Twenty-Seven Years That Saved a Nation

On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela walked through the gates of Victor Verster Prison in Paarl, South Africa, a free man after twenty-seven years behind bars. The apartheid government had locked him away in 1962, hoping to silence his voice and crush his movement. They confined him to a tiny cell on Robben Island, forced him to break rocks in a limestone quarry, and denied him contact with the outside world for years at a stretch.…