MANDELA TAKES CLINTONS FOR A WALK THROUGH HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA
By Peter Baker March 21, 1997
In her many travels around the world as first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton has been toasted by plenty of foreign leaders who proudly showed her their palaces, their historic landmarks, their national treasures.
Nelson Mandela showed her his prison cell.
But then again, there may be no more historic landmark in South Africa these days than Spartan, 6-by-9-foot Cell No. 5 in this island prison six miles off the Cape of Good Hope. And there is certainly no more revered national treasure than Mandela himself, the prisoner-turned-president who struggled for the liberation of South Africa's black majority.
Less than three months after the infamous Robben Island facility was reopened as a museum celebrating the fight against apartheid -- South Africa's now-vanquished system of racial separation -- Mandela returned today to lead Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, through its halls and past the bars that once separated him from the outside world. With an easy smile and no trace of bitterness, Mandela played the genial guide. Here he had a garden. There was the court where prisoners played basketball. This was the small cabinet where he kept his few belongings.
"When we first arrived, they put me in this one," he said, gesturing to a wooden door where a cell has now been made into an office. "Then one day we came back, and they had put me in the very last cell. We didn't know why they did that."
It soon became clear, though. In the first cell, Mandela recalled, "I acted virtually as a spokesman for the prisoners." Prison officials hoped that by moving him they would isolate him. But it didn't work, he said, because any time they came to talk to the inmates, "every prisoner here said, Now you go down to our spokesman.' "
Clinton's visit off the southern tip of the continent was perhaps the most emotional touchstone so far during her two-week journey through Africa. At her every stop over the last four days, from a housing project started by shantytown women to a monument to the Soweto uprising, Clinton has sought to highlight Africa's progress toward democracy and offer encouragement from the United States.
"We have an old saying in America that idle hands are the Devil's work," she said in a speech to 500 students and guests at the University of Cape Town this morning. "From what I have seen in just a few short days, the Devil will have no help here. South Africa is a country that is too busy to hate."
In her address, modeled after one delivered at the same school by Robert F. Kennedy 31 years ago, Clinton announced a commitment of $16 million more in U.S. aid for efforts to eradicate polio from Africa by 2000.
During a question-and-answer session with students, though, Clinton sounded themes that might have sounded more familiar to a domestic audience. In assessing their role in history, she said "women do most of the hard work in our world" and warned the young women in the audience not to be "tricked or seduced into undermining other women's work or opportunities."
Clinton laughed when one woman asked her whether there might ever be a female president in the United States. "Well, hope springs eternal," she answered.
"You know, I have thought a lot about this," she continued coyly, prompting gales of laughter and applause, before she added the caveat, "strictly as a student of political science."
The first lady predicted that women would run in 2000 and win within 20 years. Wondering aloud why it had been easier for Britain's Margaret Thatcher, India's Indira Gandhi and Israel's Golda Meir, she theorized that perhaps it was because they worked in parliamentary systems where they were elevated by peers who knew their work.
After her speech, Clinton spent the rest of her day with Mandela. Their two stops together vividly illustrated the vast distance he has traveled, physically and politically.
Before heading to Robben Island, where he spent 18 of his 27 years behind bars before being set free in 1990, Clinton met with him at Genadendal, the picturesque presidential mansion he inherited four years later, located on a rolling, leafy estate in Cape Town, where security guards keep others out, not Mandela in.
The 79-year-old president moved slowly but steadily as he led the first lady by the arm and later wrapped his arm warmly around Chelsea. After the prison tour, the Clintons joined Mandela for a $56,500-per-couple dinner on the island to raise money for the museum, which opened Jan. 1. Among the other guests were U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and comedian Bill Cosby.
Mandela was first taken on the long, lonely boat ride to Robben in 1964 after he was convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment. In those days, African prisoners were called "boys," deprived of sugar and bread, and forced to wear short pants no matter the season. Letters and visits were restricted to one every six months. Eventually, the inmates were sent to a nearby limestone quarry, where for eight hours a day they swung pickaxes -- and, when guards weren't looking, quietly passed along news of the liberation movement on the outside.
Mandela came to look forward to the quarry, even though the intense glare from the reflected sun damaged his eyes. "You get used to hard work," Ahmed Kathrada, who was convicted alongside Mandela and now serves in Parliament, said today as he showed the Clintons around the quarry. "But you don't get used to loneliness in your cell." CAPTION: South African President Nelson Mandela talks to first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton at his residence in Cape Town before their visit to Robben Island.
