South Africa's Mandela marks 20 years of freedom

Thousands gathered for commemorations near Cape Town at what was known in 1990 as Victor Verster, the last prison where Mandela was held. The crowds milled around a 10-foot (3-meter) high bronze statue erected at the prison in 2008 depicting Mandela's first steps as a free man. Exactly 20 years ago, Mandela emerged from Victor Verster on foot, hand-in-hand with his then-wife Winnie, fist raised, smiling but resolute.

"We knew that his freedom meant that our freedom had also arrived," Cyril Ramaphosa, a leader in Mandela's African National Congress who headed a welcome committee for Mandela in 1990, told the crowd at the prison Thursday.

Earlier, Ramaphosa and other ANC leaders had approached the gates of the prison to reenact Mandela's 1990 walk. Arms linked, they stepped through shouting: "Viva Mandela!"

Just four years after Mandela's release, South Africans held their first all-race elections, making Mandela their first black president. Mandela stepped down after one five-year term, helping to entrench democracy in South Africa in contrast to elsewhere on the continent where politicians hung on to power through fraud and violence.

Mandela also is beloved for championing racial reconciliation, ensuring a peaceful transition that spared South Africa the chaos and destruction of anti-colonial wars elsewhere in Africa.

Since 1994, his ANC party has reduced the number of people living in poverty, built houses and delivered water, electricity and schools to blacks who had been without under apartheid. But needs remain great, and impatience has grown along with a gap between the poor and the rich -- among them new black entrepreneurs.

Mvuso Mbali, 37, was in the crowd Thursday and said he was at the prison 20 years ago.

"And I still remember vividly what happened," he said. "Today we are reinventing our freedom, and uniting our people to follow the values of Mandela."

Others at the prison on Thursday said Mandela's release -- triumphant as it was -- carried uncertainty, too.

"When Mandela was released we did not know what was going happen," said Nontuntuzelo Faku, who came to Thursday's event.

Being at the prison 20 years later, she said, "makes me realize how far the country has come."

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