Word: verster
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...local time on Sunday, Feb. 11, Nelson Mandela walked out of the Victor Verster Prison Farm near Cape Town -- free at last. It was, said an announcer for the official South African Broadcasting Corp., "the moment that a majority of South Africans, and the world, have been waiting...
...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...
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...
Mandela is the sole black leader in South Africa who has a chance to bring both sides to compromise. Despite his advancing years and his near fatal bout with tuberculosis in 1988, he was described by a visitor to Victor Verster as "very nimble, alert, self-confident, charismatic, not a mere symbolic leader but someone who is in touch with events." Few others possess the pragmatism that Mandela has honed over the years, which may enable him to grow from a facilitator of negotiations to a reconciler...
When Winnie Mandela appeared after a visit to her husband at the Victor Verster prison farm near Cape Town last week, she was radiant and smiling. For the first time Nelson Mandela had talked about making arrangements for his homecoming. According to family lawyer Dullah Omar, the black nationalist leader who has been imprisoned since 1962 was "buoyant, confident and raring...