Mandela was a flawed icon. But without him South Africa would be a sadder place via TheCitizen_News
I was one of the thousands who watched Nelson Mandela, the South African liberation struggle hero, leave prison on 11 February 1990, and then mount the podium in front of Cape Town’s City Hall, expressing the hope that the apartheid government would agree to negotiations so that there might no longer be the need for armed struggle against apartheid to continue.
I fretted about what I’d seen during my decade of membership of the African National Congress , the leading liberation movement for which he was jailed: the seeping corruption, elbowing for position, the exile old guard’s insistence on primacy. And, as he left prison hand in hand with his wife, Winnie, I feared the influence of a woman who’d already been convicted of kidnapping, and accused of so much more.
The example I recall most vividly came six months after his release when the leadership of “Operation Vula” were rounded up. In the end, Mandela’s team got more than many expected – a one-person, one-vote election and a progressive constitution with no entrenched rights for racial minorities. Without Mandela none of this would have been certain, or even likely.Mandela’s five years as president were more ambiguous.
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