Mandela's first day of freedom was momentously low-key

The day in 1990 when Nelson Mandela walked to freedom, I waited hours in the hot sun outside city hall in downtown Cape Town, in a crowd of thousands of blacks and mixed-race coloreds dying to glimpse their hoped-for savior. Mandela, who died yesterday at 95, had been locked away in prison for more than 27 years. As it happened, the excitement of witnessing history that day was tarnished by mishaps.

The mood grew ugly because of a five-hour delay in Mandela's scheduled arrival, partly due to his wife, Winnie, who had failed to show up on time at the Victor Verster Prison, 45 minutes outside Cape Town, where Mandela was last held. Some hotheaded youths had taken to skirmishing with police around the fringes. Gunshots and tear gas were in the air, while colored thieves were hard at work pickpocketing whites and blacks alike, even foreign journalists like me. (I lost a tape recorder ripped from my hands.)

Many coloreds gave up and drifted away long before his arrival, reflecting what I assumed was their deep ambivalence over the prospect of black rule given their own minority status and frequent alignment with the country's white minority.

Everyone in the crowd did, however, have one thing in common. No South African outside his white jailers and his fellow inmates had any idea what the 71-year-old Mandela looked like, or what he thought. Since his imprisonment in 1962, the government had banned the media from publishing his photo or words. The man so long awaited to lead his people out of the nightmare of apartheid to the promised land of democracy was a total mystery.

Would he lead a black uprising and call for the overthrow of the white minority government? Or would he continue negotiations with his former white captors for a peaceful transfer of power, talks that he had begun in 1985, from prison, in secret, with the iron-fisted Afrikaner president, P.W. Botha?

Mandela's first day of freedom offered one intriguing hint that he intended to make a determined effort to befriend the jittery white population. On his way to Cape Town, Mandela smiled and waved to the few whites who turned out along the road to see him. He even stopped to say hello to one very surprised white family he beckoned to come over to talk to him.

Still, I remember his debut before the nation and world as a bit of a letdown. He had never made a speech before a mass of television cameras, and the one he gave that day didn't excite the thinning crowd so much as did just his appearance. South African blacks were simply mesmerized to finally behold the man who embodied all their hopes, while whites stared at him with trepidation and culled his words for signs of their fate under black rule.

I got to know Mandela progressively over the next few days. He held his first international news conference in the well- manicured garden belonging to the official residence of Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the outspoken critic of apartheid and 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner. Mandela seemed somewhat frail; we had been told he was feeling ill. Many wondered if he was up to the grueling negotiations that lay ahead.

But Mandela quickly warmed to the limelight, mixing nationalist rhetoric with assurances to the whites. His regal bearing and manners made him seem every bit the African tribal chief he was born to be, yet with the airs of a European aristocrat, a soothing soft voice and conquering smile. Most amazingly, after wasting half a lifetime in captivity that had begun by cutting stones, he evinced no bitterness toward whites.

Over the next weeks, I followed him around the country as he introduced himself to the country's black, colored, Indian and white populations. You could feel his power and authority mounting day by day.

He needed it. Mandela had to deal with a long suppressed black constituency that felt the day of reckoning with its white rulers was finally at hand. The favorite chant of his militant young followers was "Shoot the Boers," the name for Afrikaners whose own hardliners took to plotting coups.

Yet Mandela never got distracted from his central goal, laboring on through four years of tough bargaining to assure black rule. At the same time, he waged a public campaign to reassure whites they were wanted and needed in a new South Africa.