WORLD : Mandela Signals Release Is Near : Mandela Expecting to Be Freed Within Weeks, His Wife Reports
Jailed black South African nationalist leader Nelson Mandela signaled for the first time today that he expects to be free within weeks.
He told his wife in a prison meeting to begin arrangements for his release.
It was the first time since his arrest in August, 1962, and his 1964 life sentence for sabotage that Mandela or his wife, Winnie, had acknowledged any optimism about an imminent release.
“This is the real stuff now,” Winnie Mandela told reporters at the gates of the Victor Verster prison farm about 40 miles northeast of Cape Town, where her husband is held in a bungalow previously used by a white warder’s family.
She said: “I don’t think we are talking about months any longer.”
She said Mandela, 71, who had previously insisted he had no idea when he would return home, asked her during a three-hour visit to begin preliminary arrangements for his release.
She declined to say what those arrangements could involve.
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