Nelson Mandela to be buried on December 15

• Posted on December 6, 2013
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

President of South Africa Jacob Zuma has announced that the late Nelson Mandela will be accorded a state funeral on Sunday 15 December.

Mr Mandela spent 27 years in jail before becoming South Africa’s first black president in 1994.

His administration replaced the racist white-minority regime that had enforced segregation of black and white people in a policy known as apartheid.

Mr Mandela went on to become one of the world’s most respected statesmen.

A service of national mourning will be held at a 95,000-seater stadium on the outskirts of Johannesburg on Tuesday, Mr Zuma said.

His body will then lie in state in the capital, Pretoria, before being taken for the funeral in the village of Qunu in the Eastern Cape, where he grew up.

“God was so good to us in South Africa by giving us Nelson Mandela to be our president at a crucial moment in our history,” said long-time ally Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, at a service in Cape Town on Friday.

Later he cited Mr Mandela’s weaknesses, including “his steadfast loyalty to his organisation and some of his colleagues who ultimately let him down”.

“This tolerance of mediocrity arguably lay the seeds for great levels of mediocrity and corruptibility that were to come.”

Mr Mandela had been suffering from a lung illness for a long time.

He had been receiving treatment at home since September, when he was discharged from hospital.

As soon as the news broke, small crowds began to gather in Soweto’s Vilakazi Street, where Mr Mandela lived in the 1940s and 1950s.

They chanted apartheid-era songs, including one with the lyrics: “We have not seen Mandela in the place where he is, in the place where he is kept.”

By daybreak, dozens more had gathered.

“We are celebrating his life and all that he did for us,” said one of the mourners, Terry Mokoena

-BBC