How Mandela made us human again

As a South African journalist who has worked for almost 25 years for various publications, I’ve covered many milestones in our history as sports, political and economics correspondent, including the terms of our democratically elected presidents Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. While at the now-defunct anti-Apartheid newspaper, SOUTH, in the early 1990s, I witnessed the unbanning of our liberation movements including the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress, the Azanian People’s Organization and the South African Communist Party.
I covered the Olympic Games in Barcelona in 1992 — when South Africa did not yet have a national flag or an anthem — which marked our return to the international sporting community after decades of isolation and sanctions. When our athletes won medals, we had to stand to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy as our anthem, which was bizarre and quite poignant at the same time. I joyously reported on our first democratic elections in 1994 and the election of Mandela. I witnessed our new negotiated Constitution put in place in 1997, guaranteeing everyone equality before the law, regardless of color and ethnicity. I also reported how the last racist laws of the National Party government was finally removed from our country’s statute books; and then recorded, with unconcealed glee, the death of the 100-year-old National Party that had been in power from 1948. Members of the Nats, as we called them, joined other parties in the ever-changing South African political landscape, resulting in many of the oppressors becoming members of the party they had once banned and vilified.
It was a glorious time. In 1999, I also became a father for a third time, of another son. Unlike his two older brothers, who were born in 1984 and 1990, my youngest one was what we call in South African parlance a “Born-Free.” In other words, he was born in a free and democratic South Africa.
But of all these good and bad memories, one moment will always stand out and which I have written about several times over the years in various publications. This was the day Mandela was released. I was a 22-year-old freelance reporter at a local daily when we heard Mandela was going to be released from Victor Verster Prison in Paarl, about 50km from the Cape Town city center. On that Sunday Feb. 11, 1990, we all hurried off to the Grand Parade, determined to catch a glimpse of the man who had been incarcerated for over two decades just a few kilometers away on Robben Island. It was a boisterous, noisy crowd with people dancing and singing freedom songs, and waving the black, green and gold flags of the African National Congress. Speakers on the balcony were giving us regular updates about what was happening. We heard that Mandela had just walked out of Victor Verster prison with his then wife Winnie. He was now traveling to us to give his first speech since his release.
Late that afternoon, with Darling Street in front of the Grand Parade in shadow, he appeared. There was a deafening, sustained roar from the crowd. Even now, as I write about this incident for the umpteenth time, I have goose bumps on my arms and neck, a lump in my throat, and tears in my eyes.
I have never been able to fully articulate the emotions I experienced along with the many thousands that day, but it was one of the deepest and most profound feelings I have ever felt. It was of course Mandela’s release, but it was also ours. It was finally a recognition that we too were human beings.
No one would ever again tell me I couldn’t sit on a “Whites-Only” park bench, to take a third class train carriage, live in a certain area, swim on a particular beach, or refuse me entry into a restaurant or cinema because of the color of my skin. It is this that I’m grateful to Mandela for. He was the symbol of our freedom. Hamba Kahle (Go well) Madiba.

- The writer is a senior journalist based in the Gulf region.