Read this spine-tingling dispatch from ANN LESLIE as she witnessed Mandela walk free into Cape Town

As I write this, I am shaking with delayed shock. I have been fleeing gunshots, running shoeless through streets full of smashed glass from looted shops.

For the last four hours my head has been spinning with a confused mixture of excitement, fear, joy and foreboding at what has happened and is still happening today.

In this I am no different from anyone else in this vast and beautiful land which quivers on the edge of a political landslip because one elderly, dignified, grey-haired man, walking with a slight limp, four hours ago crossed a stop sign painted on the drive of the Victor Verster Prison — and walked slowly out into the turbulent freedom of a new South Africa.

For me and thousands of people — black and white, young and old — who’d gathered outside the bougainvillaea-splashed buildings on a small rural road in the usually sleepy wine country of the Cape, it had been a long, hot wait.

Armed police offers stand guard in Cape Town on February 11 1990

Leslie describes seeing an ‘elderly, dignified, grey-haired man’ walk ‘slowly out into the turbulent freedom of a new South Africa’

Police opened fire on rioters in Cape Town after Mandela’s release

Under searing winds, under the wrinkled shadow of the Simonsberg Mountain, the crowd had been singing freedom songs. ‘Mandela prescribes freedom.’ ‘We are going to PREE-TORR-IA! We are going to PREE-TORR-IA!’, and ‘Soldiers of Communism!’

As the crowd, in exquisite harmony, sang ‘Listen, we are calling you, Mandela!’ an old man in jackal skins performed a war dance aiming a ferocious stick at the 150 or so sweating and impassive policemen massed round the front of the gates. 

Newsmen whiled away the hours cracking mordant jokes: ‘What’s he doing now? Getting back the watch they took away from him 27 years ago?’

A tiny black Baptist preacher Vuyami Mtini, from a nearby township, his shining face beaming with the fatuous but touching innocence of so many men of the cloth, chirruped: ‘This is so nice! So nice! I hope it will stop all this fighting and all these moaners!’

The slim, black 33-year-old Cheryl Carolus, of the Mass Democratic Movement, her hair streaming in the wind and shouting to be heard over the TV helicopters above, told anxious Pressmen there would be a delay because the reception committee ‘wanted Comrade Mandela to be with his family and in a sense adjust, because it’s going to be a perplexing time on a personal level. He hasn’t seen Winnie since the decision was announced’.

Then the crowd suddenly stiffened, like a huge, dusty animal sniffling something in the air. It began ululating and whistling with a kind of moaning sound. ‘He is coming. Mandela! Mandela! Viva! Viva!’

I had waited impatiently a mere four and a half hours in this place for this moment of history.

But for this mythic ‘god’, this 71-year-old man approaching us, on whose tall, grey-suited frame so many impossible hopes, so much anguish, so much unreasoning love and equally unreasoning hate are pinned — and in whose name so much blood has been spilled, and as I write, is being spilled — this ecstatic moment had taken 27 years to achieve.

As ‘Comrade Mandela’ walked towards us, lifting his right arm in the clenched fist salute of the ANC, his wife by his side, the crowd boiled over with the madness of unbottled joy and unfettered ecstasy.

Suddenly I was swept forward in a maelstrom of flailing limbs and sweat, dust and screams. A huge ANC banner pole tore through my hair, my shoes were ripped from my feet, and I felt my blood warm and sticky on the hot tarmac. For a terrible moment I thought that this was what it felt like to be about to die.

I would have been just another ‘innocent bystander’ victim in a war which has claimed so many since the man before me first lost his freedom.

Through the mass of sweating heads and Mandela T-shirts, arms and elbows shoving into my face, I could see the blue uniforms of grim-faced white policemen linking arms with ANC ‘marshals’.

Tall, khaki-clad youths in tennis shoes and home-made epaluettes in the once-banned ANC colours safety-pinned to their shoulders — and screaming ‘Get back! Get back!’

Only later did I have time to remind myself that a mere fortnight ago these ‘marshals’ would have been beaten and arrested for wearing these gold, green and black strips of cotton on their shirts and these slogans on their baseball hats.

Here, for a moment, however reluctantly, the ‘old’ forces of apartheid and the ‘new’ ascending order of black power had linked arms against increasing chaos on this tiny rural road.

Then, suddenly, the hysteria was over — for the moment. The crowd, realising that their hero had been whisked away in a motorcade, began the slow shuffle towards the distant roadblock.

The crowd stretched ahead for at least two miles as I began to trudge, shoeless and bleeding with them, along the road.

A soldier took pity on me. It helped that I was white; a pregnant Indian woman in a sari who’d fainted in the road was ignored.

The Afrikaner soldier had clearly not realised that I was a member of the hated international Press. When I told him, he swore.

The crowd and the cars moved at snail’s pace. Joyous youths began hitching rides on the tops and boots of the cars ahead, waving their ANC banners and chanting.

Suddenly three youths in Welcome Mandela T-shirts jumped onto the back of the soldier’s car and he slammed on the brakes to shake them off, almost sending both of us through the windscreen.

‘Get off my f****** car man, you f****** animals! If you touch my car again I won’t answer for what I’ll do. You are f****** rats out of hell!’ he screamed, his tiny blond moustache almost vaporising with sweat and rage. ‘And these are the people we are handing this country over to!’

I said I thought that they were being remarkably good-natured and merry. He refused to speak to me again. The only sounds he uttered were grunts and mumbles of continuing fury.

When I reached my car, I gave three women from a Capetown squatter camp a lift to the bus stop.

‘Did you see him? We couldn’t because the crowd was too big!’ ‘Yes,’ I told them. They gasped, and one of them gripped and stroked my shoulder as though I were a sample of the True Cross.

‘Did he look well?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Oh thank God,’ said a grandmother, a vast sofa-shaped woman in blue sateen which, she told me, was her best church dress.

‘We wondered whether he would be killed when he walked out, by the police. He said when he was imprisoned that he was prepared to die for his beliefs.’

I told her that I too remembered the famous statement he made from the dock (said to have been written for him by a British journalist) in which he admitted the charge of sabotage and explained that the government had left no other way out for his people but armed resistance.

He finished his speech with these words: ‘I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.

‘It is an ideal which I hope to live for, and to achieve. But if need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.’

And if, when walking out of that prison, he had indeed ‘died for his beliefs’ at the hands of some Afrikaner nationalist prepared to kill for his beliefs, what then?

‘Madam, South Africa would die,’ said the sateened grandmother without rancour or anything other than a kind of resigned fatalism. ‘We would have lost all hope. God would have deserted us.’

What a terrible burden for a mere mortal to bear, I commented, as the car inched its way through the crowd. ‘Indeed, madam, indeed. But God has chosen him.’ A cruel God, I thought, for no man, not even Mandela, cannot reconcile this warring country overnight.

I left the women at the bus stop and set off down the motorway towards the city. Every bridge over the road was garlanded with people chanting ‘Viva! Viva!’ and raising the clenched fist sign of the ANC.

Despite my bleeding feet and the scepticism which should rule every journalist’s head, I felt infected by the joy and stuck my fist out of the car and shouted back ‘Viva!’

I passed two blonde girls in shorts, their young peachy skins telling of rich suburban homes and barbecues under the stars behind garden walls bristling with electronics and barbed wire. Yet they were waving a huge ‘Welcome home Mandela!’ banner and shouting excitedly ‘Viva!’

Outside Mitchell’s Plain township, where the United Democratic Front was founded in 1983 to protest against the new constitution which extended the vote to Indians and mixed-raced people but not to blacks, a huge crowd had split across the motorway forming an unofficial roadblock.

They surrounded my car and began thumping on the roof — but with joy and high spirits, not rage.

I suddenly felt as elated as I had when I crossed through the Berlin Wall in one of the first East German cars inching towards freedom — and yet then I was not a threat to the West Germans greeting me and thumping on the car as I crossed the border.

But here I was, a white woman, a representative of the ‘oppressor’ race alone in a luxury car.

Why, I thought, are they leaning through the window and kissing me and slapping me on the back and laughing at my shoeless state as though I were one of them?

Perhaps, I thought, there is hope of reconciliation. Perhaps there is an innate generosity of spirit which wil see this country through the dark times ahead. But then I arrived in Capetown itself. Fifty thousand people had crammed into a city which on normal, summer Sundays, is a ghost town.

Helicopters clattered overhead in the evening light, while below their rotor-blades youths were smashing and looting shops and birdshot was being fired.

The stabbings and the killings had begun: the whole bloody drama of hatred and confrontation which characterises so much of what I’ve seen in South Africa in the last two weeks was playing out yet another grim act.

As I fought my way to a local office to write this report, other journalists came running in with me and begun punching lift buttons furiously.

‘Christ, Mandela says he won’t come out and speak to the crowd until there’s calm, and there won’t be calm until he comes. What a shambles! The Mass Democratic Movement has made a real mess of this — and they are so arrogant. The man has failed his first great leadership test!’

In the offices, people were yelling ‘any confirmations on those deaths? One, two or three? God it’s chaos out there!’

I ran out into the street in my bare feet, trying unsuccessfully to avoid the shards of glass from the wrecked Mutual Pharmacy. ‘Hey,’ someone shouted laughingly, ‘why don’t you loot yourself a pair of shoes like everyone else?’

I was running towards the handsome pink-stoned City Hall over-looking Grand Parade where, some hours earlier, Mandela was supposed to have emerged to greet his people.

When this man was flown out at dead of night shackled in a military plane to Robben Island to serve his life sentence in June 1964, the world he left then was another place.

That was the year in which Churchill spoke to the Commons for the last time and Martin Luther King was jailed for trying to force integration in a Florida restaurant.

If ‘Comrade Mandela’ has indeed failed his first leadership test, who can blame him.

I hope, as the world does, that he will pass the next ‘leadership test’. I hope, as the world does, that he will be allowed to do so.

The joy, the euphoria and the sense that reconciliation is possible has — perhaps understandably in the circumstances — now faded from my mind.

Dame Ann Leslie (pictured at the Political Book Awards 2013, Feb 6 2013) witnessed Nelson Mandela’s release from prison on February 11 1990

Nelson Mandela and his companion Graca Machel (right) share a laugh aboard the QE2 cruise liner in this file photo taken March 1998

All I can remember now, is the angry young soldier shouting obscenities about the joyous ‘animals’ daring to touch his car. The cold-eyed young cops I’ve seen at so many demonstrations who’ve waded into peaceful crowds.

Above all, I remember the men I’d seen wearing Nazi-style insignia, carrying guns, batons, and cufflinks, baying for an ‘Afrikaner state’ and beating a man to pulp at the Right-wing rally in Pretoria on Saturday.

What will you do, I’d asked one of these frightening men, when Mandela is released?

He grinned. ‘He won’t be free for long. He will be killed. Guy Fawkes night will be nothing compared to what will happen next!’

And he stroked his alsatian, fingered his gun and laughed.