2000 Francs Nelson Mandela

Rwanda issued this coin in 1990 while Mandela was still imprisoned on Robben Island — he would not be released until February of that year, and the timing of the striking relative to his actual release on the 11th remains ambiguous in mint records. For a landlocked central African nation with no direct political ties to South Africa's liberation movement, the issue was an unusually pointed diplomatic statement, one of several such commemoratives Rwanda produced during the late 1980s and early 1990s targeting international humanitarian figures.