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.

But something unexpected happened in those decades of captivity. Rather than growing bitter, Mandela grew wise. He studied Afrikaans — the language of his oppressors — so he could one day speak to them as neighbors. He mediated disputes among fellow prisoners, sharpening the diplomacy he would later need. When he finally emerged, blinking in the South African sunlight with his fist raised beside his wife Winnie, he did not call for vengeance. He called for reconciliation.

Four years later, at his presidential inauguration in Pretoria, Mandela invited his former prison guards to sit as honored guests.

Genesis 50:20 records Joseph's words to the brothers who sold him into slavery: "You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives." What Joseph's brothers meant for destruction, the Almighty used for deliverance. What the apartheid regime meant to bury, God used to prepare.