While dodging Bosnian mortars
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“I couldn’t have made it without John’s hat!”
Joe Biden claims he was arrested in South Africa while trying to visit Nelson Mandela
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is facing scrutiny over a dubious tale from the campaign trail, claiming that he was arrested in South Africa while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison.
Biden, 77, first told the story at a campaign event in Columbia, South Carolina on February 11, as he tried to shake off defeat in New Hampshire, and has repeated it twice more during outreach to black voters.
'This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid,' Biden said in Columbia of the former South African president, who was imprisoned for 27 years by the apartheid government.
'I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robben Island,' Biden went on.
No contemporaneous or other supporting evidence has emerged to support Biden's extraordinary claim, leading some to compare it to the so-called 'Mandela Effect', a phenomenon in which a person's vivid memory of a historical event or cultural touchstone turns out to be false.
