Word: caping
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State President F.W. de Klerk was still delivering his opening-day speech before Parliament when an antiapartheid leader interrupted a protest rally four blocks away to deliver "a very important message." Some 3,000 demonstrators, massed in searing sunshine across from the Cape Town city hall, fell silent as she announced, "The A.N.C. has been unbanned." The gathering seemed stunned at the news that the African National Congress, the leading force in the fight against apartheid, outlawed and in exile since 1960, would once again be a legal participant in the nation's politics. Then someone shouted, "Amandla!" (power...
...current wave of hope has an epicenter, it is at the end of a dirt lane on the grounds of Victor Verster Prison Farm, 35 miles east of Cape Town, where Mandela remains confined. There, in a comfortable three-bedroom former warder's house overlooking the vineyards of the Franschhoek Valley, Mandela rises early each morning to begin another day of appointments. The government suggests that his freedom is imminent, but even while still behind a prison fence, Mandela is already playing his self-appointed role as "facilitator...
With expectations growing daily, antiapartheid leaders will be listening closely this Friday when De Klerk delivers his maiden state of the nation address to the opening session of Parliament in Cape Town. They want the President to outline a timetable for negotiations and to meet the main conditions blacks have laid down for participation: Mandela's release, an end to the 1986 state of emergency and the lifting of bans on antiapartheid organizations...
...Klerk's most important step was to begin a personal dialogue with Mandela, a revered leader of the African National Congress. The government wanted to speed up the "talks about talks," designed to get formal negotiations under way. On Dec. 13, at the presidential residence in Cape Town known as Tuynhuys, the two men held the first of a planned series of meetings on ways to convene an indaba (Zulu for "negotiations") that would write a new constitution granting blacks the right to vote for a national government. The meeting signaled that De Klerk, unlike his predecessors, was willing...
Mandela's busy life at Victor Verster contrasts sharply with the years of hard labor he endured on Robben Island, a penal colony across from Cape Town Harbor where he was incarcerated for nearly two decades. For the first ten years he swung a pickax in a limestone quarry, breaking boulders into gravel. But the harsh punishment only strengthened his resolve, and he directed his anger into a crusade for better prison conditions. "To us," says Steve Tshwete, an A.N.C. guerrilla leader imprisoned for 15 years, "he represented the correctness of our cause and the inevitability of our victory...