Frail Mandela leaves hospital for care at home

JOHANNESBURG — Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president, was discharged from a hospital Saturday after a nine-day stay to receive treatment for pneumonia, the South African government said.

Mandela, 94 and in frail health, has been hospitalized three times in the past four months. He has suffered from repeated lung infections, a legacy of the tuberculosis he contracted during his 27 years as a political prisoner of the white-minority government in South Africa.

Mandela was discharged from an unnamed hospital “following a sustained and gradual improvement in his general condition,” said a statement released by the office of President Jacob Zuma.

Mandela will continue to receive high-level medical care at his home in Johannesburg, the statement said.

Mandela had received similar treatment at his home in Johannesburg after a stay at a hospital in nearby Pretoria in December, when he was treated for a lung infection and had a procedure to remove gallstones.

In March, Mandela was hospitalized overnight for what authorities said was a successful scheduled medical test.

During Mandela’s latest hospitalization, doctors drained fluid near his lungs, easing his breathing.

On Saturday afternoon, shortly after the presidential statement on Mandela’s discharge, a military ambulance was seen entering his home in the Johannesburg neighborhood of Houghton. In recent years, Mandela had been spending more time in Qunu, the rural area in Eastern Cape province where he grew up.

But his delicate condition required that he be moved to South Africa’s biggest city.

In his years in prison, Mandela became a symbol of South Africa’s struggle to throw off the oppressive system of strict racial separation known as apartheid.

He emerged in 1990 and led South Africa through a difficult but largely peaceful transition to full democracy. He was elected president in 1994 but left office after a single term.

He retired from public life in 2004 and has not been seen publicly since 2010, when he made an appearance at the World Cup soccer tournament, where he didn’t deliver an address and was bundled against the cold in a stadium full of fans.

Many South Africans refer affectionately to Mandela by his clan name, Madiba. Buildings, squares, and other places have been named after him, and his image adorns statues and artwork around the country.

The central bank issued new banknotes last year that show his smiling face.

Primrose Mashoma, a South African, said she wished that Mandela would live, basically, forever.

“I wish him to stay maybe a hundred more years,” she said.

In Saturday’s statement, Zuma also thanked the medical team and hospital staff that looked after Mandela and expressed gratitude for South Africans and people around the world who had shown support for Mandela. The South African government has sought to balance efforts to satisfy wide public interest in Mandela’s condition with an intense campaign to preserve Mandela’s privacy.