South Africa Mandela Declines Offer of Freedom

From his cell, a demand to dismantle apartheid

Dressed in the yellow T shirt of the United Democratic Front, a rapidly growing antiapartheid movement, Zindzi Mandela, 25, at the side of Johannesburg's Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu, stood silently for a moment in Soweto's Jabulani Stadium. Then she began to read to the 9,000 people gathered before her a message prepared by her father, Nelson Mandela, in his prison cell. "I cannot and will not give any undertaking at a time when I and you, the people, are not free," Mandela, South Africa's best-known black activist, said in his statement. "Only free men can negotiate; prisoners cannot enter into contracts....

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