The South African anti-aparthied revolutionary icon Nelson Mandela’s 61-year-old arrest warrant is set to be auctioned off on March 26th by NFT startup platform Momint.
In Brief:
- This is the arrest warrant’s first and only NFT having verified scarcity.
- The Virtual Nation Builders team modeled it with precision with NFT auditors confirming the validity.
- The net proceeds from the Nelson Mandela NFT sale will move towards Liliesleaf National Heritage Museum.
Momint states that “His warrant of arrest is a unique historic document with worldwide significance. It will immortalize a moment in history by recording it on the blockchain.”
The original document is dated 1961 and is handwritten in both English and Afrikaans. It is now yellowed, with gnarled edges and staple holes on one side. The document was a request for a formal arrest warrant from the prosecution to a judge, who had sole jurisdiction to issue one.
This is the arrest warrant’s first and only NFT. The team at Virtual Nation Builders scanned and modeled it with precision. This is also the first official heritage NFT ever created in South Africa.
The first purchaser of this NFT will be entitled to 5% of all subsequent sales of the NFT for the rest of their life. The NFT has verified scarcity and can’t be manipulated in any way. The opening bid is R900 000, approximately $59500.
The authenticity has been verified by NFT auditors as a deep dive verified NFT. The Lead NFT Auditor who conducted the audit is David Loxton. David is a Lead NFT Auditor at NFT Auditors and is a director at Schindlers Forensics AI.
The arrest warrant NFT will also give the owner exclusive access to view the original, which is kept in a vault at Liliesleaf Farm National Heritage Museum in Johannesburg for safekeeping.
Liliesleaf’s foundation director Nicholas Wolpe stated, “As far as we know, that was what they used to arrest Nelson Mandela” adding it is the only copy known to exist.
The Lilliesleaf farm functioned as the hidden headquarters and nerve center of the then-banned African National Congress (ANC), which led the fight against white minority rule, between 1961 and 1963.
Mandela hid there for a while, posing as a farm worker. Liliesleaf, which transitioned into a museum later, had to close in September 2021 owing to financial issues. The net proceeds from this NFT sale will move towards Liliesleaf itself.
On August 5th, 1962, Nelson Mandela was detained in the southeastern KwaZulu-Natal region.
The first democratically elected black president in South Africa spent the most of his 27-year sentence on Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town, following the 1963 Rivonia treason trial.
NFTs are a great way to document historic moments and pass it on to the coming generations. Recently, the Ukraine government also announced plans to launch an NFT collection documenting the history of the Russian invasion on their nation.
