Nelson Mandela walks free after 27 years
On this day · 11 February 1990
On a sweltering Cape Town afternoon, the world's most famous political prisoner stepped through the gates and into the end of apartheid.
At about 4:14 p.m. on 11 February 1990, Nelson Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison near Paarl, hand in hand with his wife Winnie, and raised a clenched fist to a crowd that had waited hours in the heat. He was 71 and had spent 27 years behind bars, the first 18 of them in the lime quarries of Robben Island.
His release followed a gamble by President F.W. de Klerk, who days earlier had unbanned the African National Congress and other liberation movements. That evening Mandela addressed a vast throng from the balcony of Cape Town’s City Hall.
“I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all.”
The freed prisoner now became chief negotiator. Four years of fraught talks produced South Africa’s first nonracial election, and in 1994 Mandela was sworn in as president. He and de Klerk shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize for dismantling a system that had jailed one of them for a generation.
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