The Long Walk Ends: Nelson Mandela Is Released

On the afternoon of 11 February 1990, Nelson Mandela walked through the gates of Victor Verster Prison near Paarl, hand in hand with his wife Winnie, his fist raised to a crowd of supporters and the world’s cameras. He was 71 years old and had been a prisoner for 27 years. [2]

Twenty-seven years

Mandela had been arrested in August 1962 and then, at the Rivonia Trial in 1964, sentenced to life imprisonment for sabotage as a leader of the African National Congress’s armed wing. From the dock he declared that a democratic and free society was “an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” [3] He spent 18 years in the harsh limestone-quarry world of Robben Island before transfers to Pollsmoor Prison and finally to Victor Verster, where he lived his last months of captivity in a warder’s cottage while secretly negotiating with the government. [1]

The dam breaks

The release did not come from nowhere. South Africa in the late 1980s was under intensifying international sanctions, internal revolt, and economic strain. On 2 February 1990, the new state president, F. W. de Klerk, stunned parliament by lifting the ban on the ANC and other liberation movements and announcing that Mandela would be freed. [1] Nine days later, the gates opened. That evening Mandela addressed an enormous crowd from the balcony of Cape Town’s City Hall, telling them he stood before them “not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people.” [3]

From prisoner to president

What followed was four years of fraught, often violent negotiation between the ANC and the government over the shape of a post-apartheid state. Mandela and de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for that work. [1] On 27 April 1994, South Africans of all races voted together in the country’s first democratic election; on 10 May, Mandela was inaugurated as its first Black president. [3]

Why the moment endures

The image of Mandela’s walk to freedom became one of the twentieth century’s defining pictures because of what it did not lead to: the racial civil war that many considered inevitable. Instead, the released prisoner preached reconciliation with the system’s beneficiaries while dismantling the system itself — a demonstration, watched live around the planet, that a seemingly permanent injustice could be ended by negotiation. [2]