Mandela and White Foe of Apartheid Reunited After 28 Years

Jailed black leader Nelson R. Mandela held an emotional reunion Thursday with an 84-year-old white woman who was his co-defendant in a landmark anti-apartheid trial 28 years ago.

Helen Joseph, who in the 1960s was one of the first whites banned by the government, spent four hours with Mandela in Victor Verster Prison near Cape Town.

“He was in very good form, full of jokes, full of laughter,” Joseph said outside the prison gate. “He looks forward to coming home, but he doesn’t know when it will be.”

Joseph, who is now confined to a wheelchair, described the meeting as a “wonderful, friendly, loving visit.”

Mandela, 71, heads the outlawed African National Congress guerrilla movement. He has been imprisoned for more than 27 years and is serving a life sentence for plotting to overthrow the white-run government. His release is widely expected within weeks.

Meanwhile, South African officials have for the first time allowed Mandela to talk by telephone with exiled African National Congress leaders from his prison cell.

Alfred Nzo, general secretary of the ANC, said Thursday that he spoke to Mandela for the first time in 26 years Tuesday night.

“I know his voice. When he came on the line, I immediately knew it was Nelson,” Nzo said. He said he last spoke with Mandela in 1963, when both were in Pretoria prison.

Mandela and Joseph emerged as leading voices of the anti-apartheid movement in the 1950s. They were among more than 150 co-defendants at a 1956-61 treason trial.

All the accused were acquitted, but the trial made clear the government’s intention to clamp down on opponents. Mandela went underground shortly after the trial to form the ANC’s armed wing. He was arrested in 1962 and has been imprisoned since.

Joseph resumed her anti-apartheid activities after the trial but was placed under police restrictions, including house arrest, for most of the 1960s and 1970s. Police lifted the restrictions in 1982, when she was 77. A year later, she was arrested for singing and giving a clenched-fist, black power salute while attending a treason trial.

Last year, the African National Congress awarded Joseph its highest award for her “outstanding contribution to the struggle to end apartheid and transform South Africa into a united, democratic and non-racial country.”

Joseph still attends anti-apartheid rallies and is greeted with rousing cheers by black audiences.

She said Mandela has agreed to meet government leaders, including President Frederik W. de Klerk, because “the time has come for peaceful talks between the government and the ANC.”

“The ANC can’t give up the armed struggle at this stage, but he (Mandela) is very hopeful,” Joseph said.