SOUTH AFRICA: US PRESIDENT CLINTON VISITS MANDELA PRISON CELL

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Published 2015-07-21

(27 Mar 1998) English/Nat

U-S President Bill Clinton joined South African President Nelson Mandela in a visit to the prison cell where the anti-apartheid leader spent 18 years in jail.

Mandela gave his guest a personal tour of the prison on Robben Island where he spent most of his 27 years in jail as a political prisoner.

They flew to the island from Cape Town after holding a joint news conference with Clinton, who is on a 12-day African tour.

The day was not all about providing picture opportunities - Mandela found time to appoint a three-member judicial commission to investigate a possible coup plot against him uncovered by military intelligence.

Robben Island lies just off the coast of South Africa from Cape Town.

But the small island is as important to the country and its history as the years of apartheid and strife which occurred on the mainland itself.

U-S President Bill Clinton continued his visit with South African President Nelson Mandela on Friday with an excursion to Robben Island.

The two leaders flew separately from Cape Town following their joint news conference there.

Mandela, accompanied by his partner Gracia Machel, greeted the president and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton on the island where he spent 18 years in isolation from his countrymen.

The South African leader brought his high profile guest to visit the prison where he was held as a political prisoner for those 18 long years during apartheid.

Clinton, the first U-S president ever to visit South Africa, made the important stopoff to recognise Mandela's years of courageous struggle against racial injustice in South Africa.

The two leaders walked through the vast expanse of the prison's courtyard.

They then walked arm in arm inside to cell number five where Mandela became a national hero.

The two world leaders shared a somber moment walking the bleak hallway where the leading activists against South Africa's white rule were kept.

Mandela looked up and down the hall with Clinton before finding the door to the cell that was his home for nearly two decades.

Clinton stood in the tiny cell with Mandela as he heard about how the South African prisoner-turned-president passed his days in custody.

Mandela told about his lonely and difficult days as a prisoner as the two men peered through the bars of the tiny cell window.

The South African leader first came to the prison in 1964 after being sentenced to life in jail for planning the takeover of the then-apartheid regime.

His early years at the prison were spent doing hard labour in a limestone quarry - work that left Mandela with permanent physical reminders of his time there.

Mandela was later transferred to a mainland prison near Cape Town where he served the last of his 27 years before his release.

Robben Island was a working prison until 1996, two years after the country's first open elections and Mandela's rise to president.

It now stands as a museum for South Africans to remember their own troubled history and remarkable transition to democracy.

The Robben Island visit was an important symbolic gesture by Clinton, who is the first U-S President to ever visit the country.

Clinton and Mandela were treated to a song by a group of children in the prison's courtyard for their visit.

Mandela thanked President Clinton for making the trip to the landmark so important to his and the country's political rebirth.

SOUNDBITE: (English)
"Coming to Robben Island is to add something more important to that achievement of coming to South Africa and we appreciate that very much."

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