Biden backs down over Mandela claim
Joe Biden’s campaign has conceded that he was not arrested for trying to visit Nelson Mandela in jail, despite his repeated recollections of such an incident.
On campaign visits to Nevada and South Carolina, where the Democratic electorate is mostly black, Biden claimed that, during a visit to South Africa in the 1970s as senator for Delaware, he was detained in Soweto.
In a retelling of the tale in Las Vegas last week, Biden added that he was thanked in person by Mandela after the anti-apartheid campaigner became president of South Africa in 1994.
In a clarification yesterday, his team admitted that the former vice-president had only been ‘‘separated’’ from black members of a congressional delegation after flying in to the country at the height of white minority rule.
‘‘This was apartheid South Africa. There was a white door. There was a black door. He did not want to go through the white door and have the rest of the party go to the black door,’’ Biden’s spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield said.
Bedingfield could not explain Biden’s use of the word arrest, which he first mentioned a fortnight ago at a campaign event in South Carolina as he tried to shake off his defeat in the New Hampshire primary.
Nor could his communications director account for Biden’s recollection of being thanked personally by Mandela.
In Biden’s telling, he had been trying to visit Mandela, who died in 2013, on Robben Island, an infamous prison about 1500 kilometres from Soweto.
The backdown came as the Democratic rivals for the party’s nomination tussled over black voters before the first southern state primary on Saturday.
At a breakfast event at the Mount Moriah Missionary Baptist Church in North Charleston yesterday, Bernie Sanders boasted of being arrested while campaigning for civil rights, while Biden sang the praises of the leading African-american politician in South Carolina.
Polling in South Carolina, where more than 60 per cent of Democratic voters are black, suggests that Biden might be on the verge of a comeback before Super Tuesday next week, when 14 states will decide their candidate.