Letter from Pretoria: Young and old of all races wanted a chance to pay homage

 
Military personnel carry the remains of the late Nelson Mandela at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, December 11, 2013, where it will lie in state for three days. REUTERS/Marco Longari/Pool (SOUTH AFRICA - Tags: POLITICS OBITUARY SOCIETY MILITARY)
Kim Sengupta11 December 2013

They were silent as they walked past, some however stopped to cry after they had left the canopied stage where Nelson Mandela’s body had been laid.

 This was not unexpected, the police had boxes of tissues on offer. “We are all sad too”, said a female officer consoling an elderly woman.

Madiba, as people here call him, lay with his head on white cloth in the glass topped coffin with a navy honour guard of four. He wore a  black and gold shirt, his face looking  younger than his age.  Bouquets had piled up on the side, from his family, from the great and the good, nationally and internationally; were also smaller bunches of flowers which had been brought by members of staff.

I asked a young man, Freddie Akhona, wearing a Mandela t-shirt, carrying a Mandela poster what went through his mind when he looked at Madiba? “ He looked comfortable, I do not know what it was like when he died, he did not look as if he suffered. I think at the end all he has been through caught up with him.”

The scene was one of serenity, peace as well as loss, apple blossoms floated in the warm sunshine, strangers talked quietly to each other. It was very different from the last leader I had seen ‘lying in state’, it came to my mind :Muammar Gaddafi,  on the floor of a refrigerated meat store in the Libyan city of Misrata after being tortured and killed. There was glee then in the faces of those who had come to look, children knelt down to be photographed by their parents.

President Mandela had  a key role in bringing Col Gadaffi in from the cold, helping with the Lockerbie settlement, playing a part in persuading him to give up his chemical and biological porgrammes. There were lots of photographs of them together, how differently had their lives gone since then.

A couple were sitting on the grass outside the under a blue and white awning shielding the body. Rashida Yakub had a collection of newspaper cuttings in front of her. “I did not really know the details about his life so much. It is only after his death I started to find out more. We wanted to come today because I realize just how much he did for us.”

Madiba’s body was at its resting place at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the symbol of white might during apartheid, before being taken for the funeral ceremony at his tribal homeland on Sunday. It was taken from a military hospital where it had lain in cortege this morning, the coffin draped in the national flag and flowers, including rare Eastern Cape Alos the former President particularly liked.

 It will lie in state for three days at the building, described by the government as a “modern day acropolis, on hill over Pretoria. The building has two wings, representing Afrikaans and English, but none of the indigenous languages. Mr Mandela was inaugurated here as the first black president in 1994.

As I watched the endless stream of people walk past the coffin, an army officer said that it was expected the numbers would continue to rise, reaching a crescendo on Friday. “ The funeral will be very tightly controlled, so we expect people from other cities to come here in the next days.”

Mr Mandela’s family and dignitaries from home and abroad were the first to go in to pay their respect this morning; the public came later, collected in buses from points in the city, many waving the national flag, the flag of the African National Congress, and pictures of the lost leader.

Among the great and the good were those who had been central to his tempestuous personal and political life. Mr Mandela had been laid outside, with four junior members of the navy forming an honour guard, the top half of his body visible through a glass lid.

Mr Mandela’s former wife Winnie looked distraught, supported by her youngest daughter Zindzi, pausing to hold the arms of Grace Michel, Mr Mandela married later. His grandson and heir Mandla Mandela, who had walked behind the coffin, joined them in a consoling huddle.

The official visitors were led by Mr Mandela’s successors as heads of state, Thabo Mbeki and the current incumberent Jacob Zuma, who had been relentlessly heckled and booed by the crowd during a memorial service for Madiba yesterday in Johannesberg in front of foreign dignitaries, exposing, in front foreign dignitaries, the bitter faultlines in the nation’s politics which had deepened since the late president left public life. Also there was FW De Klerk, the white president who had officially ended apartheid and was among those cheered at the memorial.

The public had gathered at three points in the city to be taken in later in the afternoon. Three generations of Samson Kwazi’s family had been waiting patiently for over two hours at one of them in Fountains Valley Park. “I am a pensioner, but my son has taken a day off work and my two grandsons here, I have been giving them some education about Madiba, lessons in history, how our country was formed, unless they learn about that, how can they, the young people, stop this country getting worse and worse.”

Mr Kwazi, 73, had taken part in protests against apartheid and jailed, he said, as a result. “At the time I was so angry that I could killed, yes killed, to get our freedom, and a lot of people on both sides thought like that. But Madiba, he saved us from that. He said, look I’ve been jailed for so many years and I do not want revenge and you should also feel the same way.

“I was at the stadium [where the memorial was held] yesterday and I am glad that Zuma was booed, he is a crook.  But we cheered De Klerk, most of the people were black but we cheered a white man who was president during apartheid. Why? Wed did it, because of what Mandela taught us.”

At the end of each day the coffin will be driven back to the Military Hospital, where it had been kept since his death, overnight. The government has asked the public to line the rout for each trip.

“I will be doing that every day, it will be my privilege” said Walter Andibe, who returned to South Africa braking off his holiday on learning of Mr Mandela’s death. “You outsiders may think I am crazy, but you would not understand what he meant to us. He created this country, he gave us our self-respect. We have a personal relationship with him you probably will not have with politicians in your country.”

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