CAPE TOWN - US Ambassador Leo Brent Bozell has expressed how deeply he was moved when he visited Nelson Mandela's Robben Island cell.
Bozell visited the island prison as a guest of struggle stalwart Tokyo Sexwale. This was for the ambassador to get an understanding of how hard South Africa's freedom was fought for.
"On the one hand, you can say it's what I expected. I read the book. Nelson Mandela went to great lengths to describe it. But then you are walking in the footsteps of these men, and you’re trying to, as I told Tokyo, you’re trying to fathom what it was like to be there for years, and years and years. And I can’t fathom that. If you weren’t there, you can't understand it, and I don’t pretend to understand it,” Bozell said.
He also took the opportunity to clarify his views.
"I think those words were really out of context."
He said that during the time of the Soviet Union, you were either on the side of the Soviet Union or the West.
"The Soviet Union was the greatest threat to freedom. We were at the height of the Cold War. ANC had aligned itself with the Soviet Union. The moment it did that, it became the enemy of the United States. The Soviet Union was defeated, the Soviet Union dissolved. The moment that happened, everything changed. The ANC was no longer what it had been," he said.
Bozell is returning to the States to report back on his first few months in South Africa.