Nelson Mandela Walks Free: February 11, 1990

On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison near Paarl, holding his then-wife Winnie Mandela’s hand, roughly an hour later than the world’s assembled press had expected, and 27 years, five months, and six days after his imprisonment began. He had served that sentence across three institutions: nearly eighteen years on Robben Island, where he performed hard labor in a lime quarry and was permitted one visitor and one letter every six months in the early years; six years at Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town after 1982; and the final fourteen months at Victor Verster, where authorities held him in a warder’s cottage with relatively relaxed conditions as secret negotiations with the government intensified. He emerged at 65 years old, having entered prison at 44, dressed in a light suit rather than prison clothes, and raised a fist to a crowd that had waited hours to see him.

Mandela’s release did not happen in isolation. State President F.W. de Klerk, who had taken office in September 1989, opened Parliament on February 2, 1990, with a speech that stunned the country: he announced the unbanning of the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress, the South African Communist Party, and dozens of other organizations that had operated illegally or in exile for three decades, and confirmed that Mandela would be freed unconditionally. Those steps followed years of secret contacts between the government and the imprisoned Mandela, mounting internal unrest, an increasingly unsustainable international sanctions regime, and the diplomatic thaw that accompanied the end of the Cold War, which reduced the apartheid government’s ability to justify its rule as a bulwark against communism.

That evening, Mandela addressed a crowd of roughly 50,000 people from the balcony of Cape Town’s City Hall, delivering his first public speech in nearly three decades. He thanked the international anti-apartheid movement, reaffirmed the ANC’s commitment to the armed struggle as one option “for as long as the causes which necessitated it exist,” and made clear he saw his release as the beginning of negotiations rather than the end of the fight. Television networks around the world carried the walk to freedom live, turning it into one of the most-watched news events of the era and a symbol, for millions who had followed the anti-apartheid campaign for years, that the system’s collapse was no longer a hope but a near-certainty. Four years later, in April 1994, Mandela would be elected president in South Africa’s first fully democratic election.