NEW TWIST: Biden NOW Says He Was ‘Stopped’ By ‘Afrikaners With Guns’ On Way To See Mandela

Poor “Uncle” Joe Biden.

The former vice president can’t seem to remember exactly what happened back in the 1970s and, lately, claimed he was “arrested” in South Africa while trying to see then-prisoner Nelson Mandela.

First, Joe Biden said the whole thing happened in Soweto, a suburb of Johannesburg. That’s 900 miles from where Mandela was being held in prison on Robben Island. Then, following a debate in South Carolina, a campaign aide admitted that Biden wasn’t actually arrested but “separated” from members of the Congressional Black Caucus after landing on the tarmac in South Africa ahead of a Congressional junket.

But now Biden is saying he was yanked off the plane by “Afrikaners with guns.”

On Friday, the first time Biden directly answered questions about the ever-evolving tale, he said he was separated from members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) by “Afrikaners with guns” during a trip to the country.

“I wasn’t arrested, I was stopped. I was not able to move where I wanted to go,” Biden said when asked directly if he had been arrested.

But he made more alterations to the story. While he at first claimed it happened “on the streets of Soweto,” he now says it happened at an unnamed airport. He said it may have been near Cape Town — much closer to Mandela’s prison. And he also abandoned the claim that he was with “our U.N. ambassador” at the time.

“I was with a black delegation, the CBC, the Congressional Black Caucus. They had me get off a plane,” he said. “The Afrikaners got on in their short pants and their guns. Lead me off first and moved me in a direction totally different. I turned around and everybody, the entire black delegation, was going another way. I said, ‘I’m not going to go in that door that says white only. I’m going with them,'” he said.

“They said, ‘You’re not, you can’t move, you can’t go with them.’ And they kept me there until finally I decided that it was clear I wasn’t going to move,” Biden said. “What they finally did was, they decided they’re not going to let the black delegation go through a black door, I’m not going to go through a white door, they finally took us through — if my memory serves me — to a restaurant.”

But his memory hasn’t served him well lately. In at least three campaign appearances over the last few weeks, Biden said that during a trip to South Africa in the 1970s, he was “arrested” as he sought to visit Mandela in prison.

“This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid,” Biden said at a campaign event in South Carolina. “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 Robbens (sic) Island.”

“After [Mandela] got free and became president, he came to Washington and came to my office,” Biden said later at a black history awards lunch in Las Vegas. “He threw his arms around me and said, ‘I want to say thank you.’ I said, ‘What are you thanking me for, Mr. President?’ He said, ‘You tried to see me. You got arrested trying to see me.’”

But Biden never mentioned the arrest in his memoir or in a statement following Mandela’s death — and he’s never mentioned it on the campaign trail until recently.

Then last week, a campaign spokesman recast the whole tale, saying Biden wasn’t actually “arrested,” but instead “separated” from a congressional delegation for a short period while at a South African airport.

“He was separated from his party at the airport,” Biden spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield told reporters after Tuesday night’s Democratic debate.

“It was a separation. They — he was not allowed to go through the same door that the — the rest of the party he was with. Obviously, it was apartheid South Africa. There was a white door, there was a black door. He did not want to go through the white door and have the rest of the party go through the black door. He was separated. This was during a trip while they were there in Johannesburg.”