Well-wishers gather outside Mandela’s home to pray
While media keep a death watch, others wish him a speedy recovery
HOUGHTON, SOUTH AFRICA — “We love Madiba. He will be in our hearts forever,” said a simple handmade sign on the wall outside Nelson Mandela’s mansion in one of South Africa’s most affluent neighbourhoods.
Despite announcements in the past few days that the ailing 94-year-old anti-apartheid crusader and global icon has finally been responding to treatment for a recurrent chest infection, his official medical condition remained “serious” seven days after he was admitted to hospital for the fourth time in seven months because of difficulty breathing.
A swarm of journalists and a battery of television cameras connected to satellite uplinks continued to maintain a respectful, around-the-clock siege across the street from Mandela’s cream-coloured home because of rumours that he might wish to die in his own bed.
Those who made the pilgrimage to Mandela’s doorstep on Friday had a far different mission than those manning the stakeout. They came to pray for South Africa’s first black president and wish him a speedy recovery.
Among the visitors Friday was a group of teenagers from Nimrod Moloto’s Medoli Music Ensemble. It draws its musicians from one of the most troubled parts of Soweto, the black township where Mandela lived before spending 27 years in jail, and a frequent flashpoint during the decades-long struggle to rid the country of its white supremacist government.
“Everyone is touched by everything that happens to Nelson Mandela,” said tenor Zuka Cutu, who is also one of the ensemble’s directors.
“We are here because we wanted to give Madiba a message to get well.
“We know that this is not a time to be excited, but they (the ensemble) were very excited to do this. For them it was a dream come true.”
The ensemble, which has performed to critical acclaim overseas, opened with Prayer: A Plea for Africa, which they learned especially for the occasion after Mandela was hospitalized last weekend. Its brief program concluded with Thula Sizwe, a protest song from the apartheid era which roughly means “Calm the Nation.”
Houghton Estates, with its perfectly manicured lawns, leafy luxury homes and battalions of top-end cars, remains a bastion of immense white privilege, although a few black families have moved in since Mandela and his followers abolished apartheid during the early 1990s.
Mandela is credited with holding the country together through some very difficult years by forging what his old neighbour from Soweto, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, called the “Rainbow Nation.”
Such is the respect for Mandela today that it would be difficult to find a South African — white or black — who would find his choice for a retirement home even mildly ironic. Few here would begrudge Mandela anything in his twilight years.
Nevertheless, Houghton shows how even Mandela, a political Superman celebrated worldwide for his leadership and for his sense of fairness, has not been able to entirely change South Africa.
In many ways the Johannesburg suburb looks and feels exactly like the old South Africa.
Every residence is a fortress with three- and four-metre-high walls and plenty of surveillance cameras. Each compound carries signs promising intruders that they will be met by “proactive security” and by “an armed response.” Self-described “tactical units” cruise the streets in muscled pickups trying to deter home invasions.
The other South Africa lurks everywhere. Many street signs in Houghton are adorned with handwritten notices put there by black men and women searching for work as domestics, painters and thatchers or offering to repair tennis courts and swimming pools.
Just as they did during the apartheid era, at the end of the work day, large numbers of blacks gather quietly on the main thoroughfares beside the grand homes where they are employed, waiting quietly for crowded vans to take them back to their modest homes a few hours and a world away in the black townships.
Still, Mandela would be delighted with progress of a different kind that will be made this weekend.
A keen lover of sports and its healing power, the lanky former boxer badly wanted the national rugby team, the Springboks, whose successes were an obsession of the ruling Afrikaners before the end of white minority rule, to integrate.
On Saturday, a 21-year-old black player — Siya Kolisi — who grew up in poverty near Mandela’s birthplace in the Eastern Cape, is expected to play his first test match against Scotland.