Mandela Walks Free: The Caribbean Community’s Finest Morning

Key Developments at a Glance

• 2 February 1990: F.W. de Klerk unbans the ANC and thirty-three other organisations; Nelson Mandela’s release is imminent.
• 11 February 1990: Nelson Mandela released from Victor Verster Prison after 27 years; Caribbean community celebrates with the world.
• 31 March 1990: Poll tax riot in Trafalgar Square; Caribbean community caught between opposing a regressive tax and rejecting political violence.
• Caribbean community anti-apartheid organisations begin to redirect their focus toward democratic transition and the new South Africa.
• Michael Manley PM Jamaica; CARICOM presses for further international support for ANC as negotiations begin in South Africa.
• 42nd anniversary of HMT Empire Windrush: community marks the milestone with exhibitions and retrospectives across British cities.

On 11 February 1990, Nelson Mandela walks out of Victor Verster Prison through a gate into a crush of press and supporters, raising his fist, blinking in the afternoon light after twenty-seven years. The image is watched, live, by hundreds of millions of people around the world. In churches and community centres and living rooms across Britain — in Brixton and Handsworth, in Hackney and Moss Side, in every city where the Caribbean community has built its presence — the moment is marked with tears and celebration and a deep, specific satisfaction: the satisfaction of people who have worked for this moment across decades and who have been told repeatedly that it would not come, and who did not stop. The Caribbean community’s anti-apartheid activism — its boycott campaigns, its community solidarity, its political pressure sustained through organisations including the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the 1990 Trust, and countless church and community groups — has been part of the long international campaign that made Mandela’s release, and the unbanning of the ANC that preceded it, politically possible. The morning of 11 February 1990 belongs, in part, to them.

Mandela’s Release: The Morning After the Long Night

F.W. de Klerk’s announcement on 2 February 1990 — unbanning the ANC, the Pan-Africanist Congress, the Communist Party of South Africa, and thirty-three other organisations, and announcing Mandela’s imminent release — is received in the Caribbean community with the recognition that something irreversible has happened. The apartheid state, which for forty years maintained its system of racial classification, forced removals, Bantustans, and state violence against its own population, has acknowledged that it cannot continue. The political calculations that led de Klerk to this moment include the role of international sanctions, international pressure, and the sustained moral and political campaign waged by the international anti-apartheid movement of which the Caribbean community was a constituent part.

Mandela’s speech from the steps of Cape Town City Hall on the evening of his release is received in the Caribbean community with the attention that the community gives to political speech of genuine historical weight. His commitment to negotiation, his insistence on the ANC’s non-racialism, his call for international sanctions to remain in place until irreversible democratic change has been achieved, and his tribute to Oliver Tambo and to all those who maintained the struggle during the years of his imprisonment, are characteristics that the Caribbean community’s political tradition recognises and honours. The community’s celebration is joyful and specific: this is what sustained, principled political struggle, maintained across decades against the odds, can achieve.

The Poll Tax Riot and the Community’s Position

On 31 March 1990, a demonstration in Trafalgar Square against the Community Charge — the poll tax — descends into disorder. Cars are set alight, shop windows are broken, and police and demonstrators clash across central London. The riot is the most serious disorder in London since the Brixton riots of 1981, and it marks a new moment in the political campaign against the tax that the Caribbean community and its organisations have been sustaining since the measure was first proposed. The Caribbean community’s position on the poll tax is clear: it is regressive in its structure and unjust in its impact, falling most heavily on the poorest people in the poorest areas. The poll tax must be opposed and repealed.

The disorder of 31 March creates a more complex position for the community’s organisations. The Caribbean community’s political tradition has consistently distinguished between legitimate protest and political violence, and has consistently argued that the interests of communities already regarded with suspicion by the police are not served by disorder that provides justification for disproportionate policing. Community leaders and organisations respond to the Trafalgar Square riot by reaffirming the campaign against the poll tax while distancing themselves from the violence. The political argument remains: the tax is unjust, and the government must abolish it.

Michael Manley’s Jamaica and the New International Order

Michael Manley, who returned to the Jamaican prime ministership in February 1989 following the PNP’s general election victory, is governing Jamaica through one of the most transformative periods in international affairs since the post-war settlement. The end of the Cold War, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, has changed the strategic environment within which Caribbean states operate. The international economic framework — which Manley resisted in the 1970s and which imposed structural adjustment conditions on Jamaica during the Seaga years — remains dominant; but the end of Soviet competition removes one of the constraints that made the IMF and World Bank’s demands on developing nations conditional on strategic calculations that occasionally worked in those nations’ favour. CARICOM’s response to the new international order is to press for recognition of small island states’ special vulnerabilities and to resist the reduction of development assistance that a post-Cold War Western consensus might otherwise deliver.

Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; New Nation; The Voice; BBC News; Reuters; AP; The Guardian; Commission for Racial Equality; Anti-Apartheid Movement; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK); House of Commons Hansard.

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