Free at Last The World Against Apartheid: Have You Heard from Johannesburg?

This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

There's a Zulu saying,

which basically says that people don't go in one direction like water.

I think, with water,

we can block it this way, or you can put the dams, you can do anything,

it will still find a way of getting around, whatever the obstacles,

because it's got one course that it's determined to get to.

It's moving down towards the sea.

Freedom. Despite decades of struggle,

for black South Africans, it was still just a distant dream.

But now, at last, the tide was beginning to turn.

Marches. Protests.

The civil disobedience,

the activities of the trade union movement,

put the maximum possible international pressure to isolate the apartheid regime,

to weaken it.

Inside, outside, they were all coming together.

There's a total onslaught against South Africa...

..to destabilise our country and to make us give in,

and to make us accept dictates from outside.

Nelson Mandela was still locked up in prison,

but the apartheid regime was now under extreme pressure.

There would be no let up until he and his country were free.

# Hey, said what's the word?

# Tell me brother, have you heard

# From Johannesburg?

# Tell me what's the word now?

# Sister-woman have you heard

# From Johannesburg? #

1978, and PW Botha becomes South Africa's new prime minister.

By now, the country had become an international pariah.

South Africa faced a UN arms embargo,

a worldwide sporting boycott,

and the threat of economic sanctions.

After years of struggle, the ANC's campaign

to isolate the country was proving highly successful.

Something had to give.

PW Botha made a very important speech at a place called Upington

in 1979, and he said,

"We will have to adapt or die."

REPORTER: For PW Botha, the road to reform

began in the grounds of the union building,

South Africa's White House. For PW Botha,

an overwhelming mandate for reform,

as whites voted in favour of a new three-chamber parliament.

Whites are joined by coloureds and Indians, blacks were excluded.

I think the whites have an existential dilemma.

On the one hand, they live in Africa,

but, on the other hand, they're susceptible to pressures

that come from the white world, Europe and the Americas, etc.

So there has been a desire on their part to want to be seen

not to be so bad after all, you know?

Because they have to be accepted into the white family

of so-called civilised nations.

For PW Botha, there was this great hope

that the Tricameral Parliament will be a breakthrough.

He and his government expected that the whole world,

the Western world, will be very impressed.

He went on this big European tour

to convince Europe about the importance of reform.

He even had an interview with the Pope.

The most significant stop on Botha's tour was the United Kingdom.

Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister,

strongly opposed any sanctions against South Africa.

Quite a lot has been done in the right direction.

There's very little apartheid in sport in South Africa.

When you've got them coming in the right direction, don't hit out.

Encourage the further movement in the direction which you want to go,

but do also keep alive the strongest economy in the whole of Africa,

and that is South Africa, and keep it alive

for all of the people eventually to govern

and play their part in government.

All over Britain, the anti-apartheid movement had been gaining ground.

# Fighting to stop this mass deception

# Fighting to scrap the pass-laws... #

Botha's official visit had rapidly become a fiasco.

We had demonstrations that stopped the underground,

stopped the whole of London, on the day he arrived.

The original intention of Botha coming to Downing Street

they had to call off, and they had to fly him

by helicopter to Chequers, out of the country,

and even then we had people demonstrating.

# Fighting to change the world

# And here... #

So, here's a leader of a country

invited as a guest by the British government.

No hotel in Britain would put him up, no aircraft would fly him,

no train would have him,

and those unions say so, and she doesn't shake hands with him

because she can't afford to give a photograph

of shaking hands with him.

Margaret Thatcher was forced to change tack.

Botha comes to this meeting, meets Mrs Thatcher,

this has been the crowning point of his European tour, and what happens?

We have the biggest ever anti-apartheid demonstration here,

and what Downing Street and the government says afterwards,

it's an endorsement of the issues we were raising,

rather than the issues Botha was raising.

Mrs Thatcher made it abundantly clear

that we do find and we'll always find it unacceptable

for a person's rights to depend on the colour of their skin.

We hope to see a political development

that will meet the aspirations of all the people of South Africa.

Nobody can rightfully decide for South Africa

how to keep its house in order.

That is our responsibility and our responsibility alone,

that is all I say.

Botha's tour was a disaster.

Europe was not impressed with his reforms,

and in South Africa, opposition was about to explode.

In a bizarre way, PW Botha actually gave us the impetus

to form a national movement, because what he had tried to do

was to try and say to coloureds and Indians,

"We give you a little bit of a better deal

"than we'd give to other people, the race of the black population."

Will there ever be "one man one vote" in South Africa?

No.

We knew, as coloured people and Indian people,

if we allowed this to happen, that the solidarity we had built up

through the black consciousness movement in the 1970s,

that that solidarity would be shattered.

What we needed was for everybody to come together

to show our united opposition and form a united front.

Across South Africa, the call went out to all races.

"Come to Cape Town under the banner of the new United Democratic Front."

SINGING

Communities sent delegates, so you'd have this bus

arriving from a particular area in the country

and they were carrying the hopes and aspirations of those people,

and the spirit was fantastic.

SINGING

I mean, here we were,

every single political organisation had been suppressed,

driven underground, its leaders thrown in jail, tortured.

Biko had died in our midst.

So, one would have expected...

I mean, I wouldn't say that people would be intimidated

but at least more subdued. But there was nothing of that.

No amount of intimidation,

jail, punishment,

house arrest will stop the people from marching to freedom today.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

This is the same government

who thinks that they can play God in the lives of people,

the same government who detain us without trial

and torture us in their jails

and ban those who stand up and speak for justice,

who throw them on that infamous island or lock them up in Baltimore Prison.

This is the government who want you to go and vote.

You must be crazy to do that!

By the time the government was ready with its constitution,

we had convinced the vast majority of the coloured and Indian communities

to boycott those elections.

We engaged in what I call the politics of refusal.

Our refusal to be manipulated, to be bought by the apartheid regime.

The success of that first refusal had lain the foundations

for the work of the United Democratic Front in the 1980s.

We've got to keep going.

A general build-up...

..of a massive force in our country that says no to apartheid.

A new South Africa now, today.

Not tomorrow.

CHANTING

People started to challenge things around rent struggles,

housing struggles.

Black and white, Indians and coloureds...

Communities coming together to make demands

to a government we all pay rates and taxes to.

My freedom is God-given!

I don't go around saying, "pass, please".

It was a struggle that was in churches.

It was a struggle that was on factory floors.

REPORTER: In Durban today, a strike at seven major bakeries.

The 1,800 workers felt secure enough to stay inside the gates,

stopping the last loaves they produced from getting out.

Suddenly, the traditional economic supremacy of whites has been taken away.

It really was a very, very strong truly democratic movement

that represented very ordinary men and women.

And that was the strength of the UDF,

that ordinary people were taking charge of their own lives.

And there was a very strong engagement with the ANC,

the underground here and people in the neighbouring states,

ANC people based in the neighbouring states.

You've tuned into Radio Freedom,

the voice of the African National Congress.

'The time has come that the rest of the black masses of our country,

'all 25 million of us,'

should join in one determined offensive

to make all of our country ungovernable.

It was the internal conflict, the internal dissensions,

ungovernability, chaos,

created by the UDF,

that finally brought South Africa to its knees.

REPORTER: The government hoped it would end.

They wanted an end to the day-by-day violence

that's left the country's black townships virtually ungovernable.

They want to be impossible.

The people were simply no longer prepared to listen.

I must say, I was afraid.

Because I have a strange feeling of my stomach

that we are...

We are also going to experience

a bloody French Revolution in South Africa.

The ANC's armed wing now stepped up its bombing campaign

in the centre of major cities.

Listen, my friends, listen.

Destroy white South Africa,

and our influence in this subcontinent of Southern Africa

and this country will drift into factions, strife, chaos and poverty.

APPLAUSE

In July 1985, PW Botha declared a state of emergency throughout South Africa.

PW Botha coined the phrase that there's a total onslaught,

a total Communist onslaught against South Africa.

It was against the white civilisation,

it was against Christianity,

it was against capitalism, etc.

and that therefore we need a total strategy,

and billions and billions was spent on defence.

GUNSHOT

That's when the Army started to move into townships,

literally occupying townships.

Sometimes it was almost as many soldiers in the township as what there were residents.

Hey, somebody's there. Block him! Block him, get up there.

You saw these roadblocks.

What they then did was stop buses and they really beat people up.

All manner of things happened in that period.

People disappeared, people I knew very well.

Some people poisoned.

People were dumped into drums of acid and disappeared.

People were dumped in rivers with crocodiles, you know, killed.

You'd be walking off somewhere, and the next thing you'd be gone.

There are still some people who haven't been accounted for.

It's a weasel!

So when I think back about what we achieved,

at the same time, all these images of these people that one knew

that had lost their lives.

SINGING

In response, the ANC increased the level of its attacks.

If you're being attacked, if you're being beaten up every day,

if you're being shot at, if you're being insulted

and subjected to inhumanities and indignities,

and you're a man, you're a human being, and this is being done to you

by another human being, you can put up with this for some time,

but you do reach a point where you feel you must resist and you must fight back.

REPORTER: The ANC's guerrillas once took elaborate precautions

to avoid hurting white civilians, but no longer.

We're moving away from this level of precaution,

and we'll continue, of course, to calculate on what will this mean for civilians?

And we're absolutely certain

that many civilians will be caught in the crossfire.

20 people were hurt in the latest bomb attack outside a supermarket.

15 bombs have gone off in urban areas this year,

nearly half of them since the state of emergency began three weeks ago.

Mounting such a major campaign

required the constant movement of ANC forces.

People had gone out of the country for training

and had come back into the country.

I had to be constantly in the neighbouring countries,

the borders of South Africa,

which became the important conduit for contact with people

coming from inside the country out, and going back.

We used to cross quietly, clandestinely into South Africa.

So Mac Maharaj came to Amsterdam

and he explained this all to me.

He said, "What we're going to need are very special skills.

"We're going to need people who can disguise people,

"not just amateurs, professional people, the best people there are.

She had access in her network to dentists

who were able to do false teeth that will change your face,

and she had access to a lot of artists in the theatre world.

Conny Braam's disguises allowed key ANC members

to operate secretly within South Africa.

Now, you can bring leadership into South Africa,

but, without a base, they can't operate.

So the idea was that I'd recruit people, preferably couples,

they would emigrate to South Africa, have a job, buy a house,

a car, preferably a big house of course with a big wall around it,

a job, a social life, everything,

and then they would have servants, like all white people have servants.

But these would be, of course, very special servants.

I mean, a gardener... You can let your imagination work from there.

And in the kitchen could be... You never know who's a minister now!

This was a highly secret operation, only known by four people,

of course including Oliver Tambo.

It was his idea, he was the main responsible person for this.

I agreed with Oliver to develop an entire new communications system.

Computers and modems - I didn't know about it all.

And through that, I linked Nelson Mandela with Oliver Tambo.

Now, there was one weak point in that whole communication system, and it was the new floppy disk.

New coding had to go via Amsterdam to South Africa every three weeks.

I could only think of one category of people who fly in all the time -

air hostesses, stewardesses.

Conny's stewardess was able to pass customs easily.

She became a magnificent courier.

I then sent Mandela's lawyer to go and visit Nelson.

We agreed on a particular mode by which messages would come to him.

And then it would go back.

Now, for the first time in 20 years,

Oliver Tambo could communicate with his old friend and comrade

Nelson Mandela in prison.

They could actually talk to each other.

From strategic to practical questions,

there was an overwhelming load of issues.

And the notes in these archives will show how

they would meticulously work at the formulation.

So the South African government

thought they separated him from his organisation,

underestimating us!

Especially clever Mac.

# Whoa, Nelson Mandela

# We all receive your hand. #

By now, Mandela's organisation had guerrilla bases in Angola,

and offices throughout the countries bordering South Africa.

The Frontline States.

I treated Oliver Tambo as head of state,

just away illegally from his country.

We were going to allow them to set up their organisations on our soil.

-# Praise be to God

-Praise be, praise be, praise be

# Bless our great Zambia... #

'We could have stayed away from an active

'but special struggle against Apartheid.'

And the rest of Africa would have understood and appreciated that.

But I went ahead and participated.

South Africa, it was very hard.

We were almost in a kind of state of war with them

and they were warned about the dangers

that they will cause to their own people

if they continue accommodating terrorist bases.

They attacked Maseru, where they killed citizens of Maseru.

They attacked Mozambique, Maputo, Matola.

They would kidnap people in the Frontline States,

and they even went to war in Angola.

One day, about 11, one Saturday morning, we heard bombs.

I got the shock of my life.

There were 600 people dead.

Before the end comes,

we expect...

..rivers of blood to flow.

The streams have started.

And it will take the international community only...

We are helpless.

..to restrict the duration of the slaughter.

For decades, Tambo had appealed for sanctions from the West,

arguing that this would bring the apartheid government to the negotiating table.

Sanctions are a weapon that the international community

can and must use against the racist regime.

A weapon that can weaken Pretoria's capacity

to maintain its aggressive posture.

The South African government is under no obligation

to negotiate the future of the country with any organisation

that proclaims a goal of creating a Communist state

and uses terrorist tactics and violence to achieve it.

I will have nothing to do with any organisation

that practices violence.

I've never seen anyone from the ANC, PLO or the IRA,

and would not do so.

Oliver had to carry the case for the African National Congress

into hostile territory, into all the countries of Western Europe,

into the United States.

Initially, the doors were closed to him.

CHANTING: ANC! ANC!

But in the very countries whose leaders refused to meet Oliver Tambo,

grassroots opposition had been growing for decades.

With the UDF's success in South Africa,

these international campaigns would finally be victorious.

All over the world were these anti-apartheid movements.

So many people for the same cause.

Millions and millions there must have been.

'Out there in the world were people who morally felt so offended

'by what was happening to us that they took huge risks.

'People were beaten up by police in their own countries.'

We had created a climate internationally.

It was directly related to what was happening at home.

As struggle escalated in the country, you got greater support.

The international isolation of the apartheid regime

was not because the leaders of those countries made that decision.

It came from the grassroots in those countries,

and people must know it made a huge difference.

In America, a wave of demonstrations erupted on campuses,

in city councils and, finally, in Congress.

President Reagan has fought long and hard

to prevent Congress from imposing new economic sanctions

against South Africa.

Recently, even leaders of his own party begged him to stop.

He didn't. Today, he lost.

The Senate joined the House in overriding Mr Reagan's veto.

And, in fact, in many countries it was a criminal offence

to lend money to the South African government.

So it was a terribly, terribly difficult time to try

and keep this economy afloat.

And I think that, quite literally,

the apartheid state was becoming bankrupt.

REPORTER: Britain has done an about-turn on its policy on South Africa.

It's offered to meet Oliver Tambo,

the leader of the African National Congress.

It will be the first meeting between a minister and this organisation

which is banned in South Africa.

'It was a tremendous success.

'It turned the whole of public opinion round to the extent

'that a number of Conservative MPs'

would say bluntly in Parliament

that apartheid was morally wrong and indefensible.

Mr Tambo, could we ask you to come to the microphone, sir?

-What are you all doing here?

-We hope you'll tell us something.

'It's a sea change of opinion.'

That whole sea change of opinion is what we were looking for.

Thank you very much. Thanks very much.

HE CHUCKLES

You have turned me into a little film star!

LAUGHTER

-REPORTER:

-This man, Oliver Tambo, who the Reagan Administration

once considered a Communist and a terrorist,

became a Washington VIP today.

A symbol of the administration's abrupt shift from a policy

of dealing exclusively with South Africa's white minority government,

to opening a dialogue with the black nationalists who want to destroy it.

By the end of the decade,

the ANC would have more official international missions

than the South African government had embassies.

We knew we would need that solidarity

during the next phase of our struggle,

which is to negotiate, peacefully,

a solution to the problems of South Africa.

We have said, the first step,

the very first one,

which would lead us to consider the possibility of negotiations

as a realistic way out of the situation

would be the release of Nelson Mandela

and other political prisoners.

Why is this unacceptable?

# Free

# Free

# Free, free, free Nelson Mandela. #

By now, Nelson Mandela had become a household name.

This was no accident.

The general advice we got from the British anti-apartheid movement,

from a lot of others - that you need a face, you need a name.

# Free

# Nelson Mandela

# 21 years in captivity

# Shoes too small to fit his feet. #

Before we started, nobody cared.

There wasn't public consciousness of who Nelson Mandela was.

Mandela's transformation from a largely unknown jailed dissident

to a world famous celebrity was the result of a deliberate strategy

of the anti-apartheid movement.

In Britain, we got the largest number of institutions

named after Nelson Mandela.

Gardens at the University of Leeds were Mandela Gardens.

Local authority smashes down old houses,

builds a whole new one, there's Mandela.

In the end, the street where we had our office -

Mandela Street.

In Glasgow, the South African Consulate,

the street outside it was named Nelson Mandela Street!

Scientists from Leeds University believe they may have found

the particle from which all others are built.

By April this year, the particle had a name - Mandela.

One has to show a bit of courage and stick one's neck out.

This is what we are doing.

# Free

# Nelson Mandela. #

# Free Nelson Mandela

# Begging you, begging you. #

It was quite amazing, the impact it had.

People who were not born when Mandela went to prison

were campaigning for his release.

The South African government had been backed into

an impossibly tight corner and its leaders began to realise

that only one person could get them out.

The man they had held in prison for more than two decades.

And they were consistently looking for ways out.

Not to end apartheid. They hadn't reached that point yet.

But certainly business and other white South Africans

were beginning to question.

After I broke away from the national party early in 1987,

we had six or seven clandestine meetings with the ANC.

To be involved in those meetings was quite something special.

I still remember the first meeting in a little hotel

and we had to go down in a room in the cellar,

and I was always asking, "Am I not a traitor?

"Am I not a traitor to talk to these people?"

But even the Minister of Justice, Mr Kobie Coetsee,

starts very secret discussions only with Mr Mandela.

PW Botha's argument was that before he is prepared to have negotiations

with the ANC, the ANC must renounce violence.

And it was too much to ask for the ANC at that stage, so it broke down.

It's a bit heartless to keep saying the ANC must abandon violence,

because that is saying that the regime is not violent.

Even at a time when daily on the television screens,

we are seeing the regime shooting down children.

The government summoned foreign correspondents to Pretoria

and told them that from now on, the government will be taking a tougher line on the press.

The censorship is almost total.

No statement may be transmitted the government considers "subversive".

There can be no report about activities or behaviour of white government security forces.

I request of you to leave this area. We are operating here.

I was ordered by higher command to tell you to leave here, please,

thank you very much. I want your names.

Come, come, come.

SHOUTING

-REPORTER:

-This NBC team was deliberately shot at.

Censorship of the media was total,

and now that news from South Africa was cut off,

the job of keeping the struggle in the public eye

was taken up by celebrities and musicians.

# I said what's the word?

# Tell me, brother, have you heard

# About Johannesburg?

# Somebody tell me, what's the word?

# Tell me, brother, have you heard from Johannesburg? #

I think we became conscious of how music could really make

a difference in reaching people in a different way.

Was this a way that we could bring Mandela's case

right back to people's consciousness?

Here was someone who, if we didn't act, was going to die in prison.

And it was his 70th birthday.

Wembley witnessed some stylish sprinting as it opened its gates

to the greatest gathering of recording stars since Live Aid.

72,000 packed into the stadium

as Harry Belafonte set the concert on course with a tribute to Nelson Mandela.

He is a symbol of their fight against the cruel

and unjust system of apartheid.

'And they agreed to transmit the whole event live on BBC.'

I mean, it was unbelievable.

In Rome, it was shown in one of the big squares on a huge screen,

so that people could be there, so it wasn't just something they watched on TV at home.

So gradually the thing just kind of mushroomed into something

which exceeded all our expectations.

# It was 25 years they take that man away

# Now freedom moves in closer every day

# Wipe the tears down from your saddened eyes

# They say Mandela's free so step outside

# Oh-oh-oh-oh, Mandela day

# Ooh-ooh-ooh, Mandela's free... #

This fills us with determination to end this system.

And end it not just for ourselves, but for humanity.

And we can see humankind when we see this crowd.

We can see the young people, this is the future of the world

and they are involved with us.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

The following week,

Mandela's birthday was celebrated across Europe,

Africa...

and Asia.

SITAR MUSIC

# Mandela...

# Mandela... #

We asked people to send an anniversary card to Mandela.

150,000 people replied, including people from prisons.

And they wrote heartbreaking letters,

"I'm also in prison, and how are you doing?"

The South African government was forced into action.

It was quite clear that they knew the writing was on the wall

and they'd have to at least make some movement in this process.

And so the first batch of people were released.

Wardens come in the morning, five o'clock, the master key goes...

They say, "Get your things together, get your things together."

And I'm put onto a helicopter,

flown to the military airport in Cape Town.

It was wonderful.

REPORTER: At Johannesburg's airport, the first opportunity

for Govan Mbeki to meet the people from the townships.

Crowds bussed in, eager to catch their first glimpse of the man that to most here is a hero.

The gamble taken by the state is whether it can contain

the overwhelming emotion and raised political expectations

the release of Govan Mbeki has inevitably given rise to. Tonight, it succeeded.

The ironic sight of police protecting the same man

they kept in prison for 23 years.

But the jubilation at Govan Mbeki's release was short lived.

REPORTER: The South African government has said

it is afraid of the effect the 77-year-old Mbeki has on people.

So, from now on, the government has forbidden Mbeki from even talking to reporters,

let alone speaking or writing for publication.

He is now confined to the black townships of Port Elizabeth

where he lives. The government's position - he is being manipulated

by the outlawed African National Congress

to promote revolution within South Africa.

They make a total sham of having released him

because now they are turning him

into a prisoner who will be his own jailer.

I was given only a measure of freedom.

The African National Congress was still banned.

And the struggle was still bitter in South Africa.

It was just a reign of terror that would break the spirit

of resistance amongst people. But it was too deeply rooted.

There was no way the clock would be turned back in the country.

And so the only recourse that they had,

they thought, was to ban the UDF.

For as long as our most respectable sons -

people like Nelson Mandela, people like Walter Sisulu -

for as long as they are still on Robben Island or in Pollsmoor,

and for as long as people of the calibre of Oliver Tambo

are still languishing in exile, the UDF shall continue to exist.

APPLAUSE

We all knew that our freedom was not going to come

through the barrel of a gun.

We knew that the only way we could secure freedom

and retain it afterwards was through mass mobilisation.

In a deliberate link with the historic defiance campaigns

of the 1940s and the 1950s in which Nelson Mandela

and Walter Sisulu and those people played such an important role.

There were some beaches which were fiercely racial enclaves,

and thousands of people managed to make their way onto the beach to defy apartheid on that day.

Feed you to the sharks!

We don't want this guy. Hit this guy's face.

Hey, get lost, man.

SIRENS BLARE

HELICOPTER BLADES DROWN OUT SPEECH

They had police, they had dogs, they had tear gas.

To do what? To stop people from walking on God's beaches!

What the state did at the time was they antagonised a whole lot of other people,

including white South Africans, who for the first time felt the brunt

of the random nature of the violence that's unleashed against peacefully demonstrating people.

We had the famous Purple March

right in the middle of the city where the police decided not

just to use water cannon, but there was some purple dye in the water.

So that they could brand people and catch them afterwards.

And all of us ended up in purple in the end,

because you would have this colour which you couldn't get off for days.

And it became anecdotally known as the purple rain!

In fact, they sprayed the Methodist cathedral purple.

All the buildings in town were purple. I mean, it was mad!

And people took one clause of the Freedom Charter that said

"The people shall govern."

And it then became "The purple shall govern,"

so you really felt very proud that you were one of the purple people,

you know, who was going to govern the country.

SINGING

There was a general consensus growing

that if we just tried to carry on the way we were

that we were heading for a revolution.

In 1989, FW de Klerk became president.

Up till that stage, he was regarded as a right winger.

REPORTER: Confronted with increasing international pressure,

acting state president FW de Klerk has tried to distance himself

from apartheid.

Stop making racists out of us. We are not racists.

He must have reached a point where he said, "The longer we wait,

"we're going to lose it all."

Perhaps, why don't we talk, so that we lose a bit, but we remain?

And the world, too, was changing.

At the end of '89, South Africa lost its biggest trump card.

Because South Africa always thrived on this raising

of the Communist spectre, and saying,

"Well, we are the bastion for the free world in Africa."

And suddenly that fell away and that was no trump card any more.

All the great powers -

that was the Bush administration at that stage, Gorbachev, France,

Germany, Japan, Canada, Italy - all were involved,

realising that the policy of apartheid

was a threat for world peace.

That group, in effect, put a revolver against FW de Klerk's head.

I mean, he is a realist. He's a good politician.

He knew that he was up against the wall.

The only way you could stop it was to come to some deal.

And I mean, that was a drastic deal.

The prohibition of the African National Congress,

the Pan Africanist Congress, the South African Communist Party

and a number of subsidiary organisations is being rescinded.

CROWD CRIES OUT

SCATTERED APPLAUSE

Here was your ultimate,

ultimate conservative politician

taking not a one degree or a 90 degree,

a 180 degree turn about,

and throwing out of the window everything.

I am now in a position to announce

that Mr Nelson Mandela will be released at the Victor Verster Prison on Sunday, 11 February,

at about 3pm.

AFRICAN SPIRITUAL MUSIC

CHEERING

I stand here before you not as a prophet

but as a humble servant of you, the people.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

And the first country he visited was Zambia, to come and say thank you.

He knew how much we suffered.

It was like a big dream come true.

# Nelson Mandela

# Nelson Mandela

# Nelson Mandela... #

And I always remember that moment where, for one little moment

in history, one can see something of how life was meant to be.

Joy was a purpose.

The defining moment was to see him stand

in the halls of Congress and speak.

That's an honour that I never expected to see in my lifetime,

to see any black South African,

but to see Nelson Mandela speak to the Congress? Ha!

I mean, the whole country was celebrating.

And you suddenly realised that what you had done

was that you'd actually really reached ordinary people

and that they were celebrating

and they felt that they had played a part in that.

But it was Mandela's visit to Sweden,

his first stop outside Africa, that meant the most.

And they came here because of Oliver Tambo, to see him.

That was the first journey abroad.

The decades of work securing international support

had taken their toll. Six months earlier, in August 1989,

Tambo had suffered a stroke

and moved to a clinic as a guest of the Swedish government.

It was an emotional, an emotional occasion.

It was like, "Is it true? Are you out of prison?

"Is it true that you come to Oliver Tambo?"

Oliver could walk, talk with great difficulty.

And they mostly embraced each other.

And they stood hand-in-hand, and they just beamed,

like two happy children seeing each other

after such an enormously long time.

Madiba would come, towering... "Oh..."

All the speeches each one of them has made

will never be as meaningful as that first hug.

After 27 years, they haven't talked directly to each other,

they have so much ground to cover, they would never sleep.

The only way to make them sleep was to separate them, painful as it was.

I actually didn't think he would live to go back to South Africa.

Trevor Huddleston, Mike Terry and I went to see him

in North London a day before he was due to return to South Africa.

He could hardly speak. He couldn't stand unaided,

and I said to Adelaide Tambo,

his wife, "Will Oliver survive the journey?"

And she said, "Well, he's got to go back, he wants to go back."

And we left very despondent.

And some months later I spoke to Adelaide, I said, "What happened?"

She said, "It was quite incredible.

"We could almost feel, from the moment the plane took off,

"Oliver gathering strength going home,

"and all the disjointed nerves began to grow back again."

Actually, when he got off the plane, he actually walked off the plane.

It was astonishing, absolutely astonishing power of will.

In December 1990, Oliver Tambo's 30 years of exile came to an end.

But he would never vote in a free South African election.

You know, when he died,

some people who were working with him in exile fainted.

They couldn't believe it.

Particularly because he died before he saw the liberation,

the victory, the result of what he was working for.

The whole of Africa lost something when he died.

Oliver Tambo was in a class of his own. We have lost a truly great man.

On 27 April, 1994, for the first time in its history,

all South Africans voted in a free and democratic election.

Having to stand in that queue to do something

for which I'd sacrificed all my life,

but there was something about it that felt almost like an anti-climax,

come to think of it! It's like you prepare your life

for all of this and all it ends up with is, you know,

it's just the little ballot and then, what next?

And then you turn and you walk away and it's over! Is that it?

When you compare it to what it cost to get there

and what we did to get there.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd