The late and iconic anti-apartheid champion Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela loved Toronto and its residents, who last week returned their love for the late South African president by celebrating his life and 100-years since his birth.

Downtown’s Yonge and Dundas Square was filled with well-wishers last weekend who showed up to remember the famed leader, who visited our city attracting huge crowds in 1990, 1998 and 2001.
Madiba, as he was affectionately called, first visited and fell in love with Canada in 1990, just four months after being freed from a South African jail. He said he was deeply moved to be in a place where, unlike apartheid South Africa, people were free to determine their destiny.

While here, he addressed the joint Houses of Parliament; became the first foreign leader awarded the Order of Canada; an honorary Canadian citizenship and to be greeted by 45,000 screaming Toronto students to launch the Canadian Friends of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund.
Thousands of residents lined the streets of Toronto to see the former President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999 on his visits. People of all ages, races and backgrounds reacted with a joyful outpouring of affection and respect as they waited.
The appreciative city in return dedicated a section of University Ave., from City Hall to Queen’s Park, as Nelson Mandela Boulevard in 2015. The naming stemmed from a visit, when a huge march was held on the University Ave. where Mandela gave a speech attended by tens of thousands of people.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner remembered many of us by face and was always willing to give his support or advice on issues affecting the Black community.
Mandela praised Canada for supporting the anti-apartheid movement and had asked the government not to lift trade sanctions on South Africa, a request then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney proudly obliged.

The ‘father of South Africa’ would have been proud of a rousing speech to 15,000 people by former U.S. president Barack Obama at the Wanderers cricket stadium in Johannesburg last July 17 to mark Nelson Mandela International Day 2018 and 100-years of his birth.
Obama said Madiba’s light shone brightly “even from that narrow Robben Island cell” and forced him as a young college student to re-examine his priorities and “consider the small role I might play in bending the arc of the world towards justice.”
‘’He came to embody the universal aspirations of dispossessed people all around the world, their hopes for a better life, the possibility of a moral transformation in the conduct of human affairs,” the 44th U.S. President told a cheering crowd.
‘’The man went to prison for almost three decades. He split limestone in the heat, he slept in a small cell, and was repeatedly put in solitary confinement,’’ he warned.
Before arriving in South Africa, Obama paid a brief visit to Kenya, his father’s home country. There, he opened a youth centre run by his half-sister and visited the home of his step-grandmother in the village of Kogelo, where his father was born and was buried.

Mandela was imprisoned under apartheid rule in 1962 for fighting for freedom against the white-dominated apartheid government of South Africa. He was freed in 1990 due to mounting pressure from the international community.
He was incarcerated for 27 years with several comrades for the struggle against apartheid on the infamous Robben Island prison off the coast of Cape Town. He won the heart of the world and symbolized the triumph of the human spirit following his release from Pollsmoor Prison.
Millions of people from around the world watched his emotional release from prison, which was broadcasted live on television. He was elected president of South Africa in 1994 and humbly chose the path of reconciliation and restitution instead of revenge.
Mandela shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 with former South African president F.W. de Klerk, who helped to end the dehumanizing apartheid system, which required Blacks to have ‘pass books’ and was in place from 1948 to the early 1990s.
Mandela passed away in 2013 and was given a heroic, televised state funeral.

– 30 –