Mandela family keeps close vigil
‘I’m not going to lie. He does not look good’
Pretoria • Crowds converging outside Pretoria’s MediClinic Heart Hospital grew larger throughout Thursday after conflicting reports about the health of former president Nelson Mandela.
South African media reported he was on life support and his family gave a downcast report, but President Jacob Zuma said he was “much better today than he was when I saw him last night.”
Mr. Mandela’s family had been summoned to a morning meeting with medical staff, and Mr. Zuma had cancelled a trip to Mozambique at the last moment.
One of Mr. Mandela’s daughters said, “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 Mr. Zuma, who called him “much better.”
Impromptu choirs sang songs from the apartheid struggle outside the hospital as they awaited news about the 94-year-old Mr. Mandela. Members of the media also gathered outside, but their presence has drawn criticism from Mr. 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 told South African Broadcasting Corp.
“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.”
“We don’t mind the interest. But I just think it has gone overboard,” she added
Twenty days ago, Mandela was taken in the wee hours of the morning to the Pretoria hospital from his home in the upmarket Johannesburg suburb of Houghton. What should have been a 45-minute journey was interrupted by a 40-minute stay at the side of an expressway after the military ambulance broke down.
In announcing Mr. Mandela’s hospitalization June 8, the government revealed for the first time “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 South Africans had not heard during his previous three stays in hospital for treatment for the same ailment since last December.
As the realization sank in Mr. Mandela was 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 self-serving. Although Mr. Mandela has not been president for 14 years and had no role of any kind in public since attending a soccer match three years ago, his towering presence continued to cast a powerful moderating spell over South African life.
Except to state his condition was unchanged, the government and Mr. 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, Mr. Zuma announced Mr. Mandela had deteriorated and was now in “critical condition.” At the same time, various South African media confirmed Mr. Mandela was only able to breathe with the help of a ventilator.
Since then, family visits to his bedside and the remote ancestral home 1,000 kilometres 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 he was no longer conscious, was breathing with the help of a ventilator and was undergoing regular dialysis because his kidneys had failed.