Nelson Mandela invited the prosecutor who sent him to prison for 27 years to lunch. Then he introduced him to the cameras.
In the video below he says it himself: “In actual fact he is the fellow who sent me to jail.”
His name was Percy Yutar. In 1963 he was the state prosecutor in the Rivonia Trial. He called the ANC a communist terrorist organisation and asked the judge to apply the full weight of the law. The crimes could carry the death penalty.
Mandela got life.
In 1995, now President of South Africa, he sat Yutar at his table. The lunch was kosher, for him.
A reporter says this is the man who could have had Mandela sentenced to death. Mandela answers: “That is a wrong statement, but I’ll deal with that.” Then: “That is now passed.”
Yutar speaks: “In what other country in the world would you have the head of the government inviting someone to lunch who prosecuted him 30 years ago?”
Then he asks God to bless Mandela with good health.
Years later Yutar claimed his charges saved the defendants’ lives. Mandela’s own lawyer called that self-aggrandising.
Some people say this was the greatest act of forgiveness of the century. Others say it was politics, and the prosecutor was rewriting his past.
Could you sit down to lunch with the man who took 27 years of your life?
-Abiola Aremu Ogunlade