Mourning Mandela
South Africans erupt in songs, dance and tears as world pays tribute to icon of struggle against apartheid.
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Themba Radebe spun slowly in a circle.
First he pointed his cellphone camera at a group of children chanting Nelson Mandela’s name as they waved posters of the antiapartheid champion. Pivoting to his right, Radebe aimed his camera at a swaying group of adults who sang in Zulu while rocking and clapping.
A day after Mandela’s death at 95, South Africans of all colours erupted in song, dance and tears Friday in emotional celebrations of the life of the man who bridged this country’s black-white divide and helped avert a race war.
“I don’t think Mr. Mandela belonged to black people,” said Alex Freilingsdorf, a Toyota executive at a Soweto dealership. “He belonged to South Africa.”
Freilingsdorf and other white South Africans mingled among the hundreds of blacks gathered outside a home where Mandela lived as a young lawyer in the rough and tumble Soweto township.
The mood was simultaneously celebratory and sombre at the impromptu street festival where Radebe filmed scenes to share with his family.
“I’m sorry, I’m too emotional. The tears flow too easily,” said the balding 60-year-old, his eyes sparkling with tears as he reflected on how South Africa’s race relations have improved — “not perfect, but much better” — compared with his childhood in the black township.
“This is a celebration of the death, because we knew he was an old man,” Radebe said. “He brought a lot of changes to our community, because I grew up in apartheid. It was a very bad situation.”
At a service in Cape Town, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel laureate like Mandela and himself a monumental figure in the struggle against apartheid, called on South Africa’s 51 million people to embrace the values of unity and democracy that Mandela embodied.
“God, thank you for the gift of Madiba,” Tutu said, using Mandela’s clan name. “All of us here in many ways amazed the world, a world that was expecting us to be devastated by a racial conflagration,” Tutu said as he recalled how Mandela helped unite South Africa as it dismantled the cruel system of white-minority rule, and prepared for all-race elections in 1994. In those elections, Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison, became South Africa’s first black president.
At Mandela’s home in the Johannesburg neighbourhood of Houghton, where he spent his last months, a multiracial crowd paid tribute.
“What I liked most about Mandela was his forgiveness, his passion, his diversity, the impact of what he did,” said Ariel Sobel, a white man born in 1993, a year before Mandela was elected president.
Mandela’s body is to lie in state from Wednesday through Friday after a memorial service at the same Johannesburg stadium where he made his last public appearance, in 2010, at the closing ceremony of the soccer World Cup. He is to be buried in his rural childhood village of Qunu on Dec. 15, after a state funeral.