When 2 freedom icons met

MANILA, Philippines - When former President Corazon Aquino and her daughters Ballsy Cruz and Pinky Abellada met President Nelson Mandela in Pretoria in August 1996, the anti-apartheid revolutionary leader told Cruz she was very lucky.

“You really know how to pick the best mom!” Mandela told her, “in his deep, booming voice,” Cruz recalls.

Mandela, 95, died at home in Johannesburg yesterday after struggling with a series of lung infections for the past two years. Mrs. Aquino was confined in hospital for over a month herself before succumbing to colon cancer on Aug. 1, 2009.

“My mother admired Mandela very much,” Cruz recalls, adding how impressed her mother was with Mandela whom she found “so humble” despite his fame and devoid of bitterness despite his 27 years of incarceration for his stand against apartheid.

“Despite the great heights he reached, wala siyang kayabang-yabang (he had no hint of arrogance). He was so warm and he had no hint of bitterness in him,” Cruz told The STAR.

Mrs. Aquino, an icon of democracy herself for leading a bloodless people power revolution in the Philippines, was in Pretoria in 1996 to be the keynote speaker of the Nelson Mandela Award on Human Rights (for Public Health), sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

A few months after that, she paid formal tribute to Mandela when she received the Fulbright Prize at the US State Department in Washington, which honored Mandela himself with the award the year before.

“I am greatly honored yet deeply humbled to receive this award. For I am preceded in this distinction by one who took upon himself, what seemed for centuries, the impossible struggle of a people for equality, dignity and freedom in their own country,” Mrs. Aquino said.

She praised Mandela for vanquishing racism, “so that when he danced on the stage of his inaugural as the first black president of South Africa, good men and women throughout the world followed his steps.”

“And he achieved this, not by force but with reason; never with hate but with, I think, something like love; not with recriminations but with an unyielding resolve never to look back in anger but forward, with the enemy of his people, to the time when they can regard each other as one.”

When Mrs. Aquino told former US embassy charge d’affaires Joseph Mussomeli how honored she was to have been in the company of Mandela, he reportedly told her, “You, too, Mrs. President, have done much to vanquish oppressors. You are both freedom icons.”