 |
| Christo Brand, his former guard from Pollsmoor Prison, drop by his home
for his birthday in 1998, to gift him a discontinued hair oil that he
used while in prison |
I was 19 years old when I first came face to face with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, the bleak maximum security prison where I was his warder. He was 60. Until that day in 1978 I had never heard of him, or his African National Congress.
I worked in B Section, where seven of the eight men known as the Rivonia Trialists, who had been convicted of terrorism charges in 1964, were held. Mandela set my young mind racing. I saw this quiet, dignified man scrubbing floors, emptying his toilet bucket, cleaning the exercise yard – sometimes on his knees – and tending a little garden where he grew chillies and vegetables.
