosevelt and perhaps even Pope John
Paul II. So, undoubtedly, would Nelson Mandela.

At great personal cost Mandela challenged and defeated one of the most egregious evils of the 20th century
— apartheid. Against all odds he transformed South Africa from a global pariah, or "skunk of the world" as
he once put it, into a multiracial democracy. In the process, he saved his country from seemingly inevitable
racial war.

Those were his measurable achievements, and they are told in vivid detail in these reports, which span seven
decades. Others are harder to quantify, but no less real. By surviving 27 years in prison and emerging, free of
rancour, to preach forgiveness and reconciliation he helped to change not just South Africa but the world.

He shamed oppressors and inspired the oppressed. He demonstrated that even the most bitter conflicts can
be resolved through dialogue. Above all, he showed that the human spirit can triumph against the most brutal
and repressive state machinery.

In the autumn of his life this dignified, charismatic, physically imposing man enjoyed a status unique in the
world, a matchless moral authority. He transcended race and ideology, and at a time when politicians around
the world were squandering their peoples' trust he became a universal hero.

Unlike so many other African leaders, Mandela was incorruptible, discouraged any cult of personality, and
voluntarily relinquished power after a single term as President. But he was no saint, as he himself admitted.
For all his efforts, South Africa's future is not yet assured.

Prison was the making of Mandela, in more senses than one. By the time of his imprisonment he had not
greatly distinguished himself as a revolutionary strategist, or as leader of the ANC's armed wing, though he
acquired a certain glamour as the "Black Pimpernel" who spent 17 months evading capture.

But he was locked up after delivering a ringing declaration from the dock of his readiness to die for his cause,
and over the next quarter century — as South Africa's white regime grew steadily more repressive — he
became an ever more potent symbol of his people's struggle for freedom. More than once Mandela refused
freedom in return for renouncing armed struggle, arguing that the state was the real perpetrator of violence.

As the decades passed, international condemnation of apartheid grew, sanctions weakened South Africa's
economy, and the black insurrection intensified. From his prison cell Mandela offered dialogue, and eventually
the beleaguered regime did turn to the man who had once been its foremost enemy. Still a prisoner, he was
taken secretly to meet President P.W. Botha, who served him tea in his official residence, and later Botha's
successor, President F.W. de Klerk.

Mandela's release on February 11, 1990, was broadcast live around the world, and was one of those
momentous events indelibly printed on the minds of those who watched it.

He had been in prison more than 10,000 days. He had gone in aged 44, and was emerging at 71, a great-
grandfather. He had become a global icon, but few could even remember what he looked like. The myth was
so powerful that it seemed impossible Mandela could live up to it, but he did.

Over the next four years he preached reconciliation, not revenge, despite repeated provocations. He used his
immense stature to assuage white fears and hold together the ANC while he made compromises with de
Klerk's reviled National Party. His "negotiated revolution" reached its climax on April 27, 1994, when South
Africans of every colour queued for hours to elect their country's first multiracial government. Mandela, aged
75, cast the first vote of his life — for himself as President.

"Out of the experience of an extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long must be born a society of
which all humanity will be proud," Mandela proclaimed at an inauguration that marked the end of the last
bastion of white rule in Africa.

In office, he continued to show extraordinary magnanimity. He invited the prosecutor responsible for his
imprisonment to lunch, visited the widow of Hendrik Verwoerd, the high priest of apartheid, and appointed
one of his old prison chiefs Ambassador to Austria. "Courageous people do not fear forgiving, for the sake of
peace," he said.

His single most dramatic gesture, however, came at the Rugby World Cup final in 1995 — rugby having been
the ultimate apartheid sport. After South Africa beat the All Blacks in an epic match, Mandela walked on to
the field in a Springbok jersey to present the trophy to Francois Pienaar, the astonished captain.

A stadium packed with white Afrikaners erupted in delight, chanting "Nel-son, Nel-son, Nel-son" in honour
of the man who had won the ultimate victory by delivering their country from its dark past.

December 5, 2013
December 12, 1952

Nelson Mandela first appeared in The Times as a 34-year-old lawyer. His membership of the ANC and
support for a campaign of civil disobedience against the establishment of apartheid resulted in his
first banning order, which restricted his movements and attendance at meetings or rallies.

Mr Swart's Action in Johannesburg; Attorney Prohibited

Nelson Rolihlahla Dalibunga Mandela, an attorney, president of the Transvaal branch of the African National
Congress, and national "volunteer in chief" of the defiance campaign, has been prohibited by the Minister of
Justice from attending any gathering in the Johannesburg magisterial district, for six months. He is also
prohibited for six months from living in any area of the Union except the Johannesburg magisterial district. The
notice prohibiting attendance at gatherings was given under the Suppression of Communism Act, and stated
that in the Minister's opinion the objects of Communism would be furthered if Mandela attended any
gathering in Johannesburg. The other notice restricting movements in this district was given under the Riotous
Assemblies Act, and referred to the promotion of feelings of hostility between Europeans and non-
Europeans.
January 22, 1953

After the National Party's slim victory at the 1948 general election, it had set about building the legal
framework for apartheid, limiting the vote to whites, outlawing mixed-race marriages, registering the
population by race and reserving prime residential areas for whites. The Times article extracted below
describes the racially charged campaign for the subsequent election five years later, prophetically
declaring that "if the Nationalists return to power they may remain in power a long time." They were
not to leave office until 1994.

Last Chances in South Africa

From Our Cape Town Correspondent

The last session of the present Parliament of the Union of South Africa will be opened informally by the
Governor-General tomorrow. It will be a short session, necessarily called to vote supplies for the
administration of the country until after the General Election, which all observers expect will be in April or
early May.

On the constitutional front the Opposition has the initiative, but last year's riots at Port Elizabeth, East
London, and Kimberley, together with the non-European resistance campaign which preceded them, have
given the Government an opportunity of regaining the initiative on the race relations front, which is more
interesting to the ordinary voter, and can be made more frightening.

The Appellate Court's invalidation of the High Court of Parliament Act last year (which defeated all
Government attempts to place the Coloured voters of the Cape Province on a communal roll to vote for
special representatives in Parliament) was a formidable blow to the Government's prestige.

The dispute hinged upon whether the sovereign independent status of the Union conferred by the Statute of
Westminster did or did not override certain safeguards to the non-European franchise contained in the
Union's constitution, the South Africa Act, which is an Act of the British Parliament. The Government
contended that it did. The courts found—unanimously in the Appellate Division—that the safeguards still
stand.

This result has given the Opposition the double advantage, first, of claiming the credit for being right in its
contention that the safeguards in the constitution are still legally as well as morally binding, and, secondly, of
receiving the votes of the enfranchised Coloured men in marginal Cape seats.

Though supporters of the Nationalists were deeply shocked when the Appeal Court's decisions were
announced, Nationalist propaganda has turned its legal defeat to advantage by claiming that the volkswil (the
will of the people) has been thwarted after all these years of fancied independence by a residuum of British
imperial domination; one of nationalism's tasks, according to these claims, is to complete the sovereign
independence of the country by establishing beyond all doubt the supremacy of Parliament, which expresses
the volkswil, against the Courts, which consist of appointed judges not responsible to the volkswil.

The issues at stake ensure that the election—and the Parliamentary session that will immediately precede it—
will be hard and bitterly fought. It will be an election of last chances: for the Government to complete its
formidable structure of apartheid and for the Opposition to maintain what it regards as the true democratic
parliamentary tradition in government.
In the Mixed Marriages Act, the Group Areas Act, and the Registration Act (which provides for a national
register and identity papers for all), the Nationalists have laid the foundation for the sorted-out community
they visualize as their ideal. But the ideal cannot be realized unless this legislation is so fixed by administrative
action that the changes in the Union's body politic are irreversible and the legislation cannot be repealed
without grave disturbance.

Moreover their legislative programme is incomplete. They are committed to removing the Coloured voters
from the common roll and giving them communal representation; they are also committed, though not so
urgently, to the ultimate abolition of the present communal representation of the Cape Natives in Parliament. If
these things are not done during the life of the next Parliament, the Nationalists fear that the integration of the
Bantu into the general economic and social structure of the country will become irreversible.

An unusual urgency, therefore, animates their election preparations. The Opposition, on the other hand,
knows that if the Nationalists return to power they may remain in power a long time. By some means the
Coloured voters will be removed from the common roll, thus depriving the Opposition of valuable support in
the Cape. The vote will probably be given—according to statements by Nationalist Ministers—to young men
and women of 18, and the majority of these youngsters would vote Nationalist. The Government will find
some means—whether by packing the Senate or otherwise—of making it impossible for the Courts to test
the validity of legislation.

Those are practically certainties. The Opposition fears, also, that continued Nationalist administration will
inject such a state of chronic irritability into race relations that future agreement will be almost impossible and
international relations deteriorate. This is the temper in which Parliament opens, and this is the temper in which
it will conduct its debates. After the session it will be easier to discern the details of the respective party
platforms, and perhaps begin the risky task of calculating odds.
December 7, 1956

Opposition to apartheid grew throughout the 1950s, bringing together a loose coalition of groups
representing all races. The South African government responded with laws restricting opposition
activity and speech — laws which are set in context by this leading article from The Times. Although
he is not named, Nelson Mandela was among the 140 people arrested. He was put on trial for treason
but eventually acquitted in March 1961.

Swoop in South Africa

In a sudden swoop the South African police have pounced upon 140 men and women, Europeans, Africans
and Asians, who it is safe to say are all politically distasteful to the party in office. Many of them have
affiliations to named organizations in opposition, resting some on an ideological and others on a racial basis. It
is perhaps worth noting that bodies that command substantial European support, though no less resolutely
anti-Nationalist than the African National Congress or the Society for Friendship with the Soviet Union, are
missing from the list: the leaders of the Black Sash Women and the Torch Commando remain at large while a
Methodist minister and the most highly placed African academic, the Principal of Fort Hare, are rounded up.

The charges brought against this multitude of suspects are variants on the general theme of disaffection. On
the face of it, the Government's action belongs to a type recently familiar in many countries, the violent
outburst of an authoritarian regime in a panic. Whether that is an unfair description on the present occasion
may be left to be decided when the cases come to trial and the evidence is produced to justify the
Government's evident suspicion that a dangerous conspiracy is afoot.

In every case, it is reported, there is a charge of high treason, and the Suppression of Communism Act and
the Riotous Assemblies Act are also cited. In Great Britain prosecutions for high treason are very rare; the
offence is narrowly defined and the procedure hedged about with safeguards for the accused. In South
Africa, where, as here, it is punishable with death, it need amount to no more than preparing, with a hostile
intention, to disturb the State; and the accused is denied trial by jury.

Of the Riotous Assemblies Act, acting Chief Justice Stratford said in the case of Sachs v. Minister of Justice
that it was directed not against offences committed but to "restraining a man from committing a crime he may
commit but has not yet committed, or doing some act. . . which he may do but has not yet done." The Court
went on to observe that by this Act Parliament deprived a person of the right of being adequately heard in his
defence, of facing and cross-examining his accusers, but that the rule of law, the supremacy of the law that
Parliament made, must prevail over the rule of natural justice.

The Suppression of Communism Act is the measure passed by the Malan Government in 1950, which not
merely made the Communist Party an unlawful organization but empowered a Minister to name any individual
as a Communist and then impose severe civil disabilities on him. Of this Act Chief Justice Centlivres was
compelled to acknowledge that, even if the Minister was honestly mistaken in making an order against such a
person, it would be useless for the victim to come to the courts for aid.

These are formidable engines for the defence to confront; but they are part of the law of the Union, and the
law must now take its course. Here, as in South Africa, the trials must not be prejudged; but they deserve to
be watched with a vigilant eye by all who care for civil liberty, and especially for the rights of unprivileged
races. After the judicial hearing the issues will certainly be returned into the political arena; and if by then it has
been shown that the Government has been trying to use in the interest of a party powers that Parliament
intended only for the protection of the State, then there will be a great cause to plead, which will test the
vigour of the Opposition under its new leadership.
March 22, 1960

The Sharpeville massacre marked a turning point both in the fight against apartheid and South
Africa's relationship with the rest of the world. In the weeks after the massacre, protests and rioting
led the government to introduce a state of emergency and to ban the ANC and the Pan Africanist
Congress. In response, Mandela persuaded the ANC to abandon its long-held policy of peaceful
protest and founded Umkonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), an armed group committed to acts of
sabotage directed against the state.

56 Killed In Riot Near Johannesburg

Johannesburg—The Pan-Africanists' campaign against the pass laws exploded to-day on the banks of the
Vaal river—at Vereeniging and in Vanderbijlpark near by, the site of many industries and the country's largest
steel-rolling mill. After desultory shooting in the morning, in which one African was killed and another
seriously wounded, a crowd of several hundred Africans this afternoon began stoning the police armoured
cars. Quite suddenly there were bursts of firing, chiefly from Sten guns, and the mob scattered, leaving about
80 people sprawled on the ground in a growing pool of blood.

Among them was a dead child and a screaming woman, painfully if superficially wounded. By dusk a dozen
bodies were in the mortuary with, according to the police, more to come in. Some 30 people had been
admitted to local hospitals with serious wounds.

One report put the number of dead at more than 50, while the injured people exceed 150, including a score
of women and children.

FRENZIED HELP

Mr Charles Channon, a Press photographer with long war experience, described the scene as the "bloodiest"
he had even seen; he added that most of the young constables were "obviously appalled" by what their
shooting had done, and they tried to make some amends by the "almost frenzy" with which they helped to get
the wounded people into the ambulances.

Darkness brought peace to the riot areas, but an active citizen force was put on standby, and kommando
patrols were maintained. During the morning and afternoon Sabre fighters of the South African Air Force
dived low over the massed Africans at Sharpeville, but the planes were unarmed and appeared to have had
little effect in frightening the mob.

Nobody seems to know quite how the tragedy occurred, especially as the anti-pass campaign had opened
to-day so calmly almost everywhere. Around Johannesburg, headquarters of the movement, there were civil
disobedience protests, which were handled amicably, almost humorously; and at Durban and Port Elizabeth
everything was normal.

The Pan-Africanist Movement, which is a rival breakaway group from the moderate African National
Congress, had set to-day aside for pass law protests, and people were asked to go peacefully to the nearest
police stations to report that they had not got their passes with them and ask to be arrested. In most places
the police apparently told them to go away, although in Johannesburg Mr Robert Sobukwe, leader of the
Pan- Africanists (and a lecturer at Witwatersrand University), was detained with 10 others for questioning.

CAR WRECKED
Around Vereeniging, however, trouble was apparently expected and after the shooting in the morning police
reinforcements were sent there. Soon after noon about a dozen Saracen armoured vehicles were on call at
the Sharpeville location. Soon the police station at Sharpeville, standing in a large open compound, was
virtually besieged by thousands of Africans shouting "Africa, Africa!"

The only way the police outside could make contact with those in the station was to force a way in with the
Saracens. As soon as the armoured cars got through, the ranks of Africans would close again. A municipal
motor car which ventured through earlier in the morning emerged as a wreck, with the occupants injured.
Gradually the station force was built up to 60 armed policemen.

Up to late this afternoon no official explanation had been given for the immediate cause of the order to fire,
but some hooliganism had been going on before the crowd started stoning the armoured cars.

There had been a previous disturbance, early in the morning, when batons and tear gas were used to disperse
a crowd round Vanderbijlpark police station. The crowd seemed to be mostly composed of domestic
servants who had decided to stay away from work. This evening Skietkommandos (volunteer home guards)
were patrolling the streets of both Vereeniging and Vanderbijlpark, but from the time of the mass casualties
this afternoon, all districts along the Vaal were quiet. The Pan-Africanists' demonstrations against the pass
laws were planned as non-violent, and were meant originally to last indefinitely. It is hoped here that with this
tragedy they will be called off.

EXTREMIST AIMS

The Pan-Africanist movement, which claims between 25,000 and 30,000 paid- up members, is an extremist
organization whose watchword is "Africa for the Africans." Formed two years ago, it has accepted the
"Accra line," which aims at the creation of a black-ruled Socialist "united states of Africa," south of the
Sahara.

JOHANNESBURG, March 21.—An official at Vereeniging Hospital put the casualties to-night at 56 dead
and 162 injured. Forty-four people seriously injured are in this hospital, and the other injured have been
transferred to Baragwanath Hospital, near Johannesburg.

[The death toll later rose to 69]

March 16, 1961

South Africa's isolation deepened in 1961 when it withdrew from the Commonwealth to avoid being
expelled. On May 31 the country became a republic and its membership lapsed, severing its historical
ties to the UK. It rejoined the Commonwealth in 1994.

South Africa Decides To Leave

From Our Diplomatic Correspondent

South Africa will withdraw from the Commonwealth on May 31. This decision, coming after further long
hours of discussion between the Commonwealth Prime Ministers at Lancaster House yesterday, came
nevertheless with a sense of shock and sorrow—even though there was, too, a certain transient relief.

Throughout yesterday the Ministers continued drafting and redrafting an announcement about South Africa's
application for continued membership when she becomes a republic. Agreement, in the British view, was very
near on a formula to keep South Africa in, to express what all the other, members felt about her racial policy,
and to state also what Dr Verwoerd had replied.

The technical difficulty was to find words not so harsh as to make South Africa's withdrawal inevitable and
therefore virtually expel her—which no one wished to do—and yet stiff enough to show that a real stand was
being taken by the Commonwealth against racial discrimination.

The real difficulty, however, was that the apartheid policy is not compatible with Commonwealth ideals. Dr
Verwoerd could argue that such ideals were not practised elsewhere, but the other members were at least at
one in wishing to live up to them, while in South Africa racial discrimination is preached as a virtue.
Meanwhile Dr Verwoerd himself gave no sign whatever that the policy itself would be modified by even a
scintilla.

As the debate went on it became more and more clear that attacks upon apartheid within the Commonwealth
would increase in future. Dr Verwoerd evidently came gradually to the view that the basic difference over
racial policy would in practice continue to create strains for South Africa and for the Commonwealth, which
were becoming, and would increasingly be, intolerable.

DIGNIFIED STATEMENT

At this point he took, in the British view, the honest course. With much dignity and restraint he rose to tell the
other Prime Ministers that he felt that South Africa was not welcome as a member and was in fact an
embarrassment. After a short adjournment he announced that he thought it better both for South Africa and
for the Commonwealth to withdraw the application for readmission to membership.

As Dr Verwoerd left the conference room only a small group, including Mr Macleod, the Colonial Secretary,
watched him go. All the other Prime Ministers were at work with their delegations. Mr Macleod looked
down from the balcony with an expression, it was said, of "pensive gloom". A South African official who was
following his Prime Minister, replying to a British expression of sympathetic regret, said with what seemed a
sort of numb puzzlement: "I don't think they know what they've done."

HOPE OF RETURN
He meant evidently that the other Prime Ministers had excluded South Africa and would regret their insistence
upon discussing what to the South Africans is an internal matter.

There were others last night who thought that a dangerous precedent had been created by the attacks upon a
member's policy, but many argued, too, that South Africa's racial policy was certainly not just an internal
matter. As but one clear and concrete proof of this they pointed, for instance, to her refusal to permit non-
white diplomatic missions from other Commonwealth countries.

Many felt that in the end the Commonwealth would gain, and hoped one day to see South Africa return to the
fold. The argument about who was to blame—whether South Africa was forced out, or by her policy made
her departure inevitable—will certainly continue for years.

Soon after Dr Verwoerd left Lancaster House, this statement was issued: — At their meetings this week, the
Commonwealth Prime Ministers have discussed questions affecting South Africa. On March 13 the Prime
Minister of South Africa informed the meeting that, following the plebiscite in October, 1960, the appropriate
constitutional steps were now being taken to introduce a republican form of constitution in the Union, and that
it was the desire of the Union Government that South Africa should remain within the Commonwealth as a
republic. In connexion with this application the meeting also discussed, with the consent of the Prime Minister
of South Africa, the racial policy followed by the Union Government. The Prime Minister of South Africa
informed the other Prime Ministers this evening that in the light of the views expressed on behalf of other
member Governments and the indications of their future intentions regarding the racial policy of the Union
Government, he had decided to withdraw his application for South Africa's continuing membership of the
Commonwealth as a republic.

The reference to the future intentions of other members certainly does not imply an ultimatum from any
Government that it would leave the Commonwealth if South Africa did not.

HOSTILE ACTION

Dr Verwoerd can have been in no doubt, however, that unless apartheid was modified, South Africa could
expect an increase in economic boycotts, agitation against South Africa in the United Nations over the
suppression of human rights and over her treatment of South West Africa as part of the Union, and further
exclusion of South African citizens from some Commonwealth countries or from passage through some
Commonwealth countries, such as has happened in Ghana.

Moreover, the statement from Mr Julius Nyerere, Chief Minister of Tanganyika, that his Government would
not wish to seek Commonwealth membership if the present South African Government continued as a
member, operated as an influential argument.

NO SIGN OF ANGER

This, no doubt—and a strong hint that Ghana would have to reconsider her attitude—is what caused Dr
Verwoerd to discern in the future a motion for expulsion. It was being emphasized last night that there had
been no sign of anger when the break came. Dr Verwoerd has made clear that his Government wishes to
continue cooperating with those Commonwealth members with whom it already cooperates.
May 29, 1961

The Times report below describes a government determined to make the transition to a republic
without disruption. Mandela, two months after the end of his treason trial, calls for peaceful protest.

Lull Descends On S. Africa

Johannesburg — With South Africa entering the most fateful week in its history a lull has descended on the
affairs of the nation. As the rising of the last Union Parliament transfers the focus of interest from the Cape to
the Transvaal the silence has been broken only by appeals to Europeans to remain calm, to Africans to ignore
the call for a three-day stop page of work, and to all South Africans to greet the republic with pride and
humility.

Though it would be wrong to describe the lull as ominous it certainly has an air of unreality after the tension of
recent weeks. With massive troop and police dispositions complete, senior officers are confident that the
week will pass quietly.

Colonel A. T. Spengler, head of the Rand security branch, said yesterday: "We hope there will be no trouble-
and I do not see any reason why there should be." Statements have been made by national and civic leaders
to the effect that life will proceed as usual and that "there is no need to panic".

Even Mr Nelson Mandela, principal organizer of the threatened demonstration, has made a final call to his
people to conduct the protest in a quiet and peaceful way.

Thousands of Africans are in a dilemma as they feel they are in danger whatever they do. Many who work for
the Government stand to lose their jobs if they stay away tomorrow, Tuesday and Wednesday, and some
working for private concerns will probably lose pay at least. Yet they fear leaving their families exposed to the
activities of intimidators in the townships. It is believed, therefore, that the stay-at-home demonstrations will
be fairly effective in the huge complex of townships in south-western Johannesburg in which most of the city's
native population lives.

An, important factor could prove to be the weather. The high Veld winter is normally dry and sunny but it has
rained steadily here today and the outlook is unsettled. Continuous rain could swell the number of those
staying at home as effectively as any appeals or threats from the organizers of demonstrations.
August 9, 1962

During early 1962 Mandela left South Africa without permission from the government, travelling to
Britain to gain support for the ANC and to Morocco and Ethiopia for military training. He returned to
South Africa in July and was arrested the following month at a police road block, as this brief Times
article reports.

Mandela Arrested in S Africa

Nelson Mandela was committed to prison today by a Johannesburg magistrate to face trial on a charge of
incitement. This former secretary-general of the banned African National Congress has been on the run since
South Africa became a Republic in May, 1961. Mandela was not asked to plead and did not say a word
throughout the proceedings. The prosecutor handed in a certificate from the Attorney General of the
Transvaal preventing Mandela from applying for bail for 12 days.
August 17, 1962

The Times report on Mandela's subsequent appearance in court paid unusual attention to his clothing,
but also revealed the depth of support that he and his cause enjoyed.

Jackal Skin Cloak Worn In Court

Nelson Mandela, former secretary-general of the banned African National Congress, wore a jackal skin
cloak when he appeared before a Johannesburg magistrate today, and there were demonstrations by Africans
and Indians both inside and outside the building.

The 44-year-old attorney was remanded for trial on October 15 in the regional court on a charge of
incitement; no application for bail was made. Mandela was arrested last weekend in Natal by Special Branch
police who had been hunting him for 15 months. His wife, Winnie, wore traditional Tembu dress in court, for
the Mandelas are related to the paramount chief and other heads of the Tembu (Transkei) people.

The crowd was silent in court, but immediately after the brief hearing Africans formed up in the corridor and
at a slow march the column went into the street singing "Nkosi Sikelela Afrika" (The Lord bless Africa). As
the building echoed with the lusty singing, magistrates and court officials came out to watch the procession.

Outside, a crowd of some 200, including some whites, formed into a rough column and began marching
towards the city hall. The police several times halted them near Commissioner Street as they were blocking
traffic, and finally persuaded them to disperse without incident. Members of the crowd gave the thumbs-up
sign of the African National Congress.

The Johannesburg evening newspaper for Africans, The World, said that an emergency meeting of the
A.N.C. executive in exile had been called in Dar-es-Salaam to consider the arrest of Mandela.
November 8, 1962

A similar atmosphere of song and protest prevailed when he was convicted and sent to prison three
months later.

5-year penalty for Nelson Mandela

Pretoria — Nelson Mandela, the 44-year-old African nationalist leader, was sentenced today by a special
regional court in Pretoria to a total of five years' imprisonment—three years for inciting Africans to stay away
from work in May, 1961, as a protest against the establishment of the Republic of South Africa, and two
years, the maximum, for leaving the country without valid documents.

Mr W. A. van Helsdingen, the magistrate, said Mandela had acted in a way calculated to lead to tyranny and
destruction in planning a campaign of incitement.

The magistrate said he took into account the serious nature of the offence and the degree of deliberation
which Mandela had shown in committing it; because of these factors he was not entitled to a fine or a
suspended sentence. "I do not think a lenient sentence would deter him. Even today he has indicated that,
whatever the sentence would be, he would continue the cause. His main object was to overthrow the
Government by unlawful and undemocratic means."

Mandela, a tall man wearing a jackal-skin cloak, said in addressing the court that it had been made clear that
the strike would be a peaceful protest, in which people would be asked to stay in their homes. Nevertheless,
round the campaign there was created an atmosphere of civil war and revolution, not by the Africans but by
the Government. He was prepared to pay the penalty, even though he knew how desperate was the position
of the Africans. Nothing the court could do would change him from the fight. "When my sentence has been
completed I will still be moved by my conscience to resist race discrimination."

He said his conscience had made it imperative that he should oppose laws which in his opinion (he is a
lawyer) were unjust, immoral, and intolerable. He had not applied for a passport because he knew it would
not be granted. He mentioned people whom he had met while out of the country, among them Mr Hugh
Gaitskell, whom he saw in London.

Each time he entered the court Mandela gave the clenched-fist salute of the banned African National
Congress, and the African spectators in the court rose and called out Amandhla (Strength). When the
magistrate adjourned the court to consider the sentence Mandela, as he went out, shouted Amandhla three
times, and this was echoed by the Africans.

The well of the court had been reserved for about 150 Africans, while the Europeans sat in the galleries.
When all the seats had been taken the police closed the doors and cleared the street outside the court. There
was a strong force of police round the court, some carrying haversacks reported to contain tear-gas bombs.

There was a demonstration at the conclusion of the hearing, but no violence, as the crowd from inside, singing
Nkosi Sikilele Afrika (God Save Africa), joined those outside. Women danced in the street and chanted. The
police linked arms across the street, urging the crowd along, and the demonstration eventually petered out.
October 29, 1963

In July 1963, while Mandela was in prison in Pretoria, police raided a farm in Rivonia, near
Johannesburg, which the ANC had used as a hideout. They found evidence linking Mandela to the
organisation and charged him with sabotage, as The Times reported.

Sabotage trial opens today

Pretoria — Seven men, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Denis Goldberg, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Mohamed
Kathrada, Lionel Bernstein, and Raymond Mahilaba, who the state alleges were the high command of a
national liberation movement engaged in plotting sabotage in preparation for guerrilla warfare and an armed
invasion, are due to be tried in the Supreme Court, Pretoria, tomorrow.

Four others, James Kantor, Elias Matsoalede, Andrew Mlangeni, and Bob Alexander Hepple, are joined
with them as co-conspirators. They face charges of sabotage, contravening the Suppression of Communism
Act and the General Law Amendment Act. The indictment lists 222 acts of sabotage.

In a separate case, two Supreme Court judges today reserved judgment on an appeal by Walter Sisulu
against a six-year sentence passed on him last March for incitement and furthering the aims of the banned
African National Congress.

An international campaign for the release of South African political prisoners has been launched by an
emergency committee sponsored by the Anti-Apartheid Movement.

Mr Jeremy Thorpe, Liberal M.P. for North Devon, is acting as honorary secretary of the campaign, which is
also supported by Christian Action, Amnesty, the Africa Bureau, and the Movement for Colonial Freedom.
April 21, 1964

As the trial progressed, the court heard evidence of preparations for a campaign of sabotage against
the South African government. When Mandela spoke he did not deny the allegations but set out
precisely and eloquently why he believed it had become necessary to turn to violence.

Africans Tell Court Why They Chose Violence

Pretoria—Nelson Mandela, former leader of the banned African National Congress and one of the nine
accused men in the "Rivonia " sabotage trial, made a statement from the dock when the defence opened its
case today. He explained why Umkonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) had been formed, and he outlined
the history, aims and policy of the African National Congress.

He denied that the "struggle in South Africa" had been in any way inspired by the Communist Party. "I did
what I did as leader of my people because of my experiences in Africa, and not because of what any outsider
might have said", he declared.

He did not deny that he had planned sabotage. "I did not do this in a spirit of recklessness", he said. "I
planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the situation after many years of oppression and
tyranny of my people by the whites."

Walter Sisulu, former general secretary of the African National Congress, also told the court that his aim was
emancipation of the African people from white domination. Sisulu gave his evidence on oath.

NO OTHER WAY

Mandela said that Umkonto we Sizwe, which was unconnected with the African National Congress, had
been planned for two reasons:

1. "We believed that, as a result of Government policy, violence by the African People had become inevitable
and that unless a responsible leadership was given to control the feelings of our people there would be an
outbreak of terrorism which would cause bitterness between the various races of the country."

2. "We felt that without sabotage there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their
struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All other means of opposing this principle were closed by
legislation."

Mandela said he came to the conclusion in June, 1961, that as violence was inevitable it would be unrealistic
and wrong for the African leaders to continue with their policy of non-violence when the Government met
their demands with violence. "I felt morally obliged to do what I did."

The African National Congress was committed not to undertake violence, but it was prepared to depart from
its policy to the extent that it would no longer disapprove of properly controlled sabotage. Sabotage was
chosen because it would not involve loss of life.

EFFECT OF SABOTAGE

It was hoped by this means to put a heavy drain on the economy of the country by scaring away foreign
capital and to force the voters to change their allegiance. Sabotage would draw world attention to South
Africa. Strict instructions were given to saboteurs that on no account were they to injure or kill people in
carrying out their operations.

He went to a meeting of the Pan-African freedom movement in Addis Ababa in 1961 to seek support in
building up a nucleus of men trained in administration. He mentioned the names of African Prime Ministers
and other leaders who promised him moral and other support.

He admitted that he made a study of guerrilla warfare because he "wanted to stand with his people and share
with them the hazards of warfare". He strenuously denied that Umkonto was a wing of the African National
Congress, although some people were members of both organizations. Violence was never discussed at
A.N.C. meetings.

Lilliesleaf Farm, in the Rivonia area near Johannesburg, was not the headquarters either of the A.N.C. or of
Umkonto and no meetings of those bodies took place there. "I was staying there because I was a man on the
run and the residence made an admirable hide-out."

Mandela, who spoke for 4 hours, said he had dedicated his life to end white domination. "It is an idea which I
hope to live and see realized. But, my Lord. it is an idea for which I am prepared to die."

Earlier in his statement he said he had practised as an attorney for a number of years. He was a convicted
prisoner, serving a sentence of five years for leaving the country without a permit and for inciting people to go
on strike at the end of May, 1961.

RIGHT TO REVOLT

Walter Sisulu, giving evidence, said he had never been a member of the Communist Party. He joined the
A.N.C. in 1940. Up to 1949 the A.N.C. had always adopted constitutional methods of protest, but after that
the policy was changed to one where the laws of the country would be defied. A defiance campaign was
launched in June, 1952. Up to 1962 the A.N.C. still had a policy of non-violence.

He did not take part in Umkonto's activities. "I hate the destruction of property and I hate more loss of life.
But I am a realist and I realize that the African people have a right to revolt against oppression."

Mr. A. Fischer, Q.C., the chief defence counsel, told the court today that certain important parts of the state's
evidence would be admitted and other important parts would be denied. The four main points which the
defence would deny were that four of the accused men—Dennis Goldberg, Ahmed Kathrada. Lionel
Bernstein and Raymond Mahlaba—were members of the "national high command" of Umkonto: that
Umkonto was a section of the A.N.C.; that the A.N.C. was the tool of the Community Party and that its aims
and objects were the aims and objects of the Communist Party; and that Umkonto adopted a military plan
known as "Operation Mayabuye ".

The hearing was adjourned until tomorrow.

June 12, 1964

After eight months on trial, Mandela and most of his fellow accused were found guilty. The Times
carried extensive details of the verdicts.

Eight Found Guilty in South Africa Sabotage Trial

Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and six other men were found Guiltv in South Africa's sabotage trial today of
planning a "violent revolution" against the country's racial policies. Mandela and Sisulu are two of the most
active nationalist leaders in South Africa.

A ninth defendant, Lionel Bernstein, was acquitted, but he was arrested immediately after by the security
police on new charges.

Eight defendants were found Guilty of recruiting persons for military training inside South Africa and abroad
for an admitted underground sabotage organization known as Umkonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation).

They were said to have conspired wrongfully and unlawfully "to have recruits trained in the preparation,
manufacture, and use of explosives for committing acts of "violence and destruction" against the Government
of Dr Verwoerd. In addition, the court found that the training covered conventional warfare and guerrilla
warfare. All those found Guilty are due to be sentenced tomorrow.

"STRENGTH IS OURS"

A crowd of nearly 150 Africans waiting in the street outside the Supreme Court stirred at the news of the
verdict with shouts of "Amandla nga wethu" (strength is ours). As blue-uniformed policemen moved up, those
in the crowd thrust their arms into the air in the clenched fist and upright thumb sign of the African Nationalist
Congress Party, South Africa's oldest black political movement until it was banned by the Government for its
opposition to apartheid.

Mandela, a 45-year-old lawyer and tribal prince who is known as the "Black Pimpernel" for his former ability
to elude capture by police, had been the party's deputy national president. Sisulu, aged 52, had been its
secretary-general. Mr Justice Quartus de Wet, the presiding Judge, termed Mandela the "prime mover" in
establishing the Spear of the Nation organization.

Long before the Judge took his seat on the Bench, the court galleries and all corridors were crowded with
observers and spectators, while others, including many Africans, gathered outside the Palace of Justices.

The proceedings lasted only a few minutes. As the nine men stood with expressionless faces in the dock, the
Judge said he had recorded his reasons for the conclusions he had come to and would not read them out. He
then announced the verdict, and said that he did not propose to deal with the sentences today. "The state and
defence will be given the opportunity to make any submissions they wish tomorrow."

JOHANNESBURG HEARING

Mandela, the last except for Bernstein to leave the dock, smiled and waved a hand to one of the attorneys.
Mrs Bernstein with her daughter ran from the public gallery to meet her husband. She touched his arm and
then cried out as plain-clothes policemen led him away. She was later allowed to go below, accompanied by
an attorney. A police spokesman said that the offences alleged against Bernstein were committed in
Johannesburg and Bernstein would appear before the Johannesburg magistrate tomorrow.

The Judge said that Mandela had admitted being one of the founders of Umkonto we Sizwe (Spear of the
Nation) and deputy president of the African National Congress and as such a member of the executive
committee. He had also admitted that he toured Africa during the first half of 1962 and underwent military
training, made arrangements for Umkonto recruits to receive military training, and solicited and received
financial help for Umkonto. Mandela, the Judge said, had further admitted that at his request the national
executive authorized its secretariat and external missions to assist Umkonto in transporting recruits for military
training and that on his return from his trip he reported to his colleagues in A.N.C. and Umkonto on the
results.

"GUERRILLA WARFARE"

It was conceded by his counsel on the admissions that Mandela was Guilty on counts two, three, and four.
Count two alleged that the accused, together with named persons and other unknown persons conspired with
each other to aid or procure wrongful acts concerning the recruitment of persons for training in the
preparation and use of explosives for the purpose of committing acts of violence in the republic, conspiracy to
commit acts of guerrilla warfare in the republic, acts of assistance to military units of foreign countries when
invading the republic, and acts of participation in violent revolution in the republic. It also alleged that these
acts would have injured, damaged, destroyed, obstructed, tampered with or endangered the health or safety
of the public.

Count three charged the accused and co-conspirators in the execution of the common purpose of committing
acts the same as those set out in count one, which cover the recruitment of persons for training in preparation
for the use of explosives, in the art of warfare including guerrilla warfare, and military training generally for
causing violent revolution in the republic.

Count four alleges that the accused, in the execution of the common purpose, personally and through their
agents solicited, accepted and received money from various persons or bodies within and outside the republic
and gave money to various persons for the purpose of enabling or assisting sabotage in support of a campaign
against some of the laws of South Africa or in support of a campaign for repeal or modification of such laws
or variation of the application of such laws.

It was contended that Mandela was Not Guilty on count one because he was in prison from August 5, 1962,
and it was not proved that any act of sabotage had been committed between this date and the first date in the
charge—namely, June 22—and therefore he could not be held liable for acts of sabotage committed by
agents or servants.

COMMUNISM DENIED

Count one alleges sabotage by all of the accused in that they personally, and by virtue of their being members
of an association of persons, committed acts similar to those mentioned in counts two and three except that
certain acts are particularized in annexures.

The Judge said that Mandela was one of the leaders of Umkonto. "In my opinion he at no time disassociated
himself from the acts of Umkonto, and in fact does not say so. He was, and presumably still is regarded as
one of its leaders. In my opinion he cannot escape conviction on count one."

Dealing with part of the evidence, the Judge said that Mandela was at great pains to deny that he was a
communist, but it was interesting to compare what he wrote in his report on the Pafmecsa (Pan African
Freedom Movement of East, Central and Southern Africa) conference, namely: "It is clear that in this area
there are great reservations about our policy and there is a widespread feeling that the A.N.C. is a
communist-dominated organization." "I may add that I share this feeling after hearing all the evidence in the
present case", the Judge said.

In regard to Walter Sisulu, it was conceded on his own evidence that he was Guilty on counts two, three and
four. He was at all material times a member of the national executive of A.N,C., he was consuilted on and
approved the decision to allow members of A.N.C. to set up Umkonto, he agreed with the decision of the
executive to allow its secretariat and external missions to cooperate with Umkonto in transporting recruits, he
was a member of the national secretariat of A.N.C. which attended to Umkonto external correspondence.
He was not on the High Command, but was kept informed of its decisions and on occasions attended its
meetings, and participated in its deliberations.

This took place when there were discussions of a political nature: for instance, the policy of guerrilla warfare.

The Judge said that it seemed to him unimportant whether Sisulu was a member of the High Command or not.
It had been stated that the executive committee allowed its members to form Umkonto. "In actual fact it
seems to me that a better expression is that the executive sponsored Umkonto."

It was clear that the A.N.C. executive still retained the political guidance of Umkonto and authorized its
members with its approval to embark upon a policy of sabotage and also authorized its secretariat to assist
Umkonto.

IDLE CONTENTION

"In these circumstances it seems to me to be idle to contend that Umkonto and its members were not agents
or servants of the national executive." Sisulu must be convicted on all four counts.

Dennis Goldberg was conceded by his counsel to be Guilty on counts two and three. The Judge found after
examination of the evidence that Goldberg must be convicted on count one. In regard to count four it seemed
that when Goldberg associated himself with the Umkonto organization he associated himself with all the
objects known to him. He must have known that money was collected and used for subversive purposes. The
Judge found him Guilty on all four counts.

It was conceded that Mbeki was Guilty on all four counts and in the light of his admissions and state evidence
he was clearly Guilty on all four counts.

Elias Motsoaledi was Guilty also on all four counts. It had been conceded by counsel that he was Guilty on
counts one, two and three. In regard to count four, the Judge said, it seemed that in associating himself with
Umkonto, he associated himself with all its activities which were known to him. "I find it impossible to believe
he did not know that money was being collected and used in connexion with the activities of this
organization."

It was admitted that Andrew Mlangeni was Guilty on counts two and three. But I do not think this goes far
enough, the Judge said. He went on to consider the evidence of witnesses who implicated Mlangeni in
activities of Umkonto. "I accept the evidence of the state witnesses and am satisfied that the accused was
implicated in the transport of trainees and in sabotage activities." He was found Guilty on all four counts.

Raymond Mhlaba denied complicity in the affairs of Umkonto. There was evidence that he was regarded as
one of the leading members of A.N.C. in Port Elizabeth, where he lived. The judge examined the evidence
and then gave a summary of Mhlaba's own evidence, a great deal of which was taken up with criticism of
Government policy and explanation of the alleged hardships of non-European people. Concluding, the judge
said: "I regard the accused as an unreliable witness."

PROPAGANDA WORK

He was satisfied that he was implicated in acts of sabotage and in other activities of Umkonto. He was Guilty
on all four counts.

The Judge dealt more fully with evidence given by Kathrada than with that of the other accused. It was clear,
he said, that Kathrada was an active supporter of the so-called Liberation Movement. It was also clear that
propaganda was considered to be an important ancillary to the activities of Umkonto which consisted mainly
of perpetration of acts of sabotage. A.N.C. leaders who were not members of Umkonto were clearly
encouraging the latter by means of propaganda.

He could not believe that Kathrada was not aware of and did not contemplate the effect which the pamphlet
he typed would have upon its readers. This document included encouragement of Umkonto and incitement of
readers to support the organization. Two further documents stencilled by Kathrada appeared to stand on the
same footing. The question to be considered in the case of Kathrada was whether he had been proved to
have been an accomplice of the other accused.

There were additional factors to Kathrada's conduct in relation to the pamphlet. In actively supporting the
pro-Mandela campaign, Kathrada must have had in mind that the arrest of Mandela might have a deleterious
effect upon the campaign for which he was working and also on the activities of Umkonto, and the object
would be to enable Mandela to be freed and continue the work he was doing prior to his arrest.

DAILY CONTACT

In addition during the period from May 24 until the date of his arrest Kathrada was in almost daily contact
with Goldreich, Sisulu, Goldberg, and Mbeki who were actively associated with the affairs of Umkonto. "I
am satisfied that the state has proved that Kathrada was a party to the conspiracy alleged in count two and I
find him Guilty on this count. I am not satisfied in regard to his guilt on the other three counts, and he will be
found Not Guilty on these three counts."

Finally turning to Lionel Bernstein, the Judge said that Bernstein admitted that he was listed as a communist,
Marxist, and Pacifist. He was a foundation member of the Congress of Democrats until it was banned in
1954. He advocated socialism as a long-term policy. There were circumstances when a non-violent policy
was wrong. From 1960 many people advocated violence to which the leaders responded slowly. Bernstein
held the Government responsible for this because it would not listen to people's demands. He wrote about
this in a pamphlet.

"That pamphlet is a criticism of Government policy that cannot, I think, be interpreted as implicating himself in
any unlawful violence", he said. Bernstein was never a member either of Umkonto or the National High
Command. The Judge examined the connexion of Bernstein with the Rivonia property which he was invited to
inspect in a professional capacity as an architect.

It was possible that he gave to conspirators literature and notes about the Soviet-Chinese differences and
Indian-Chinese differences so that the conspirators could decide on their policy should they succeed in
overthrowing the Government and taking its place. But even if that inference was drawn, that did not make
him a co-conspirator in relation to the charges in the indictment.

GUILT NOT ESTABLISHED

The guilt of Bernstein had not been established and he was found Not Guilty on all charges.

In a preliminary review of certain aspects of the case, the Judge said that it was conceded that the Umkonto
organization directed sabotage operations during the period covered by the charges. It was also a common
cause that the organization was composed of the High Command situated in Johannesburg and four regional
commands in four provinces.

According to the evidence of Mbeki, which in this respect appeared to be true, it was decided at a meeting of
the executive or central committee of A.N.C. in June, 1961, to "allow" its members to form a body to
engineer and direct acts of sabotage against targets described as "symbols of apartheid", which included
buildings belonging to the Government, to the Bantu Affairs Department and communications including
electric, telephone and railway signal installations.

It was also clear from his evidence considered in relation to the statement of Mandela and in relation to
documentary evidence that the latter was the prime mover in forming the organization. He had been deputy
leader of A.N.C. before it was banned in 1960 but had continued his activities.

"It appears to me from evidence and documents that the leader of the A.N.C.. Luthuli [former Chief Albert
Luthuli], was informed about the activities of Umkonto and was consulted from time to time but kept in the
background."

Dealing with documents emanating from the Communist Party, the Judge said that these appeared to be of
little relevance. It did appear to him from evidence that many if not the majority of the members of the A.N.C.
and of Umkonto did also belong to the Communist Party.

Sisulu conceded that A.N.C. cooperated with the Communist Party because their aims were similar, but
A.N.C. was not pre- pared to go is far as the Communist Party and was not prepared to approve converting
South Africa into a communist state.

In regard to general evidence given in the case, the Judge said that the material witnesses were all
accomplices, and it was well established that such evidence must be regarded with great caution, especially
evidence implicating an accused. In addition all material witnesses were detained for questioning under
provisions of section 17 of Act 37 of 1963 and kept in solitary confinement until they were prepared to make
a statement.

FEAR OF REPRISALS

"The possibility must be bourne in mind that suggestions made by questioners were accepted and that
evidence was concocted to satisfy the questioners."

Another fact the Judge had to bear in mind was that most of the witnesses appeared to fear reprisals. There
was evidence, both written and verbal, that "traitors" should be suitably dealt with. Practically all the acts of
sabotage alleged in the indictment were proved to have been committed. Evidence was given that the
instructions were that care should be exercised that no person was injured or killed. It was argued that a
number of acts deposed to by witnesses fell outside this instruction and that the leaders of the organization
could not be held responsible for those acts.

"For the purpose of my decision I accept this contention, although I have some doubt whether the leaders
should not have contemplated that saboteurs employed would probably get out of hand." The Judge said that
the paragraphs in count two which alleged that the accused conspired, committed or procured the
commission of acts of guerrilla warfare, acts of assistance to military units of foreign countries and acts of
participation in violent revolution fell away. Sisulu, Goldberg and Mbeki in evidence stated that Operation
Mayibuye (the document setting out a plan for guerrilla warfare) was under consideration but never adopted.

AFRICAN ANTHEM SUNG

"I indicated during the course of the argument that in my opinion it had not been proved that the plan had
progressed beyond the preparation stage, and I adhere to that view." The only difference, therefore, between
counts one and two was that in count one it was alleged that the accused as leaders and/or is members of
Umkonto and allied organizations were responsible for acts committed by their agents or servants.

As far as count two was concerned, this alleged that the accused were liable for further similar acts which
were contemplated but had not yet been performed on the basis of conspiracy.

Mrs Winnie Mandela, her son and her mother were escorted into the packed courtroom to hear the
judgment. Mrs Sisulu in tribal dress was escorted by a senior police officer into the courtroom.

Police were out in strength on Church Square near the Palace of Justice this morning, some of them with
police dogs, but they were unobtrusive and tactful and there were no unpleasant incidents. Before the crowds
dispersed after the brief court hearing rallying cries were shouted by Africans and the African anthem Nkosi
Sikelel i Afrika was sung.
June 13, 1964

The judge could have imposed the death penalty on Mandela, but instead sentenced him to life
imprisonment —a sentence that meant he was likely to die in jail. Among the protesters interviewed in
Trafalgar Square for this Times report was Thabo Mbeki, the son of one of the accused, who would
later succeed Mandela to become South Africa's second black president.

Life Imprisonment for African Leaders

Protests in Britain and at U.N.

Sentences of life imprisonment were imposed yesterday on Nelson Mandela and the other seven men—five
Africans, a white man and an Indian—convicted of sabotage after an eight-month trial in Pretoria.

Delegates at the United Nations Security Council meeting in New York protested against the sentences.
Demonstrators lined the pavements outside the South African Embassy in London and British trade union and
political leaders expressed anger and sympathy.

A statement from Mr Albert Luthuli called on the west to impose sanctions on South Africa.

From Our Correspondent

Pretoria—Nelson Mandela and the other seven men found Guilty yesterday of sabotage and plotting violent
revolution were today all sentenced to life imprisonment. Judge-President Quartus de Wet said that the crime
on which they had been found Guilty was in essence one of high treason. He added that the state had decided
not to treat the crime in this form. Allowing for this "I have decided not to impose the supreme penalty". But
that was the only leniency he could show.

The judge said he had heard in mitigation the submission that the accused were recognized political leaders
and had been motivated in their acts by a desire to alleviate the grievances of the African people in this
country. He was by no means convinced that this was so.

PERSONAL AMBITION

"People who organize revolution usually plan to take over the Government as well through personal ambition",
he declared. It was the function of the court to enforce the laws of South Africa.

The accused showed no emotion on being sentenced. They were: Nelson Mandela, aged 46; Walter Sisulu,
52, former secretary-general of the banned African National Congress; Dennis Goldberg, 33, a white man, a
former leader of the banned Congress of Democrats; Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, 44; Elias
Motsoaledi. 39; Andrew Mlangeni, 38 (all A.N.C. officials); and Ahmed Kathrada. an Indian and former
leader of the Indian National Congress

Before the sentence was read several hundred police surrounded the court building and patrolled Pretoria's
Church Square facing the court.

Whites outnumbered Africans in the crowds in Church Square. For hours members of both races stood
silently to await the sentencing. At the end, a group of African women suddenly unfurled canvas painted
banners bearing the words, "You will not serve these years as long as we live," "We are proud of our
leaders," and "A milestone of freedom has been reached."
Holding the banners in front of them the women sang "Nkosi Sikelele Afrika" (God Bless Africa) until police
with linked arms cleared the roadway in front of the court and seized their banners.

MEN OF SINCERITY

Mr Alan Paton, author of Cry, the Beloved Country, made an appeal in court for clemency for the accused.

"I came here because I was asked to come", he declared after taking the oath.

Mr Paton said that as the national president of the Liberal Party he knew Mandela, Sisulu and Mbeki well.
He described Mandela as "heir apparent" to Mr Albert Luthuli, the former A.N.C. leader.

"I have the highest regard for him—he holds a very high position in the African community. His name among
Africans is as well known as Luthuli," Mr. Paton said. He described Mandela, Sisulu and Mbeki as men of
"sincerity and a very deep devotion to their people."

There was a clash between Mr Paton and Dr Percy Yutar, the deputy Attorney-General, who declared he
would "unmask" the author and show him to have come to court to spread propaganda.

"Where do you stand?" Mr Paton was asked in cross-examination.

He replied: "I am a believer in the removal of any racial discrimination whatsoever, also economic
discrimination. I am in favour of a reconstructed society (in South Africa), in favour of some measure of the
redistribution of the land and wealth of this country and the removal of the grosser inequalities."

He declared he did not "believe in violent action as an expedient or as a principle". He thought the African
people in this country felt they had only two choices—" either to bow their heads and submit or to resist by
force". He added: " It is very painful to think that people think that there are only these two choices."

Mr Yutar asked Mr Paton: "Are you a communist?" "No", was the reply. "Are you a fellow-traveller?" "I
don't quite know what a fellow-traveller is, but I am not."

STRUGGLE FOR RIGHTS

Mr Paton said he disapproved of the communists' totalitarian methods.

Mr Harold Hansen, Q.C., told the Judge in his mitigation plea: "These accused represent the struggle of their
people for equal rights. Their views represent the struggle of the African people for the attainment of equal
rights for all races in this country.

"They are men who have been moved by the poverty of their people . . . moved by the existence of barriers
which prevent their people attaining the status of full human beings."

The A.N.C. had turned to violence and illegal actions in the period 1952-61 when it was "a sad fact" that
laws were passed which deprived Africans of what rights they had until then enjoyed. "Their motivation was
not to overthrow the state and its institutions, to despoil anyone of their property and rights. Their motivation
was to make public their people's grievances and to ameliorate the conditions of non- Europeans.

LACK OF A FORUM

"There was no forum through which grievances of the Africans could legitimately be expressed. The leaders
inevitably aspired to acts of sabotage to draw attention to their plight.
"My plea is not a plea for mercy, but a plea for understanding, wisdom and compassion. . . . We in this
country understand well the struggle for national liberation. We understand its motivation. Political offences
rarely take place when there is an avenue through which grievances can be stated and remedies sought."

Defence lawyers said afterwards that an appeal was unlikely but steps might be taken to lodge an appeal on
behalf of Kathrada, who was convicted on only one of the four counts. Life sentences in South Africa can
actually last a lifetime, but the State President reviews all cases after 21 years and can commute the sentence.
Before that the prisons board can reduce sentences. It is possible for prisoners to be freed after 12 to 15
years.

Demonstrations In Britain Over Pretoria Sentences

Hundreds of demonstrators carrying placards lined the pavements outside the South African Embassy in
London yesterday in protest against the sentences passed at the Pretoria trial. They chanted slogans
demanding the release of Nelson Mandela and the others convicted of sabotage.

Among the demonstrators were a group from the National Assembly of Women wearing black sashes, and
some boys from Eton. Police patrolled the pavement outside the embassy.

MRS ESME GOLDBERG, wife of Dennis Goldberg, said in London last night that her reaction to the
sentences was one of tremendous relief. "It is strange how one's values change. At first, when people were
sentenced to three years or 12 years, we said how dreadful, and here we are relieved at a life sentence." Mrs
Goldberg, who was speaking at a press conference in the House of Commons organized by the World
Campaign for the Release of South African Political Prisoners, added: "I think pressure brought to bear on
the South African authorities by the World Campaign definitely succeeded in avoiding the death penalty in this
case."

MR THABO MBEKI, son of Govan Mbeki and a student at the University of Sussex, said that he had
expected the death sentence to be passed as a gesture by the South African Government against people
seeking to interfere in their affairs. Also at the meeting was Mrs Rae Sherwood, sister of Lionel Bernstein,
who was acquitted on Thursday but immediately rearrested.

BISHOP'S MISSION

Mr Jeremy Thorpe, the campaign's honorary secretary, announced that Bishop Joost de Blank, the former
Archbishop of Cape Town, would be flying from London on Monday to present a petition to the United
Nations General Assembly in New York. This petition, which calls for the abandonment of the Rivonia trial
and release of all political prisoners in South Africa, had more than 90,000 individual signatures and the
support of organizations representing over 250 million people.

Mr David Ennals, a member of the executive of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, said that the sentences would
stimulate "much more vigorous action against the South African Government" throughout the country and
throughout the Anti- Apartheid Movement.
June 15, 1964

Immediately after his conviction, Mandela was transferred to the prison at Robben Island, where he
would remain for 18 years.

Mandela Moved To Island Prison

JOHANNESBURG—Nelson Mandela, the African nationalist leader, and the six other Africans sentenced
with Dennis Goldberg to life sentences in the Rivonia sabotage trial last Friday are detained on Robben island,
off Cape Town, a senior police officer said. Goldberg, the only white man convicted, had not been sent to the
island, which is reserved for non-white prisoners.

Mrs Susanna Johanna Fischer, aged 56, wife of Mr Abraham Fischer, Q.C., who was senior defence
counsel at the sabotage trial, died in a car crash last night. Her husband was shaken but not seriously hurt.

A bomb tonight blew up the front of a post office in the Johannesburg suburb of Vrededorp, mostly inhabited
by Indians. The explosion threw people living near by out of their beds. An African was seen running from the
scene.
June 15, 1964

As protests against the sentences grew, another recurrent theme of the anti-apartheid movement
emerged. The call for sanctions against South Africa and a boycott of goods produced in the country.

3,000 Protest At Sentences — 'Unions Should Bar S. Africa Goods'

Police stood shoulder to shoulder outside South Africa House yesterday afternoon while in Trafalgar Square,
not a stone's throw away, 3,000 people joined in protest at the sentences imposed in Pretoria on Nelson
Mandela and his seven compatriots.

The meeting had been organized by the Anti-apartheid Movement, members of which had marched in
procession from Hyde Park carrying banners. They had been accompanied by nuclear disarmers making a
similar protest, but the ban-the- bomb marchers did not join the meeting: instead, they paraded around the
South African building, which they heard described during the afternoon as a fortress of reactionism.

After it was all over Mr Anthony Wedgwood Benn, accompanied by some of the other speakers, went to
Downing Street to hand in a letter to "the present occupant of No. 10" protesting and calling for action.

"OUTCRY SAVED LIVES"

Lord Russell, the first speaker, expressed a view which many others enlarged upon—that world-wide outcry
had saved the lives of Mandela and his colleagues.

The United States and Britain, he said, traded in vast amounts with the South African tyranny. They sold arms
to South Africa. It was an appalling illustration of Western hypocrisy about freedom that the United States
and Britain abstained in the Security Council on the issue of condemning apartheid. If the tyranny was to be
ended without dreadful violence, western governments must be made to act now.

Lord Russell was certain that the international boycott of South African goods had been an important factor in
the struggle against apartheid. Commendable as the efforts against the South African regime had been until
now, however, he believed they were insufficient. He would therefore suggest another way.

"If Mr Frank Cousins and the Transport and General Workers' Union would use their great influence to
persuade the International Federation of Free Trade Unions to refuse to load any goods anywhere intended
for South Africa, and refuse to unload any goods at any South African port, the South African tyranny will
end." They would have the support of Asia, Latin America, and "all decent men and women, east and west".

THE WATERSHED

The Bishop of Woolwich, Dr J. A. T. Robinson, recalled that on October 11 last year the General Assembly
of the United Nations called on the South African Government to abandon forthwith the arbitrary trial then in
progress and to grant unconditional release to all political prisoners. It was a resolution which had the
unprecedented majority of 106 to one, the one being South Africa. This was a motion which even the United
Kingdom voted for.

"Well, what are we going to do about it?" he asked. "Surely at last the watershed has been reached. Surely
the time has come for no more abstaining on United Nations votes. Surely the time has come for no more
equivocating on the supply of arms. Surely the time has come for no more dragging of our feet on the subject
of economic sanctions."

In November, 1962, he said, the United Nations asked all member states to break off diplomatic relations
with South Africa and boycott its goods. "When are we going to give teeth to this resolution? These men paid
the price of honour with their freedom and their lives; are we not even prepared to forgo our oranges and our
dividends?"

Later it was learned that 11 people are to appear at Bow Street Court today as a result of disturbances in
Trafalgar Square.

The executive of the Transport Salaried Staffs' Association yesterday carried a resolution expressing grave
concern and dismay at the sentences, and calling on the South African Government to revoke them "or stand
condemned in the eyes of world opinion ".

The executive of the United Nations Association unanimously adopted on Saturday a resolution deploring the
sentences and calling on South Africa to grant an amnesty. It urged the British Government to press the South
African Government to comply with the wishes of the General Assembly and Security Council.
November 9, 1970

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who was married to Nelson Mandela from 1958 to 1996, remains a
controversial figure. She has been accused of human rights abuses during the apartheid era and
convicted of fraud and theft, but was credited with keeping her husband's name alive during his long
imprisonment.

Mrs Mandela sees husband

Cape Town—Mrs Winnie Mandela yesterday paid a half-hour visit to her husband, Nelson, former leader of
the banned African National Congress, serving a life sentence on Robben Island.

Mrs Mandela, who was recently placed under house arrest in Johannesburg, was granted permission to fly to
Cape Town to visit her husband whom she has not seen for two years.
April 5, 1976

This announcement that the South African government might be willing to release Mandela was the
first of many such moves. As The Times correspondent reports, any release would have come with
conditions designed to split the ANC and neuter Mandela's authority as an anti-apartheid campaigner.

Mandela release being considered

From Nicholas Ashford, Johannesburg

The South African Government is considering the release of Mr Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the
banned African National Congress (ANC) who are serving prison sentences on Robben Island.

Mr James Kruger, the Minister of Justice, said at the weekend that he had asked the Department of Police
and Prisons to submit reports on the men after receiving requests for their release from the Government of the
Transkei, the black "homeland" for Xhosas which is due to become independent in October. "We are
definitely considering it", Mr Kruger said, adding that the Transkei was seeking an amnesty for Xhosa
prisoners as part of its independence celebrations.

Confirming that formal negotiations have begun for the release of the men, Chief Kaiser Matanzima, the
Transkei leader, said he was unable to comment in any detail "but you can be sure that we want those
involved to go free in the Transkei. It is definitely not a question of transferring them to a local prison ".

Apart from Mr Mandela, who is related to Chief Matanzima, other Xhosa political prisoners on Robben
Island include Mr Walter Sisulu and Mr Govan Mbeki. All are serving life sentences after being convicted at
the 1964 Rivonia trial of sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the Government. They were members of the
high command of Umkonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the militant wing of the ANC.

Confirmation that their release is being considered represents a major change of policy by the. Government.
A year ago Mr Vorster, the Prime Minister, said that Mr Mandela would never be released. He maintained
that he was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party who wanted to establish a communist state in
South Africa in the interests of the Soviet Union.

Only two weeks ago Mr Kruger himself said the Government had no intention of entering into any deal with
the Transkei Government for the release of the Xhosa prisoners. The Government clearly regards the release
of political prisoners as a possible means of giving credibility to an independent Transkei and gaining it
recognition internationally.

A decision to release Mr Mandela, one of the staunchest opponents of apartheid, would place the ANC
leader in a dilemma. He is regarded as a national black leader, not a tribal, one. Yet his release would
presumably be conditional on his acceptance of Transkeian citizenship. This could be interpreted as
acceptance of the South African Government's policy or separate development.

His wife, Mrs Winnie Mandela, said she did not know how her husband would react. "He can only make up
his mind when someone actually comes to him on the island and says: 'You are a free man'. Perhaps he will
just return to his cell."

Meanwhile nearly 1,000 people attended the funeral yesterday of Mr Joseph Mdluli, a former ANC member
who died in Durban a day after being detained by security police. According to his wife, Mr Mdululi was in
good health at the time of his arrest After examining the body at Durban police mortuary she claimed it was
bruised, swollen and cut. His death is being investigated by the police.

The circumstances of his death have caused widespread public concern. Mr Denis Hurley, Roman Catholic
Archbishop of Durban, has called for a full investigation and Mrs Helen Suzman, the Progressive-Reform
MP, is to raise the matter in Parliament

A number of messages read at the funeral called for the repeal of legislation providing for detention without
trial.
April 10, 1976

In this instance, the government apparently withdrew its offer before it had been put to Mandela.

Mr Mandela to remain imprisoned

Cape Town—The release from jail of Mr Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the banned African National
Congress was effectively ruled out today by Mr James Kruger, the Justice Minister.

Mr Kruger said last weekend that he was "definitely considering" a request for an amnesty to mark the
independence of the Transkei homeland on October 26. This would possibly have included the release to the
Transkei of Mr Mandela and other Xhosa political prisoners.

But Mr Kruger announced that, after careful consideration, the Government had decided against such an
amnesty.
June 18, 1976

The Soweto uprising in 1976, like the Sharpeville massacre 16 years earlier, led to a hardening of
attitudes in the country's pro and anti-apartheid camps. It also drew further condemnation from
liberal South Africans and foreign governments. Estimates of how many died during the riot and in
the violence that followed in other townships vary widely, but The Times later put the death toll at
500.

Death toll rises to 41 in second day of rioting at Soweto

From Nicholas Ashford, Johannesburg

Rioting spread to the east and west of Johannesburg tonight as Soweto ended its second day of violence,
sparked off by yesterday's police shooting of black students protesting against the use of Afrikaans in lessons.

This evening the police said that at least 39 blacks and two whites had been killed since the rioting began
yesterday morning. The South African Press Association reported, however, that the death toll may now
exceed 50. The police said that 250 blacks and five whites had also been injured and 130 people had been
arrested.

Major-General W. H. Kotze, officer commanding the anti-riot police force in Soweto, said there was no end
in sight to the rioting. Asked if it was getting worse, he replied: "How can it get worse?"

Tonight several hundred black students rampaged through the streets of Kasigo, the black township of
Krugersdorp, a mining town about 20 miles west of Johannesburg. An off-licence was set on fire, cars
overturned, a police station attacked and road blocks of concrete slabs set up. Later the police said the
situation had been brought under control.

Earlier about 2,000 children at Tembisa township, on the East Rand, marched through the streets to
demonstrate their support for the Soweto riot. Armed police sealed off the township after students had tried
to set fire to a car.

For the second day running clouds of dark smoke hung over Soweto as rioters set fire to government offices,
schools, clinics, shops and vehicles. Army helicopters continued to drop tear gas canisters as more than
1,500 policemen armed with automatic rifles and machine guns, some black and some white, supported by
armoured cars, tried to quell the looting and violence. The Army units called out last night were not sent into
action, however.

Trouble spread to the white heart of Johannesburg this afternoon. The police baton-charged a crowd of
Africans who had gathered at the bus station near the city's business centre, trying to get transport home to
Soweto.

In another incident, about, 150 policemen wielding batons broke up a protest march organized by white
students from the University of the Witwatersrand in support of the protesting black students. The marchers
were also attacked by white thugs wielding iron bars and chains.

The South African Government fiddled while Soweto burned. It has taken no action to defuse the tense
situation; Mr M. C. Botha, the Minister of Bantu Education, said it was too early to say whether he would
reconsider the ruling that teaching in Soweto's schools should be conducted half in English and half in
Afrikaans. Tonight it was announced by Mr Kruger, Minister of Police and Justice, that he was setting up a
one- man judicial commission to investigate the Soweto disturbances.

The inquiry will be carried out by Mr Justice Cillie, Judge President of the Transvaal.

According to informed sources the riots have led to a major clash within the Cabinet with Mr Botha, being
blamed for allowing the situation to get out of control. There was speculation that he and his deputy, Mr
Andries Treurnicht, might lose their posts because of the serious international setback South Africa has
suffered as a result of the shootings.

The Government seems convinced that the rioting is a deliberate attempt to discredit Mr Vorster, the Prime
Minister, before next week's meeting in West Germany with Dr Kissinger, the American Secretary of State.
Tonight his office confirmed that he intended to go ahead with his journey to Europe.

The mood in Soweto today had grown even uglier than yesterday and rioters were attacking anything or any
one connected with white authority. Mr Manie Mulder, chairman of the West Rand Urban Bantu
Administration Board, which runs Soweto, said nearly all the board's offices had been destroyed and attacks
on other buildings were continuing.

Schools and off-licences also appeared to be principal targets for attack. From a hill overlooking Soweto
today I could see smoke rising from two schools in Meadowlands, a suburb on the north side of the
township.

Because of the strong anti-white feeling among the rioters, the police sealed off the township to all Europeans
today. It is feared that if the unrest is not brought under control quickly, the deaths could exceed the 69
blacks who were killed at Sharpeville in 1960.

Much of the trouble is now being caused by young Tsotsis (black teenage "bovver boys "), who have been
rampaging through the streets armed with shovels, pickaxes, iron bars, knives and sticks, smashing and
burning vehicles indiscriminately.

But the police remained the main target of the rioters' anger. In a scene reminiscent of the Hungarian uprising,
stone-throwing youths attacked a convoy of police armoured personnel vehicles. They were driven off only
after the police had opened fire. Orlando police station, at the centre of the riot area, was under a virtual state
of siege, with crowds of children jeering and stoning police vehicles.

Although life in the white areas of Johannesburg has continued as normal, white South Africans have been
stunned by the violence of the riots. The disturbances have been given blanket coverage in both the Afrikaans
and English press and on television.

Opposition spokesmen and church leaders blamed the Government's unbending attitude on the Afrikaans
issue, as well as its racial policies, for the rioting.

The Very Rev Desmond Tutu, Anglican Dean of Johannesburg, wondered whether the police would have
used their guns if those protesting had been white instead of black.
April 27, 1977

As years went by, international concern about Nelson Mandela and his fellow prisoners grew. In 1977,
13 years after he had been sent to Robben Island, the South African government tried to allay
criticism by inviting journalists to tour the prison (although only on the condition that copy would be
vetted by the Prisons Department).Poignantly, the Times reporter describes catching a glimpse of the
island's most famous prisoner: "Mr Mandela, described by a judge at a previous trial as 'the leader
and figurehead of his people,' was clearing weeds from a pathway with a shovel when the journalists
saw him. He tried to conceal himself behind a tall rockery as they passed."

A glimpse at the life of prisoners of Robben Island

Conducted tour to dispel 'Devil's Island' tab on S Africa's maximum security jail

Robben Island—The South African Government, sensitive to allegations that it runs a "Devil's island" for
political prisoners, has finally allowed outsiders to see its maximum security jail. All its inmates are non-whites,
convicted enemies of the state.

The fenced-in, group of single-storey buildings is on Robben Island, a 232 acre piece of land seven miles
north of Cape Town.

Major-General Jannie Roux, one of South Africa's deputy commissioners for prisoners, conducted 24 local
and foreign correspondents round Robben Island yesterday. He said it was a unique event as the prison had
not been seen at close quarters by the media since it opened on April 1, 1961.

In that time opponents of the South African Government have dubbed it "South Africa's Devil's Island" after
the notorious French penal colony, partly because of the secrecy surrounding it, and partly because of
allegations, of ill-treatment of prisoners inside.

One of the conditions under which the journalists were taken to the island was that they submit their copy to
the Prisons Department for vetting by General Roux "for security reasons ".

The prison holds 370 black, Asian and Coloured men in brightly-polished, freshly- painted, barrack-type
buildings.

Thirty-two of the inmates have been sentenced to stay for the rest of their lives. They include Nelson
Mandela, president of the banned African National Congress; Walter Sisulu, secretary-general of the ANC;
Govan Mbeki, ANC's national chairman and Andre Mlangeni, also of the ANC. All were convicted in 1964
on four counts of sabotage and conspiring to start a violent revolution.

Mr Mandela, described by a judge at a previous trial as "the leader and figurehead of his people," was
clearing weeds from a pathway with a shovel when the journalists saw him. He tried to conceal himself behind
a tall rockery as they passed.

The journalists were not allowed to interview inmates.

Mr Mandela's cell was shown to the journalists along with others in a special section of the prison. Mr
Mandela and 29 other prisoners have a life apart from the rest of the inmates of Robben Island. While the
others live in large dormitories, they occupy individual cells in their own block with their own recreation hall,
eating area and toilets.

Asked how the "special" prisoners were, selected, the general said: "We must think of the effect they might
have on the other men. We prefer to keep them apart."

The cells, measuring 7ft by 8ft have thickly barred windows which look down into a courtyard with a
concrete tennis court.

The island, covered by sparse grass, thick bushes and small trees, looks directly into Table Bay. It is
populated only by the prisoners, their 174 white jailers, and the prison officers' families—750 people in all.

The number of prisoners has risen by 130 over the last year, due in part to the riots in South Africa's black
and Coloured townships. It was built to hold 650 people.

The prisoners work a five-day week, with Saturday and Sunday off. Officers said the working day for
prisoners was from 7.15 am until 4 pm, with one hour for lunch and smoking breaks.

The prison officers are usually not armed, General Roux said. None of the officers seen by the reporters
yesterday carried guns.

The prisoners are not allowed newspapers, radios or television for security reasons. They are permitted a
maximum of two visits a month of half an hour each in which talk of politics and current events is forbidden.
Only two letters a month are allowed in and two out, subject to censorship.

The prison is surrounded by twin steel-mesh fences about 20ft high and the same distance apart. The island's
greatest security fence is the sea, It is three miles to the nearest land and the waters are frequently rough and
cold.

Nobody has escaped from Robben Island, General Roux said. Only two have tried, 15 years ago, when
ordinary criminals were confined here. Their makeshift raft capsized a few yards from the island and they
swam back into the arms of their jailers.

The visit by the journalists had been kept a close secret until just before two Dakota aircraft flew them in from
Cape Town. General Roux said this was to ensure that the journalists saw Robben Island as it was, adding
that neither prisoners nor staff was prepared for the press.
July 18, 1978

In an article to mark Mandela's 60th birthday, The Times' South Africa correspondent summarised the
man's life and his significance within the anti-apartheid movement.

Prayers said for Robben Island prisoner No 466/64

From Nicholas Ashford, Johannesburg

Tomorrow will be just another day for prisoner No. 466/64 on Robben Island—a day of repetitious prison
routine, of dull prison food, another day of a sentence which will end only with death. But for many people in
South Africa and other parts of the world it will be a day of remembrance for Mr Nelson Mandela, the
colossus of African nationalism in South Africa.

Mr Mandela will be 60 tomorrow. Almost one third of his life has been spent behind bars, his speeches and
writings have been banned, and the organization which he led, the African National Congress (ANC),
proscribed.

But despite official attempts to obliterate his memory, he is still a figurehead for South African blacks who
wish to liberate themselves from white domination. He is their leader.

Despite his years in prison he remains as much a symbol of black resistance and an inspiration for black
hopes as he was when he was leading his campaign of defiance in the 1950s or when he went "underground"
before his arrest in 1962.

He is probably the only black leader who has the respect and support not only of the militants in the black
consciousness movement, but also of homeland leaders such as Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, of KwaZulu. As the
slogan painted on a Soweto wall proclaims: "Mandela is with us still."

In Britain Mr Mandela's birthday is being commemorated with special meetings and speeches and the
dispatch of 10,000 birthday cards, none of which will probably ever reach Robben lsland. In South Africa,
because of the political situation, the anniversary must be marked in a more subdued way, privately and with
prayers.

In a small three-room house in Brandfort, in the Orange Free State, Mr Mandela's wife, Winnie, his two
daughters and his baby grand-daughter, will observe a day of fasting and prayer. Their prayers, the younger
daughter Zinzi, says, will not be just for Mr Mandela but for all political prisoners in South Africa.

Mrs Mandela leads of life of lonely banishment in Brandfort where she was sent just over a year ago on the
orders of Mr James Kruger, the Minister of Justice. Her only contact with her husband is through letters and
the occasional visit to Robben Island.

Neither in his letters nor during his family's visits is Mr Mandela allowed to discuss anything but family
matters. Even references to "aunt Helen" (Mrs Helen Joseph, the first person to be banned in South Africa
who is godmother to Mr Mandela's grand-daughter) are banned. But despite these restrictions, Mrs Mandela
says, her husband remains in good spirits, inspired by the hope that he will live to see black South Africans
achieve their freedom.

The South African authorities are determined to ensure that he will not fulfil this ambition. He was sentenced
to life imprisonment in 1964 and in South Africa there is no remission for political offences.

Mr Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born in Transkei, the son of a Tembu chief and a kinsman of Chief Kaizer
Matanzima, the Transkei Prime Minister. He was destined for chieftainship, but a rebellious spirit plus an early
interest in student politics while he was at Fort Hare University made him turn his back on his family's tribal
background.

He went to Johannesburg where he first worked in the mines before being taken on (with the help of Mr
Walter Sisulu, one of his fellow prisoners on Robben Island) by a firm of white lawyers. He studied law at the
University of the Witwatersrand and later set up his own legal partnership with Mr Oliver Tambo, the present
head of the ANC in exile.

Mr Mandela joined the ANC in 1944 and helped to found its militant youth league. By 1952 he had become
deputy national president of the ANC and led 8,500 people in the campaign of defiance. He was given a
suspended sentence and was served with a banning order.

Four years later he was one of the principal defendants in the treason trial during which he helped to destroy
the Government's case against the ANC. He was acquitted and shortly afterwards was elected leader of the
National Action Council set up by the all-in African Convention. He immediately went "underground" and
directed a three-day nationwide strike in May, 1961.

In June of that year, he and other ANC leaders decided to set up Umkonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation)
to carry out acts of sabotage against public buildings. A year after the founding of Umkonto, Mr Mandela
was arrested and charged with inciting strikes and leaving the country without a permit. He was sentenced to
five years imprisonment. While still in prison he was brought to court again in October, 1963, as the chief
accused in the Rivonia trial. The following year he was sentenced to life imprisonment for sabotage.

Before being silenced, Mr Mandela made a remarkable four hours and a half declaration in court explaining
the aims of African Nationalism, why the ANC had found it necessary to resort to violence and rejecting state
allegations that the ANC was dominated by foreigners and communists. It was an eloquent and moving
speech which perhaps more than any other act singled him out as the leader of black South Africans.

He concluded with these words: "The ANC's struggle is a truly national one. It is a struggle of the African
people, inspired by their own suffering and their own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live.

"During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. 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."

At 60 Mr Mandela is still hoping that he will live to see this ideal fulfilled.
April 21, 1980

This brief report shows that opinion within the South African establishment was split on whether
Mandela should be released from prison.

Mandela plea by former security chief

General Hendrik van den Bergh, South Africa's former head of security, favours the release of Nelson
Mandela, the black nationalist leader serving a life sentence for plotting a coup, the Johannesburg Sunday
Express said today.

In an interview the retired head of the Bureau of State Security, told the Express that if he was still in office he
would recommend an immediate in-depth investigation into Mr Mandela's present situation with a view to
releasing him, if only on humanitarian grounds.

Mr van den Bergh said Mr Mandela was not a communist. "He stood, and still stands for, black nationalism
just as Afrikaners—and I am one—stand for Afrikaner nationalism".
December 28, 1981

If opinion was divided in South African government circles, outside the country it seemed united.
Winnie Mandela led global calls for her husband's release.

Why they must free my husband

Brandfort, South Africa—Releasing Nelson Mandela from prison and negotiating with him is the only way
whites will avoid a bloodbath in this country," says Mrs Winnie Mandela, the wife of South Africa's leading
black nationalist.

Mrs Mandela, banned and banished to this small farming town by this country's white-minority Government,
said in an interview: "The Government has imprisoned all the moderate blacks who believe in sharing power
with whites and in racial harmony. All those left are the ones who have learned from the Afrikaner that the
only way to get power is through the bullet."

Mr Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment on June 12, 1964, for conspiring to overthrow white rule.
Mrs Mandela was detained without charge on numerous occasions and was banned after the 1976 Soweto
riots.

Under her banning order she must get permission to leave this Orange Free State town 30 miles north of
Bloemfontein. She also may not be quoted in the South African press. No explanation has been given by the
security forces, and the banning is renewable indefinitely.

Mrs Mandela's five-year banning order expires at the end of this month but she expects it to be renewed. She
remains optimistic about the future of South Africa because of the confidence Nelson exudes during her
periodic visits to him at Robben Island prison off Cape Town. She was to see him again on Christmas Day.

"Nelson has always been confident that he will come out of that prison. In each and every single letter he
writes over the past 20 years, and in each and every visit, he has always been confident that he will come out
and lead his people to liberation," she said.

Mrs Mandela also said her husband was aware of the recent stepped up sabotage campaign by the banned
African National Congress, which Mr Mandela led until his imprisonment. She said he still runs the
organization.

"He is as much in control of the situation today as he was 20 years ago, and human life is sacred to him and
the African National Congress, regardless of colour," she said.

Polls of the country's 19 million black majority show Mr Mandela remains the favourite for president if blacks
gain control. Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu, an influential black activist, has predicted Mr Mandela will be
prime minister within five to 10 years.
April 8, 1982

After 18 years on Robben Island, Mandela was moved to a mainland prison on March 31, 1982. The
transfer was conducted in secret and was tentatively reported in The Times more than a week later.

Mandela said to be off Robben Island

Cape Town—Mr Nelson Mandela, president of South Africa's banned African National Congress, and three
other ANC leaders have been transferred from Robben Island to a mainland jail, the South African Press
Association reported today.

Mr Mandela, in the eighteenth year of a no-parole life sentence, and the others had been moved from the
island for the first time since their imprisonment on sabotage charges in 1964 and shifted to Pollsmoor prison
"for administrative reasons".

The others were identified as Mr Walter Sisulu, the former ANC secretary-general, and two party officials,
Mr Raymond Nhlada and Mr Andrew N. Angeni. All four are serving life sentences.

Sapa was quoting Brigadier H. Botha, chief liaison officer of the Department of Prisons in Pretoria, who
declined to elaborate on the reasons for the move. Asked to confirm the report, a department spokesman
said he would have to check.
September 5, 1984

Against a backdrop of continuing violence, this leading article from The Times identified a new mood
in the South African government: an understanding that it could not maintain the status quo
indefinitely.

Sharpeville Sends Another Message

Sharpeville is a name etched in the hearts of the Afrikaner rulers of South Africa. In 1960 in this small
Transvaal town police opened fire on a crowd of peaceful demonstrators and killed 69. The world reacted in
horror. There was a flight of capital and panic in government circles. "Things will never be the same," said one
minister. African leaders going to prison predicted that within three years they would be in power, and their
confidence then did not seem as unwarranted as it proved.

Twenty-four years later Sharpeville is back in the world headlines. There are significant differences. The days
of peaceful mass demonstrations are past. The police fired on rioters this time, and Africans murdered African
collaborators with the regime.

This time the economy, though deep in trouble because of the continuing recession, the low gold price and the
weakness of the rand, will not suffer as it did then: there are now effective fences against a flight of capital.

No one thinks that Sharpeville 1984 is the precursor of dramatic change, as some did with Sharpeville 1960.
The message is more sombre: things cannot go on in the long term as they are in South Africa; violence is
ever-present, occasionally bubbling up into the world headlines, and certain to get worse.

The immediate and surface causes of the riots are relatively trivial: rising rents, inadequate schools (in which
there was an excess of corporal punishment) and diminishing employment at a time of sharp inflation. But the
mood of discontent has also been heightened by the intense political campaign waged by the United
Democratic Front against the Coloured and Indian elections and by the brutal police reaction to it. The riots
can be seen as yet another rejection of the new constitution introduced by Mr P. W. Botha, which redraws
the apartheid boundaries to give some rights (but not a real share of power) to the Coloureds and Indians
while leaving the black majority un-represented.

Violence is multi-faceted in South Africa. The murder on his doorstep of the deputy mayor of Sharpeville
(hacked to death and his body set alight) must be seen in context. In one year 90 people were judicially
executed and 40,000 sentenced to corporal punishment; the prison population is 106,000 (from a population
of 30 million, compared with about 45,000 in Britain from a population of 55 million). It is a form of violence
that uproots families and deports them to black "homelands", that keeps Nelson Mandela in jail for more than
22 years and that caused Steve Biko to be murdered in police custody.

White South Africans tend to be cocooned against this violence (though there is an endemic crime wave).
Manifestations usually take place away from the comfortable white suburbs in "townships". But complacency
became more difficult in 1976 when schoolchildren in Soweto demonstrating their anger caused over a year
of rumbling violence with about 600 people killed. The positive achievement of Mr Botha has been to bring
out into the open the idea that some dramatic change is necessary if South Africa is to survive. The message
from Sharpeville Mark Two is that his proposed change is not enough
January 29, 1985

The long process that led to Mandela's release began with indirect negotiations conducted in part
through British politicians and newspapers. Here, the South African government responds to
Mandela's suggestion that the ANC could call a truce if it were recognised as a political party, an idea
he floated in an interview with Lord Bethell, a historian, human rights campaigner and Conservative
member of the House of Lords.

Pretoria offers talks to ANC leaders if it abandons violence

From Michael Hornsby. Cape Town

The South African Government would be prepared to talk to the African National Congress (ANC), the
banned black-nationalist organization, if it abandoned violence, a spokesman for the Office of the President
said in Cape Town yesterday.

"The position of the President (Mr P. W. Botha) is quite clear. If the ANC stops their campaign of violence,
we will sit down and talk to them. If they do not stop their violence we will not talk to them", Mr Jack
Viviers, the presidential press liaison officer, told The Times.

The statement was made in response to a request for reaction to remarks made by the ANC leader, Mr
Nelson Mandela, in an interview with the Conservative peer, Lord Bethell, in Pollsmoor Prison near Cape
Town, where he is serving the 21st year of a life sentence.

Lord Bethell's account of the meeting appeared in last weekend's Mail on Sunday newspaper in London, and
quoted Mr Mandela as saying that the ANC "would declare a truce" if the Government "legalize us, treat us
like a political party, and negotiate with us".

Until the Government did this, however, "we will have to live with the armed struggle", Mr Mandela told Lord
Bethell, adding that it was up to Pretoria to make the first move because "the armed struggle was forced on
us by the Government".

Mr Mandela was evidently referring to the fact that ANC did not resort to sabotage and guerrilla war until
late in 1961, more than a year after it and other black organizations had been banned by the Government.

Mr Viviers said Mr Botha would not comment on the details of Mr Mandela's remarks. If talks were to be
opened, the president would require 'not just a statement of intent, but hard and fast evidence over a
considerable period of time that violence had in fact been abandoned.

"You have to realize that we are dealing with an organization that is supported and financed by the Soviet
Union, and we would have to be very sure that the ANC was not just engaged in another ploy to gain
recognition", he said.

Lord Bethell's meeting with Mr Mandela has aroused great interest in South Africa, though none of his
remarks could be quoted in the South African press under the local censorship laws.

No one can remember when a foreign politician was last allowed to meet Mr Mandela, still less to discuss
politics with him.

Only a fortnight earlier, Senator Edward Kennedy had been refused permission to see the ANC.
There is speculation that the Government wanted to sound out Mr Mandela's views without, talking to him
directly, and when Lord Bethell applied for an interview some months ago it decided that his Conservative
credentials and specialist interest in human rights made him a suitable intermediary.

One of the most interesting statements made by Mr Mandela is his unequivocal expression of regret for the
car bombing in Pretoria on May 23, 1983, which killed nearly 20 people and injured more than 200 others,
and his insistence that the ANC's intended targets remained buildings and property.

"Something must have gone wrong with the timing. It was a tragic accident", he is quoted as saying by Lord
Bethell.

Mr Oliver Tambo, acting president of the ANC in exile, who once ran a Johannesburg legal practice with Mr
Mandela, has never disowned the Pretoria bombing in such explicit terms.

The Bethell interview comes after several months of speculation that Pretoria may be preparing the ground for
talks with the ANC. At the end of last year Beeld, an Afrikaans newspaper which supports the government,
sent a senior reporter to Lusaka, Zambia, to interview Mr Tambo and other ANC figures. It recommended
as a result that dialogue should be opened with the ANC.
February 11, 1985

Two weeks later, Mandela rejected the offer of conditional release, but in terms that raised hope of a
future settlement.

Mandela rejects release offer but leaves open prospect of negotiations

Michael Hornsby, Soweto

Mr Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned leader of the banned African National Congress, yesterday turned down
the offer made by Mr P. W. Botha, the South African President, on January 31 to release him if he
renounced violence as a political instrument.

Mr Mandela appeared, however, to leave open the possibility of negotiations with the Government and a
suspension of the "armed struggle" if Mr Botha were to release him and other political prisoners
unconditionally, and also to allow the ANC, which has waged a sporadic guerrilla war since 1961, to operate
legally.

The ANC leader's terms — his first public statement in South Africa since he was jailed more than 20 years
ago — were read out by Miss Zindzi Mandela, aged 23, his daughter, at a vibrant and colourful rally
attended by about 8,000 people in the Jabulani Amphitheatre here in the heart of South Africa's largest black
township five miles south-west of Johannesburg.

The rally was intended chiefly to celebrate the award of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize to Bishop Desmond
Tutu, the black Anglican Bishop of Johannesburg. It was organized by the United Democratic Front, a
multiracial alliance of radical anti-apartheid groups, many of whose leading office-holders are former
Members of the ANC.

Bishop Tutu, resplendent in purple robes, was the main guest of honour at the rally, which developed into one
of the most open and uninhibited expressions of support for the ANC in many years. To "promote the aims"
of the organization is a treasonable offence in South Africa.

Mrs Winnie Mandela and Mr Ismail Ayob, the family's lawyer, were allowed to visit Mr Mandela in the
Pollsmoor Prison near Cape Town last week to obtain his response to Mr Botha's offer of conditional
release. Mrs Mandela could not make her husband's statement public herself because she is a "banned"
person.

To repeated shouts of "Amandla", the black nationalist slogan meaning "power", Miss Mandela quoted her
father as saying: "I am a member of the African National Congress. I have always been a member of the
African National Congress and I will remain a member of the African National Congress until the day I die."

According to his daughter. Mr Mandela also declared: "I am in prison as the representative of the people and
of your organization, the African National Congress, which was banned. What freedom am I being offered
whilst the organization of the people remains banned?

"Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts. I cannot and will not give any undertaking
(to renounce violence) at a time when I and you the people are not free. Your freedom and mine cannot be
separated."
Mr Mandela, who has been in prison since 1962 and was convicted of sabotage and jailed for life in 1964,
said he was "not a violent man". He declared that the ANC had turned to violence only "when all other forms
of resistance were no longer open to us."

Meanwhile, the South African Department of Prisons has announced that two men serving life terms on
Robben Island in Table Bay have accepted release on the same terms as those rejected by Mr Mandela. The
authorities have refused to reveal their names.
March 25, 1985

The sense of crisis in South Africa deepened during 1985, with the start of what this Times article
describes as "a civil war within the black community". The report also suggested that the country's
president, PW Botha, was unsure whether to respond with more violence or to strike a conciliatory
pose. The last paragraph identifies a significant development: the economic factors that had
supported apartheid were starting to change.

Botha: trapped between reform and repression

Johannesburg — The fresh surge of violence touched off in South Africa's black ghettoes by last week's
slaughter at Uitenhage in the Eastern Cape amounts in fact to no more than a heightening of a state of unrest
that is now endemic.

The Eastern Cape, a once sleepy rural hinterland with an industrial coastal fringe that became a cradle of
black militancy, has been in intermittent turmoil for more than a year. The police there had earned a more than
usually savage reputation even before they fired last week on a crowd on its way to a funeral at Uitenhage,
killing 19 blacks and wounding many others. In the past week alone, some 40 people in all have been killed in
violence in black townships of the region.

Black anger is at a high pitch everywhere. Ever since last September, when serious disturbances began in
Sharpeville, there have been almost daily reports of outbreaks of stone-throwing, arson, school boycotts and
deaths (now numbering more than 230). So routine have such reports become that it takes an outrage like the
Uitenhage shootings to push the unrest back into the headlines of even the South African press.

The well-attested brutality of the police is matched by a popular backlash of increasing savagery against the
most easily accessible symbols of the state's oppression — those blacks holding positions in the apparatus of
government and law-enforcement. Prime targets are black policemen, who account for half the force, and
black town councillors. Scores of their homes have been set on fire or attacked with petrol bombs. Some of
the occupants have been burnt alive with their families, others hacked down by enraged mobs as they tried to
flee from the flames. Hand grenades are lobbed into the offices of township mayors.

The violence of the civil war within the black community itself is a new and ugly dimension to the unrest. The
township councils, seen by Pretoria as generously offering a form of local self-government, are scorned by
most blacks as no more than agents for transmitting decrees from on high on such matters as rents and water
and electricity charges, and as insultingly inadequate substitutes for real political rights.

Pretoria's apologists contend that unrest is an unavoidable by-product of change, especially when a
traditionally oppressive government is trying to mend its ways. The South African president, Mr P. W. Botha,
has repeatedly spoken of the risk of instability during a period of reform, and argues that the government has
to be all the firmer at such times in putting down attempts at subversion.

The trouble is that the government's heavy-handed approach, buttressed by its apparently unshakable belief
that the unrest is the work of a small minority of communist agitators and malcontents, merely stimulates more
disorder.

What Mr Botha refuses to acknowledge is that the vast mass of blacks see his reforms as merely
reformulating apartheid rather than abolishing it. That perception is unlikely to be changed, or the unrest
stemmed, until there is a clear declaration of intent to repeal all legislation enforcing racial segregation, and a
willingness to share power with blacks in a central political structure that accommodates all race groups. That
is the minimum requirement of even moderate blacks such as Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, the Zulu leader, who is
regarded by many radicals as having sold out because of his opposition to foreign economic disinvestment
and his role as chief minister of the KwaZulu "bantustan".

When he opened the new parliament of whites, Indians and mixed-race Coloureds in January, Mr Botha for
the first time indicated a willingness, albeit typically hedged by ambiguity and qualification, to address the
central grievances of the still disenfranchised black African majority. The scepticism with which his remarks
were almost universally greeted in the black community seems to have been all too well founded, in the light
of later events.

Mr Botha's promise of new political structures for blacks, above the local government level, remains
undefined, but it has been made pretty clear that it does not imply a fourth chamber for blacks in the
parliament. Similarly, Mr Botha's potentially promising offer of a new "negotiating forum" for all races was
torpedoed almost immediately by the government's own actions. At first glance, it looked like a gesture
towards the "national convention" which the United Democratic Front, Chief Buthelezi, black churchmen such
as Bishop Desmond Tutu and white liberals in the Progressive Federal Party could all accept as a starting-
point for real reform, provided the African National Congress was included. The government, it was said,
was willing to talk to all who supported peaceful change.

Mr Botha offered to release Mr Nelson Mandela, the ANC's imprisoned leader, if he renounced guerrilla
warfare. In the same breath, however, he arrested most of the leadership of the United Democratic Front.
Conflicting statements over the future of influx control (the web of laws and regulations that restrict the
movement of blacks outside the tribal "homelands") and over forced population removals have shown the
same pattern of inconsistency.

Part of this is deliberate obfuscation, since it suits Mr Botha's purpose. There is, however, also genuine
confusion about where the country is headed. Mr Botha is locked into a posture of strategic indecision:
unwilling to embrace thoroughgoing reform for fear of losing what remains of his traditional Afrikaner
constituency, but equally unable to fall back on unmitigated repression, because he needs the support of
groups he could previously afford to ignore — Coloureds, Indians, white liberals, businessmen worried by
trade-union militancy, foreign opinion.

The gloomy economic outlook, and faltering confidence here that South Africa's importance as a source of
strategic minerals is still a copper-bottomed insurance against economic sanctions, are new factors. South
Africa was rescued from previous political crises — after Sharpeville in 1960 and again after the Soweto riots
of 1976-77 — by periods of economic boom. No such windfall is in sight now.
June 26, 1985

With the violence in South Africa continuing, the ANC took the decision to allow people of all races to
join. Although it is unclear how much influence Mandela could exert from prison, this significant step
reflected his belief that the anti-apartheid struggle was not solely a movement of black Africans.

ANC opens doors to all races and vows to step up armed conflict

Lusaka—The African National Congress (ANC) has fully opened its membership to all races during a top-
secret conference in Zambia. The ANC president, Mr Oliver Tambo, announced the move yesterday at the
organization's headquarters in Lusaka after the conference.

The meeting, attended by about 250 delegates, was the first of its size organized by the ANC for 16 years.
Mr Tambo said that five Indian, white and coloured people had been included for the first time on the ANC's
national executive committee, which was expanded from 22 to 30 members.

The first white member is Mr Joe Slovo, a leading member of the South African Communist Party who is
widely believed to be a key organizer of sabotage attacks in South Africa by the ANC's military wing,
Umkonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). The other non-black members are: Mr Mac Maharaj, an Indian
who spent 15 years in isolation on Robben Island with Mr Nelson Mandela, and who has been a senior
official of the ANC's political committee since January last year; Mr Aziz Pahad an Indian based in London
for many years; Mr Reg September, a Coloured activist who used to head the Coloured People's Congress,
allied to the ANC in the 1950s; and Mr James Stuart, a Coloured member of whom little is known.

Mr Tambo was reappointed president and Mr Alfred Nzo retained his position as secretary-general. At the
nine-day conference the ANC had also resolved to sharpen the armed struggle "against South Africa's white
regime, with the aim of making apartheid impracticable and the country ungovernable". Mr Tambo warned
Pretoria to be prepared to "accept the consequences of its actions".

In intensifying the ANC's struggle, "the distinction between soft and hard targets will disappear", he said. "In
the process, some innocent people will get killed. There can never be an end until the system of apartheid is
abolished."

Although Pretoria had called on the ANC and its imprisoned leader, Mr Mandela, to renounce violence, it
had killed 12 "soft targets" in its raid this month on the Botswana capital, Gaborone, he said. In the past year
South Africa had killed an average of 50 civilians a month in putting down unrest in black townships.

The ANC's acceptance of Coloured, Indian and, particularly, white members on its executive could
exacerbate differences between it and smaller South African liberation groups such as the Pan Africanist
Congress and the Azanian People's Organization. These groups exclude whites.
August 12, 1985

Further speculation that Mandela might soon be let out of jail led The Times' South Africa
correspondent to unpick the debate within South Africa's government about what to do with its most
celebrated prisoner — and to imagine how Mandela himself might respond to his liberty.

A free Mandela?

Will South Africa's best-known black leader be released from prison? Nicholas Ashford considers the
consequences of such a move

The dilemma facing the South African government as it considers whether or not to release Nelson Mandela,
the imprisoned leader of the banned African National Congress, is a brutally straightforward one. Does the
man whom most South African blacks regard as their leader pose a greater danger to white rule from behind
bars, or as a free man?

The remarks made over the weekend by Roelof "Pik" Botha, the foreign minister, after his dash to Europe for
talks with British, American and West German officials, suggest there is a body of opinion within the South
African cabinet in favour of releasing Mandela.

White public opinion, however, particularly among conservative Afrikaners already unhappy about the
relaxation of apartheid laws which has taken place during the past 18 months, is unlikely to welcome the
release of a man who heads what they have been told for the past quarter of a century was a "terrorist
organization".

When Mandela, now aged 66, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, the South African authorities
clearly hoped that the man and the organization he led would soon be forgotten.

They underrated both Mandela's immense personal appeal and the influence of his cause, however. After
more than two decades behind bars, Mandela's name is probably better known than any of his fellow
countrymen, certainly better than most members of the South African government.

Streets and buildings in cities around the world have been named after him. His courage has served as an
inspiration to thousands of blacks who have followed him into jail because of their opposition to apartheid.
His memory has been kept constantly alive by his wife, Winnie, who has herself been banished and
imprisoned for fighting for her husband's release, and for freedom for all blacks.

Mandela's cause – for a unified South Africa in which there would be full political rights for all – has also
gathered momentum since he was first put behind bars in 1962. His political aims are now shared by virtually
all black political organizations in South Africa, and by a small but growing number of whites. They also have
the support of the international community.

Individual members of the South African government have been aware for some years of the dangers of
keeping Mandela in prison. They realized that imprisonment — first on Robben Island and, since 1982, in
Pollsmoor prison near Cape Town — has made him a hero to his people and a symbol of apartheid's harsh
injustice to the world at large. Even President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher, who are otherwise prepared to give
South Africa time to carry out a cautious programme of reform at its own pace, have started to call for his
release.
During the late 1970s several others were made to free Mandela on condition that he went to Transkei and
assumed the nationality of the poor black "homeland" where he had been born in 1918, and which South
Africa had pushed into "independence" in 1976.

Mandela immediately rejected these offers, as the government doubtlessly expected he would. To have
accepted would have meant acknowledging the legitimacy of the black "homelands", therefore accepting
apartheid's basic premise of separate white and black nations. He made it clear, then, as he has on
subsequent occasions, that his principles were of greater importance to him than his personal freedom.

Last January President Pieter Botha came up with an offer which seemed both genuine and more difficult for
Mandela to refuse. He could go free so long as he publicly renounced violence.

Mandela again refused. To have accepted would have meant dividing the ANC, a banned organization which
has been behind a series of bomb attacks in recent months, and abandoning his colleagues, many of whom
are still behind bars.

Mandela's eloquent response to this offer was read out by his daughter, Zinzi, during a rally in Soweto in
March. "Let him (Botha) renounce violence." Mandela said. "Let him say that he will dismantle apartheid. Let
him unban the people's organization, the African National Congress. Let him free all who have been
imprisoned, banished or exiled for their opposition to apartheid ... I cherish my own freedom dearly, but I
care even more for your freedom."

The government's motives on that occasion are unclear. Undoubtedly, some members of the cabinet – such
as "Pik" Botha and Barend du Plessis, the minister of finance – want to see him released, if only to reduce
growing international pressure for economic sanctions against South Africa.

It is understood, however, that the president did not consult his cabinet before publicly announcing his offer,
but only discussed it with General Johan Coetzee, the commissioner for police. It was Coetzee, a strident
anti-communist and anti-ANC ideologue responsible for putting scores of activists behind bars, who insisted
on imposing the condition of non- violence.

Whether Coetzee, one of the most influential members of President Botha's security council, has modified his
views in the past six months remains to be seen. But all who know Mandela remain convinced that he will
never agree to leave Pollsmoor prison if any conditions are attached to his release.

It is doubtful in any case whether the president would want to offer Mandela unconditional release
immediately, for domestic reasons. Many whites would regard an offer to free Mandela now as a sign of
weakness on Botha's part and an attempt to appease international opinion. Such a move would certainly
erode support for the National Party in the five by-elections to be held over the next two months and
accelerate the drift towards the hardline Conservative Party.

Botha should have greater freedom to act once the by-elections and the forthcoming provincial congress of
the National Party later this autumn are over. A general election is still years away and a dramatic gesture
such as Mandela's release, coupled with the reforms which Botha is to announce in his speech to the Natal
party congress on Thursday, would enable countries like Britain and the US to stiffen their resistance to
sanctions. It would also allow Reagan to revive his policy of "constructive engagement".

How would Mandela react if he were freed? He would be expected to resume his struggle against apartheid
immediately. But Mandela has never been found guilty of committing an act of violence and holds that it
should only be used as a last resort. Recent interviews which he gave to Lord Bethell and Professor Samuel
Dash, an American lawyer, showed him to be a responsible, dignified, statesmanlike figure who wanted to
see peaceful change in South Africa.

Mandela told Dash, for example, that "whites in South Africa belong here, this is their home. We want them
to live here with us and to share power with us." His message was clearly intended for the ears of the South
African authorities.

Some members of the Pretoria government believe that by freeing Mandela they might neutralize his support.
They also believe his release could set off a power struggle between Mandela and Oliver Tambo, the existing
president of the ANC, and provoke a rift between the ANC and the South African Communist Party.

Such possibilities undoubtedly exist. In rejecting last January's freedom offer, however, Mandela made a
point of praising Tambo as "my greatest friend and comrade for nearly 50 years". At a recent congress the
ANC reaffirmed its links with the SACP.

ANC supporters point out that some white South Africans also hoped that the release two years ago of
Herman Toivo ja Toivo, the founder of the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) would force
a split with the organization's president, Sam Nujoma. Such a rupture did not occur and Toivo is now
carrying on the struggle against South African rule of Namibia from outside the country as Nujoma's deputy.

There's nothing in Mandela's past to suggest he could be a divisive force. Ever since he became active in the
struggle against apartheid when he was studying at Fort Hare and Witwatersrand universities, he has stressed
the need for unity if white rule were to be ended. He was dismayed at the rupture with the late Robert
Sobukwe which led to the creation of the Pan-Africanist Congress in the late 1950s. He is understood to be
deeply unhappy at the divisions which continue to plague the nation's 26 million blacks.

During his trial in 1964 Mandela spoke of his ideal of a "democratic and free society in which all persons live
together in harmony and with equal opportunity". "It is an ideal," he said, "which I hope to live for and
achieve, but if need be an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

There now seems a good chance that Mandela will not be allowed to die in prison, as once seemed a virtual
certainty, but will eventually be set free to continue to his campaign for a democratic and free South Africa.
Whether he will live to see his dream become reality is far from certain.
August 16, 1985

Expectations of significant reforms had been rising, but were not to be fulfilled. With support
declining for his National Party as the all-white electorate drifted towards the anti-reform
Conservative Party, President Botha backed away from substantial changes to the apartheid system.

Botha offers blacks citizenship but dashes reform hope

President Botha dashed hopes of significant reforms of apartheid in a hardline Durban speech, but indicated
that he was ready for limited negotiation with the black majority.

A 10pm to 4am curfew was clamped on Soweto, South Africa's biggest black township where about two
million blacks live, under the Government's emergency powers.

Whitehall expressed disappointment that the reforms did not go far enough while the United States reacted
cautiously saying that it was seeking clarification.

Mrs Winnie Mandela said her husband, the jailed African National Congress leader, was willing to meet
President Botha, but only if the meeting took place in his prison.

President Botha defiantly declared his commitment to white rule in a speech last night which he described as
his 'manifesto for a new South Africa'.

He ruled out the possibility of one man one vote or parliamentary representation for blacks.

He told a cheering audience at the Natal congress of the National Party in Durban, where at least 70 people
died in riots in black and Indian townships last week: 'I am not prepared to lead South Africa on the road to
abdication and suicide.

'Destroy white South Africa and this country will drift into factional strife, chaos and poverty.'

He said that although the Government wanted to solve the country's problems through peaceful negotiation
this readiness to negotiate should not be mistaken for weakness. 'We have never given in to outside demands
and we are not going to do so now. South Africa's problems will be solved by South Africans and not by
foreigners.

'We are not going to be deterred from doing what we think best, nor will we be forced into doing what we
don't want to do.'

Mr Botha's speech fell considerably short of expectations that he would announce significant apartheid
reforms.

However, he did say that all blacks, whether homeland citizens or not, will retain South African citizenship.
This indicated a measure of flexibility not previously apparent, and is in contrast to the Government's previous
hardline attitude that blacks designated as citizens of the 'independent' and 'self-governing' homelands should
lose their South African nationality.

Mr Botha said: 'I firmly believe that the granting and acceptance of independence by various black people
would, in the context of their own statehood, represent a material part of the solution. I would, however, like
to restate my government's position, namely that independence cannot be forced upon any community.'
He announced a crash programme to improve the townships.

As Mr Botha spoke, the unrest that has gripped the townships for nearly a year continued.

Last night Dr Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, leader of the unofficial white opposition Progressive Federal Party,
said President Botha's speech did not indicate much important progress or give South Africa much new hope.

'It did not measure up even to any of the moderate expectations that had been generated. But it is a re-
affirmation of his commitments to reform and negotiation. We can take some comfort from the fact that he has
not gone back on what he has stated before.

Mr Botha was in a jaunty mood and opened his address to the Natal Nationalists with a sarcastic reference
to the media build-up it had produced.

'Most of the media in South Africa have already informed you what I am going to say tonight or what I ought
to say. Of all the tragedies in the world I think the greatest is the fact that our electorate has refrained so far to
elect some of these gentlemen as their government. They have all the answers to all the problems.'

Speaking mostly in English—Natal is basically an English-speaking province, and there was a large contingent
of diplomats in the audience—Mr Botha said there had been an 'unparalleled scurry' both from within and
from outside South Africa to predict and prescribe on what he would announce.

Mr Botha said he would not make a declaration of intent, as he has been urged to by black leaders such as
Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, the Zulu leader, setting out the Government's programme for reform. The president
emphasized however that the constitutional future of blacks would be negotiated with homeland leaders as
well as leaders from the ranks of urban blacks.

But he was adamant that he would consider freeing Mr Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned African National
Congress leader, only if he gave a commitment not to plot or organize violence for the furtherance of political
objectives.
October 5, 1985

After a protracted internal debate, the American government imposed sanctions on South Africa in
September 1985 and stepped up public criticism of Pretoria. In this Times report, the US Secretary of
State warned South Africans that unless they acted soon to dismantle apartheid they would face
violent upheaval.

Shultz tells Pretoria to talk now or face a violent end

From Michael Binyon, Washington

Since President Reagan's imposition of sanctions against South Africa last month, the US has been taking an
increasingly tough public line with Pretoria, culminating this week in warnings that apartheid is doomed and
the South African Government should negotiate before it is toppled by violent revolution.

Mr George Shultz, the US Secretary of State, said earlier this week, "The only alternative to a radical, violent
outcome is a political accommodation now, before it is too late."

Elaborating on this in an interview with The New York Times yesterday, he said: "In my judgement it is over.
It can't last." He again called for the release of Mr Nelson Mandela, and negotiations with the African
National Congress.

He said there came a time when people stopped arguing about whether apartheid was a good idea, and
accepted that it was irrelevant.

"It's going to disappear." he said. The question was how to manage the transition. This was the question the
US wanted the South Africans to address while there was still a real chance of doing so through discussion
and negotiation.

"If it isn't addressed, we can have a cycle of continued violence and at least one can readily imagine this
blowing up into a really violent upheaval," he said.
May 25, 1986

Despite disappointing anti-apartheid campaigners with the slow pace of his reforms, PW Botha was
regarded by many on the right of his own party as a traitor. This Sunday Times article describes splits
and violence among his former supporters and suggests that the South African government's bombing
of an aid station in Zambia was an attempt to appease white extremists — an indication of the
polarised political climate into which Mandela would eventually emerge.

South Africa — The Enemies Within

Eric Marsden and Patrick Bishop

It should have been a week in which President Botha confirmed South Africa's resolve to deal with the black
terrorist threat. But the cross border raids last Monday did little to quell far-right fears that his programme of
reforms is a sell out. On Thursday the long-awaited white backlash erupted to leave Botha under siege.

IN the town hall at Pietersburg last Thursday night an old white lady had her first choking whiff of tear gas. It
has become a common enough smell in the black townships of South Africa but not in such bastions of white
power as Pietersburg town hall in the Northern Transvaal where the most pungent odour is usually Chanel No
5.

As acrid fog from the police gas grenades filled the hall the old lady was bemused. 'What are they doing to
the air?' she said. 'It tastes awful. Why are they using it against us?'

The battle of Pietersburg marks an historic moment in the internal upheavals of South Africa. It is the first time
that the white South African police force used tear gas against a solely white South African gathering. They
did so with reluctance waiting until neofascists from the militant Afrikaner Resistance Movement had fought,
like thugs on the football terraces, with members of South Africa's ruling National party for a full 40 minutes
before the gas grenades were released. The pictures of white beating up white flashed around the world.

The country's foreign minister, Pik Botha, was supposed to have addressed a meeting of the National party
faithful until the young 'storm falcons' — the supporters of the white resistance movement — charged into the
hall and began throwing Botha supporters off the stage. The emblem of their party, deliberately designed to
resemble the Nazi banner, was hoisted over the platform as their leader, Eugene Terreblanche, was carried
shoulder high into the room.

Botha had intended to tell the meeting of the government's reformist policies. Instead, the meeting heard the
thoughts of Terreblanche, who is a fanatical supporter of apartheid and wants to re-establish the 19th century
Boer Republic as a fortress state for whites.

As the crowd of 400 rushed from the gas-filled hall the 'storm falcons' began a chorus of 'My Pikkie (a
derisive reference to Botha) lies over the ocean. ' A woman in a fur coat, a member of the National party,
murmured 'unbelievable. '

ONE thousand miles to the north in Lusaka, the capital of Zambria, a group of African refugees found the
behaviour of the South Africans even more unbelievable.

Makeniplots is a ramshackle collection of breeze block huts in a bleak landscape of bush and scrub about
five miles from Lusaka. It is a transit camp run by the United Nations with a small population of 86 refugees
from political and natural disasters throughout Africa. Most of the residents are Namibians, together with
Angolans, Ugandans, Ethiopians and nine South Africans. Hardly anyone in Lusaka has heard of it, but it was
on the map of the South African defence force as a training camp for terrorists from the African National
Congress.

Last Monday at 9am, two South African jet fighters screamed over the camp and bombed it. One Namibian
was killed, 11 people were injured and a block of huts left a smoking ruin. Earlier that morning South African
commandoes had been busy in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. Two teams planted bombs in a city centre
office and a suburban house used by the ANC, both empty. At the same time helicopter-borne troops
opened up on an alleged ANC camp on the edge of Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, killing at least one
soldier.

The South Africans claim the strikes had military value. The attack on Makeniplots, however, was a tragic
mistake — it is not an ANC camp. The people there were escaping violence rather than promoting it. 'There
was no reason for them to come here,' said an Ethiopian refugee. He and other residents, believe the only
possible target was a nearby farmhouse, was a printing works and a creche, which is said to have been used
by the ANC.

Since the ANC began stepping up its armed struggle it has received little in the way of military assistance from
either President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia or Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Their caution has been
dictated by the long arm and heavy punch of the South African forces.

Until now there has been a tacit understanding with South Africa that Zimbabwe will not be attacked so long
as the ANC is not allowed to use the country as a military springboard. Mugabe seems to have kept to his
side of the bargain. An ANC unit that was found to have been involved in a landmine attack on South African
farmers in the northern Transvaal at the beginning of the year has been ordered out of the country.

In Zambia, Kaunda has supplied the ANC only with refuge and moral support. Its headquarters are in a small
group of shabby, single-storey offices in the heart of Lusaka but there is no evidence of any training camps in
the country. Most observers believe that the bulk of ANC training takes place in Tanzania and Angola and
that its weapons are provided by the Eastern Bloc. The ANC says the biggest contribution to its
administrative costs comes from Sweden, which also provides them with cars.

The ANC is desperately short of weapons. The most recent discovery, west of Johannesburg and hailed by
the security services as 'the largest arms find yet', yielded a handful of assault rifles, some limpet mines and a
small quantity of explosives. Last week the ANC spokesman in Lusaka, Tom Sabina, said that the ANC
would need more guns if the 'escalation of the armed struggle' announced in Zambia last year was to take off.

'People don't have effective weapons,' he said. 'Because we don't have the AKs (the AK 47 automatic rifle)
we must rely on petrol bombs. '

UNKNOWN to the old lady in Pietersburg and the Ethiopian in Makeniplots last week, there may have been
a link between the violence they both experienced. The South African raids on three black African states
were really aimed not at the ANC but at the extreme right-wing white South African voters. They pose,
according to South African government officials, a far greater threat to the South African government.

President P W Botha, who now faces the danger of civil strife between whites as well as blacks, says he is
determined to press on with his racial reforms despite the backlash of the extreme right. A public opinion poll
carried out two weeks ago shows that 70% of whites think Botha is 'doing a good job'. The percentage in his
favour was higher among the English speakers than the more fundamentalist Afrikaners.
This puts the battle of Pietersburg in a better perspective. A right-wing takeover is hardly likely, although the
strength of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement is increasing and they claim that right-wing parties control all
the Transvaal from Pretoria to the Zimbabwe border as well as the Orange Free State, a good third of the
land mass of South Africa.

Botha, who is 70 and this month celebrated 50 years of active politics, is bitter and intensely worried. He
understands the methods of the 'storm falcons' for, as a young National party organiser in the 1930's, he
specialised in disrupting meetings of General Smuts' United party with strong-arm tactics. He wants to retire
within the next two years and be remembered as the reformer who bridged the racial gap in South Africa and
introduced a multi-racial constitution, without abandoning the white man's leadership role. Instead, he is
reviled abroad and at home more than any of his predecessors, by both white and black.

WHITE thumped white in Pietersburg last Thursday, but in the black township of Crossroads, just outside
Capetown, black had been slaughtering black all week.

By Friday the official death toll was 32, though black leaders put it as high as 70. Among the victims were
two men and a woman murdered in 'necklace' executions. Car tyres were hung around their necks, filled with
petrol and then set alight. They burned to death.

One man saved the life of another, who was being beaten and kicked to death, and was then beaten for his
kindness by the angry crowd. More than a thousand houses have been destroyed and thousands made
homeless in the fighting which has raged between rival factions: the politically militant youngsters, called 'the
comrades' and the conservative older group, known as 'the fathers'.

They have tried to drive the anti-apartheid activists out of the camps and, according to 'the comrades',
receive help from the South African police.

Botha's solution to the chaos is the National Council Bill, which was published last week. It proposes to give
blacks an advisory role in government and in planning a new multi-racial constitution. It may be stillborn
unless Botha agrees to release the ANC leader Nelson Mandela from prison. This is the basic demand of the
moderate Zulu leader, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. He says that Mandela's release is an 'absolute
prerequisite' to his own participation, and without him the council will have little credibility.

If Botha sticks to his refusal to free Mandela, then the council will be made up of minor homeland leaders and
urban councillors who are spurned as collaborators by township radicals.

His dilemma is that if he frees Mandela, he faces the wrath of Terreblanche and the extreme right who have
threatened to 'take over South Africa'.

IT IS the trouble within South Africa more than the threats of sanctions or disapproval from without that
weigh on Botha. The US administration angrily denounced the raids. On Friday it expelled the South African
defence attaché, Brigadier Alexander Potgieter, as a mark of its disapproval. A US military attaché has been
withdrawn from Pretoria 'for talks'.

The official US position remains that new sanctions would have little effect on the economy. There is however
a gradually increasing movement among American companies to pull out of South Africa.

The most recent to leave was General Electric and companies like IBM and Xerox are giving the first warning
signs. American banks are imposing restrictions on South African loans and 55 major banks now restrict
loans to the government.
In Britain, Mrs Thatcher is ready to back selective sanctions, but remains opposed to blanket economic
sanctions. She is worried that even if Britain applied them many other countries would simply step in and take
the valuable trade. At present 120,000 people in Britain are directly employed in South African export trade
which includes a high proportion of engineering goods.

Despite such reticence, Zambia is determined to force the West into imposing sanctions, although some
Western diplomats doubt the resolve of the frontline states. They are heavily dependent on South Africa for
exports and for rail and sea routes for trade.

An indication of this comes from Kaunda, who appears to have reconsidered his threat to withdraw from the
Commonwealth in protest over the lack of progress over sanctions. Kaunda has said: 'We do not need major
sanctions. Just the banks will do the job within the week. This will save lives and property. '

Botha has decided to get tough. Both black and white are likely to feel the effects of this new policy. Botha
has ordered the police to crack down on the white neo-fascists and the black radicals.

The government has also vowed to restore its authority both within the country and anarchy in the townships
and homelands and tightening border security to stop infiltration and arms smuggling by the ANC. In a speech
last week, just before the South African raids, he warned that action was about to be taken to dispel enemy
disinformation that his government was stricken by uncertainty and confusion. He claimed the forces of
stability were greater than the forces of disorder. He lashed out at foreign interference. 'We do not want to
break off our foreign relations, but the unsolicited interference sometimes reaches proportion which
undeniably prove that some countries want to conceal their domestic problems behind their meddling in our
problems. '.

He has warned that he has not used his full strength against 'the comrades' in the townships and is now
preparing to do so. Political funerals have been curbed, and new police detention powers will allow drastic
action to be taken in troubled areas without an emergency being declared.

Botha's immediate fear is that June 16, the tenth anniversary of the Soweto riots, could bring all the warring
factions of South Africa onto the streets, black against black in the townships, and black against white, as the
ANC musters its strength for strikes and disruption.

His reforms might help to defuse some of the black anger but they will inevitably fan the fury of Terreblanche
and the right wing and white will once again fight white. The old lady from Pietersburg may have to grow
accustomed to the acrid smell of tear gas.
June 13, 1986

As the crisis in South Africa deepened, some began to suggest that Mandela might be the man to
defuse it. The Times published extracts from the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group's report on
South Africa, which called for Mandela's release and insisted that fears he would lead a violent
insurrection were misplaced. "Mr Mandela's own voice would appeal for calm," it says. "We believe
his authority would secure it."

Mandela 'should be freed'

From the beginning, we recognized the essential significance in any political settlement of one man, Nelson
Mandela. Imprisoned these last 24 years, latterly in Pollsmoor Prison, he is an isolated and lonely figure,
bearing his incarceration with courage and fortitude.

(He) can be said to represent all those imprisoned, detained, banned, or in exile for their opposition. … Mr
Mandela is himself a political prisoner. Nelson Mandela is a symbol for blacks, not only of their lack of
political freedom but of their struggle to attain it. He is a potent inspiration for much of the political activity of
black South Africans. (He is) a legend in his own lifetime.

The call for his freedom has developed into the centrepiece of the demand for a political settlement. It is the
shorthand for the proposition that, as his daughter Zindzi conveyed it, 'there is an alternative to the inevitable
bloodbath. '

But we also recognize that, for some whites, he represents something rather different—fears which, if
unfounded, are real nonetheless. They include the belief that Nelson Mandela is a man of violence and that
violence could not be contained on his release.

Most of these fears have been fuelled by the Government's own campaign against Mr Mandela and the ANC
(African National Congress). To that extent, they are self-induced; but they are nonetheless real for all that
and cannot be ignored. …

With each month and year of (Mandela's) further incarceration, the difficulties of the Government will grow.
While fit at present, he is a man of 67. It would be wise to heed the words of Soren Kierkegaard: 'The tyrant
dies and his rule ends: the martyr dies and his rule begins'.

The group approached the (two) meetings with Mr Mandela with another measure of care. It was impossible
not to be aware of the mythology surrounding him but equally, we were determined that it should not colour
our impressions or influence our judgement.

We were first struck by his physical authority — by his immaculate appearance, his apparent good health and
his commanding presence. In his manner he exuded authority and received the respect of all around him,
including the gaolors. That in part seemed to reflect his own philosophy of separating people from policy.

His authority clearly extends throughout the nationalist movement, although he constantly reiterated that he
could not speak for his colleagues in the ANC; that, apart from his personal viewpoint, any concerted view
must come after proper consultation with all concerned; and that his views could only carry weight when
expressed collectively through the ANC.

There was no visible distance of outlook, however, between Nelson Mandela and the ANC leadership in
Lusaka. He was at pains to point out that his own authority derived solely from his position within the
organization.

We found his attitude to others outside the ANC reasonable and conciliatory. (He) was conscious of the
divisions which had arisen among the black community. Nevertheless he was confident that, if he were to be
released from prison, the unity of all black leaders, including Chief Buthelezi, could be achieved.

Nelson Mandela took care to emphasize his desire for reconciliation across the divide of colour. He
described himself as a deeply-committed South African nationalist but added that South African nationalists
came in more than one colour. … He pledged himself anew to work for a multiracial society in which all
would have a secure place. … He recognised the fears of many white people, which had been intensified by
Government propaganda, but emphasised the importance of minority groups being given a real sense of
security in any new society in South Africa.

That desire for goodwill was palpable. The Minister of Justice … was present at the start of our second
meeting and Mr Mandela pressed him to remain, saying he had nothing to hide. It was his strongly stated view
that if the circumstances could be created in which the Government and the ANC could talk, some of the
problems which arose solely through lack of contact could be eliminated.

We were impressed by the consistency of (Mr Mandela's) beliefs. He emphasized he was a nationalist, not a
communist … His principles included the necessity for the unity and political emancipation of all Africans in
the land of their birth. …

Our fourth impression was that Nelson Mandela was a man who had been driven to armed struggle only with
the greatest reluctance, solely in the absence of any other alternative to the violence of the apartheid system
and never as an end in itself. It was a course of action which, he argued, had been forced upon him.

We accept that the release of Nelson Mandela presents the South African Government with a difficult
dilemma. … There is a growing realization in Government circles that any benefits of incarceration are
outweighed by the disadvantages which daily become more apparent. The Government expressed the fear
that his release might result in an uncontrollable explosion of violence.

We do not hold this view. Provided the negotiating process was agreed, Mr Mandela's own voice would
appeal for calm. We believe his authority would secure it. … We all agreed that it was tragic that a man of his
outstanding capabilities should continue to be denied the opportunity to help shape his country's future.
June 12, 1988

As the years went by and Mandela remained in prison, birthday celebrations provided a way for many
in the West to demonstrate their solidarity. As he turned 70, Wembley Stadium played host to pop and
rock superstars—and political messages rendered oddly opaque by BBC attempts to comply with rules
on impartiality.

Music to anti-apartheid ears

THE 72,000 fans at yesterday's birthday celebration for Nelson Mandela made it the most spectacular pop
concert since Live Aid.

The extravaganza, organised by the Anti-Apartheid Movement to raise the world's awareness of the jailed
South African leader of the African National Congress, was watched by 200m television viewers in 60
different countries but probably most closely by right-wing Conservative MPs.

The MPs, led by John Carlisle, were looking for any pro-ANC messages during BBC2's live transmission.
Carlisle, MP for Luton North, claimed the BBC had been ``hijacked by left-wing extremists" and criticised
the broadcast of political statements about South Africa by some performers.

Last night the BBC said it had experienced a ``sizeable reaction" from viewers. Halfway through the 10-hour
show it had received about 150 calls.

A spokesman said: ``Reaction obviously varies from those who are congratulating us on broadcasting the
concert and those who say we should not be showing it. At the moment those who say we shouldn't be
showing the concert have the upper hand, although calls are still coming in and the picture could change."

BBC producers tried not to mix pop with politics. But it was always difficult. Stevie Wonder, billed as the
special mystery guest, made use of his late platform last night by making the concert's most outright political
speech, in strains reminiscent of Martin Luther King, the black American civil rights leader.

Wonder, whose appearance was delayed after part of his equipment was stolen from outside his dressing
room, told a cheering crowd: ``We still live in a divided world. When one person is oppressed, everyone in
the world is oppressed." Similar comments were made by earlier performers.

The dichotomy of the day was clear on Wembley Way, the approach to the London stadium, as ticket touts
and Trotskyites stood side by side selling black-market tickets for £40 and socialist newspapers for 30p.
Inside the stadium, the event sprouted political dimensions almost every time anybody on stage spoke.

While introducing a Cape Town dance troupe, Sir Richard Attenborough said apartheid was an evil system
that wastes talent. Harry Belafonte said it was a ``cruel system from which people should be freed".

But the stars, including Sting, Dire Straits, Whitney Houston, UB40, The Eurythmics, Lenny Henry and Billy
Connolly, had been warned not to say anything too political on stage.

George Michael, obviously heeding the advice, tried a subtle approach: ``There are restrictions in certain
parts of the world and that is what today's all about. But we all know, yeah?" There was a modified cheer
from the crowd, suggesting that some did not know.

Sting confused the crowd even further by singing part of a song in a foreign language. Nobody was certain
whether it was an inflammatory call for revolution, but MPs will probably demand a translation.

Despite the huge party for his birthday, there was no direct statement of thanks from Mandela. Ismail Ayob,
his lawyer, said he was delighted that such an event was taking place to highlight the plight of black people in
South Africa.

For many, the music was obviously the main attraction. But the political messages were never far away.

The finale was the appearance of the rock band, Dire Straits, who won the hearts of the audience by relating
how their first album had been banned by the South African regime. The fact that it was the first time the band
had played together publicly for two years may have been another reason for the warm reception as was the
bonus of having Eric Clapton guest as a guitarist with them.

Finally, the stadium lights came down, cigarette lighters and matches were struck to create the atmosphere of
a candle-lit vigil for Mandela as fireworks boomed overhead. The scene was capped as the crowds filed out
to the anthem Amazing Grace, sung by opera singer Jessye Norman. Fans responded with an impromptu
chorus of Happy Birthday to Mandela.

Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, leader of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, said: ``The message is coming
across quite clearly that the South African government's system of apartheid is cruel and evil and must end."

However, some people still failed to receive the news. An amused Wembley official joked that one confused
pop fan had rung up earlier in the week to ask: ``What time is Mandela coming on to sing?"
October 18, 1988

With Mandela's release appearing increasingly inevitable, The Times asked what impact he would
have on the political landscape. Perhaps surprisingly, some of his most ardent supporters had
reservations. Our correspondent reported: "For many of the faithful it is extremely disconcerting to
think of Mandela, so long deified in endless hagiography, stepping down from the cross to become an
active politician again."

If Mandela goes free

RW Johnson, Durban

An interesting thing to do here at the moment is to ask supporters of the United Democratic Front and
African National Congress how they view the persistent reports that President Botha is to release Nelson
Mandela unconditionally in early November. ``I'll believe it when I see it" is an understandable first response;
but this is quickly followed by a strongly negative reaction. Mandela's release would be meaningless, would
come too late, would change nothing, one is told; in any case he's ill, he's old, he's gaga, he'll be assassinated.
Quite noticeably, the more radical the activist one is talking to, the more negative the reaction.

Some now even assert that the whole ANC tactic of concentrating on Mandela as a personal symbol was a
mistake — what about Mandela's fellow-prisoners, such as Walter Sisulu and Kathy Kathrada, let alone the
thousands of others in jail and detention? One UDF activist went so far as to tell me that ``the movement will
determine the conditions under which Mandela can be released", and I had to remind him that Botha alone
holds the prison key. Yet these are the very people who have campaigned ceaselessly for his freedom.

There are several reasons for this hesitation. Mandela, as an imprisoned symbol of defiance for over a quarter
of a century, has become a sort of icon to a whole generation, an African Christ on his crucifix. For many of
the faithful it is extremely disconcerting to think of Mandela, so long deified in endless hagiography, stepping
down from the cross to become an active politician again. There is an uneasy, if unspoken, feeling that
perhaps Mandela serves the movement better as a symbol (i.e. in jail) than he ever can in the mundane day-
to-day world the rest of us live in.

But most of all there is the fact that Mandela's release would, overnight, transform the political dynamics of
the liberation struggle with consequences that might be hard to control. No one doubts that the ANC enjoys a
historical legitimacy, or that it is the most powerful black political movement; but for more than 25 years its
leadership (the so-called ANC External Mission under Mandela's second-in-command, Oliver Tambo) has
been based in exile in London and, more recently, Lusaka. Despite its remoteness, the External Mission has
enjoyed an unchallenged authority within the movement — all else apart, Pretoria has killed or jailed most of
those inside the country who might have challenged the dominance of the exiled leadership.

The result is that ANC supporters inside South Africa can easily be tempted into thinking there is little they
can do and that in the end salvation will come from outside: one piece of graffiti you sometimes see reads
``Free Us, Tambo". Mandela's release could, at a stroke, change all that and shift the ANC's centre of gravity
back inside South Africa.

It is possible, of course, that Mandela's health is so poor — he has just had TB — that Botha will release him
simply so that he does not die in jail. In that case he would, though free, play almost no role. That seems
unlikely: all reports are that his health has largely recovered (he has always been a fitness fanatic). There is
also no doubting the man's very considerable intellectual capability — he has read omnivorously in jail,
secured further degrees, is widely conversant with international affairs and is the sort of person who gives
people Tolstoy for birthday presents.

The modesty, courage, sense of humour and penchant for self-criticism which shine forth from his speeches
and letters all suggest a quite exceptional man, one of overwhelming moral stature. If freed he will surely play
a role especially since, now an old man, he has no time to waste.

Mandela will, for a start, want to erase the disastrous image of his wife, Winnie, who is seen as his
representative but who, in fact, seems to be out of anyone's control. Winnie repeatedly makes speeches
which flout official ANC policy. A week ago, for example, I heard her speak in favour of terrorist attacks on
``soft targets", and she attacked as ``gutter journalists and traitors" those who dared to expose her
extraordinary dealings with the right-wing American businessman Robert Brown. Within her own township
Winnie has become deeply unpopular, and ANC supporters are privately deeply embarrassed by her, though
of course they feel obliged to defend her publicly.

It is very noticeable that although Winnie says all sorts of hair-raising things which would land anyone else in
jail, the government is quite happy to let her be, no doubt calculating that she is sowing a valuable degree of
alarm and despondency in black ranks. More than three weeks ago things reached a point where Winnie was
openly flouting her husband's express instruction that she disband her young thugs known as the Mandela
Football Club. Indeed, things have reached such a point that a Mandela Crisis Committee has been set up.

The crisis is Winnie herself, and one of the Committee's functions is, mark this, to ensure communications
between Winnie and Nelson — her visit on Saturday to the Cape Town clinic where he is convalescing was
their first meeting since mid-August. If Nelson's release means Winnie's relegation to a back seat, there will
be audible sighs of black relief.

It is possible that the government, on releasing Mandela, will try to place restrictions on him preventing him
from moving around the country, speaking at rallies and so on. He would ignore them and dare the
government to put him back in jail. (Botha's claim that Mandela is now co-operating with the government is a
fiction meant to reassure right-wing whites.) Equally, the government may be hoping that it can defuse
Mandela's symbolic power by allowing him to speak, but ignoring him, so that he bangs on and on to no
effect. That would not work: Mandela would attract huge township crowds and the excitement and
momentum he built up would quickly become a force of its own. In that heady climate Mandela's
assassination would be an ever-present possibility.

In that case, whoever the assassin might be, the government would be blamed, which means that it would
probably want to surround Mandela with security police which he would resist.

A freed Mandela would doubtless set his sights on a speedy negotiation of majority rule, and to that end
would hope to muster international support and the maximum degree of black unity within South Africa. His
first demands would have to be the unbanning of the ANC and other black organizations, the release of all
other political prisoners, and the return home of ANC exiles. Pretoria might make some gestures, but it would
want the quid pro quo of the calling off of all ANC violence.

As for the exiles, Pretoria would either ignore the call for their return completely or allow back only those it
regarded as African nationalists, leaving the communists in exile. If and it is a very big if Pretoria then offered
negotiation it could hope to drive a wedge between Mandela and the External Mission.

Even before that, though, Mandela would cross a Rubicon when he called for African unity. From prison he
has repeatedly made it clear that ``both Tambo and Buthelezi are my brothers". It would, of course, be sound
strategy to face the government with a wall of African unanimity behind him, and there is no doubt that
Buthelezi, the moderate Zulu leader, would rally to the call. But because of the deep antagonism towards
Buthelezi in many parts of the UDF and also among the ANC exiles, many would find it impossible to follow
Mandela down that road: the very call for unity would thus produce disunity. It is the consciousness of this
Rubicon just ahead which makes so many UDF supporters nervous of Mandela's release now.

A freed Mandela would thus face a sea of troubles as well as a torrent of acclaim. He would undoubtedly
come under almost intolerable pressure from all sides, which is hardly what one would recommend for a 70-
year-old man recovering from TB. But few men have shown such fortitude and moral strength for so long as
Mandela already has. The chance exists that he could surprise us all again.
January 28, 1989

Almost a quarter of a century after he was sent to jail and 13 years after the first reports that he
would soon be released, the South African government confirmed that it was talking to Mandela
about setting him free.

Pretoria in freedom talks with Mandela

The South African Government is talking to Nelson Mandela, the jailed black nationalist leader, about ways
to effect his release without triggering bloody riots, Mr Stoffel van der Merwe, the Information Minister, said
yesterday.

He said he could not promise that Mandela, leader of South Africa's outlawed African National Congress,
would be freed this year.

Mandela, aged 70, was jailed for life in 1964 for sabotage and plotting to overthrow the country's white
minority Government.

``If we just released him today ... it would undoubtedly have the result that people would get killed. We have
to create a situation where that will not be the result," Mr van der Merwe said. ``We are talking to him about
it."

He declined to say why he believed Mandela's release would cause riots and deaths: ``I am not saying that
Mr Mandela is going to kill people, or that he is going to order people to kill people, but that is going to be
the result."

Mandela's lawyer, Mr Ismail Ayob, said it was absurd to suggest that releasing his client would cause deaths.
He was not aware of discussions with the Government.

``I think they are just looking for excuses yet again not to release Mandela. There would be a great
outpouring of joy at his release after serving two or three life sentences, but I cannot imagine why even one
person would die," he said.

Mandela was moved in December to a luxurious bungalow on a country prison farm after transfer from prison
and treatment for tuberculosis.

``Mr Mandela is not in jail any more, he is in detention," Mr van der Merwe said.
September 21, 1989

When FW de Klerk replaced PW Botha as South African president, hopes rose once again. He was a
liberal by the standards of the National Party and he came to power at a time of great geopolitical
change. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War had undermined the
government's persistent assertion that apartheid was the only effective bulwark against an ANC-
inspired Communist takeover. In the leading article below, The Times urges de Klerk to learn from his
predecessor's mistakes and ensure that he delivers what is expected of him.

Olive branch in South Africa

Four years after President Botha so dismally failed to cross the political Rubicon in South Africa, his
successor has pushed his own boat into the stream. In yesterday's inaugural address Mr de Klerk spoke of
fashioning ``a new South Africa" which had rid itself of past antagonisms. He promised measures to end
discriminatory legislation and ``urgent attention " to a Bill of human rights. His Government would gradually
bring to a close the three-year-old state of emergency in the country.

It was a speech which sought to appease right as well as left, emphasizing the need for firm action against
violence. It counselled against ``unreasonable" expectations, and warned radicals that they had no place in the
peace process. But Mr de Klerk's tone was conciliatory. He even acknowledged past failures by the
Government and appealed to the international community for help in the movement towards a negotiated
settlement.

It was the speech which his predecessor, P. W. Botha, should have made in Durban in 1985. Then, instead
of outlining a programme of reforms, Mr Botha spat defiance at the world. The question now for his
successor is whether he has said too little too late.

This was not so much a curative prescription as an attempt to get the diagnosis right and persuade the patient
that something was being done. In fairness, one should never have expected a package of reforms in a 20-
minute ceremonial address. But despite his early, more liberal approach, black leaders have grown sceptical
of Mr de Klerk. Positions had steadily hardened since President Botha's failure to cross his Rubicon, thus
reducing the chances for honest compromise. The African National Congress and its backers sought nothing
less than a straight transfer of power.

Since then, there have been two significant developments. One is that economic realities have pushed the
frontline states and at least some elements in the ANC towards the option of a negotiated peace. The other
was this month's election in South Africa. The result was interpreted by the battered National Party as a
mandate to introduce political change. It implied the need for early negotiation with the country's
unenfranchised black majority.

Yesterday's gesture in commuting the death sentences on seven prisoners in Pretoria's Central prison might be
seen as an earnest of the Government's good intent. Meanwhile the latest wave of speculation about the
imminent release of Nelson Mandela seems clearly to have been officially inspired.

Dr Allan Boesak, president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, said he would give the country's
new President six months to prove himself. If by then Mr de Klerk made the progress that he promised ``we
might find ourselves in a situation where one may begin to be hopeful". That may sound less than effusive, but
coming as it does from a trenchant critic of Pretoria, it constitutes an encouraging response.
The inference one may draw is that Mr de Klerk is still in time to reach an agreed solution in South Africa.
Having created an opportunity for himself, he now needs the political nerve to seize it and his people must find
the courage to follow him.
January 26, 1990

At the beginning of 1990, with talks between the ANC and the apartheid government continuing, The
Times reported that negotiations were following a framework laid out by Mandela himself.

Mandela secret peace plan revealed

Nelson Mandela, the jailed black nationalist leader, launched a personal initiative for a political settlement in
South Africa a year ago with an eloquent appeal for negotiations between the Government and the African
National Congress in which he called for compromise on both sides.

His impassioned plea for peace talks, supported by arguments for black-majority rule, was contained in a
lengthy document prepared for a meeting with Mr P.W. Botha, then President, which took place last July.
Copies of the statement, in four closely typed pages, were made available to the press for the first time
yesterday by Mandela's lawyers.

Unexpectedly, Mandela's peace plan was fully reported on the state television evening news last night, but Mr
Kobie Coetsee, the Minister of Justice, issued a terse statement afterwards: ``There is no record of such a
document." He did not elaborate.

While overtaken in some respects by recent developments, the document makes it clear that current moves
towards negotiations are largely due to the remarkable intervention of the veteran ANC leader.

``The deepening political crisis in our country has been a matter of grave concern to me for quite some time,
and I now consider it necessary in the national interest for the African National Congress and the Government
to meet urgently to negotiate an effective political settlement," Mandela wrote.

Expressing fears that the country was sliding into civil war, he said negotiations were literally a matter of life
and death.

``The key to the whole situation is a negotiated settlement, and a meeting between the Government and the
ANC will be the first major step towards lasting peace in the country ... An accord with the ANC, and the
introduction of a non-racial society, is the only way in which our rich and beautiful country will be saved from
the stigma which repels the world."

Mandela said that such a meeting would have to address the demand for majority rule and whites' fear of
black domination.

``The most crucial task which will face the Government and the ANC will be to reconcile these two positions.
Such reconciliation will be achieved only if both parties are willing to compromise," Mandela said. He
suggested the two sides might work out preconditions establishing a proper climate for negotiations before
actually beginning the negotiations.

Mandela followed up this proposal with an appeal to Mr Botha to seize the opportunity to break the
deadlock without delay. ``I believe that the overwhelming majority of South Africans, black and white, hope
to see the ANC and the Government working closely together to lay the foundations for a new era in our
country, in which racial discrimination and prejudice, coercion and confrontation, death and destruction, will
be forgotten," he wrote.
In the event, the autocratic Mr Botha, suffering from the after-effects of a stoke, was forced from power a
few months later and succeeded by President de Klerk, who has gone some way towards implementing the
first stage of Mandela's peace plan.

Mandela said: ``The position of the ANC on the question of violence is very simple. The organization has no
vested interest in violence. It abhors any action which may cause loss of life, destruction of property, and
misery to the people ... but we consider the armed struggle a legitimate form of self-defence against a morally
repugnant system of government which will not allow even peaceful forms of protest."

Tracing the liberation struggle back to the British colonial era, he said that oppressed people had consistently
resorted to force when peaceful channels were closed: ``Africans as well as Afrikaners were, at one time or
other, compelled to take up arms in defence of their freedom against British imperialism."

On black political aspirations, he said: ``Majority rule and internal peace are like the two sides of a single
coin, and white South Africa simply has to accept that there will never be peace and stability in this country
until the principle is fully applied."

In a rare burst of anger, he denounced the Government for reinforcing whites' beliefs that African nationalists
were dominated by communists: ``After more than 300 years of racial indoctrination, the country's whites
have developed such deep-seated contempt for blacks as to believe that we cannot think for ourselves, that
we are incapable of fighting for political rights without incitement by some white agitation ... The Government
is deliberately exploiting that contempt."
February 3, 1990

In stark contrast to his predecessor, de Klerk astonished allies and opponents with the speed of his
reforms. At a stroke, he lifted the ban on the ANC and other groups, announced that Mandela would
go free, suspended the death penalty, lifted media restrictions and vowed to negotiate with any group
serious about talking.

South Africa begins trek to democracy

Gavin Bell, Cape Town

President de Klerk of South Africa yesterday lifted the 30-year ban on the African National Congress and
announced the imminent release of Nelson Mandela in a speech that stunned the world with the extent of its
reforms.

Restrictions on some 30 other organizations, including the Communist Party, are to be lifted; political
prisoners will be freed; the death sentence is to be suspended, and emergency restrictions on the media are to
be abolished, Mr de Klerk told the opening of Parliament in Cape Town.

Inviting the ANC to negotiate a new power-sharing agreement, he said: ``The season of violence is over. The
time for reconstruction and reconciliation has arrived."

The ANC welcomed the ``positive measures" in Mr de Klerk's speech, and said it would review the situation
urgently; but a statement issued from Sweden by the organization's president, Mr Oliver Tambo, urged other
countries ``to do nothing to lessen the isolation of the apartheid regime".

Mr de Klerk's announcement was immediately welcomed around the world and sent South African shares
and gold prices soaring. Mrs Margaret Thatcher said the moves were a vindication of Britain's no-sanctions
policy; but President Bush, the Commonwealth and the European Community all said sanctions should remain
until progress towards dismantling apartheid was irreversible.

Mr de Klerk said his Government wished to release Mr Mandela, the veteran ANC leader, without delay but
more time was required. ``There are factors in the way of his immediate release, of which his personal safety
is not the least."

He also wished to end the state of emergency, but the security situation, particularly in the Natal townships,
required its retention at present.

No executions would take place until Parliament had considered proposals for broadening judicial discretion
in imposing the death sentence and for automatic right of appeal. Detention under emergency regulations
would be limited to six months.

The relaxation of media control was immediately apparent in the evening television news bulletin, which
screened interviews with ANC leaders.

Speaking alternately in English and Afrikaans, Mr de Klerk told MPs: ``It is time for us to break out of the
cycle of violence and break through to peace and reconciliation. The silent majority is yearning for this. The
youth deserve it.

``The table is laid for sensible leaders to begin talking about a new dispensation. The agenda is open and the
overall aims to which we are aspiring should be acceptable to all reasonable South Africans.

``There is no longer any reasonable excuse for the continuation of violence. The time for talking has arrived,
and whoever still makes excuses does not really wish to talk. I repeat my invitation with greater conviction
than ever — walk through the open door, take your place at the negotiating table."

Mr de Klerk reaffirmed that his long-term goal was equal rights in every sphere, and said he had asked the
Law Commission to consider democratic constitutions which safeguarded human rights. ``It is neither the
Government's policy nor its intention that any group, in whichever way it may be defined, shall be favoured
above or in relation to any of the others."

Senior cabinet ministers said the Government was prepared to go much further towards dismantling apartheid
through negotiations with as wide a spectrum of political and community leaders as possible.

Dr Gerrit Viljoen, the Minister for Constitutional Development, said this applied to fundamental legislation
classifying and segregating people according to race. ``The Government considers that these `pillars of
apartheid' have to go. There will be universal franchise."

Mr R.F. ``Pik" Botha, the Foreign Minister, concluded: ``The National Party wants a new South Africa, in
which all South Africans will participate. Mr de Klerk will end white domination."

But a political battle was signalled by Dr Andries Treurnicht, leader of the pro-apartheid Conservative Party,
who challenged Mr de Klerk to call an election. He said the President was naive and out of touch with the
Afrikaner community. ``We are going to mobilize every section of the white community to fight for our
survival in freedom in our own country," he said.
February 12, 1990

Nine days later Nelson Mandela was a free man, addressing a rally in Cape Town and appearing on
South African television for the first time.

Mandela strolls to freedom

Gavin Bell, Cape Town

Nelson Mandela emerged from more than a quarter of a century in jail last night to tell tens of thousands of
supporters that the armed struggle against apartheid must continue.

There could be no negotiation until the state of emergency was ended and all political prisoners were freed,
he told a rally of 50,000 cheering people in Cape Town.

``Our resorting to the armed struggle in 1960 was a purely defensive action against the violence of apartheid,"
he said. ``We have no option but to continue."

As Mr Mandela spoke, jubilant blacks across South Africa danced in the streets, but the celebrations were
tinged with violence, and 19 people were reported killed in various clashes. One was shot by police as
groups of youths waiting to hear Mr Mandela looted shops in Cape Town.

When he finally appeared at the City Hall, Mr Mandela appealed for calm and after his speech urged the
crowd to disperse peacefully.

He called on his supporters to intensify and redouble their campaign against apartheid and urged overseas
states to continue sanctions against the Nationalist regime. Most South Africans, black and white, recognized
that apartheid had no future: ``It has to be ended by our decisive mass action. We have waited too long for
our freedom.

``Our struggle has reached a decisive moment. Our march to freedom is irreversible. Now is the time to
intensify the struggle on all fronts. To relax now would be a mistake which future generations would not
forgive."

But he also said that President F.W.de Klerk was a man of integrity and he hoped a climate conducive to a
negotiated settlement would be created soon, making the armed struggle unnecessary. ``We call on our white
compatriots to help us in reshaping a new South Africa," he said.

Mr Mandela's first words to the cheering crowd contained a message of peace. ``I greet you all in the name
of peace, democracy and freedom for all," he said. ``I stand here before you not as a prophet, but as a
humble servant of you the people."

He concluded by reiterating his statement at his trial in 1964, when he declared: ``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 I hope to live
for and achieve, but if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

Mr Mandela had been an angry young revolutionary when he first spoke those words before being bundled
into prison. Yesterday, aged 71, he walked free as a distinguished elder statesman, but hopes that he would
be welcomed in a dignified manner were dashed when the rally degenerated into bloodshed. One person was
shot dead and three were said to have died from heart attacks as the assembly overflowed a parade ground
in front of the City Hall.

Doctors treated more than 100 people after police fired on groups of black youths looting shops. Some
retaliated by hurling bottles and stones, and hundreds ran for cover as police fired again.

Clashes were reported in at least two other areas, including the tribal homeland of Ciskei, where hospital
officials said police shot dead three people and wounded 20.

In Natal province, where ANC supporters have been feuding with a more conservative black group, police
said 12 people were killed in factional fighting.

But elsewhere, the mood was euphoric, with blacks dancing and jogging through the streets. In Soweto,
thousands of people gathered outside the Mandelas' tiny ``matchbox" house and formed a human chain on
hearing news of his release. Mr Mandela is expected to return home from Cape Town today.

Mr Mandela had first appeared at the gates of Victor Verster prison at Paarl, 40 miles from Cape Town,
with his wife, Winnie, at 4.14pm local time more than an hour behind schedule. Holding his wife's hand and
repeatedly punching the air in a victory salute, he tried to walk a few yards but was halted by the crush of
thousands of ecstatic supporters who had waited hours in searing sunshine to welcome him.

With a smile and a wave, Mr Mandela dressed in light brown suit and tie climbed into the silver BMW sedan
and drove off escorted by four police motorcycle riders.

In the pandemonium in Cape Town, the motorcade apparently took a wrong turning and missed the rear
entrance to the City Hall which had been cordoned off. The car was immediately engulfed by a seething,
screaming mass of humanity which trapped the car for 15 minutes.

Outside the City Hall, a vast crowd waving green, black and gold banners of the African National Congress
gathered to hear Mr Mandela, who finally appeared on the balcony at 8pm.

As he spoke, state television broadcast a profile of the ANC leader, including an interview he gave the BBC
in 1961. It was the first time Mr Mandela had been shown speaking on television; and the station later
broadcast taped excerpts from his Cape Town speech.

Mr Mandela's release was welcomed throughout the world. Mother Teresa of Calcutta said: ``God has been
so good. Thank God for this".

In a telephone call, President Bush told him that all Americans ``were rejoicing at his release" and invited him
to the White House. ``I stated to him our desire to see a peaceful evolution towards a totally racially free
South Africa, a society without prejudice, a society of total freedom," Mr Bush said.
February 26, 1990

The extent of the challenge awaiting Mandela was soon bloodily evident, as the death toll resulting
from tribal rivalries reached 3,000. As The Times reported, Mandela tried to use his standing to bring
the violence to an end.

Mandela orders end to spiral of violence among rival blacks

Nicholas Beeston, Durban

Mr Nelson Mandela yesterday instructed tens of thousands of his followers in Durban to lay down their arms
and stop the bloody feuding between rival black groups in Natal.

In an address to the largest political rally since his release, the ANC leader warned more than 150,000
supporters that the continued violence threatened to derail the peace process for the entire country. His
conciliatory call was the most determined attempt yet to halt nearly five years of fighting between the United
Democratic Front, the pro-ANC umbrella movement, and Inkatha, the conservative Zulu nationalist
organization, which claims to represent the majority of the country's largest tribe.

Up to 3,000 people have been killed and tens of thousands made homeless in black-on-black violence
throughout the province for control of the townships.

``My message to those of you involved in this battle is: take your guns, your knives and your pangas
(machetes) and throw them into the sea," he ordered. ``Close the death factories and this war now."

Mr Mandela received a rousing welcome from the crowd, who waited hours in the sweltering midday sun,
outside Durban's King's Park stadium, but his conciliatory message and call for peace was at times greeted in
silence. Over the weekend at least six Front supporters were shot dead near Durban.

``In the last few years of my imprisonment my greatest burden, my deepest suffering, was caused by reports
that reached me of terrible things happening to you people in Natal," he said.

``If we do not bring a halt to the conflict we will be in great danger of corrupting the proud legacy of our
struggle. We endanger the peace process in the whole country."

Although he said that some tribal chiefs in South Africa had collaborated with the white regime, he refrained
from making any direct criticism of Inkatha and its leader, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. He added that while
fundamental differences remained between the two sides, any non-discriminatory political organization would
be allowed to operate in a future South Africa.

But he ruled out the possibility that Natal would be granted a special status in any future settlement.

``We extend the hand of peace to Inkatha and hope that it might one day be possible to share a platform with
Chief Buthelezi," he said.

The ANC leader particularly stressed the importance of unity within the ranks of the blacks in South Africa
until a non-racial democratic state could be established.

Mr Mandela also paid tribute to the Zulu nation for its historic struggle against ``imperialism" which he dated
back to the defeat of British forces at the battle of Isandhlwana in 1879 by King Cetshwayo.
``Our youth has been the shock troops of our struggle," he told the crowd, made up mainly of teenagers.
``Our youth must be ready to demonstrate the same perfect discipline as the armies of (Zulu) King Shaka."

He also praised the role of Natal's influential Indian community in the fight against apartheid.

Tomorrow Mr Mandela will leave South Africa for the first time in 27 years when he sets off to Lusaka, in
Zambia, for talks with the exiled ANC leadership.
August 8, 1990

When Mandela announced that that ANC was ending its armed struggle, the acclaim was not
universal. As The Times reported, he was criticised from both right and left.

Ceasefire by ANC branded as illegal by right

Ray Kennedy

THE ceasefire in its 30-year guerrilla war agreed by the African National Congress early yesterday was
described as ``untenable and illegal" by the right-wing white opposition Conservative party.

The black-consciousness Pan Africanist Congress branded the agreement one-sided in favour of the
government, and said it would intensify its conflict with Pretoria.

But Alfred Nzo, the ANC's secretary-general, defended the accord, saying it had made real gains.

The ceasefire, announced by Nelson Mandela, the ANC's deputy president, after 15 hours of talks with the
government in Pretoria, was viewed generally as a symbolic milestone on the road to real negotiations on a
new constitution.

But there was concern about the ANC's ability to persuade its guerrillas that the ``armed struggle" is over. Mr
Mandela has admitted that the organisation has been unable to communicate to all of them the commitment to
peaceful negotiation agreed at the first round of talks in May.

Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the KwaZulu homeland and leader of the Zulu Inkatha movement said more
was demanded of the ANC-South African Communist party alliance than a commitment to ``no new
violence". More than 3,500 people have been killed in four years of warfare between Inkatha and the ANC.

Andries Treurnicht, leader of the Conservative party, said the ANC had not renounced violence but had
merely called a ceasefire.

``If the talks don't bring about the required result, which is the surrender of power, then the fighting continues.
It is either a surrender of power or a seizure of power," he said.

Government sources in Pretoria expressed optimism yesterday that real negotiations on a new constitution
would start early next year. Further exploratory talks with the ANC were expected within weeks and another
high-level meeting would be held before the end of the year.

The government sources said it was significant that the ANC had suspended the armed struggle without all its
conditions being met. ``This indicates their seriousness to take to the road of negotiation and their subtlety and
realism," they said.

The immediate tasks are for a working group representing both sides to identify political prisoners to be
released under an amnesty to come into effect by September, and to agree on arrangements for the return to
South Africa of about twenty-two thousand political exiles. The government has undertaken to pave the way
for this by considering the repeal of sections of the Internal Security Act.
September 16, 1990

As negotiations continued, the massacre of 26 black commuters on a train leaving Johannesburg

raised fears of an all-out civil war. Tensions between Mandela and de Klerk were brought to the fore
when the government planned its response, as The Sunday Times reported.

De Klerk's `Iron Fist' cracks down on killing

Andrew Hogg, Johannesburg

WITH South Africa sliding into anarchy, thousands of police and soldiers will be drafted into 27 battle-
scarred townships this week in a last-ditch effort by President FW de Klerk to prevent his reform process
from grinding to a bloody halt.

The security operation, codenamed Iron Fist, is aimed at containing the violence that has claimed more than
760 lives in the past six weeks. It will include curfews in trouble-spots and the cordoning-off with razor wire
of migrant workers' hostels which have become the focus of much of the trouble. Nobody entering or leaving
will be allowed to carry weapons.

Road blocks will also be mounted to deter mobile terror gangs, and light machineguns will be placed on
police armoured cars and patrol vehicles.

De Klerk's crackdown will also focus on tracking down what he and Nelson Mandela believe is the ``hidden
hand" behind the violence. Although there is no hard evidence for it, many blacks and whites suspect that the
attacks are being orchestrated by a ``third force" of whites possibly renegade members of the South African
defence force's recently disbanded ``dirty tricks" Civil Co-operation Bureau which is intent on destabilising
the country and thwarting reform.

``There are forces which do not wish peaceful negotiations to succeed," De Klerk said. ``All those desiring
peace must stand together to identify and counter these forces."

De Klerk will present the measures to a cabinet committee for approval tomorrow. The committee is the
successor to the state security council which under PW Botha, De Klerk's predecessor, became a by-word
for repression.

De Klerk and his advisers are determined, however, to scotch suspicion that he is preparing to impose a state
of emergency as Botha did that could last for years. At a meeting on Friday with Mandela, deputy president
of the African National Congress, De Klerk is understood to have said that measures could be taken to halt
the killings, but that they would need ANC support.

Mandela, who later said there was ``a real and terrifying prospect of a full-scale civil war", was reputed by
government sources to have acquiesced to the demand. But at a press conference yesterday, he criticised the
crackdown as reckless and ineffective. ``I am not prepared to be a partner to the government in carrying out
apartheid laws," he said. ``The measures leave much to be desired and will create more problems. It is a
licence given to the security forces to kill our people."

The attack by Mandela will have dismayed De Klerk, for whom international acceptance of the new
measures is crucial as he grows closer to gaining recognition for his reforms. Last week the European
Community led moves at the United Nations for a resolution that would leave the door open for an easing of
sanctions. The World Bank is considering opening an office in South Africa, and De Klerk is due to pull off
an important coup in eight days' time a meeting in Washington with George Bush.

Bush is known to favour an easing of sanctions, likely to include re-establishing air links between the two
countries and dropping an embargo on agricultural produce. All this would rapidly fall by the wayside if De
Klerk and his government were seen to be turning the clock back.

Although few in South Africa would deny that drastic action is needed to halt the killings, the traditionally
heavy hand of the South African security forces still managed to assert itself yesterday when the measures
were announced by Major-General Gerrit Erasmus, the regional police commissioner.

Iron Fist will hardly inspire confidence among people who have lived for years under the boot of apartheid.
Nor will Erasmus's assertion at a press conference that ``if Mr Mandela wants an iron fist, we will give him an
iron fist".

The deployment of extra troops, however, is likely to be welcomed by the vast majority of township dwellers
who have found themselves caught up in the conflict between the mainly Zulu Inkatha movement and the
ANC.

The question is whether the measures will prove sufficient to curb incidents such as last week's massacre of
passengers on a commuter train travelling to Soweto. The attack, and the widespread coverage it received
around the world, is believed to have convinced De Klerk that urgent action was necessary.

As the train pulled out of Jeppe station in central Johannesburg, an impromptu prayer meeting was held, with
gospel songs reverberating through the carriages. Daphne Zwane, 24, a bank typist, was among the group.
Three stations down the line, she and a dozen or so other worshippers were too intent on their devotions to
notice the group of silent men who had joined the already packed carriage.

Seconds later, as Zwane lowered her head in prayer, a shot rang out and a slaughter began that, even in the
bloody annals of South African history, will rank high for sheer, wanton savagery. Producing guns, knives,
pangas (African machetes) and sharpened screwdrivers, the men, without a word, set about killing all around
them. By the time they had finished, 26 lay dead and more than 100 were injured.

It was neither a faction fight nor the settling of political scores. The victims were largely from South Africa's
burgeoning black middle class, endeavouring, despite 40 years of apartheid, to better their lives.

In her hospital bed later, Zwane, with a stab wound in her back, had difficulty remembering what had
happened. ``I didn't even see the men." she said. ``We were singing and praying in the carriage when I started
to hear shots. I saw people holding big knives and stabbing people and I tried to run away. It seemed as
though they wanted to kill all of us.

``I was stabbed in the back, then I must have been unconscious. The men moved away and continued to stab
other people. The train doors were open and I managed to fall out, calling to Jesus as my lord and saviour."

Zwane was lucky. With most of the hydraulically operated doors on township trains impossible to close
because of vandalism, the killers had positioned men to hack down those attempting to jump for their lives.
Some managed to escape through windows. Their injured bodies littered the approaches to Benrose station,
where the train finally came to a halt.

The attack had been perfectly conceived and executed. Although Benrose is near inner-city Johannesburg, it
is a local halt in the middle of an industrial wasteland, overshadowed by a gold mining slag heap. It does not
feature on the map, is not served by roads, and the attackers were quickly able to fade into the landscape.

Any number of extra police would probably have been powerless to prevent such a random massacre. But in
the weeks ahead South Africa can only pray that the tactics of the authorities will help ease the violence.
January 12, 1991

The playwright Arthur Miller interviewed Mandela for a BBC documentary broadcast in early 1991.
Writing about the experience for The Times, Miller described travelling through a divided Cape Town
to meet a man who seems quietly confident that he can bring his country together.

In South Africa's crucible

Arthur Miller

What struck me strongly about Nelson Mandela in his American public appearance last summer was the
absence in him of any sign of bitterness. After 27 1/2 years with his nose against the bars, he seemed
uninterested in cursing the whites who had put him there for the crime of demanding the vote in a country
where his people outnumber their rulers by about ten to one.

I suppose his rather majestic poise, unmarred by rancour, lowered white defensiveness to the point where
reactionaries could join with liberals in applauding his speech to Congress. But such unanimous appreciation
is bound to be suspect when an honest man can hardly please everyone with his views; after all, with all his
charm and civility he was still the man who had organised the ANC's armed guerrilla force, for one thing.

But, watching from a distance, I had found him extraordinarily straightforward in his persistent refusal to
pulverise his history to suit current American tastes, crediting communists for being the first whites to befriend
his movement, sometimes at the risk of their lives. Likewise, criticising Israel and in the same breath reminding
us that perhaps 90 per cent of his earliest supporters had been Jews.

In short, he allows himself to remain complicated; he has a grandson named Gadafi (which was not his idea,
however), and has written that the highest expression of democracy is the British House of Commons, and
the best legal system the American with its written Bill of Rights. To me, in our interview, he said that he had
never joined the Party. He did not add that he had never been a Marxist, but whether or not he thought he
had been, I judge that he sees men in all their variety of character and deed in the foreground of events, rather
than as shadowy creatures manipulated by forces as a Marxist usually must.

I agreed to a conversation with Mandela after much hesitation. The whole thing had begun with a London
phone call from one Beverley Marcus, through whose South African English I discerned that she had
proposed to the BBC that they film Mandela and me talking about life rather than politics, and that Mandela
was receptive to the idea because he had called a halt to any more interviews where the same simple-minded
questions would inevitably be asked.

Lacking a reporter's killer instinct or investigative techniques, I was simply very curious about the roots of this
man's unusual character. How does one manage to emerge from nearly three decades in prison with such
hopefulness, such inner calm?

But my main impulse came out of my New York background; a racially splintered city with over 2,000
people murdered last year, it has next to no credible black leadership, and so Mandela's success or failure
seemed far from an academic question for me. If he can lead his riven country into a multi-racial democracy
the ripples could rock New York, Chicago, Detroit — yes, and Europe and Russia and Israel, where the
single most potentially explosive social problem is ethnicity and its unmet, often incoherent demands.

South Africa was full of surprises, the first being the fact that Beverley's younger sister, Gill, is Nelson
Mandela's veritable right hand, in charge of ANC public relations, and that their father was his and Oliver
Tambo's accountant. I suppose I should have felt my integrity at risk by this news, but I had never had the
intention of drawing and quartering Mandela, only seeking a pathway into his nature and that of his
movement. Gill, with her inside knowledge of the movement and unabashed declarations of its amateurish
failings, as well as of the constantly shifting so-called tribal conflict, turned out, in fact, to be of great help in
my grasping the situation.

Cape Town and the Cape area, which Beverley suggested my wife, Inge Morath, and I visit for a few days to
unwind from the 14-hour plane trip, is an unlikely place to begin preparing for a talk with a revolutionary
leader, since it is as close to Beverly Hills and the California littoral as you can get without tripping over a
movie studio. Balmy air, a lazy Atlantic surf lapping white beaches, swimming pools and very good fish
restaurants — I felt myself beginning to sink into its lovely lethargy. Just like the steady stream of British who,
with their super-valuable sterling, are buying up homes they could never afford in England.

Then one climbs a dune 100 yards across a beach road fronting some extremely lavish homes and their tennis
courts and from the dune's ridge one looks down into a squatter-town of hundreds of cardboard and tin
shacks thrown one against the other right up to the edge of the sea. Don't the rich nearby object? Not all do
— some happily sell drinking water to the blacks here who have no supply of their own. But of course this
shanty town in Hout Bay, near Cape Town, will have to go, for the view of the sea is superb and the sand as
white as sugar, a piece of prime real estate which will not be denied its promise forever.

But one can drive the Cape and Cape Town and indeed South Africa end to end without the slightest
awareness that this sanitised prosperity involves only three million of its 30 million inhabitants. The famous
South African schizophrenia is not hard to understand. To be sure, the back pages of the paper display ads
for razor wire with which to surround one's home, and the walls surrounding white homes show a metal sign
reading ``Instant Armed Response", and in many areas you are instructed not to stop at red lights at night lest
your car be hijacked. But you quickly get used to this palpable fear, just as we have in New York, where as
a child in Harlem I always carried all my books and belongings with me to the blackboard or they'd be gone
when I got back to my seat.

But South Africa is unique; it has state socialism for the whites — 60 per cent of all jobs are in state
enterprises and fascism for the blacks. Still, by the time we got back to Johannesburg after five days in the
country, I felt the place strange but comprehensible as merely one more kingdom of denial, unusual mainly for
the immense proportion of its majority ghettoised and stripped of civil rights.

Mandela's new house in the middle of Soweto has been criticised by some as one of Winnie Mandela's
ostentations, standing as it does in the midst of the Soweto slum. Actually, donations built it. And there is a
scattering of other quite good middle class homes in the midst of the squalor, since the few successful middle
class blacks have been barred from white areas along with the poor. It is all part of the hopeless muddle of a
modern technological state trying to sustain the most primitive chest-pounding Nazi master-race dogmas. So
surrealism looms at every turn — the largest BMW dealership in Africa, black-owned, stands at the very
edge of Soweto, a glass cube showroom exploding beams of white light toward houses yards away that have
neither water nor sewers and whose occupants are no doubt unemployed and probably illiterate.

From the outside, the Mandela house seems less elaborate than odd, a large, chesty configuration of obliquely
angular brick walls, an impromptu sort of construction until one is inside and realises that it is a kind of
fortress, its vulnerable dining and living rooms with their glass doors protected by a deep brick veranda
extending outward some 30ft or so. One drives into a receiving yard surrounded, as in so many other homes
in this scared country, by a high wall with an electronically controlled, steel sliding door. And the doors of the
main rooms are double-hinged to support a steel inner gate painted a discreet ivory to match the walls.
Presumably these are barriers to an invading force. Mandela's daughter, Zinzi, came into the living room
pursuing her three-year-old son, both of them handsome, round-faced, and no doubt accustomed to crowds
of strangers in the place our crew was stringing its cables out, Gill Marcus was already on the phone, the
floors and walls seemed covered with gifts, trophies, bric-a-brac, and now Winnie was here, explaining that
she would not be eating with us because Nelson kept watching her calories and she liked to eat what she
liked to eat.

Whereupon Mandela appeared, making a round gesture with both hands referring to her weight, and saying
``Africa", both of them laughing while she bent to lift her rampaging grandson, whom she handed to a nurse.
Even in his quick glances at her, one saw Mandela's overwhelming love for his still-young wife, and she
clearly basked in it. But her indictment in a murder case and impending trial seemed to hang in the air despite
her tired jocularity.

Mandela was not wearing one of his formal London suits, but a collarless short-sleeved African blouse with
gold-embroided yoke, a chief's blouse, it looked to me. Gill hoped he would relax with me, and he would
gradually come quite close. But he is by nature a formal, conservative man who in a peaceful country would
have been chief justice of its supreme court or perhaps the head of a large law firm. And my first question to
him after we had walked out on his veranda and looked down at Soweto, the dumping ground for human
beings, was how he had been raised.

He sat at first pressed against the back of his couch, somewhat on guard, having been cornered by
interviewers who find it impossible to believe that he simply means what he says. He was the son of a chief
and saying it one saw how serious it was to be a chief's son; and he had been taught early on that he would
have the responsibilities of governing and judging. Even now, he straightened a bit as he told with pride how,
when he was ten and his father died, an uncle had taken over his education and his life. ``My father occupied
a position equivalent to that of prime minister in the tribe ... To me as a child, the Transkei was the centre of
the entire world ... The missionary tried to destroy the belief in custom and they created the perception that
we have no history or culture." And, with an amused grin, ``when the 1939 war began, we felt we were loyal
subjects of the British monarch. That was the atmosphere in which we were brought up."

``And what went on inside you when the missionary told you you had no history?"

``I'm not so sure if I knew that I had a history." And later, ``I must confess that Africa ... remained a dark
continent in that I knew very little about it and I knew better about Europe, especially Britain."

This meticulous specificity, and his staid, almost Victorian structure of speech and demeanour suddenly had a
root and expressed an innate authority which no doubt helped to keep him together through his prison
decades. Mandela, to put it simply, is a chief.

This may help to explain why it has been so difficult for him to deign to confer with his rival, Chief Buthelezi of
the Zulus, who have recently been on the attack against Xhosa people. Buthelezi, it is felt, helped to justify
apartheid by accepting the headship of a concocted homeland where his people were dumped. It is not only
the equivalent of a French Maquisard guerrilla accepting political equality with a Vichy collaborator; there is a
moral issue involved for Mandela, and his pride. Nevertheless, when Mandela did appear at a recent ``peace
conference" with Buthelezi, the latter's people so threatened him that he was forced to leave the area.

The tribe, he insists, is basically an extended family. And in modern times there is no ``natural" conflict
between tribes which are largely urbanised now, living side by side and intermarrying, joining the same unions,
attending the same schools. It was the British and then the apartheid government that had always tried to
tribalise Africa, pitting one against the other, setting up so-called homelands, territories that had never existed
before. ``There is one Africa and there will be one," Mandela said, creating a ball with his two hands.

The present conflict is ``simply a conflict between two political organisations", a conflict that has failed to
make headway in Soweto, as one example, because it is more politically sophisticated rather than because
the people are mainly Xhosa. ``But when Zulus attack they never ask whether you are Zulu or something else,
like the recent attack on people in the train, who do not sit according to tribes. They attack anyone."

And who would be interested in orchestrating these attacks?

He pauses before this answer, which goes to the heart of his hopes. ``My belief is that President de Klerk
wants South Africa to take a new direction and it is therefore difficult ... to say that the government itself is
orchestrating this violence ..."

And, finally: ``They have either lost control over certain elements of their security forces or those elements are
doing precisely what the government wants ... They want to negotiate with a weakened ANC ... You are not
dealing with tribal people from the countryside but people who are sophisticated in the use of weapons, who
know how to move very swiftly with military precision ... There are efforts now to start the Renamo
movement in South Africa." (Renamo is the Mozambiquan mercenary outfit that murdered thousands.)

I turned to his prison time. He and his comrades had originally been assured by a prison officer that they'd be
out in five years because the world was so outraged by their life sentences. But five years came and went.
Winnie could visit twice a year, his children were growing up with no father, and here his face showed his
pain at his inability to protect his family — the helplessness desecrated his chiefly role. Government
harassment of Winnie was driving her out of one job after another until ``there were certain moments when I
wondered whether I had taken the correct decision of getting committed to the struggle. But at the end of
these hesitations with myself I would feel that I had taken the right decision ... The certainty of our final victory
was always there. Of course I became sometimes very angry when I thought about the persecution of my
wife and that I could not give her the support she needed. I felt powerless. And also my children were
hounded out of one school after another ..." His vulnerability was plain here. This was as close as he was able
to come to acknowledging what must have been the loss of hope for release before he died; instead, he
preferred to find something positive to emphasise. When the world began to forget him, and all black
movements were suppressed, the government restated that a life sentence meant life. ``But in the English-
speaking universities they came all-out to oppose these harsh measures ... People tend to forget the
contribution that was made by the National Union of South African Students, which was a white
organisation."

This is not an opportune upbeat recollection, but his ultimate vision of a non-racial South Africa. It is more, I
am convinced, than a tactic to recognise the future need for whites with advanced education and business
prowess. It was striking how he never seemed to categorise people by race or even class, and that he
spontaneously tended to cite good men even among the enemy.

``That came from my prison experience. It gets very cold in Robben Island and we had no underwear. Some
warders went strictly by regulations you were allowed two blankets. But another warder would slip you an
extra one. I made some good friends among the warders, some of them visit me now."

In fact, in the final years he ran ``Mandela University" in Robben Island, and white warders were among his
pupils. But there wasn't time to talk about this. We'd scheduled two sessions and at the last minute had to
settle for one because he had to rush off to deal with the murders going on all over the place and the
government's inability or unwillingness to keep order.
On the way back to Johannesburg that night, Gill Marcus pressed the driver on no account to stop at red
lights and to drive as fast as possible through the darkness.
February 2, 1991

The dismantling of apartheid legislation continued apace with the repeal of laws that limited where
black South Africans could live and own land.

New South Africa to arise on ruins of racist laws

From Gavin Bell in Cape Town

WITHIN a few months, a new generation of South Africans will no longer be stigmatised by their racial
origins. For the first time in almost 80 years, they may buy and own land wherever they have the means to do
so, and there will be no racist laws proscribing where they may, or may not, live.

Such are the effects of sweeping reforms announced in parliament yesterday by President de Klerk as a
prelude to negotiations on a post-apartheid constitution. The measures will do more to destroy the ivory
tower of white supremacy in South Africa than even Mr de Klerk's decision, precisely one year ago, to unban
the African National Congress and release Nelson Mandela, its leader, from prison. Roelof ``Pik" Botha, the
foreign minister, told reporters that the government had dismantled ``two and three-quarters" of the four
surviving pillars of apartheid.

The last pillar intact is the constitution, which will be rewritten in forthcoming negotiations. The fraction refers
to continuing race classification, under the terms of the doomed Population Registration Act. Gerrit Viljoen,
the minister of constitutional development, said the existing population register would be maintained in
compliance with the present constitution and electoral acts, but it would disappear when a new constitution
was introduced. In the meantime, he said: ``All (new) race classification stops from the moment of the repeal
of the Act." Thus while the 28 million blacks, five million whites and four million other races who inhabit South
Africa are still technically identified by the colour of their skins, the laws which discriminated between them
are destined for the scrapheap of history. It would be naive, however, to pretend that the reforms will have an
immediate impact. Economic factors and racial prejudice among right-wing whites have diminished the effects
of similar reforms last year which opened hospitals and other social services and amenities to all races.

While the repeal of the Group Areas Act is certain to lead to the expansion of multiracial communities in the
cities, the white stranglehold on 87 per cent of the land, as decreed by the Land Acts, will be considerably
tougher to break. A mass demonstration by angry white farmers which brought Pretoria to a halt this week
made the point.

Mr de Klerk summed up the dilemma: ``No one dare underestimate the emotions, and even the conflict
potential, relating to land rights. Everybody has a natural need for access to land and its utilisation — much
more is necessary than the mere repeal of discriminatory legislation."

In a carefully timed move, homeless blacks erected squatters' shacks in Johannesburg to press for decent
housing. Municipal workers demolished them, but the point was made that the plight of landless blacks is
critical.
December 14, 1991

In response to its reforms, the South African government was rewarded with a loosening of the
restrictions imposed on the country. First to go was the ban on sporting and cultural tours. The Times
report below also includes a tacit admission that the government had covertly funded the Inkatha
Freedom Party, the ANC's main rival, to stoke divisions among black South Africans.

Sports boycott of South Africa ends

From James Bone in New York and Ray Kennedy in Johannesburg

THE United Nations General Assembly last night scrapped its sporting and cultural boycott of South Africa,
the first move to ease UN sanctions on the country.

The 166-nation assembly decided unanimously that the voluntary ban on sporting, cultural, scientific and
academic exchanges should be lifted because of progress towards ending apartheid. But UN members
stipulated that the resumed ties should be with ``unified non-racial sporting organisations" and ``democratic
anti-apartheid organisations and individuals in these fields". United Nations officials said after the decision that
a UN blacklist of performers and sports stars who have worked in South Africa would be abandoned next
week.

In its annual omnibus resolution on apartheid, the general assembly also encouraged countries to lift remaining
economic sanctions as South Africa moves towards multiracial democratic rule. The move followed a speech
to the general assembly this month by Nelson Mandela, the leader of the African National Congress, in which
he appealed for sanctions to be removed in two main stages when South Africa sets up an interim government
and when it drafts a democratic constitution.

The general assembly's promise of a phased lifting of sanctions will strengthen the ANC's hand at the
constitutional conference which is due to be held in South Africa next Friday.

Meanwhile, claims that the South African police used public money to fund activities by the Zulu-based
Inkatha Freedom party, which is seen in government circles as the main opposition to the ANC, prompted a
curiously equivocal official response yesterday.

Captain Craig Kotze, the spokesman for Hernus Kriel, the minister of law and order, who is responsible for
the police, said: ``This newly publicised operation and others of its kind are, in fact, nothing more than a relic
of a bygone era and should be seen as such. Squabbling about history at this stage will not contribute to the
real progress that is now being made in the search for peace in South Africa."

The captain added that the police had given a categoric assurance that all such covert activity had been
terminated at the end of July 1990. Captain Kotze's statement came as a supreme court judge overruled a
proclamation by President de Klerk allowing Zulus to carry ``cultural weapons" in Natal province, the scene
of feuding that has caused thousands of deaths. Mr Justice Didcott said it was hard to understand, in the light
of widespread violence in Natal, why the proclamation had been issued last year.

Inkatha, led by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, has been exposed as having received a substantial sum of money
to hold a political rally last January. This was nine months after President de Klerk had declared that covert
government support of Inkatha had ceased.
Lieutenant-General Johan van der Merwe, the commissioner of the South African police, has admitted that
the Inkatha rally in January was secretly funded and has said that there will be a full enquiry into the affair.
November 18, 1993

The negotiations to create South Africa's new democratic constitution lasted for almost two years.
When the breakthrough finally came it was in the early hours of the morning, close to The Times' final
printing deadline, and the report was consequently brief.

South Africa heralds new era

From Ray Kennedy in Johannesburg

WHITE and black South African leaders adopted a draft constitution early this morning, paving the way for
the country's first all-race election on April 27 and heralding an end to minority rule.

It fell to Mr Pravin Gordham, of the Natal Indian Congress and chairman for the day, to proclaim the historic
decision at the World Trade Centre outside Johannesburg after nearly two years of tortuous negotiations.
Delegates clapped and cheered as he announced that the draft constitution had been approved by a
``sufficient consensus" of 21 leaders of political parties. ``It seems we have irrevocably crossed the Rubicon,"
he said.

The draft constitution will go to parliament, which meets in special session in Cape Town on Monday, for
formal enactment. ``South Africa will never be the same again," President de Klerk, the final speaker in the
negotiating forum, told delegates.

He said that when he assumed office he had spelt out a vision for a new South Africa. ``Today we have set
the seal on that part of my vision. But this is only the first step. I intend to continue my task to help make a
better South Africa for all its people. I pledge myself to work for that."

Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress president, said that the country was emerging from a society
structured on violence. ``Whereas apartheid sought to fragment our country, we are reuniting our country," he
said. ``The central theme of the constitution is the unity of our country and people. Millions who were not
allowed to vote will do so. I, too, for the first time in my short life, will vote.'
April 25, 1994

Against a backdrop of ongoing black-on-black violence and bombings by right-wing white extremists,
Mandela used his final campaign speech to reassure white South Africans and urge them not to leave
the country.

Mandela pledges safety for whites to prevent exodus

From Sam Kiley in Durban and Ray Kennedy in Johannesburg

NELSON Mandela closed his election campaign in Durban yesterday with an impassioned appeal to
frightened whites to stay in South Africa and have no fear of black rule.

Addressing 150,000 people at Durban's King's Park stadium, the African National Congress leader attacked
South Africa's security forces for failing to end political intimidation in KwaZulu/Natal. On Saturday, three
ANC campaigners were killed in Ulundi, the KwaZulu capital, by supporters of the Inkatha Freedom Party.

Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the Inkatha leader, went to the ANC stronghold of Soweto outside
Johannesburg yesterday and urged his supporters to stop violence, lay down their arms and support free and
fair elections.

Speaking at his own final rally in a stadium, Chief Buthelezi appealed for calm after a bomb, probably planted
by right-wing whites, killed at least nine people and wounded dozens in Johannesburg earlier in the day.

``I call for a true multi-party, multi-racial endeavour finally to put violence behind us and develop national
unity," he told 10,000 supporters, many waving spears and other traditional Zulu weapons. He said the time
had come for Inkatha to prove to the country and the international community that it was a powerful force.
The Zulu leader, commenting on the Ulundi killings, said he had urged his youth wing to let the ANC
campaign freely in Ulundi. Before the rally, one man was shot in the stomach, apparently by accident, when
enthusiastic Inkatha supporters fired in the air.

White South Africans have been gripped by a creeping fear of the future as political violence appears to
spiral. Travel agents reported solid bookings out of the country for this month; and the immigration
department said that January and February saw the first net outflow of white people in years.

Mr Mandela, in the final phase of his campaign, said: ``There are prophets of doom who say that, after the
results of the elections are announced on the 29th, blacks all over the country are going to run wild and take
white property from them. That is not true.

``We have plans to make sure that will not happen. Nothing hurts me more than to see people leaving the
country and taking their skills and education away to serve another nation. I appeal to whites, in particular, to
have no fear of the future, because the ANC recognises the vital role they will play in rebuilding the country."

Fears of an assassination attempt on Mr Mandela rose last night after the car bomb attack in central
Johannesburg. Men and women were separated into two columns and individually searched as they entered
the sports ground for the Mandela rally.

But there was no visible extra security personnel. Mr Mandela's bodyguards, notoriously slack and often
caught sleeping on duty, were unable to prevent people sneaking under the stage the ANC president spoke
from.

Mr Mandela has recently gone out of his way to reassure South Africa's five million whites that their
businesses and land will be safe from nationalisation under an ANC-led government, which this week's first
non-racial elections are expected to produce. He said that a democratic South Africa faced a secure
economic future, in particular because the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank had assured him
the country would benefit from a substantial aid package.

Last week the American Administration said it would be doubling its aid to South Africa to $180 million
(£120 million) a year. In an upbeat and optimistic mood by the end of his last campaign speech, Mr Mandela,
75, began with a savage attack on the security forces in KwaZulu/Natal. He repeated his demand that the
territory's police be disbanded or confined to barracks during the elections. He said that the South African
Defence Force was ``running around in the sticks" rather than raiding Inkatha training camps and closing them
down.

Violence in the province has fallen markedly since Inkatha announced it was entering the elections last week.
But fears of violent clashes between ANC and Inkatha supporters during the polls are uppermost in voters'
minds. Mr Mandela also repeated an earlier signal that he would be hard on any organisation, notably
rightwingers or Inkatha, which violently challenged the outcome of the elections.

Using a tougher tone than his normally jovial public speaking voice, he said that anyone interfering in the
democratic process would face ``the full force of the law" under an ANC government. ``They must pay for
their crimes, and they are going to pay."

Last night President de Klerk condemned the bomb attack in Johannesburg and said it would not stop the
first all-race elections. ``Crimes of this nature will not stop the election," the President said. ``There is no
possibility that radical minorities will be allowed to frustrate the will of the vast majority of the South African
people. All they will achieve will be to add to the unnecessary suffering of innocent citizens who have already
suffered enough."

The President said police would offer a reward of 500,000 rand (£93,000) for information leading to the
conviction of the perpetrators of the car bomb attack, the worst ever in Johannesburg. Hernus Kriel, the Law
and Order Minister, said mindless acts of terrorism would not halt the birth of a South African democracy.

``Those responsible for this outrage will achieve nothing except strengthening the determination of the people
of South Africa to vote for democracy."

About 15,000 people have been killed in South Africa, mainly in clashes between ANC and Inkatha
supporters, since President de Klerk began dismantling apartheid in 1990.
April 27, 1994

Voting in South Africa's first democratic election began on August 26, 1994. The Times report below
captures the joy of those voting for the first time, as well as the continuing chaos, threats and bomb
scares.

Jubilant Mandela hails `the dawn of our freedom'

From Michael Hamlyn in Johannesburg and Sam Kiley in Durban

THE historic transfer of power from the white minority to the black majority of South Africans began
yesterday with the opening day of voting in the country's first all-race democratic election.

An emotional and extraordinary day ended with the symbolic lowering of the old South African tricolour on
public buildings and the hoisting of the new flag.

Nelson Mandela, the ANC president, greeted ``the dawn of our freedom" with a message of reconciliation
and peace, declaring that the country needed the skills and experience of the white population. ``It is a
tragedy, when the whites are leaving in large numbers."

He warned ultra right-wing whites, who are blamed for bomb attacks that have left 21 people dead since the
weekend: ``Let us send a message loud and clear: we will not let a handful of killers steal our democracy."

The first day of their liberation was welcomed enthusiastically by blacks. One 80-year-old woman told a
radio phone-in programme: ``I am on top of the world. I feel I've been a pregnant woman with labour pains,
and today I've given birth to democracy." However, complaints came from around the country that voting
stations were not ready, ballot papers were not available, even that electoral officials were not where they
should have been.

In Durban, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi called for extra voting time in KwaZulu/Natal after polls opened
chaotically with no provision for his Inkatha Freedom Party on the ballot paper. The Inkatha leader said
voting, which opened for the elderly and infirm yesterday and begins in earnest today, should be extended
into Friday following widespread reports that stickers which should have been put on the bottom of ballot
papers printed before Inkatha joined the elections had not arrived.

Chief Buthelezi's request was officially rejected, but later in the day Pallo Jordan, an African National
Congress spokesman, said: ``There are problems that are arising, and if it is necessary to review the number
of voting days, obviously we are open to that suggestion."

Rural areas in the north of the province, which made up most of the pre-colonial Zulu kingdom, areas near
Pietermaritzburg and several polling stations close to Durban all suffered logistical problems. Large numbers
of polling stations either failed to open or opened late. Inkatha claimed that its supporters were afraid to enter
polling booths in areas dominated by ANC supporters.

Yesterday Ziba Jiyane, Inkatha's national spokesman, said the problems on the first day of voting had been
due to poor organisation rather than attempts at ballot-rigging. One of the worst areas was in Ulundi, the
KwaZulu capital, where polling was described by a Commonwealth observer as a ``total shambles".

In Northern Transvaal the election did not start at all, when officials failed to turn up with voting materials. In
the Transkei towns of Port St Johns, Libode and Ndqeleni, voting equipment also failed to arrive on time.

Two hoax reports of bombs halted traffic in the centre of Johannesburg yesterday, and police reported ten
bomb alerts at polling stations and other buildings in the Orange Free State.

No bombs were found and police said they suspected attempts to disrupt the voting.
May 3, 1994

The count continued for several days after voting had concluded, but the result was never in doubt.
When FW de Klerk conceded defeat, Mandela's moment had arrived.

Triumphant Mandela `free at last'

Michael Hamlyn in Johannesburg

NELSON Mandela claimed victory for his African National Congress in the South African general election
last night with a joyous shout: ``Free at last!"

Just hours after President de Klerk had conceded, Mr Mandela claimed the fruits of a lifetime of fighting
apartheid, but paid generous tribute to his opponent's contribution to the historic changes. ``This is your
victory, too," Mr Mandela said. ``You helped end apartheid."

Mr Mandela told his supporters: ``I stand before you filled with deep pride and joy, pride in the ordinary,
humble people of this country. You have shown such a calm, patient determination to reclaim this country as
your own, and joy that you can loudly proclaim from the rooftops free at last!"

With about 44 per cent of the estimated 22.7 million votes counted, the ANC had 62.6 per cent to 23.7 per
cent for Mr de Klerk's National Party. The mainly Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party had 6.2 per cent, followed by
the pro-apartheid Freedom Front's 2.8 per cent.

``We may not have done as well as we hoped, but that is how democracy works," Mr Mandela said,
referring to hopes that the group would win a two-thirds majority permitting it to rewrite the constitution. But
in the new mood of conciliation, the ANC is making clear that any revision will be a joint effort.

The ANC is projected to win about 240 seats in the new 400-seat parliament, which on Friday will select a
President certain to be Mr Mandela. On Tuesday the new leader will be inaugurated at a ceremony attended
by world leaders.

The speeches brought to an end a remarkable period in African history which began with Mr Mandela's
release from prison in February 1990 and ended with the black majority voting in the country's first
democratic election.

About 300 people, many of them weeping, watched Mr de Klerk as he conceded the end of his presidency
at the National Party's headquarters in Pretoria. ``Next Tuesday I shall lay down my responsibilities as state
President," he said. ``I shall be handing over the presidency to Mr Mandela.

Mr Mandela has walked a long road, and now stands at the top of the hill," he said of the ANC leader, who
spent 27 years in prison for opposing apartheid. He added: ``I hold out my hand to (him) in friendship and in
co-operation."

The mood at ANC election headquarters in the Carlton Hotel in central Johannesburg could hardly have been
more different. Mr Mandela, in a dark suit, danced on stage as hundreds of supporters joined a choir in
singing ``Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika", or ``God Bless Africa". ``This is one of the most important moments in the
life of our country," he said. ``Now is the time for celebration, for South Africans to join together to celebrate
the birth of democracy."
Mr de Klerk said: ``Mr Mandela will soon assume the highest office of the land, with all the awesome
responsibility which it bears. He will have to exercise this great responsibility in a balanced manner which will
assure all our communities that he has all their interests at heart. I am confident this will be his intention.

``As far as my own position is concerned, my political task is just beginning. Everything that we have done so
far — the four years of difficult and often frustrating negotiations, the problems and the crises have been
simply a preparation for the work that lies ahead." Mr de Klerk faces the future as a deputy to the new
President and of turning the once white and solidly Afrikaner party into a multiracial grouping capable of
winning majority power at the next election.

He spoke from a hastily built open-air platform outside his party's federal headquarters in Pretoria. His wife
Marike stood beside him as he spoke, surrounded by Cabinet ministers. Mr de Klerk insisted that when he
lays down his responsibilities, ``I shall be handing over the presidency to Mr Mandela, but I shall not be
leaving government. I shall be surrendering power not to the majority of the moment, but to the South African
people."

He would be in a good position in the government of national unity to be vigilant against any erosion of
individual, minority or religious rights, to help to build a strong economy based on free enterprise principles
and to ensure that social services are affordable, caring and effective.

``We believe we have the recipe for the future and we plan to spread our message and win further support
until, one day, we shall be the largest party in the country," he said. ``Our objective will be to prove this at the
polls in five years' time."

In KwaZulu/Natal the Inkatha Freedom Party is maintaining its lead, but only 14 per cent of votes have been
counted and more urban townships are to report soon. These are likely to have voted heavily in favour of the
ANC.

There is not the same problem in the Western Cape, which has almost completed its count. The National
Party is assured of victory there, having taken something like 55 per cent of the votes.

John Major last night congratulated Mr Mandela by telephone and sent him a message saying: ``... your
commitment to reconciliation has won the lasting admiration of the world."
May 11, 1994

The following week Mandela was sworn in—the bullet-proof cage in which he stood a reminder that
some still hoped to spoil the party.

Thousands wait in the sunshine for late swearing-in ceremony

From Michael Hamlyn in Pretoria

NELSON Mandela was inaugurated yesterday as South Africa's first black President behind a bullet-proof
glass cage, with the air force in the skies above him and tens of thousands of jubilant compatriots on the lawns
below. He immediately vowed that South Africa would never again be ``the skunk of the world".

Despite rumours of foiled right-wing bomb and rocket attacks, a huge security operation involving more than
4,000 police ensured that power passed smoothly from the minority whites to the new black-dominated,
democratically elected government. Long years of white rule ended as the oath of office was administered by
Michael Corbett, the Chief Justice.

The ceremony, held in baking sunshine, was attended by the largest assembly of heads of state and
government ever seen in Africa.

Guests included the Duke of Edinburgh, who protected his head with a panama hat, Douglas Hurd, the
Foreign Secretary, Hillary Clinton, wife of the American President, Yassir Arafat, the chairman of the
Palestine Liberation Organisation, and Benazir Bhutto, the Prime Minister of Pakistan. President Mugabe of
Zimbabwe headed a long line of African heads of state and government. The day, however, belonged to the
black and white South Africans singing and chanting ``Amandla Awetu" (power to the people). ``We're on
top of the world" said the Johannesburg Star.

After taking the oath of office, in which he promised to ``obey, observe, uphold and maintain the constitution
and all other law of the republic", President Mandela promised that ``never, never and never again shall it be
that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being
the skunk of the world". Boutros Boutros Ghali, the United Nations Secretary-General, said: ``Today South
Africa regains its rightful place in Africa, the United Nations and the family of nations".

Echoing the title of his autobiography, President Mandela said: ``We understand it still that there is no easy
road to freedom." However, he promised: ``Let there be justice for all. Let there be peace for all. Let there
be work, bread, water and salt for all."

He said his government of national unity would urgently take up the issue of amnesty ``for various categories
of our people who are currently serving terms of imprisonment". Telling his audience that ``we have at last
achieved our political emancipation", Mr Mandela said: ``The time for the healing of the wounds has come,
the moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come, the time to build is upon us." To applause, Mr
Mandela praised his predecessor, F.W.de Klerk, now one of two Deputy Presidents, for his historic vision.

One of the heaviest security operations ever seen in South Africa was mounted for the occasion. The
administrative heart of Pretoria was cut off from the rest of the city by 10ft-high entanglements of razor wire
and protected by heavily armed soldiers in armoured personnel carriers.

Pretoria police said they had no knowledge of any attempts to attack the new President, but there have been
many rumours in right-wing circles that something might be done to disrupt the inauguration. Sources close to
right-wing activists suggest that three possible plots had been discussed: a kamikaze pilot would crash a small
plane into the podium; a police van stuffed with explosives would be driven through the cordons and
detonated near the ceremony; or rocket-propelled grenades would be launched at the dais. The last
suggestion was taken most seriously by the police.

They believe that last week's raids on the white-controlled Radio Pretoria, and on the right-wing
BoereKommando garrison inside the ruined fort of Wonderboom, north of Pretoria, helped to head off the
planned rocket attack.

For reasons that were not explained, the inauguration ceremony began just over an hour late, in keeping with
everything else connected with the election. This meant that the VIPs were kept waiting for longer than they
would have liked in the heat. Non-governmental dignitaries also had a hard time of it. Archbishop Trevor
Huddleston, now 81, was given a lace skull cap to keep the sun off and Lord Callaghan of Cardiff sported a
flat tweed cap. President Castro of Cuba turned pink in the face, but was in high spirits and posed happily for
photographs with Mr Arafat. The only big hitch came at the end, when the fleet of cars and buses due to take
the delegations away for lunch became stuck in a traffic jam, causing a two-hour delay.
August 18, 1994

International adulation for Mandela was boundless and within South Africa his personal popularity
remained at levels unimaginable for most politicians, but his government faced huge challenges. After
three months, The Times delivered a progress report.

Mandela's 100 days' credit

R.W. Johnson

Nelson Mandela has a lot to be cheerful about as he celebrates 100 days of the new South Africa. His own
particular achievement is the benign, generous and almost non-partisan manner which has won him admirers
far beyond the ANC. The mood of detente and relative calm which has followed the elections is largely due
to him.

His government has less to crow about. Indeed, it has done almost nothing. No single Act has been amended,
not one Bill proposed. A great deal of energy has gone into gaining control of the state apparatus, and most
of the real excitement within the ANC has been over who has which job. In opposition, the ANC always had
its eye particularly on gaining control of the security forces and the broadcasting service. And this it has
certainly hastened to do.

But progress is slow in the ministries that matter. Despite much talk, the housing programme has yet to start.
In the Johannesburg area, where the regional premier promised 150,000 new houses this year, just one has
been built. The education minister has been ill for much of the time, and it seems certain that South Africa will
start 1995 with the old apartheid school system pretty well intact. The only bright spot is the Ministry of
Health, where the minister has launched an admirable Aids programme, which is desperately necessary given
that in Natal one in ten pregnant women is now HIV-positive.

The much vaunted reconstruction and development programme is still largely a matter of words, and it seems
likely that the minister responsible will fail even to spend this year's allocated money. He has no real
department and will depend heavily on regional governments to implement the plan. But no money or powers
have yet been ceded to the regional governments, which are appropriately indignant about the delay.

The great wave of strikes after the elections came about partly because almost all top union leaders are now
in government.

On the one hand, the unions are now naively led; on the other, workers wanted to exploit their presumed new
influence with government. More than a million people have applied for the few thousand civil service jobs
being advertised by government. South African blacks all feel that this is their time, that their lot must now
tangibly improve, and that they would be fools not to ask for more. Most will, of course, be disappointed,
and Mr Mandela is only too aware of the great weight of aspirations he carries.

But he knows that development and all his social plans depend quite squarely on the economy. Pointing out
that the present 2.5 per cent growth rate is barely sufficient to keep in step with population increases, he
admitted in an interview yesterday that the hoped-for foreign investment has failed to materialise. He put his
finger on the failure of domestic businessmen to invest, however, as the economy's most fundamental
weakness. Warning of belt-tightening ahead, he pointed out that these businessmen have illegally pumped
billions of rand abroad in the past year.
His prescription of lower taxes might help investment a bit (though at the price of further increasing the public
debt), but no one doubts that the real obstacles in the path of both domestic and foreign investment are tough
foreign exchange controls and the two-tier currency (with financial and commercial rands). Foreign investors
are deterred by the difficulty of getting their money out.

Many South Africans, remembering that exchange controls were lifted briefly in the early 1980s and then
reimposed, would be inclined to see their abolition now as a welcome but short-lived opportunity to get their
money out. Thus the abolition would lead to a huge capital outflow before any inflow began in earnest.

It is the spectre of such huge and uncontrollable capital outflows that has caused the Governor of the Reserve
Bank, Christopher Stals, to warn repeatedly against such a move. The only way out of this dilemma is for
South Africa to rely on large-scale bridging finance and support from the International Monetary Fund. The
sight of the IMF backing the rand would in itself do much to calm nerves in the money markets, but such an
operation could be mounted only as part of a structural adjustment programme, which would demand
economic sacrifices and so would be anathema to many within the ANC, who blame the IMF for ruining
other African economies.

The ANC backbenchers who prevent recourse to the IMF are also quick to blame South African
businessmen for their failure to invest. Some are already beginning to argue for more radical policies of state
direction of investment. Should they succeed, this will doubtless cause further panic capital outflows.

Sooner or later, South Africa will have to break out of this circle. President Mandela's impatience with low
investment and low growth are a sign of this. The first 100 days have passed in peace and goodwill, but the
real tests are yet to come.
June 25, 1995

Mandela had little appetite for the day-to-day machinations of government, but came into his own at
great symbolic moments. Few were greater during his time in office than South Africa's home victory
in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. The Sunday Times match report conveys the political significance of
the win and the way it was celebrated: "it proved that the old game, previously malevolent here, does
have vast powers for good."

One team, one nation, one kick

Stephen Jones at Ellis Park, Johannesburg

COULD YOU have ever dreamt that one single drop goal could have such significance, such historical
weight, such redemptive qualities and such power to send a nation including a dancing President Mandela into
joyous hysterics?

The drop goal came from Joel Stransky, the Springbok fly-half. It came eight minutes from the end of the
second period of extra time and not even the power and passion of New Zealand could strike back.

An ecstatic Francois Pienaar, the South Africa captain, was presented with the World Cup by President
Mandela. Interviewed just before the presentation, Pienaar was asked how it felt to have 65,000 supporters
behind him. ``No," Pienaar said, ``we had 43million people behind us." It was a reference to the entire
population of South Africa, black and white, and to the uniting power of this tournament for South African
society.

As the Springboks paraded around the field with the trophy, songs of black Africa boomed out over the
public address, mixed in with songs of white Western youth. As the pitchside celebrations increased, deep in
the bowels of Ellis Park, the All Blacks had to face the fact that, although they had been favourites, although
they had reached heights that no other team have reached in this Cup, they had lost their grip when it
mattered and lost to the deadliest enemy of their whole proud history.

It was a day of high emotion, with a brilliant closing ceremony and spectacular stunts before kick-off,
including the flight of a jumbo jet at what seemed to be only six feet above the stadium. Perhaps the match did
not reach such heights of sheer technical excellence. But it was agonisingly tense and bitingly harsh.

And you know when New Zealand have been in a battle. They so rarely lose players during a match, but
yesterday their replacements bench did a roaring trade. You had to feel sorry for them, especially as the last
20 minutes of normal time ticked away, because they were the better side and, while South Africa were
content to tough it out on a narrow front, relying on the power of their tackling, the All Blacks stayed true to
their philosophy of a wide game. Indeed, as the long passes from Mehrtens went flashing across the midfield,
they became too speculative and made handling errors.

But they came back with a real rush towards the end of full time. There were some terrific attacks based on
the power of Lomu to draw in defences, and on the superb sharpness of Bunce and Little in the centre. But it
stayed at 9-9 from the 55th minute until the end of normal time, with both teams having put over three kicks
each.

The All Blacks tried everything to break the stalemate. Ian Jones played an astonishing lone hand in the game
in the lineout. At times, Lomu looked overawed, as you would expect any young man to be in a World Cup
final, but still managed to be a deadly threat.

Yet the brilliance of the tackling in the Springbok midfield and back row and the beavering of Andrews at
No8 always kept South Africa on terms even when their heavy forwards began to blow, almost in winded
agony, in the second half.

The rules when extra time began, with the score at 9-9, were that if the scores were still level at the end of
normal time, and neither side were ahead on tries, then New Zealand would have won the World Cup
because they had had no players sent off in the tournament, whereas South Africa had had one. James
Dalton, the Springbok hooker dismissed in Port Elizabeth against Canada, would have earned an unwelcome
place in history.

Fortunately the affair did not go down to that sort of wire. The ice-cool Mehrtens kicked a penalty from
48metres in the opening minutes of extra time after South Africa had followed up a Stransky kick in an offside
position. Stransky then kicked South Africa level at 12-12 after the All Blacks went offside at a ruck.

Surprisingly, there were signs of unease and even panic in the New Zealand ranks in the second half of extra
time, notably when Osborne, the full-back, tried to keep a bouncing ball in play by tapping almost into the
path of Williams.

South Africa managed to work themselves into the drop-goal position when Brooke was detected knocking
on. South Africa put down a perfectly solid scrum. The splendid van der Westhuizen, such a threat around
the fringes of the scrum, fired the ball to Stransky, and Stransky did the rest.

To the massive credit of South Africa, they still had the strength left in their legs to face down the expected
New Zealand onslaught. Only occasionally in the second period of extra time did New Zealand look
dangerous, although millions of South Africans must have had their hearts in their mouths when Osborne came
sprinting down the right wing outside his threequarters to open a chink of daylight. But New Zealand could
neither break through nor work Mehrtens into range for the drop goal that would have drawn the match and
given New Zealand the Cup.

Earlier, the pressure of the occasion on the defence had slowed down the action and, as usual in any match
played on the high veld, there was always the temptation to launch the ball in the air. Joubert, Stransky,
Mehrtens and Osborne could rifle the ball 60, 70 and 80 yards without any trouble on the day, and when you
are afraid that one mistake in open play could give the World Cup away on a plate, then you always feel safer
doing a spot of rifling.

Perhaps the most likely moments for those demanding a try came down the left wing of each team. Van der
Westhuizen attacked down a narrow blindside in the third quarter and Small found Stransky steaming up
outside him down the left.

Yet Stransky began to overrun Small as he waited for the pass and when the pass came, Mr Morrison, who
gave England the proud corner of a proud day, was level and correctly awarded a forward pass just as
Stransky was contemplating a glorious sprint. Earlier, Lomu was sent away with only the remnants of the
cover defence to negotiate, but again there had been a forward pass earlier in the move and Lomu was
recalled.

As the final whistle blew, Pienaar closed his eyes, flung his hands into the air above his head and celebrated in
his own silence amid a fury of noise. After the presentation, South African TV cut to a series of celebrations
taking place all around the country, everywhere from Soweto to Cape Town.
The truth is that this South African team is not of the same all-round class as the Australian team that won four
years ago. Although, given the vast upsurge in the interest in the game and the vast commercial injections into
southern hemisphere rugby last week, the Springboks will be nicely set up for life. But what happened in
Johannesburg yesterday, what South Africa's win signified, would have meant more than money could buy to
an awful lot of people.

The day did rugby proud, it proved that the old game, previously malevolent here, does have vast powers for
good. Perhaps it was a shame that no British teams were competing at the end, but to see the President
dance with joy was worth the ache of disappointment.
August 16, 1995

Another moment of symbolism, albeit on a more personal scale, followed soon after when Mandela
travelled to the white-only village of Orania to visit Betsie Verwoerd, the widow of the man who built
apartheid.

Tea for two at Verwoerd home

Ray Kennedy in Johannesburg

SOME businesses were closed yesterday in Orania, a remote South African village from which blacks are
barred, when President Mandela arrived for a brief visit and a cup of tea with Betsie Verwoerd, the widow of
Hendrik Verwoerd, the man under whose rule he was imprisoned for life.

The closures were not out of respect for the country's first democratically elected leader, according to Helen
Kingsley who runs the village's general store, but because people did not want a black man to see how they
work. Orania is the nucleus of what its founders hope will be a future Afrikaner volkstaat, or homeland,
where even the most menial jobs are done by whites. Until yesterday, the only blacks who had been there
were lorry drivers who delivered goods.

Mrs Verwoerd, a frail 94-year-old, had been unable to attend a lunch two weeks ago that Mr Mandela
hosted in Pretoria for the widows of apartheid and liberation struggle leaders to promote national
reconciliation. So the President flew to the village 90 miles south of the diamond mines of Kimberley, to meet
her. When he did so, the President clasped the beaming Mrs Verwoerd's outstretched hand and said: ``I've
looked forward to this with eagerness. I'm happy to be here."

Residents, young and old, goggled at the wary-looking black bodyguards, but there were no hostile incidents.
July 10, 1996

When Mandela visited the UK, the official climax of the state visit was a banquet at Buckingham
Palace. But The Times reports that his tour began more humbly, with "an unofficial and hardly
noticed stroll in the park at 5.15am, wearing a South African Olympic squad tracksuit. … The few
people about at that hour stopped to shake his hand and welcome him to London. `I'm very pleased to
be here,' he told them."

Queen greets Mandela with warmth and praise

Alan Hamilton

QUEEN Elizabeth the Queen Mother joined the Queen and other members of the Royal Family at a state
banquet last night in honour of Nelson Mandela in the grand surroundings of the Buckingham Palace
ballroom.

The Queen Mother, who will be 96 next month, was attending her first banquet for a visiting head of state
since the King of Malaysia came to London in 1993. Her presence was an historic nod towards her own visit
to South Africa in 1947 and also an indication that the Queen is striving to give the President of South Africa
the highest possible degree of welcome.

One hundred and fifty six guests sat down to sole, turkey and strawberries, accompanied by Louis Roederer
champagne and a 1993 Hamilton Russell, a South African chardonnay. The guest list included the Prime
Minister and several members of the Cabinet, as well as leading members of the British black community and
those with South African business and sporting connections.

Among them were Bernie Grant, MP, Trevor McDonald, the Trinidadian-born newscaster, Gavin Hastings,
the former Scotland rugby captain, Basil d'Oliveira, the South African-born cricketer, Janet Suzman, the
South African actress, and Nicholas Oppenheimer, chairman of the company that controls South Africa's
diamond production. British politicians past and present included Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, Sir Edward
Heath, Neil Kinnock, Paddy Ashdown and John Prescott.

In a welcoming speech, the Queen fondly recalled her epoch-making state visit to South Africa last year, the
first by a British monarch since King George VI took his eldest daughter there in 1947 to celebrate her 21st
birthday and cool her ardour for a young and homeless Greek prince.

Of her visit last year, she said: ``Our memories of the visit are still vivid, among them the unforgettable
welcome from the crowds in Port Elizabeth, the enthusiasm of the children at the Langa Sports Centre and
the address by Archbishop Tutu at the human rights service in Cape Town. We met some exceptional
individuals too, among them Sister Ethel in Port Elizabeth, whom I mentioned in my Christmas broadcast last
year, and the late and grievously missed Friday Mavuso, of the Self Help Association of Paraplegics at
Soweto.

``Most of all, we were struck by the sight of South Africans of all races working and playing together. We
saw for ourselves the miraculous transformation of a society based on inequality into one in which every man
and woman is equal before the law."

Praising Mr Mandela, for whom she has huge personal admiration, the Queen continued: ``It is heartening to
find that leaders across the political spectrum are still striving with you for the common goal. You have,
yourself, provided the leadership and, by your willingness to embrace your former captors, have set the
course towards national reconciliation and freedom for all the people of South Africa."

The Queen sounded a note of caution on the still-troubled country's future. ``A more truly equal society, no
longer characterised by the gulf between the living standards and expectations of different races, will take
longer to achieve. But I am sure that it will come and that South Africa has a bright and exciting future. Mr
President, you have the wholehearted support of the British people in your great enterprise. You and your
country can show a world often dominated by division that reconciliation and decency can prevail."

Mr Mandela had begun his day early. London was barely awake when he began the first day of his historic
state visit with an unofficial and hardly noticed stroll in the park at 5.15am, wearing a South African Olympic
squad tracksuit. Mr Mandela is nothing if not recognisable. The few people about at that hour stopped to
shake his hand and welcome him to London. ``I'm very pleased to be here," he told them.

At 12.20pm the Princess Royal and her husband, Captain Timothy Laurence, arrived in the foyer of the
Dorchester hotel, where Mr Mandela had stayed after arriving late the previous night, to conduct him to his
official welcome in one of the Queen's Rolls-Royces. They drove, a barely noticed convoy of two cars, to
Horse Guards Parade, where every seat was occupied. Police estimated that 6,000 people, many of them
schoolchildren or members of London's extensive South African community, crammed into every available
space to watch the arrival ceremony.

Mr Mandela arrived precisely on schedule at 12.40. The Queen, who had arrived separately a few minutes
earlier, beamed broadly as her visitor drew up. Some state visits may be a chore for her, but this one is
patently an unalloyed pleasure.

The Queen looked particularly summery in a yellow silk and cotton dress. She smiled broadly as Mr Mandela
gave her a long, lingering handshake. Mr Mandela stood alongside the Queen, with his right hand across his
heart, as the band of the Irish Guards played the national anthem of the new South Africa, Nkosi Sikelele i
Afrika (God Bless Africa). With a hint of difficulty, they both climbed into the 1902 state landau for the
ceremonial drive to Buckingham Palace.

Once on board, they smiled and chatted easily and acknowledged the enthusiasm of a crowd the like of
which has not been seen for a state visitor since Mikhail Gorbachev visited London at the height of his power
and popularity.

Once inside the Palace, the heads of state exchanged gifts. The Queen gave Mr Mandela an eight-volume set
of Dr Johnson's edition of Shakespeare, while Mr Mandela presented in return a set of South African gold
commemorative coins and a magnificently carved African chess set. The Queen was relieved; at the end of
her South African tour last year King Goodwill of the Zulus presented her with a large and exceedingly live
white bull. Mr Mandela and the Queen then sat down to a private lunch of asparagus, Scottish salmon and
summer pudding.

Later in the day, Mr Mandela called on the Queen Mother for afternoon tea, then went to Westminster
Abbey to lay a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier.

For a man who had risen at 5am after a long flight from Johannesburg, Mr Mandela needed the two-hour
respite in his programme before attending the state banquet. It was brought forward by half an hour from the
usual time. Mr Mandela has told the Queen that he likes to be in bed by 10pm.
July 17, 1998

Mandela had been reluctant to stand for the presidency at all, and there was no question of him
seeking a second term. His 80th birthday celebrations therefore also marked the beginning of his
gradual retreat from public life.

Mandela embarks on his long goodbye

R.W. Johnson in Johannesburg

NELSON MANDELA'S 80th birthday is being celebrated on a huge scale in South Africa this weekend
with tributes throughout the day on television and radio shows, special newspaper supplements, an official
party and all manner of special competitions and events.

Most South Africans see Mr Mandela as an extraordinary, heroic and charismatic figure. In a country not
blessed with far-sighted leadership, there is a deep consciousness that it has at last produced a figure greater
even than Jan Smuts, and perhaps even the equal of Cecil Rhodes in the part he has played in shaping this
country-in-the-making.

At the same time the celebrations are a way of saying goodbye. No one doubts that Mr Mandela will enjoy
an unequalled moral authority in South Africa while he lives, but he has been replaced as president of the
African National Congress by Thabo Mbeki and will surrender the presidency of the country next April. In
the eyes of both South Africa and the world, this will leave a tremendous gap and there is anxiety about what
the age of Mr Mbeki may bring. Mr Mandela's retirement will leave Mr Mbeki in an easier situation than the
one he now enjoys. There is even a chance that the Government will become more coherent and focused.
First, and most obviously, Mr Mbeki has been running the country for some years already. Almost from the
start, he took the chair at Cabinet meetings and has been extremely visible for some time, now that all political
roads lead to and from the Deputy President's office.

Secondly, Mr Mandela's great contribution lay in leading the anti-apartheid struggle and in exemplifying the
spirit of reconciliation when it was won. These were, and are, giant contributions, but there is no point in
pretending that Mr Mandela was particularly well suited to the tasks of government and administration when
he took over as President in 1994.

Mr Mbeki has had most of the real power and in effect the responsibility for government, yet he has not
enjoyed the presidential title or authority. Moreover, Mr Mandela has in important respects resembled the
ageing Charles de Gaulle: while normally preoccupied with lofty matters of protocol and principle, he will
from time to time sally forth unpredictably into the political arena when his attention is really engaged. This
was what happened when, during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference in New Zealand,
the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa saw an outraged Mr Mandela remake foreign policy on the spot — leaving
Mr Mbeki to pick up the pieces of the crucial relationship with Nigeria.

Similarly, the violence in Richmond in KwaZulu/Natal has seen Mr Mandela rush in to declare — without
much real evidence — that the police are culpable for 20 deaths and that the ANC will not participate in the
all-party talks that most observers believe are the key to peace. This must have been fairly discomfiting to Mr
Mbeki who, in the interests of reconciliation with Inkatha, has already promised to attend its congress in
Ulundi this weekend.

Mr Mbeki's problem is that Mr Mandela is an impossible act to follow, particularly since Mr Mbeki is
singularly lacking in charisma and has not even managed to develop a "favourite son" base in his native
Eastern Cape, where his opponent, Bantu Holomisa, seems to have overtaken him. To a degree that is
seldom appreciated, Mr Mbeki will be running the ANC's 1999 election campaign essentially against Mr
Mandela, desperately seeking to win a mandate of his own which will give him the authority he now lacks and
so badly needs.

The ANC's ambition to obtain a two-thirds majority in 1999 has panicked liberal democrats who espy a
single-party state not far down the road. But the fact is that the ANC won 62.7 per cent of the vote in 1994,
and if it wins less in 1999 Mr Mbeki will appear to lack legitimacy and authority. Hence the need to win even
bigger next time, at last giving Mr Mbeki a claim to the authority that he currently lacks.

For the moment, such concerns are lost in the celebrations of a much-loved old man's birthday. Once the
party's over, however, the real accounting will begin.
June 17, 1999

One year later, Mandela handed the reins to his deputy, Thabo Mbeki.

Mandela takes last step of his long walk

Inigo Gilmore in Pretoria

NELSON MANDELA made the final stop on his long walk to freedom with an emotional farewell to his
compatriots yesterday at Thabo Mbeki's inauguration as his successor.

On the 23rd anniversary of the Soweto uprising, history came full circle. Mr Mandela stood down as
President on a sunsoaked afternoon at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, for many South Africans a symbol of
oppression under apartheid.

Choirs sang, figures in animal skins danced and praise singers chanted as presidents, princes and potentates
from 130 countries gathered in the building's red sandstone amphitheatre to pay tribute.

Mr Mandela, 80, holding hands with his Mozambican wife, Graca, shuffled stiffly onto a podium to loud
applause from the 5,000 guests, including John Prescott, Britain's Deputy Prime Minister, Colonel Gaddafi of
Libya and Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian leader.

After Mr Mbeki had taken the oath of office in English, Xhosa and Afrikaans, Mr Mandela lifted his hand and
moved out of the presidential chair to make way for his successor.

Then they turned and faced the distant hills as six fighter aircraft trailed smoke in the colours of the South
African flag.

President Mbeki made a sombre acceptance speech in which he reflected on the challenges ahead and his
hopes for an African renaissance.

"For us, this day is as much a day for the inauguration of the new Government as it is a day of salute for a
generation that pulled our country out of the abyss and placed it on the pedestal of hope, on which it rests
today," Mr Mbeki said.
February 11, 2001

Recordings of Mandela's final speech before he was imprisoned in 1964, in which he anticipated "a
democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony" had been thought lost.
The tapes were later found and in 2001 The Sunday Times reported that they had been restored and a
copy of them sent to Mandela.

Tape of Mandela trial speech found

Richard Brooks

A RECORDING of the historic speech made by Nelson Mandela before he was sentenced to life
imprisonment on Robben Island has been played again for the first time, almost 40 years after he pronounced
his defiance of apartheid in a Johannesburg courtroom.

Mandela used the speech, made in June 1964 at the end of his trial, to set out his belief in equality. It has
been described as one of the greatest orations of the 20th century.

"I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination," he told the court in the
same measured terms he employed after he became president in 1994.

"I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony
and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But, my lord, if it needs to
be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

In the event, he was not sentenced to death on the charge of sabotage, but to life imprisonment. He was freed
in 1990.

Written reports of the speech quickly circulated. It was also taped, but the recordings were placed in the
national archives and lost. They were found last year, but were impossible to play because they had been
recorded on plastic dictabelts.

Then Rob Perks, curator of the British Library's oral history department, came across the recordings while
visiting South Africa and realised there were experts in Britain able to play them. The blue plastic bands were
shipped over in November. "There are hardly any recordings of Mandela from the 1960s or earlier, so that
makes this find all the most fascinating," said Perks.

This weekend, the 11th anniversary of Mandela's release, the library was sending a copy of the recordings to
the former president, who was until now unaware of their existence.

Anthony Sampson, Mandela's official biographer who attended much of the trial, was delighted. "I'd no idea
about the tapes," he said. "It's amazing."
March 2, 2003

In retirement, Mandela maintained a political role, albeit a less prominent one. In this wide-ranging
Sunday Times interview he talked about his personal life and the influence he could still exert on
active politicians. He also addressed criticisms of his response to South Africa's HIV epidemic, on
which he was almost silent while in office.

The wonderful world of Mandela

Interview by David Dimbleby

'Get me the Pope and President Putin," Nelson Mandela instructs his long suffering assistant Zelda, a white
Afrikaner, who is used to placing calls to his strictly A-list political contacts. Few fail to reply.

Only Thabo Mbeki, perhaps weary of advice from his predecessor, does not always answer. Mandela has
been up since 5am, done the daily exercises he has rigorously observed all his adult life and has breakfasted
on fresh fruit, maize flour and sour milk. He is ready for a day's work of meetings, photocalls, conferences
and the constant telephoning.

The man who accused Tony Blair of abandoning the premiership of Great Britain to become President Bush's
foreign secretary still claims Blair as a friend, along with Jacques Chirac, Fidel Castro, Gerhard Schroder and
a host of other world leaders.

"Now that I have lost power, they don't regard me as a threat," he says. But do they listen? "Some of them
do."

Now 84 and walking unsteadily as a result of a knee injury not properly treated while he was in jail, Mandela
shows no willingness to "retire from his retirement", as he puts it. His computerised diary reveals that every
hour for months ahead is booked up. It is the diary of a president still in office rather than retirement. There
are visits to New York, Indonesia and Europe. There are engagements with film stars and millionaires, pop
singers and models among the politicians and businessmen.

He enjoys the opportunity to mix with the rich and famous that his own superstar status makes possible. He
often flies on a private jet loaned by a Saudi prince, and stays at the Waldorf Astoria in New York and in a
lavish suite at the Dorchester in London.

But what is it all for? Surely the Pope and President Putin do not really want to take his advice. They might
listen out of courtesy but it is hard to believe they will be greatly influenced.

It is not always so. He brokered the deal which led Gadaffi to send the Lockerbie suspect al-Megrahi for trial
at the Hague (and then turned up in Glasgow to complain at his conviction and the conditions in which he was
being held).

Other international initiatives are less successful. His good offices served no purpose in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, nor did his offer to act as an intermediary in the Congo. Mandela brushes off these setbacks. "Even if
it is not effective," he says, "you speak your views."

Baron Munchausen told the story of a coachman who blew his horn on an icy night. No sound came out until
he arrived at an inn and put the instrument close to the fire when all the tunes melted and filled the room with
music. Mandela's insistence on being heard in the cacophony that political crises produce is similar. Twenty-
seven years in jail, as he often says, gave him valuable time to think. Now he wants the world to have the
benefit of his advice.

Despite being an icon of our times, universally known and respected, he is unassuming and courteous,
charming everyone he meets. He flatters men and flirts with women. The mantras are always the same. To
men: "Ah, good to see you. The famous Mr X. How do you look so young? Younger than when I last saw
you." To young women: "Ah hello. Are you married? I have a grandson. You must marry him." To children:
"Are you working hard? Tell your school fellows I love them." If they ask him about his years in jail he replies:
"It went very fast because we were a jolly group of people. We got a long time but we became a happy
crowd."

He is a consummate politician who deflects any questions that probe too deeply into his private life or
emotions. His old protagonist, the former president FW de Klerk, says there is "a bitterness and resentment
that does sometimes emerge", and Mandela does not disguise his contempt for those who introduced
apartheid. "Of course I despised them. They were despised by the entire world. They dressed in beautiful
suits, silk shirts and silk ties ... they were beautiful outside but full of evil inside."

One of the many humiliations Mandela suffered in jail was the deliberate destruction of his family life. He was
not allowed to see any of his children until they were 16 and could not go to his mother's nor his son's
funerals. The warders exploited the much-publicised infidelities of his wife Winnie. Newspapers were banned
in jail but they left cuttings of the more lurid stories to taunt him.

They found ways of disrupting her rare visits so their time together was cut short.

Mandela has always been generous towards Winnie, even when she flaunted her adultery. He told me that the
ANC wanted him to divorce her while he was still in jail, but he refused. She had been a pillar of the ANC
and had kept his name alive.

"When she was caught with her pants down ... one of the things that I always kept in mind was that I married
a young woman. She was a very attractive girl and when I left home after three years (to go to jail) the
temptation was too great for her and naturally she was unable to resist."

Today he has a new consort, Graca, the vivacious and ebullient widow of Samora Machel, the first president
of Mozambique, whom he married on his 80th birthday.

"I felt that a life together with her would be bliss for both of us," he says. He claims that she helped him learn
how to treat his children and grandchildren less severely than the patrician way he was used to.

For her part, she is proud of providing the family life Mandela never had. She gives a touching picture of their
private relationship with a lack of inhibition he would never show. It was when they were talking politics, she
says, that she felt for the first time "a different sort of warmth, a sort of embarrassment when you look into the
eyes of somebody and you feel this is not only respect, not just intellectual communication, but much more
than that. Of course I said to myself nonsense, it's nothing".

He started finding excuses to ring her and to go to Mozambique for weekends with her and her family. "I was
feeling some sort of excitement like that we have as teenagers, you know, to believe that life and love is
possible." His proposal of marriage was thought out carefully. "He is a man of small details," she says. "He
thinks how to touch you and I must say I just melted. He did it very, very well."

One failure, however, she admits to. She has not been able to persuade him to slow down. "I tried very hard
until I realised I was making a mistake. He needs to be very busy. He is quite clear that if he slows down he
will feel depressed. He'll feel he is not needed any more." So their marriage is marked more by their absences
from each other than their time together. They speak daily on the telephone and Mandela's staff recognise
when she is coming to town by his burst of cheerfulness. But she pursues an active political life in
Mozambique, and in Johannesburg he heads a children's charity and the Mandela Foundation. These charities
help to explain his relentless world travel.

Everywhere he goes he is raising money. It may be from American television stars such as Oprah Winfrey,
from powerful corporations, from billionaires or from heads of state. He is aware that he never gets something
for nothing.

In part, people give to be associated with the lustre of his name. The price exacted by them in return may be
modest, perhaps a photograph with their hero, or for more substantial gifts his attendance at a dinner or a
speech at a reception.

Sometimes the motive is more complex. At the Dorchester hotel Lord Attenborough, after concluding a
discussion about a proposed statue of Mandela to be erected in Trafalgar Square, discusses what Nestle,
which is keen to redeem its image in Africa, might be willing to pay for a photo opportunity with him. Nestle is
so keen to rectify its history, Attenborough explains, that if he said he would have a picture taken with the
company it would offer £250,000 or even £500,000 to his foundation.

Mandela's fundraising techniques are breathtakingly direct. He once looked at a cheque presented to him at a
private fundraising dinner by a leading South African businessman and handed it back with the words: "I am
sorry you are doing so badly. Your competitors (naming them) are thriving. I would not want to make things
worse for you." The guests squirmed with embarrassment but next day he received a cheque for double the
original amount.

The money he raises is mainly spent on two causes, education and Aids. The latter is a complex issue for him.
The epidemic was already well established when he was campaigning for election as president, but he never
mentioned it. His defence is that he was told he would lose the election if he did. "I wanted to win and I didn't
talk about Aids ... Africans don't want you to talk about it. I told them we have got this epidemic that is going
to wipe out our nation if we don't take precautions. Advise your children that they must delay as much as
possible before they have sex. When they do, let them have one partner and condoms. I could see I was
offending my audience. They were horrified."

Once safely in the presidency he still demurred. Judge Edwin Cameron, a leading Aids campaigner and
himself HIV positive, blames him for the scale of the epidemic today. "He more than anyone else could have
reached into the minds and behaviour of young people. A message from this man of saintlike, in some ways
almost godlike, stature would have been effective. He didn't do it. In 199 ways he was our country's saviour.
In the 200th way he was not."

Mandela's defence is that he had no time to concentrate on the issue. He says he was preoccupied with
preventing the country falling into chaos, even civil war. He accepts the criticism when challenged.

Making up for lost time since he stepped down as president, he has focused on the Aids catastrophe, often to
the discomfort of Mbeki, his successor. Their relationship is at best awkward. Mbeki was imposed on
Mandela as his vice-president against his wishes. In office he has dismayed Aids campaigners by casting
doubt on the cause and its treatment.

Mandela, while avoiding direct conflict and endorsing the government's cautious assessment of the efficacy of
the drugs in the Third World, nevertheless now campaigns constantly for prevention, better overall healthcare
and, crucially, the use of retroviral drugs at lower cost where they are wanted.

In a world now haunted by the spectre of terrorism, Mandela is fortunate that his commitment to terrorism as
a weapon to defeat apartheid has been forgotten or perhaps forgiven, expiated by his 27 years behind bars.
His intention to use terror as a weapon was never put to the test, partly because he was arrested so soon
after his sabotage campaign began and partly because of the military incompetence of MK, the ANC's armed
wing. But the intention was there.

It was Mandela who first urged violence on a reluctant ANC and in a passage in his autobiography he writes
that if sabotage failed he would have turned to terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Now he brushes this aside and
says, truthfully, "we never targeted civilians".

Even in the eyes of his former white opponents in South Africa the transformation from traitor to icon is
complete. After all, apartheid did not collapse as a result of pressure from the ANC alone. It imploded
because it was unworkable. Mandela is now revered as the man to whom the whites turned to deliver them
from impending chaos.

A natural leader, born into a royal family in the Transkei, he has never been at ease with the idea that he is a
superman. "The impression you are a demigod worried me. I wanted to be regarded just like an ordinary
human being with virtues and vices," he says. It is too late for that.

He showed me round the house and farm he has built in the part of the Transkei where he was born. Included
in his compound is a full-size replica of the prison bungalow in which he was held at Victor Verster jail, and
from which he began negotiations for the transition to black rule. He wants it preserved for posterity. "I come
back here whenever there is an opportunity. There are the rocks where I played as a child. Here are the
rivers where I fished." He farms cattle now, most of them gifts to honour his work. "Mugabe gave me a bull,"
he says wryly, "but I think they have slaughtered it. It was too heavy for the heifers."

This is the place where he just might one day retire, and will be buried. But not yet. As we are talking, an air
force helicopter lands in a cloud of dust to the cheers of a small crowd of children. Mandela pauses only to
tell them not to neglect their studies, climbs into it and is whirled away back to Johannesburg and another
assignment.

No peace for a living legend.

January 7, 2005

The following year, when his son died of Aids, Mandela broke the taboo surrounding the disease by
announcing the news in person.

We must not hide, says Mandela as he weeps for the son killed by Aids

Jonathan Clayton

IN AFRICA it is the killer disease that many will not discuss openly. But Nelson Mandela broke down in
tears yesterday as he told the world that his son had died of Aids.

The great statesman summoned the world's media to the front door of his home in Johannesburg to announce
that his only surviving son, Makgatho, 54, had succumbed to the virus.

His country's elite refuses to acknowledge the enormous death toll caused by HIV/Aids. But the former
South African President, 86 and increasingly frail, found the strength to admit that his family, like so many
others in South Africa, had lost a loved one to Aids.

"We must not hide the cause of death of our respected families because that is the only way we can make
people understand that HIV is an ordinary illness. That's why we have called you today to announce that my
son has died of Aids," Mr Mandela said.

"I hope that as time goes on we will realise that it is important for us to talk openly about Aids...because (it is)
the only way to make it appear normal, like cancer."

Mr Mandela said that he had argued in favour of breaking the taboo surrounding the disease for years, long
before he knew that his son was suffering from Aids.

Makgatho, a lawyer, had been receiving treatment for several months. His wife, Zondi, died of pneumonia,
one of the diseases that affect Aids sufferers, in 2003.

Mr Mandela, who was surrounded by family members yesterday, cancelled several engagements during the
past month to remain close to his ailing son. He has three daughters, one from his first marriage, and two from
his second marriage to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Mr Mandela lost his first son, Madiba Thembekile, in a
car crash in 1969.

Despite the mounting toll from Aids, and some five million cases — the highest HIV/Aids caseload in the
world — few public figures have come forward to say that Aids has affected their families.

In the early 1990s Zambia's founding father, Kenneth Kaunda, became the first senior African politician to
admit losing a family member to the disease when he said publicly that a son who died in 1986 had had Aids.
Dr Kaunda is now one of Africa's main Aids campaigners.

Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the veteran South African politician of the Inkatha Freedom Party, also helped to
break the silence over Aids deaths in the country last year when he said that two of his children had died from
related causes.

The most famous death from Aids in the country was that of 12-year-old Nkosi Johnson, who had been
orphaned by Aids. His case at first shamed the nation, but later came to symbolise the country's profound
Aids crisis.

Yesterday Aids activists were quick to applaud Mr Mandela's decision to go public with the cause of his
son's death. Grant Law, of the Topsy Foundation, said that one of the best ways of erasing the stigma
attached to the disease was the involvement of the family. "We applaud Mandela for coming out in this way
and making Aids a family issue," he said.

Deaths from the disease are usually attributed to "a long illness", pneumonia, or other secondary causes. Mr
Mandela's approach is in sharp contrast to his successor, Thabo Mbeki. President Mbeki has outraged Aids
activists by saying he believed that HIV did not always lead to full-blown Aids. He also said he did not know
anyone suffering, or who had died, from the disease.

Aids campaigners have blamed the President's personal views for his Government's poor record in fighting
the disease in South Africa, particularly its failure to make anti-retroviral drugs more widely available.

Mr Mandela officially retired from public life last year, but still has a busy schedule promoting his causes —
chief among them being the fight against Aids, which he said was no longer a disease but a human rights issue.

The world's most respected statesman allowed his former prison identification number — 46664 — to be
used as the logo for fundraising events aimed at fighting the HIV/Aids epidemic. His endorsement of the
campaign has created strains with Mr Mbeki and his Government, although the anti-apartheid hero has
carefully avoided direct criticism of either.
June 21, 2008

In 1988, Hyde Park had played host to a concert calling for Mandela's release. Twenty years later, the
man himself was in attendance to celebrate his 90th birthday. It was to be his final visit to Britain.

His eyes still sparkle, but failing health brings added poignancy to farewell tour

Jonathan Clayton

The eyes still sparkle. The wit and humour are undiminished. At 90, Nelson Mandela's magic shows little sign
of fading.

The body, however, tells a different story. Despite his iconic status, it is slowly revealing that he is a mere
human after all.

His doctors have decreed that he is well enough to fly to London, one of his favourite cities, to attend the
birthday concert in Hyde Park next Friday. This is almost certain to be his last visit to Britain and a poignant
occasion as he bids farewell to his many admirers.

Mr Mandela walks painfully slowly; his feet are often swollen and bandaged. With the aid of a walking stick,
it seems to take him an age to shuffle to his seat.

On his increasingly rare public appearances, his vehicle is brought as close as possible to his destination,
usually a mounted podium or stage. A golf cart is sometimes used to cover the extra distance from the
parking bay.

His eyesight, which was never good as a result of long incarceration in dimly lit cells, and hearing are
inevitably failing, but not his smile and famous charm.

Doctors check him daily and often express themselves amazed at his fortitude. Some believe that the strength
of character that drove him to survive 27 years in prison has allowed him to outlive all his contemporaries
from the days of struggle against apartheid and to fight prostate cancer.

His fondness for Britain is partly due to the weekly demonstrations that took place outside South Africa
House in Trafalgar Square throughout his detention. When he supported London's bid to hold the 2012
Olympics, a move that was regarded as crucial in attracting support from Third World countries, he said:
"There is no city like London. It is a wonderfully diverse and open city. I can't think of a better place than
London to hold an event that united the world."

His minders, led by his wife Graca Machel, have imposed a news blackout on his activities before the
concert. This is partly to avoid creating speculation about his health if tiredness causes him to cancel an event
suddenly, and partly not to cause offence to those that he does not meet.

It is likely that Mr Mandela will meet the Queen, whom he calls "Elizabeth". "He is probably the only man in
the world who could get away with that," said a former employee who heard him answer the phone with
"Hello Elizabeth" rather than the more customary "Your Majesty".

Bill Clinton, who attended a ceremony last July marking the beginning of a year of celebratory events for the
former South African President's 90th birthday, said that he used to dread receiving phone calls from Mr
Mandela because he knew that he would have to do whatever was asked. "He would ask me if I was busy,
and I would say, 'Well, I am just running America'. He would then say, 'Good, because I have something I
want you to do', and I would do it. That is this man," Mr Clinton told the audience.

One thing is certain this week. Mr Mandela will not make a political statement nor give any interviews, in
keeping with the decision taken when he retired formally from public life a few years ago. He said then that he
wanted only to spend time with his family, particularly his many grandchildren.

When he is not attending charity functions, he spends much of his time in Maputo, the Mozambican capital, at
the home of his wife, who was previously married to the late Mozambican President Samora Machel. He is
said to enjoy the warm climate there and also enjoys being less in the spotlight than he is in South Africa.

Plans for his funeral, expected to be one of the largest the world has seen, are never openly discussed, but all
the main television networks have put in place massive contingency plans.

Rumours about his health are constant. The Nelson Mandela Foundation has to issue reports frequently
saying that he is in good health. His birthday is actually on July 18.
Obituary: Nelson Mandela
 Obituary: Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela, President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999, was one of the most remarkable political
leaders of the 20th century. Both his achievement in almost single-handedly bringing to an end the minority-
government apartheid regime in South Africa, and the force of personality with which he accomplished this,
seemed to elevate him head and shoulders above any other head of government in the world in the period
following the Second World War.

The sheer scale of his suffering, as a prisoner for nearly three decades in one of South Africa's grimmest penal
establishments, might anyway have given him an authority that could not have been gainsaid. But that alone
would not have imparted to him the moral stature he radiated had it not been combined with a truth of
utterance in whatever he said. It was his unshakeable conviction that peace and reconciliation must be at the
heart of the new order in South Africa. The idea of revenge on the old order for the iniquities of the past, was
no part of his makeup. Once he had exchanged the plight of the political prisoner for the offices of head of
state and government of South Africa he looked always forwards into his country's future, never back.

He had emerged from a remote tribal upbringing to lead the struggle against apartheid. He did this from one
of the world's harshest prisons — Robben Island, off Cape Town. In all, he spent 27 years in jail and before
his release it was truly said that he was the world's most famous prisoner.

When he was at last released, by a white-supremacist government which had slowly realised that he was its
only hope for the peaceful future of their country, he laid the foundations of a united and multiracial South
African nation based on the principles of reconciliation and forgiveness, and he did it with a success which
was frequently described as miraculous.

It may be doubted whether anyone else could have achieved this. Although Mandela came from a royal
Xhosa family, his background was modest. He had acquired a certain reputation as a Johannesburg lawyer
while his younger years were devoted to politics and the African National Congress. After reluctantly taking
the dangerous decision to embrace violence in the battle against apartheid, Mandela was arrested and,
inevitably, imprisoned for life. His spirit unsubdued, he survived many years on the island and, at a critical
moment when popular unrest was reaching a peak — and without the full agreement of his ANC colleagues,
either in jail or in exile — he decided that it was time to engage in negotiation with the beleaguered apartheid
government.

The process was long and difficult but, with the advent of President F. W. de Klerk, Mandela emerged from
prison and set course for the majority-rule Government of National Unity that was achieved in April 1994.
He then became President of South Africa, recruiting the former president and National Party leader, de
Klerk, as his joint deputy. Throughout this long process Mandela had presented himself as a symbol of non-
racial South Africa, a country in which the discrimination and suffering of apartheid could be set aside. He
demonstrated forgiveness, patriotism, humour, wisdom, compassion, loving kindness and a vision of a united
nation.

This was a messianic role which — for he was by then an old man — he played with amazing stamina around
the world. "Madiba", as he was known at home, was greatly loved, sometimes by the most surprising people.
All South Africans knew that Madiba was the last, best hope of their divided land.

Rolihlahla Mandela — the given name means "to pull a branch of a tree", or more colloquially, "troublemaker"
in Xhosa — was born in a remote village in the Umtata district of the Transkei in 1918. His father was a
member of the Thembu royal house who died young. The boy, brought up in a peasant society, herding cattle
and goats at 5 and initiated by tribal ceremony at 16, was in effect adopted by the Regent of the Thembus,
Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo, and was educated with a view to his becoming a councillor or adviser to the
Xhosa king: he was sent to the Clarkebury Institute in Engcobo, to Healdtown Wesleyan College, and then to
the University College of Fort Hare. He was given the name "Nelson" at his first school by his teacher, Miss
Mdingane, though he never knew why it was chosen.

When the Regent arranged a marriage for his young protégé which did not appeal, Mandela fled to
Johannesburg where his first job was as a night watchman at Crown Mines. He soon met Walter Sisulu, a
young estate agent living in Orlando, who would be one of his dearest lifelong friends and colleagues; Sisulu
arranged an apprenticeship for Mandela with a liberal law firm. In those days Mandela lived in Alexandra, a
black township adjoining some of Johannesburg's most affluent white suburbs — he used to say that he
would always think of "Alex" as his home even after he moved to Soweto.

He was articled in 1943, graduated in the same year, and enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand in
Johannesburg as the only African student in the law faculty. There he met many future political colleagues,
though he did not pass his degree exams. He used to say that there was no single moment when he became
"politicised". He disagreed with what he considered the quietism of older ANC leaders, represented by Dr A.
B. Xuma, president-general of the party, and by 1944 he had associated himself with the new ANC Youth
League. But in those early years Mandela was wary, even critical, of the Communist Party. In 1944 he
married Evelyn Mase, by whom he would have four children, one of whom died in childhood.

The tensions between the younger and older generations in the ANC intensified — these were the years when
the National Party came to power and institutionalised apartheid — and in 1950 Mandela took Dr Xuma's
place on the party's national executive committee. This year was important because it featured the "Day of
Protest" — now remembered as South Africa's Freedom Day though at the time it was only a modest
success. In the same year there was, for Mandela, a reconciliation between what passed as Marxism in South
African circles and his own priority of African nationalism.

He thereafter accepted the Communist Party as an ally of the ANC, and was persuaded — again, after he
had changed his mind — to agree to a civil disobedience movement which was to be known as the Defiance
Campaign. It was, and can be seen with hindsight, a historic moment in the struggle.

In July 1952 the young lawyer was arrested under the Suppression of Communism Act and was given a
suspended sentence. In those days Mandela, and the ANC, were committed to non-violence. Mandela
believed that the South African Government could not be overthrown by protest, let alone by violence. "We
were still amateurs," he would say afterwards.

With Chief Albert Luthuli, the ANC president from 1952, Mandela became the party's first deputy president.
He was "banned" (restricted to Johannesburg and forbidden to publish or to have contact with other people).
In 1952 he had opened the first firm of African lawyers in Johannesburg with his close friend and colleague
Oliver Tambo. They were successful and busy.

In 1953, although his banning had been renewed, Mandela gave the first of his famous speeches, which had
to be read for him, in his absence, at the ANC Transvaal conference. It was called "No Easy Walk to
Freedom" (the phrase was borrowed from Nehru). In 1956, after an unsuccessful schools boycott, the
Congress of the People delivered the "Freedom Charter" which was to be a core document of the next
generation.

Mandela provided a commentary on the "Freedom Charter" to the magazine Liberation, in which he noted:
"The breaking up and democratising of these monopolies will open up fresh fields for the development of a
prosperous non-European bourgeois class. For the first time in the history of this country the non-European
bourgeoisie will have the opportunity to own in their own name and right mills and factories, and trade and
private enterprise will boom and flourish as never before."

In 1956 Mandela was banned yet again, this time for five years. He was arrested in December of that year,
imprisoned in the fort in Johannesburg, and charged with treason. It was at this point that his wife left him,
unable to endure the ordeals which came with his political life. (She had become a Jehovah's Witness; his
children, he later admitted with great sadness, had been near-traumatised by his political career.)

The famous Treason Trial in Pretoria, with 30 accused, lasted from August 1959 to March 1961. The
eventual verdict was not guilty. But a state of emergency had been declared in March 1960, after the
Sharpeville massacre, and after the trial Mandela decided to go underground. Posing usually as a chauffeur or
a servant, he quickly became a "Black Pimpernel" of popular legend as he defied the police for more than a
year, travelling throughout the country as well as abroad, before he was arrested at a road block in Natal.

He had come round to the conviction that non-violence, which he had previously espoused, had to be
abandoned since it seemed manifest that it did not work against a ruthless white-supremacist state. In his
autobiography he would later explain that "we had no option but to turn to violence. I used an old African
expression: "Sebatanaha se bokwe da diatla" (The attacks of the wild beasts cannot be averted with only
bare hands)."

He therefore agreed to the setting up of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military arm of the ANC, of which he was
commander-in-chief. In October 1962, after a trial at which he wore the Xhosa leopard-skin kaross to
illustrate that he was a black man in a white man's court, he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment.

That trial, and sentence, were overtaken by the discovery and capture by the police of almost all the members
of the Umkhonto we Sizwe high command, in Rivonia, an outlying northern suburb of Johannesburg, in July
1961.

The Rivonia trial which lasted from October 1963 to June 1964 attracted great attention throughout the
world. Mandela, sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island — he was 46 — made his most dramatic
speech: "During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. 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."

He had taken his law exams, and passed, as he was waiting the judge's verdict.

Mandela would spend a total of 27 years in prison, most of them on South Africa's Alcatraz, Robben Island.
The early years were particularly grim for him and his companions. They were required to break stones and
then to labour in the limestone quarry (which permanently damaged his eyes), enduring the racist abuse of the
Afrikaner warders while looking out on the idyllic landscape of Table Mountain. Mandela was the leader, and
established his position — one of respect — from warders and fellow prisoners from the beginning.

As the long years passed, conditions slowly improved. Hard labour was phased out for the political prisoners
by 1977, and Mandela later recorded that he could take up gardening and even tennis. He began to write his
memoirs, secretly, which were buried and then smuggled to the mainland. He played Creon in a prison
production of Sophocles's Antigone. He was occasionally visited, when the authorities permitted, by his
second wife Winnie Madikizela, whom he had married before the Treason Trial in 1958 and with whom he
had two daughters. She was herself to be persecuted for many years by the South African officials: her
sufferings on his behalf would for the rest of his life be one of Mandela's greatest regrets. In 1969 his eldest
son, Thembi, was killed in an accident, and the Government refused his request to attend the funeral.

But Robben Island, as it filled with a new generation of political prisoners, was becoming a "university" of
black protest, led by Mandela, Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Mac Maharaj and the rest of his senior colleagues. The
authorities could hardly be unaware of this.

In 1974 the Government, through the Justice Minister, Jimmy Kruger, offered the first hint of negotiation.
Kruger said that he might reduce Mandela's sentence dramatically if he would agree to move to Transkei and
accept the legitimacy of its government. Mandela refused.

The Justice Department commissioned a psychological profile of Mandela in 1980. It revealed that "Mandela
commands all the qualities to be the number one black leader in South Africa. His period in prison has caused
his psycho-political posture to increase rather than decrease, and with this he now has acquired the
characteristic prison-charisma of the contemporary liberation leader."

In 1982, perhaps because the situation on the island was becoming too difficult for the authorities to handle,
Mandela and some of his senior colleagues were transferred to Pollsmoor Prison in a beautiful part of the
Cape peninsula. Conditions were relaxed, including the rules for personal visits. It was 21 years, he later
recalled, since he had been allowed to hold Winnie's hand.

The South African Government, increasingly under pressure at home was embarrassed abroad by the "Free
Mandela" campaign which was vociferous in many countries. In January 1985, President P. W. Botha
offered, again, a conditional freedom, which Mandela rejected.

The true breakthrough came in late 1985 when, after prostate surgery, Mandela was visited in hospital by the
comparatively open-minded Justice Minister, Kobie Coetsee. He was then separated from his colleagues and
moved into a much superior cell.

Mandela decided — it was his own decision, and it was to create problems with the ANC leadership in exile
— that at last, in his own later words, "it was time to talk." He explained that he never had illusions of a
military victory over the white South Africans. During this period he was moving alone, and he understood
that any negotiations would be slow.

The Eminent Persons Group of the Commonwealth came to see him in his prison in February 1986. He
talked again with Coetsee in 1987 and 1988. A secret working group was set up with the Government in
May 1988. By this time Mandela, though still in jail, was being treated by the government almost as an
honoured guest (witness his speedy nursing home treatment for TB in that year). His relationship with his
warders had also changed, as though they had now discovered in themselves a respect, even affection, for
their country's future leader.

Mandela's life at this stage had its farcical elements. He was having secret conversations with a special
government committee (he recorded 47 meetings with them), without authority from his party-in-exile. He
was frequently escorted out of prison, although South Africa's most famous convict, and taken for
recreational drives throughout the Cape — this evidently offered opportunities for escape, which he
eschewed.

He was moved, in December 1988, to a comfortable cottage in the gardens of the Victor Verster Prison
outside Paarl, where he had white warders to wait on him — they would become admirers, even devotees.
But he refused all suggestions of release. In July 1989 he had a secret and apparently relaxed meeting with
President P. W. Botha, who would shortly be superseded by F. W. de Klerk. In February 1990, de Klerk
lifted various bans and released ANC political prisoners.

Mandela chose to delay his own release — refusing to leave prison before his colleagues — until February
11, 1990, when, to ecstatic scenes of triumph, televised worldwide and watched by countless millions, he and
Winnie emerged hand-in-hand. He had been in prison for 27 years.

There followed a difficult and confusing period between the old and the new. Members of the Afrikaner
establishment and the ANC-in-exile leadership had been holding a series of meetings, secretly, between
November 1987 and May 1990, in Europe. After the release of Walter Sisulu in October 1989 it took more
than two years for constitutional talks to get under way at the Codesa negotiations which were held in a venue
between Johannesburg and Pretoria.

Mandela, from February 1990, was technically only deputy president of the ANC (the long-exiled, ailing
Oliver Tambo being president), but no one doubted that he was the leader.

There were growing and visible tensions with F. W. de Klerk. The "Armed Struggle" was suspended by the
ANC. Mandela toured Africa, and the world, to universal acclamation.

Early in 1992 he announced that he and Winnie were to separate, in circumstances which would have
attracted scandal-mongering but which he diverted by the evident pain and honesty of his public explanation.
He wrote in his autobiography, with extraordinary candour, "My own return was also more difficult for her
than it was for me. She married a man who soon left her; that man became a myth, and then that myth
returned home and proved to be just a man after all."

After that Mandela, it seemed, could do no wrong. In late 1992 he agreed to the concept of a government of
national unity, which would include the Nationalists who had imprisoned him for so many years. When the
radical and popular Chris Hani was assassinated by white right-wingers, Mandela appeared urgently on
television and succeeded in defusing very dangerous racial tensions.

In June 1993 it was agreed that there would be a majority-rule election in April 1994 — and when the ANC
won a 62 per cent victory, amid extraordinary scenes of racial reconciliation and hope for the future, Mandela
volunteered that he was relieved that the party had not achieved a full two-thirds majority, because he wanted
not an ANC government but a government of the whole country.

The new South African Government was installed on May 10, 1994, and Nelson Mandela was sworn in as
President in Pretoria as Defence Force jets displayed the colours of the new national flag over his head.
Beside him stood the former president, F. W. de Klerk, now willing to serve as one of his two deputies; the
two men shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 when, in his speech in Oslo, Mandela saluted de Klerk: "He
had the courage to admit that a terrible wrong had been done to our country and people through the
imposition of the system of apartheid."

As President, Mandela continued to maintain and emphasise the process of reconciliation. Sometimes he took
this to dramatic lengths: in 1994, for example, he called on the widow of Hendrik Verwoerd, the chief
architect of apartheid, and visited Orania, the remote settlement where a handful of Afrikaners continued to
pursue the dream of a whites-only state; in 1995 he met the former president P. W. Botha, and also his old
prosecutor in the trials, Percy Yutar (both of whom spoke kindly of their visitor).

He had a remarkable gift for the appropriate, emollient gesture: in 1995, for instance, he attended the final of
the Rugby World Cup — traditionally the game of South African whites — wearing a Springbok jersey and
embracing the victorious South African (white) captain.

From his Johannesburg house, in affluent Houghton, he would take his morning stroll, chatting with the
neighbours; he even turned up at a bar mitzvah, invited by the boy, to the delight of Johannesburg's influential
Jewish community. He could charm any audience, whether in a township rally, or a television studio, or a
business banquet. He was always, simply, himself.

Mandela understood that these first five years were crucial to South Africa's prospects of a peaceful
emergence from the legacy of apartheid: the foundations of a multiracial constitution had been laid, and the
culture of inter-racial harmony and negotiation had been planted, but he well knew that things could so easily
go wrong. He must have understood that he was the all-important figure if South Africa was to be held
together.

Later he admitted that the transition had succeeded better than his wildest dreams: he suggested that the white
right-wing had been on the point of starting a civil war in April 1994 and a bloodbath had been averted only
narrowly.

From his inauguration he made it clear that he would step down at the next election, in 1999, when he would
be in his eighties. This inevitably brought a contest for the succession, which was quickly resolved when Cyril
Ramaphosa retreated to a career in business and Thabo Mbeki, son of Govan, one of Mandela's oldest
friends and colleagues, emerged as heir-apparent. Mbeki had been brought up in exile in Britain and had been
groomed for this role by Oliver Tambo.

Mandela's only real embarrassment was the activity of his wife Winnie. She was always a flamboyant
personality, and her indiscretions were increasingly distressing for him. When she was Deputy Minister for
Arts, he accepted her apology for publicly criticising the Government, but in March 1995 he dismissed her;
their daughters demonstrated their support for her, though, outside the townships, Winnie attracted little
sympathy.

In March 1996 Mandela endured the ordeal of a public divorce hearing in which he admitted, after evidence
of Winnie's adultery, that "I was the loneliest man during the period I stayed with her".

In 1998, on his 80th birthday, Mandela married Graça Machel, the widow of President Samora Machel of
Mozambique, who had been killed in an air crash in 1986. With Graça, Mandela finally found marital
happiness, surrounded by a huge family of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Although Mandela was the all-present figure in South African affairs in these years, his every move and
remark reported in the press, his affection in the heart of the public never diminishing, he chose not to be a
"strong" president.

He saw himself, he once said, as the chairman of the board, or perhaps he envisaged himself as the traditional
tribal elder, deliberately distancing himself from the day-to-day decisions and conflicts of government; he
rarely chaired Cabinet meetings, for example. He was famous for his habit of rising long before dawn and
taking a street walk — to the horror of his bodyguards — and then working a long day, often not finishing
before midnight.

He liked to be called "Madiba" — a Xhosa term of respect — and as the years went by more and more
South Africans of all races came to refer to him by this name. He published his memoirs, Long Walk to
Freedom, which, though the later chapters were ghosted by a skilful US journalist, is a moving and eloquent
book which became a worldwide bestseller. The royalties were given to charity (as was one third of his
presidential salary).
He did not claim that everything was perfect: on the contrary. In January 1997 for example, he spoke of
"fundamental and serious mistakes" in the Government's first two and a half years and referred to factionalism,
problems in provincial leadership, disastrous errors by the health department and, more generally, the fact that
"we are not moving as fast as we would like". He agreed that crime was a major problem, though he also
insisted that the crime wave was in part a legacy of apartheid.

In December 1997 he alarmed many of his white admirers when, in a marathon speech marking his retirement
as president of the African National Congress (he would continue as South Africa's President until 1999), he
harshly criticised continuing white racism and resistance to social and economic change. It was generally
assumed that this intemperate speech had been written by Mr Mbeki.

Perhaps his greatest error as President was his failure to recognise and publicise the scourge of Aids. In
retirement he admitted that he had been advised not to raise the subject before the 1994 election because it
would not prove to be a popular issue. It was believed that black South Africans who had endured the
policing of many aspects of their lives under apartheid would not take kindly to their sexual habits being
discussed and examined.

None of this detracted from his popularity both inside South Africa and around the world. The sweetness of
his smile must have been one of the world's best-known images. His innate courtesy and his natural charm
were remarked upon by everyone who met him. He could relax the most difficult or official occasion, whether
he was wearing one of his large collection of casual (but elegant) shirts or breaking into his stiff-jointed dance:
the "Madiba shuffle".

Mandela's willingness to step down as President in 1999 will probably stand as his most important political
legacy in South Africa. But while he liked to portray himself as just a "pensioner", his fame and iconic status
grew in the years following his retirement.

Without the burden of presidential politics, Mandela could adopt the role of informal leader of the developing
world that he retained until his death. In old age his life was busier than most people in the peak of life. He
travelled around the world, communicated with international leaders and spoke out on the issues of the day.
He established a Mandela Foundation which raised and distributed money to worthy causes in South Africa
and he started to write (without a ghost writer) a second volume of memoirs which he told friends would
cover the presidential period.

He eventually abandoned this in its intended form, but a passages from the material he had written for it
appeared in Conversations with Myself, published in 2010 and incorporating diaries, calendars, letters and
transcripts from recordings, as well as straight narrative.

Celebrities and world leaders visited Mandela, eager to touch the hem of his garment. Some critics wondered
whether there were any celebrities that he had not met. He tried to avoid upstaging President Mbeki in public,
but it was widely reported that Mbeki had not been his choice as successor.

On the subject of Aids Mandela campaigned with an intensity that demonstrated that he knew that this had
been the central failing of his administration. In August 2002 he visited and publicly embraced Zackie
Achmat, South Africa's leading Aids campaigner. But his foundation concentrated primarily on the plight of
children both in South Africa and around the world. He loved to tell the story of a young girl who had told
him that he was a silly old man who had broken the law and been sent to prison.

Mandela played an important role in attempting to transmit the lessons of the South African peace-making
process to other conflicts around the world. He persuaded President Gaddafi to release the suspects in the
Lockerbie airline bombing to be tried in the Netherlands. He attempted to play a behind-the-scenes role in
the Middle East peace process and he provided a crucial voice to the dispossessed of the developing world
who felt vulnerable in the face of an interventionist United States. In 2003 one wing of the Mandela
Foundation merged with the Rhodes Foundation to create a philanthropic organisation.

At the age of 85, in June 2004, Mandela announced that he was retiring from "retirement". The award to
South Africa that year of the hosting of the 2010 football World Cup symbolised the complete rehabilitation
of the country on the world's sporting stage, something that could never have happened without him.

Six years later, on a cold night at the final in July 2010, he and his wife Graça waved to nearly 85,000
spectators before they together witnessed Spain gain its first World Cup with victory over the
Netherlands.The fans at Soccer City stadium in Johannesburg rose to their feet to give a thunderous welcome
to their living legend, His relative silence during the last years of his life only intensified the South African
hunger for the Mandela "brand". There was a minor scandal and a court case over paintings which dealers
claimed were Mandela's work. Numerous books were published, although few improved on Anthony
Sampson's authorised biography (1999). Meanwhile the Mandela Foundation reinvented itself as an
impressive research archive.

In 2008 while visiting London, Mandela broke his silence to quietly condemn President Robert Mugabe of
Zimbabwe and in 2009 Mandela twice appeared on public platforms in support of Jacob Zuma, who was
elected President of South Africa in April 2009. In the same election, Mandela's grandson, Mandla, was
elected as an ANC member of parliament.

By the end of his life, Mandela's iconic status had long transcended orthodox political meaning. His long walk
had taken on mythical qualities and his fame had propelled him beyond "father of the nation" status into some
sort of celebrity stratosphere.

In addition to his Nobel laureateship Mandela was the recipient of countless awards from overseas. Notable
among them were the US's highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and honorary
membership of the Order of Merit from Britain. He was also an honorary Queen's Counsel and an honorary
citizen of Canada. India awarded him its highest civilian award the Bharat Ratna and he had been the last
recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. His wife Graça was
appointed an honorary DBE in 2007.

Nelson Mandela was born on July 18, 1918. He died on December 5, 2013, aged 95. He is survived by her,
and by the daughters of his marriage to Winnie Mandela. There were two sons and two daughters of his first
marriage to Evelyn Mase who died in 2004; both sons and one daughter predeceased him.