Mandela's unlikely friendship with his prison guard

Guarding Mandela: The incredible and heart warming story of an unlikely relationship formed between Mandela and his prison guard.

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As concern mounts in South Africa over Nelson Mandela's condition, this touching report looks at the unlikely bond between the leader and his Robben Island prison guard, which became a lifelong friendship.

"He was afraid to approach the street, we had to lead him by the arm," recalls Christo Brandt, Mandela's prison guard for 12 years. The government was so sure he wouldn't be recognised that from 1981, when his health first began to deteriorate, South Africa's public enemy number one walked regularly through the city of Cape Town with his prison guard on the way to hospital. The two men's backgrounds couldn't be any more different: Mandela, a black lawyer with royal blood, and Brandt, a white, working class farmer's son. Yet their close relationship broke all the rules of the apartheid regime. Mandela wrote in his autobiography, "the most important person in any prisoner's life is not the minister of justice, but the warden in one's section". When the government bugged Brandt and instructed him to set Mandela up with some leading questions, Brandt showed extraordinary loyalty and instead tipped off his friend. In 1995, the former prisoner called his old guard to offer him a job in the presidential office, where the two worked happily together for many years. "He had become like a father to me", Brandt smiles.

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