When in 1997, the Independent World Commission on the Ocean (of which I am an administrator) convened its plenary at Cape Town, Nelson Mandela, then South Africa’s President, welcomed the Commission members at his official residence.
Led by his close friend, our chairman, Portuguese President Mario Soares, we were made to feel at home, Mandela professing a well-known respect for the environment, particularly for the sea.
Asking me news about Malta, he recalled having met Prime Ministers Eddie Fenech Adami and Alfred Sant as well as President Ugo Mifsud Bonnici. He had been intent to converse with Guido de Marco, a vice-president of the Commission, who had been recalled to Malta a few hours after arriving at Cape Town, following a phone call from Fenech Adami, advising him to return soonest to Valletta – as Parliament was likely to take a vote of confidence and his presence was essential. Nonetheless, Mandela insisted I convey his warm wishes to De Marco.
Mandela was in an exuberant mood and after cocktails, he danced with Elisabeth Mann Borgese, founder of the International Ocean Institute, and with my late wife, Mercedes, whom he showed round his house.
On returning to the main hall, he greeted a few schoolchildren who, passing by, were peering through one of the windows. Offering them a fruit juice, he asked one of them what she wished to do as an adult.
“I’d like to become a lawyer,” the young girl confessed. Mandela winked at her, retorting: “Watch it! I was a lawyer but it did not keep me out of prison!” Later, he sat with Soares and myself and, inter alia, brought up the Libya situation following the Lockerbie incident.
Mandela said he was under great pressure from the Americans to exercise his influence to chastise Libya and that he should not visit Tripoli, as he had intended to do.
“I have no admiration at all for Gaddafi,” he said, “but I am not going to allow the United States to tell me what to do and where I should or should not go.”
Soares’ view was similar and they agreed to cooperate not to allow Libya to appear as a pariah state.
Then Mandela was soon his old self. Noticing my wife sitting in a corner, he invited her to dance with him again, offering her, as we were leaving, a bright red head-dress, which he ceremoniously but laughingly placed on her head.
I imagine both will enjoy recalling this episode now that they are together.