5000 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 this piece was almost certainly struck before or concurrent with that release, making the timing politically charged in ways the issuing authority likely calculated carefully. For a landlocked central African nation with no direct historical ties to South Africa, the choice of Mandela as subject was a deliberate act of pan-African solidarity.

The .999 fineness places it among the purer gold commemoratives of the period, when many sovereigns were still issuing at .900.