Freedom flag was born in a flash of genius

Ours is one of only two six-colour flags in the world and was flown from a helicopter above Pretoria at Nelson Mandela's inauguration in 1994.

What few know is that it took only two minutes to sketch a prototype. Fred Brownell, now 74, was the man who designed our national flag in 1993.

Brownell was attending a congress hosted by the International Flag Federation, in Switzerland, when he had his light-bulb moment.

It happened during "an interminable" meeting.

"I flipped over the lecture programme and drew a sketch in less than two minutes," he said.

The first drawing was of three arms in "convergence and unification".

"It was just an idea about how we could represent coming together ... streams flowing into one another, whether cultural, linguistic or whatever ... a unifying of people's cultures, something that could bring the people of South Africa together," he said.

As this country's state herald, a post he occupied from 1982 to 2002, his duties included approving the design and registration of coats of arms, badges and flags.

He had been toying with the design for a new flag since the announcement in parliament by then-president FW de Klerk on February 2 1990 that Mandela would be freed.

"As state herald, you have to look ahead. But every bright idea I had went straight into the wastepaper basket."

Ten days after his return from Switzerland, he was appointed to a commission on national symbols.

Brownell's design was kept under wraps. About 7000 proposed designs were submitted and eventually whittled down to six .

After being given a deadline of a week, Brownell submitted his idea.

It was one of five designs that was presented to the committee and the cabinet.

"No decision was taken there. But I watched their eyes - they were coming back to this one [the one he sketched in Switzerland]."

But the design needed Mandela's approval. He, however, was in Rustenburg and there was no time to get the proposed flag to him. A drawing was faxed to Rustenburg, where it was coloured before being shown to Mandela, who approved it.

Unknown until now is that Brownell's daughter, Claire, a schoolteacher in her 20s at the time, persuaded her father to alter the design of the flag because the original looked too much like the peace symbol.

"The middle leg has to go," she told her father. It did.

Brownell said he was once told that a well-designed flag could be reduced to postage-stamp size without losing any detail.

"If you can't do that, you have a bad design," he said. The new flag passed the test.

Brownell is now working on a doctoral degree in history at the University of Pretoria.

His thesis, which he is hoping to complete by the end of the year, is, not surprisingly, based on the history of the national flag.

As more than 18million South Africans went to the polls on Wednesday, Brownell hoisted the flag - his flag - outside his home in a retirement village in Pretoria.

And the other national flag with as many colours? It is that of South Sudan, the world's youngest nation, which broke away from its northern neighbour, Sudan, in 2011.