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South Africa: Happy Birthday Nelson Mandela
Former South African President Nelson Mandela. PHOTO/PETER DEJONG /AP
(Reuters) – South Africa and the world showered tributes on Nelson Mandela on Thursday as the anti-apartheid leader turned 95 in hospital and his doctors reported he was “steadily improving” from a six-week lung infection.
The country has been on edge since the former president and father of the multi-racial ‘Rainbow Nation’ established at the end of apartheid in 1994 was admitted to hospital on June 8 with recurring lung problems that kept him in a critical condition.
It was his fourth stay in hospital in six months and has reminded South Africans that the man who is globally admired as a moral beacon against injustice and an icon of democracy will not be with them for ever.
But the mood was of celebration on Thursday as thousands of South Africans sang “Happy Birthday” and took part in charitable initiatives in a global outpouring of support for the Nobel Peace Prize laureate on U.N.-designated ‘Nelson Mandela Day’.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hailed Mandela as “a giant of our times” and called on people around the world to pay tribute to him through community service.
South Africans young and old commemorated the birthday with 67 minutes of public service to honour the 67 years Mandela served humanity by first fighting against brutal and racist white minority rule and then consolidating racial harmony when he was president.
Across South Africa, office workers, students, soldiers and ordinary citizens marked Mandela Day by sprucing up orphanages, painting walls at schools and delivering food to the poor.
Many offered birthday wishes outside the Pretoria hospital where Mandela has been receiving treatment, singing songs and holding up signs wishing him a speedy recovery.
“Thank you for all that you have done for this country,” said one well-wisher, Margaret Chechie.
Mandela’s victory in the first multiracial elections in 1994 put an end to the segregationist apartheid system. Four years earlier, he was released from 27 years spent in prison under white minority rule, 18 of them at the notorious Robben Island penal colony.
Ethiopian and Nigerian migrant workers and traders who have settled in South Africa cleaned streets in Johannesburg to pay tribute to a figure widely praised as “a father of Africa”.
“In this country, Mandela is the reason all of us blacks are free, so that’s why we love him as the first citizen,” said Kennedy Uzondu, 30, a Nigerian trader who has lived in South Africa for three years.
The United Nations declared July 18 as Nelson Mandela International Day in 2009 and will celebrate with speeches from figures such as former U.S. President Bill Clinton.
“Tata (our father) is making this remarkable progress and we look forward to having him back home soon,” Mandela’s daughter Zindzi told reporters.
Zindzi said the family planned to give Mandela a collage of family photographs for a present and have lunch together at the hospital where their patriarch is being treated.
Despite the adulation on his birthday, Mandela’s post-apartheid ‘Rainbow Nation’ still has many issues to be resolved.
Enormous gaps still persist in income, employment and access to education and these inequalities largely follow racial lines, according to the government’s own data. White households in 2012 earn on average about six times more than black households.
Nevertheless, quality education and employment opportunities have also been opened up to tens of thousands of black South Africans.
This has meant the ‘Rainbow Nation’ becoming a reality at integrated universities and in major city suburbs, where a new professional class of college-educated black South Africans has been moving into once exclusively white neighborhoods.