Songs, discord mark Mandela’s last days
Media throng outside hospital irritates family
PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA — The atmosphere was thick with tension Thursday as those gathered to bear witness to Nelson Mandela’s final days sang songs of the apartheid struggle outside the hospital where the former South African leader lay in critical condition.
Meanwhile, Mandela’s family lashed out at foreign media, even raising the spectre of racism, over the intense coverage of his now 20-day hospital stay.
Family spread word during the day that Mandela’s health was deteriorating rapidly. But the president’s office released a statement shortly thereafter suggesting that, in fact, he had stabilized and his condition was improving.
From dawn until well after dusk family members and political leaders came and went from Pretoria’s Medi-Clinic Heart Hospital.
Impromptu choirs sang songs outside the hospital as they awaited news about the 94-year-old Mandela, who was said to be in critical condition. The crowds converging on the hospital grew throughout the day.
Mandela’s family had been summoned to a morning meeting with medical staff, and South African President Jacob Zuma had at the last moment cancelled a trip he was to have taken to Mozambique.
One of Mandela’s daughters said Thursday, “Tata’s (father’s) situation is critical.
“I’m not going to lie. He does not look good ... anything is imminent,” Makaziwe Mandela said. But “we still have this hope because when we talk to him, he’d flutter trying to open his eyes.”
Her dire report was at odds with the latest statement from Zuma, who after visiting Mandela Thursday, said “he is much better today than I saw him last night.”
Members of the media also gathered outside the hospital, but their presence has drawn criticism from Mandela’s family. Makaziwe Mandela said foreign media coverage of her father’s illness had become intrusive, particularly at the Pretoria hospital.
“There’s sort of a racist element with many of the foreign media, where they just cross boundaries,” she said in the SABC interview. “It’s like truly vultures waiting when a lion has devoured a buffalo, waiting there for the last carcasses. That’s the image that we have, as a family.”
She said: “We don’t mind the interest. But I just think it has gone overboard.”
Outside the hospital, a seemingly endless string of apparently spontaneous singing and dancing troupes came through, wanting to be part of what they thought would be a historic day.
“The world is going to be very lonely when Mandela is gone because he embraced everyone,” said the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Pretoria, William Slattery, who came to pay his respects and to pray.
Standing near a group of Pretorians who belted out an exuberant Tswana song known as Wake Up, Why Are You Sleeping, the priest, who moved from Ireland to South Africa 43 years ago and speaks four African languages, said he had found in his dealings with Mandela that he had always been “approachable, understanding and did not bring attention to himself.”
Slattery added that Mandela was a prime exemplar of “ubuntu,” which he described as a wonderful African quality of humanity.
“His passing will represent the end of a generation. It is almost like the passing of Queen Victoria,” he said. “But even after death he will continue to influence the general curve of the road ahead.”
As they have for days, some in the crowd expressed deep disappointment at how little the family and government had told them of Mandela’s health throughout his long hospital ordeal.
“They are trying too hard to keep him alive. I would love them to let nature takes its course,” said Kebone Segwai, referring to Mandela being assisted to breathe by a ventilator. “I wouldn’t dream of doing this to my own mother. He is an old man and deserves to be left in peace. ”
After nightfall the crowds quickly thinned as the southern winter pushed temperatures down toward 6 C.
Twenty days ago, Mandela was taken in the wee hours of the morning to the hospital from his home in the upmarket Johannesburg suburb of Houghton. What should have been a 45-minute journey on Saturday, June 8, was interrupted by a 40-minute stay at the side of an expressway after the military ambulance Mandela had been riding in had a breakdown.
When the shocking debacle with the ambulance and the world’s most revered living person was revealed 13 days later by a U.S. media outlet, the government declared that top intensive care doctors and nurses had been at Mandela’s side the whole time and he had never been in danger. It further insisted that the roadside delay while another ambulance was found had not further compromised Mandela’s health.
In announcing Mandela’s hospitalization, the government revealed for the first time that “Madiba,” as he often affectionately called here, was in “serious but stable” condition with a recurring lung infection. These were alarming words about the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s health that South Africans had not heard during his previous three stays in hospital for treatment for the same ailment since last December.
As the tone of the medical message changed, so did the response of Mandela’s Rainbow Nation. Where previously few wanted to admit that the end might come soon, most now spoke with resignation about how they prayed for Mandela’s suffering to end, rather than for a miracle from God so that he could continue living. But they continued to be drawn to the hospital, where they have been leaving touching notes and singing songs from the long struggle to end white minority rule that he led for so many years from a prison cell on an island off the Cape of Good Hope.
As the realization sank in that Mandela is unlikely to be getting out of hospital this time, there has been growing anxiety about what might come next for a nation with dire economic and social problems and a political leadership that is widely regarded as corrupt and selfserving. Although Mandela has not been president for 14 years, his towering presence continued to cast a powerful moderating spell over South African life.
Except to state that his condition was unchanged, the government and Mandela’s family provided virtually no information about the patriarch’s precarious health from June 8 until last Sunday. That night, after a late visit to the hospital, Zuma announced Mandela had deteriorated and he now was in “critical condition.”
Since then, family visits to Mandela’s bedside and to the remote ancestral home 1,000 kilometres to the south of Pretoria in the Eastern Cape where he wished to be buried took on an even greater sense of urgency amid often frenzied speculation that he was no longer conscious, was breathing with the help of a ventilator and was undergoing regular dialysis because his kidneys had failed.