Joe Biden claims he was arrested in Soweto while trying to visit Nelson Mandela on Robben Island
Democratic 2020 US presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden. Picture: Patrick T Fallon/Reuters/African News Agency Former president Nelson Mandela. Picture: Juda Ngwenya/Reuters/African News Agency Las Vegas - In at least three campaign appearances over the past two weeks, Joe Biden has told a similar story as he tries to revive his campaign in states with more diverse voters.
“This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid,” Biden said at a campaign event in South Carolina last week. “I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our UN ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robbens Island.”
Biden referred to his own arrest twice more in the next seven days, including at a campaign stop here on Tuesday where he spoke of getting arrested in South Africa between efforts to coax his wife to marry him. That proposal occurred in 1977, both Bidens have said. But if Biden, then a US senator from Delaware, was in fact arrested while trying to visit Mandela, he did not mention it in his 2007 memoir when writing about a 1970s trip to South Africa, and he has not spoken of it prominently on the 2020 campaign trail. A check of available news accounts by The New York Times turned up no references to an arrest. South African arrest records are not readily available in the United States.
Andrew Young, a former congressman and mayor of Atlanta who was the US ambassador to the United Nations from 1977 to 1979, said that he had travelled with Biden over the years, including to South Africa. But Young said that he had never been arrested in South Africa and expressed skepticism that members of Congress would have faced arrest there.
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