The body of former South Africa President
Nelson Mandela lies in state presently at the Union Buildings in Pretoria ahead
of final day funeral rite in Qunu on Sunday
The queue to see the former
president at one point stretched for over a mile. Many were unable to complete
their mission, but they, along with thousands of others, will get a second chance on before Sunday.
Nelson Mandela's lying in state
in Pretoria is part of a week of events celebrating the anti-apartheid hero's
life. It follows a memorial service at
stadium in Johannesburg where US President Barack
Obama delivered a eulogy urging the world to carry on his legacy by
fighting inequality, poverty and discrimination.
Nelson Mandela, first
President of a free South Africa,
last of the great African liberators and an icon to all humanity, looks beautiful
in death.
He lies in a wooden casket with a glass cover over his face on
the highest point in his nation’s capital, his feet to the dawn, and his head
to the sunset.
“It seems as if he is
still alive,” says Charlotte Madisha, 36. “It seems like he’s just sleeping.”
Mandela’s coffin is
shielded from the sun by a giant white and wood open-sided box, hung in white,
carpeted in red and lit with soft white light at each corner of the coffin are
four stern South African sailors in navy whites. On each side is a line of
slowly processing mourners.
Today, the second day of Mandela’s lying in state,
it stretches out of South Africa’s
seat of government, the Union Buildings, down grand balustraded steps, out into
the road below, down beyond the great iron gate that mark the entrance to
the building’s grounds, down a long, winding hill, and out into the middle of
Pretoria, the capital. It is perhaps a mile long.
Many have been here
under the blazing sun since dawn. Black, brown, white, yellow, in wheelchairs,
in nappies, respectably middle-aged and ostentatiously young, the queue is
Mandela’s ideals of a Rainbow Nation made physical and immense. “They just
don’t stop coming,” says a policeman looking on. “It’ll be 100,000 people
before the end of the day.”
South Africa is taking
its time to mourn Mandela, and for a simple reason: so integral is Mandela to
how south Africans think of themselves that many find it hard to accept
that he is gone. A national memorial on Tuesday has been followed by three days
of lying in state that continue until Friday, and after that will come his
burial at his home in Qunu in the Eastern Cape on Sunday.
The location of
Mandela’s lying in state also rights a historical South African wrong. The
Union Buildings were designed 94 years ago by South Africa’s greatest
architect, Herbert Baker, with the kind of racial blinkers that colored the
country before Mandela’s revolution. Sited on the spot of an old Setswana court
called Tshwane, after the river that flows below it, the two wings of the
building are meant to symbolize the coming together of English and Afrikaner in
one white “nation.” Mandela’s body now lies in the center of this arc. It has
now, out of respect for the true union he created, been renamed the Nelson
Mandela Amphitheater. “If it was not for him, we would be in ashes,” says
Mandla Nkosi, 43, another mourner.
“It’s a chance for me to come and be this
close to him, to satisfy myself with closure. He is my hero. He will always be
my hero.”
Mandla, like many of the mourners, takes
inspiration from seeing Mandela. “If only one person can change the world like
this, if every individual can do something like this, this world will be
something different,” he says.
Jonathan Evans, 31, who negotiates global trade
deals for South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry, says he came because
“he gives me hope to fight, despite all the challenges we have.” Kaylene
Thaver, 17, from Benoni, outside Johannesburg, has come with a group of young
Indian girls, immaculately and fashionably dressed in black, lace and gold.
“For me, it was a self-defining moment,” she says. “You look at him and see
this legend, the man who set us free. I think South Africa can only grow from
here. Seriously, we can only go to the top from here.”
The mourners leave. Then so does Mandela, to be
taken to a military hospital overnight before being returned for a final
viewing tomorrow. As the sun sets, a giant rainbow appears over Pretoria.
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