He was just a front for the white people who needed peace with the black people. “He just did a deal to get out of prison. “He was a sellout,” said Senhle Nkosi, a 25-year-old graphic designer. But many Sowetans are deeply critical of their most famous former resident. The house on the corner of Vilakazi Street where Mandela lived for more than a decade before being sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964 is a museum, an obligatory stop for both cycling tourists and school trips in what is now a bustling city with more than a million inhabitants. Soweto was once a dismal township where nearby Johannesburg’s apartheid authorities dumped non-white communities. “I was a child but I knew something important was happening,” he said. We are moving on, perhaps too fast,” said Ralph Mathekga, an author and analyst who remembers hearing Mandela’s first speech as a free man on a radio in a small village. But otherwise the anniversary will pass largely unnoticed. On that day – 11 February 1990 – Ramaphosa, who was seen as Mandela’s protege, held his speech for him. Photograph: Ulli Michel/ReutersĬyril Ramaphosa, who was elected president in 2018, will fly to Cape Town to re-enact the moment when Mandela spoke to a huge crowd from a city hall balcony hours after his release. Nelson Mandela is accompanied by his then wife Winnie, moments after his release from prison near Paarl, South Africa on 11 February, 1990.
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