Tearful S Africa prepares for final Mandela journey
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South Africa prepared yesterday a sweeping, emotional 10-day farewell to Nelson Mandela — a funeral that will draw an unprecedented gathering of world leaders and luminaries, reflecting the anti-apartheid icon’s transcendent influence.
Presidents, heads of government and royalty from every corner of the globe will be among those seeking to pay their respects to modern South Africa’s founding father, who died late on Thursday aged 95, surrounded by friends and family.
The sheer scale of the event and of the world attention and emotion surrounding it has had observers searching back decades for a precedent, with some citing the funerals of Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill.
Mandela’s body will lie in state for three days from Wednesday, ahead of his eventual burial on December 15 in his boyhood home of Qunu.
The government announced yesterday that his coffin would be taken in a cortege through the streets of Pretoria each morning, giving the millions of South Africans still coming to terms with the death of their first black leader an opportunity to say a final farewell.
The organizational logistics are daunting and the military yesterday canceled leave for troops and reservists to help crowd control.
Large numbers of mourners, carrying candles, flowers and messages of respect have turned up every day outside Mandela’s residence in Johannesburg and in the once blacks-only township of Soweto.
Memorial events begin today with South Africans invited to go to churches, mosques, synagogues and other places of worship, to pay their respects.
A huge memorial service is to be held on Tuesday in Soweto’s 90,000-plus capacity sports stadium that hosted the final of the 2010 World Cup.
US President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle will travel to South Africa together with former first couple George W. and Laura Bush.
Another former US president, Bill Clinton, who was in office when Mandela became South Africa’s first black president, will also attend.
In a tribute shortly after the revered statesman’s death was made public, Obama mourned Mandela as a “profoundly good” man who “took history in his hands and bent the arc of the moral universe towards justice.”
On Friday, ordinary South Africans across the country poured out onto the streets in a riot of color, dance and song to celebrate the life of their beloved ex-leader, known affectionately as Madiba.
In Cape Town, a crowd of thousands from all races and ages gathered for a multi-faith celebration at the site where Mandela made his first public speech after nearly three decades in apartheid jail.
“Tonight we stand in solidarity as the people of Cape Town — black, white, colored, Indian, all the religions together,” said Mayor Patricia De Lille.
South Africa’s archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu, a fellow Nobel prize winner, praised Mandela as an “incredible gift that God gave us.”
Fighting back tears, Tutu said his old friend was “a unifier from the moment he walked out of prison.”
Mandela spent 27 years in an apartheid prison before becoming president and unifying his country with a message of reconciliation after the end of white minority rule. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize with South Africa’s last white president, FW de Klerk, in 1993.
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