Writing to her father from America, where she was studying, Mandela's daughter Zeni noted, "Some think it is somewhere in the Caribbean." Yet Mandela's name and, once he was released, his face were to become known around the world. Some were not even sure where South Africa was. Few of those who were swept up in the wave of enthusiasm for Mandela's release followed the developing events in South Africa closely. Many of them had not even been born when Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1962. An estimated 200 million people watched the televised pop concert from a packed Wembley Stadium that celebrated his seventieth birthday while still a prisoner in 1988.
His release from prison on 11 February 1990, after more than a quarter of a century of incarceration, seemed to many to offer the prospect of progress after a decade dominated by the reactionary policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Nelson Mandela has become an icon of the late twentieth century. Mandela-The Authorised Biography, by Anthony Sampson, Harper Collins 1999
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