Feb. 11, 1990

By Richard Stengel

When the slender, white-haired Nelson Mandela, then 71, first glimpsed the crowd assembled at the gates of Victor Verster prison, he instinctively raised his right arm in the black-power salute of a clenched fist--a simple public gesture that he had not been able to make during his 27 years, six months and seven days of imprisonment. His release had been orchestrated by South Africa's white minority government, but it was a reluctant acknowledgement of what had become an unstoppable force. The world had lost patience with white rule in South Africa and had placed its faith in a man whom no one had seen in decades. The man who emerged was unbowed but also unsophisticated about modern media. (On that first day, he thought a furry TV boom mike was a weapon.) By the time I met Mandela in 1992, he was savvy about his image and knew that he had to banish any public bitterness to win racial reconciliation in his divided land. During what he called his "long, lonely, wasted years" in prison, he never doubted that his country would achieve democracy. It just took a lot longer than he had expected. --By Richard Stengel, who collaborated with Mandela on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom