Nelson Mandela: Atmosphere almost festive as South Africans await word on leader’s condition

• Posted on June 26, 2013
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

While a rotating roster of Nelson Mandela’s closest relatives including his wife, Graca Machel, kept a bedside vigil Wednesday at the Medi-Clinic Heart Hospital, Pretorians continued to pay their respects in song and poetry before a wall outside that has been adorned with bouquets and prayers for South Africa’s first black president, who remained in critical condition 19 days into his fourth extended hospital stay in seven months.

“There is nothing we can do. It is in the hands of Jesus,” wailed Florah Nkosi, who was dressed in the modest white and blue uniform of a follower of the Apostolic Church in Zion of South Africa.

In a thin, brave voice the domestic worker, who came to the hospital with an infant whom she cares for in her arms, sang the Tshwana hymn, Ha Le Mpotsa Tshepo Yaka or You Ask for My Faith, before a crowd of South African and foreign journalists from almost every corner of the world.

“I pray to God with all my strength that he will be strong,” Nkosi said as she fought back tears. “The nation was destroyed and he rebuilt it by planting the message of the Bible. We must follow the moral ideals that he instilled in us.”

None of those who made the pilgrimage to the hospital were happy about Mandela’s dire medical situation. But the mood was more upbeat than it was funereal. While many of those who gathered fretted about Mandela’s ebbing strength and the pain they assumed he was feeling, this was mixed with joy and a desire to celebrate his life because of the belief he will soon be free of earthly concerns.

Jane Marutle contributed to the almost festive atmosphere by setting up a kitchen to feed journalists, who have spent days and nights sitting across the street from the hospital enduring the chilling South African winter where temperatures range between about 18 C by day and 4 C at night.

“Business is good. They enjoy my cooking,” the diplomat’s daughter, who used to live in McLean, Virginia, said as she served heaping portions of soup, beef stew, rice and salad for 7 rand or about $7 per serving. “It’s profitable and I love cooking. But I do it because I feel for these people, sitting here for three weeks and getting almost no information from the Mandela family or the government.”

The family and the government have repeatedly appealed to the media and the public to give the family space during these difficult days “but they have forgotten that it was the international media who kept the world informed about Mandela and the struggle against apartheid,” said Marutle, who is a manager for a housing projects for poor South Africans. “They wanted the media’s help then and now they want them to go away. This is unfair. It is actually the government and the family who are disturbing things by not being open with the good people of South Africa. We want to know what is actually going with Mandela’s health.”

In the almost total absence of official information about Mandela’s health from either his family or the government, rumours have abounded about his actual condition. The grimmest of the speculation published Tuesday in the Citizen newspaper was that Mandela was on life support and his doctors wanted to know from the family if the ventilator he was said to be using to breathe should be switched off.

The Citizen, which has a mostly black readership, claimed that five different unnamed sources had confirmed Mandela was on a ventilator. He had suffered kidney failure and was also undergoing dialysis every three hours, the newspaper said.

Messages on the hospital wall where many of the media trained their cameras described Mandela as an inspiration to blacks in other African countries. He was an “icon” and a “hero” to those who wished him a speedy recovery, but that recovery seems more unlikely with every passing day.

In a clear sign that Mandela was not expected to live much longer, the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, Thabo Makgoba, posted a prayer on Facebook after visiting him on Tuesday evening. It said: “Grant him, we pray, a quiet night and a peaceful, perfect, end.”

Like Mandela’s illness, almost nothing has been publicly revealed about the shape and timing of the protracted grieving and burial processes that will take place whenever Mandela passes away. It is likely that South Africans will be invited to see Mandela one last time at a football stadium near his longtime home in the black township of Soweto before his body is taken to lie in state at the Union Building in Pretoria where he was sworn in as South Africa’s first black president 19 years ago this April.

A state funeral is to take place in the capital with a second funeral ceremony to follow almost immediately in the Eastern Cape where there has apparently been a squabble within the family about exactly where, how and when the Father of the Nation should be buried.

The South African Broadcasting Corporation was said to have conducted rehearsals Tuesday of some of the programming that it plans to broadcast immediately after Mandela’s death is announced.

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