The phone rang. Mary and I looked at each other. We were alone in Beyers Naudé's house. It was mid-March 1990 and Beyers had left for a meeting with members of the ANC delegation to the first ‘talks about talks’ with the De Klerk government. The ringing stopped. We were waiting for [Methodist minister] Tom Mbabane to take us to his home in Soweto. We had corresponded when Tom was detained and we looked forward to meeting him and his wife Agnes. The phone rang again. I hesitated but then Tom arrived and so I didn't answer.

Tom drove us to his house in Orlando. It was opposite the Mandela home so he and Agnes took us across to meet the housekeeper and look around. While we were talking in the back yard, Nelson Mandela himself came in. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments that no one could have foreseen … He spoke with us for ten minutes, and without any sense of false piety, asked for our prayers for the coming talks … We promised we would pray. We told him we were staying with Beyers Naudé and he said, ‘Oh, is that so? I’ve been trying to phone him but there is no answer at the house.’ I don't know what I would have done if I had picked up the phone and the caller had said, ‘This is Nelson Mandela’!