WHEN NELSON Mandela at 71 memorably strolled those last few yards from Victor Verster Prison 20 years ago today, ordinary South Africans had not heard his voice in a generation – 27 years. Their image of the man, until a day before his release, was the last published photograph taken in a prison garden in 1968.
And yet not only his people but millions the world over felt they knew him intimately and revered a figure who had become from the shadows of a jail cell a moral beacon to the world, one of the great figures of the 20th century. His persona was the symbol in Africa, as the falling Berlin Wall was in Europe, of the closing of a brutal, defining chapter of the era’s history.
On release he did not disappoint. He walked free as the humble, uncontested, and still uncompromising leader of black South Africa whose vision of a multiracial democracy and determination to embrace the old enemy had already won him grudging trust and some affection in the white community. He wrote in his autobiography of his own astonishment, driving from prison through the rich farm country of the Cape, to see white families as he passed raising the clenched fist of his beloved ANC. Four years on, he would be president.
Now he is frail and growing deaf, intellectually sharp though forgetful, tended by his adored wife Graça Machel and all but retired from public life, although he visits parliament today to mark the anniversary of his release. His foundation recently issued a statement saying he was "as well as anyone can expect of someone who is 91 years old". But he remains, as Mondli Makhanya, editor in chief of the local Sunday Timesputs it "the glue that binds South Africa together". "The closer the inevitable becomes," Makhanya says, "we all fear that moment. There's the love of the man, but there's also the question: Who will bind us?"
He was an impossible act to follow as president and both Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma have elicited inevitable unfavourable comparisons. South Africa is now a vibrant democracy but millions still live in poverty. Racial divisions and endemic criminality persist, fed by persisting deep economic inequality – income inequality between different race groups has actually increased since 1995 while a third of the country’s 50 million people live on less than $2 a day. The economy under the ANC saw its longest spurt of growth on record until the fallout from the global financial crisis pushed it into recession at the start of 2009. And although Africa’s biggest economy is now growing again, its prospects lag behind other emerging markets and analysts warn the country needs significant restructuring to address infrastructure and labour market constraints.
Mandela, typically belittling his own achievement as he assumed the presidency, warned “the truth is that we are not yet free, we have merely achieved the freedom to be free; the right not to be oppressed ... I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are a great many more hills to climb”.
But the freedom to be free is a mighty hill, a mighty legacy.