In this image from TV, Christo Brand the Robben Island jailer talks to The Associated Press Saturday Dec. 7, 2013, in his Cape Town home, about former South African President Nelson Mandela who was assigned to guard from 1978 until his release in 1990.CAPE TOWN, South Africa – He was with Nelson Mandela during all those years the anti-apartheid icon was imprisoned on Robben Island. And, like millions around the world, he has been hit hard by Mandela’s death.
Yet this South African was not one of Mandela’s fellow prisoners. Christo Brand was his jailer.
The two men – the black political prisoner and the white Afrikaans warden – forged an unlikely but enduring friendship.
They last met about two years ago when Brand, now in his 50s, brought his wife, son and grandson to see Mandela in Cape Town in a Sunday afternoon visit that lasted nearly three hours.
They had “nice chats about the past, about his family. He wanted to pick up my grandchild, to hold him, which he was a little bit shy to go to him. You could see he really reached out for touching a child at that moment,” Brand recalled.