A big story onthe life of nelson mendela
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On 11 February 1990, the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison, only a handful of people knew what he looked like.
Such had been the resonance of the "Release Mandela" campaign that his was one of the best-known names in the world. Yet had he wandered unannounced that afternoon into Cape Town's Parade, where 50,000 people were waiting for him, and mingled among the crowd, no one would have known who he was.
The concern that a lot of us who were on his side felt was that he would fall short of the vast expectations his legend had generated. On a couple of counts, he did not let us down. He was quite as dapper as we had been led to believe he had been in the 1950s, when he used to have his suits made at the same tailor as the gold-and-diamond magnate Harry Oppenheimer; and he had a fabulous 1,000-volt smile. Yet the very first public speech he made, at dusk that day before a thinning crowd that had waited six hours for him to appear, did not turn out to be the earth-shaking moment many had hoped it would be. The perception would be confirmed over time that he was no orator, like Martin Luther King or the Nobel peace prize-winning Archbishop Desmond Tutu. His delivery was drearily declamatory; his voice, monotone and metallic.
And main=The next morning - the first on which Mandela would wake up a free man after 27 years and six months behind bars - held what seemed an even stiffer test: a news conference before some 200 local and international journalists. Mandela had only appeared before a TV camera once. It had been a one-on-one interview with a British ITN reporter a year before his arrest, in 1961. By 1990, every politician alive had undergone a course on how to handle himself on TV. And here was Mandela, who had gone to jail long before TV arrived in South Africa, about to face the public exercise politicians enjoyed least. Not only was there no script, there was no way of knowing what the journalists might ask. In Mandela's case, the potential for disaster was particularly high. It would be almost impossible, or so most of us thought at the time, for him to live up to his billing. That less than charismatic speech the evening before had served to confirm the general misgivings.
And, after all, he was 71 years old; he had spent nearly three decades in bleak isolation. How well could he be?
How savvy? How up to the task?
The news conference took place at 7am in the garden of Archbishop Tutu's official Cape Town residence, where Mandela and his wife, Winnie, had spent the night. The mansion, in the gabled Cape Dutch style, sat on the steep, thickly wooded foothills of Table Mountain, whose rectangular outline Mandela had gazed upon across the water from Robben Island for 20 of his prison years. When Mandela emerged from the house, Winnie by his side, the dew still sat on the leaves. The couple smiled and waved their way down a set of stone steps to the lawn where the press awaited. Tutu, jigging with delight, led the way, eager as a Shakespearean courtier on his monarch's wedding day. There was just the one jolt, when Mandela stopped at his table and glanced at an artillery of furry cylindrical objects that would be arrayed before him when he sat down.
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