Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

Twenty years ago next Thursday, Nelson Mandela walked free from Victor Verster Prison. In this essay ‘Prometheus Unbound’written for the former South African president’s 85th birthday in 2003, FINTAN O’TOOLEhails a man who defeated his captors, who defied our expectations, and whose humanity is greater than his legend

HE WALKED, and was not driven, from jail. He was not set free, since for him there is no freedom for one man without the freedom of all, and that freedom remains to be won. He moved from a small prison to a larger one whose bars are truncheons, whose walls were poverty, contempt, indignity and the denial of common humanity. He chose the time when he would walk through the gates, defying the schedules, making the authorities and apparatchiks feel, for once, the powerlessness, the frustration, that they routinely inflicted on others. He neither exulted in his release nor complained of his years of deprivation.