Cape Town – Speaker of the National Assembly Max Sisulu says he will never forget the day when former President Nelson Mandela was released from prison 24 years ago.
Mandela, who died on 5 December 2014 at the age of 95, was released from prison on 11 February 1990 and after spending a total of 27 years behind bars, he addressed thousands of people gathered outside Cape Town’s City Hall for the first time as a free man.
In an interview with SAnews on Tuesday, Sisulu said Parliament would forever celebrate Mandela’s legacy.
“We remember fondly when Madiba walked out of prison and addressed a crowd in Cape Town, having been locked away in prison for 27 years.
“And one of the things he said when he walked out of prison was ‘I want to leave the bitterness and anger behind prison doors and walk out a free man because I won’t be free if I walk out with the anger and bitterness’.
“And therefore the legacy that Madiba taught us was reconciliation, working together for a better South Africa,” he said.
Sisulu said every Parliamentary session was about building on the legacy that Mandela left behind. “So we have to build continuously to make his dream, his vision, come true.”
Meanwhile, National Council of the Provinces (NCOP) chair Mninwa Mahlangu said during a media briefing that they had invited all former Presidents to attend this year’s State of the Nation Address, which takes place on Thursday.
Amongst the list of eminent persons invited to the Parliamentary gallery are renowned photographer Sam Nzima, a veteran journalist who captured a picture that became the iconic image of the June 1976 Soweto student uprisings.
Nzima’s photo showed a fatally-wounded Hector Pieterson -- a 12-year-old scholar shot by the police in Soweto at the start of the protests -- being carried by a grief-stricken Mbuyisa Makhubo with Hector’s 17-year-old sister Antoinette running alongside them.
Nzima, who now lives in his birth town in Lillydale in Mpumalanga, now runs a photography school in the area.
Zuma awarded Nzima with the Order of Ikhamanga for helping – with his photograph – to shine an international spotlight on apartheid’s brutality. – SAnews.gov.za
