Politicizing Mandela’s long goodbye
PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA — Nelson Mandela’s long goodbye continued Friday.
Large crowds once again swarmed outside the walls of the Mediclinic Heart Hospital, where for the past three weeks the condition of South Africa’s first black president has yo-yoed from “serious” to “critical” to “clinically still unwell” but showing “great improvement.”
The atmosphere Friday was restrained compared to the frenzy that raged for about 12 hours on Thursday when there was rampant speculation that Mandela’s death was imminent after South African media said it had confirmed that he was on artificial life support and that his condition was rapidly deteriorating.
The great majority of South Africans who have turned up at the hospital have been ordinary folks eager to show their affection for Madiba, as he is usually called here. There have been a few bemused white South African onlookers, too, standing together in small clumps on the margins of the throng.
Nobody was talking Friday but there has been speculation that the Mandela family has not yet reached a unified position on how proactive his medical care should be going forward.
A squabble involving Mandela’s heirs was resolved Friday when the Mthatha High Court acting on behalf of 16 family members ordered that his grandson Mandla, who is chief of a local Xhosa tribal council, return the remains of two of Mandela’s daughters, his one son and two other family members to the plot at Qunu.
It is there in a hardscrabble farming community that the iconic apartheid fighter has requested to be buried under a plain stone marker in a modest graveyard. The remains had been exhumed by Mandla Mandela without the permission of his other close relatives, the court ruled.
However, there were still ongoing family feuds over the disposition of millions of dollars that Mandela is believed to have placed in trust funds.
A local controversy arising from the drama of Mandela’s faltering health has been how the governing African National Congress (ANC) had cynically tried to hijack his dire medical situation for political benefit.
There was plenty of evidence of this on Thursday and again on Friday. Big ANC banners were unfurled by the entrance to the hospital and supporters in the party’s green and yellow colours were bused in to sing and march for the cameras in a bald attempt to maintain the party’s historic link to Mandela.
“I don’t think that’s abusing his name,” Education Minister Bonginkosi Emmanuel “Blade” Nzimande told reporters Friday as he and many other ANC supporters gathered in full party regalia. “It’s not electioneering. We only came after Mandela’s health became critical. We have taken this opportunity to be near him and rightfully so.”
Justifying his presence and those of hundreds of other ANC partisans, some of whom had arrived at the hospital Thursday behind a truck festooned with a sign encouraging voters to re-elect the party’s Jacob Zuma as South African president, Nzimande said Mandela had gone to jail because of things he had done in the ANC’s name and that even at this late stage in his life he remained “ANC is his own way.”
With Mandela’s life and death struggle transfixing South Africa, Barack Obama’s longawaited first visit to the country as U.S. president, which began Friday evening, has attracted less attention than it might have otherwise. The South African government has insisted that a visit by Obama to Mandela’s bedside was not planned. The American leader appeared to confirm that Friday when he told journalists travelling with him on Air Force One that “we’ll see what the situation is when we land,” before adding, “I don’t need ‘a photo op’ and the last thing I want to do is to be in any way obtrusive at a time when the family is concerned with Nelson Mandela’s condition.”
After visiting Mandela on Friday, one of his ex-wives, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, said he was still unwell but that he had rallied in the past two days. She could not say whether Obama would visit him.
Obama is to spend Saturday in Pretoria and Johannesburg. While in Cape Town on Sunday the president and his family are to visit the prison on Robben Island where, as Mandela explained in his biography, Long Walk to Freedom, he spent years wielding a sledgehammer every day to break stones.