Nelson Mandela was a “second Jesus” for what he had done for the world, said one of the people who had gathered outside his former home in Vilakazi Street in Soweto on Friday morning.
The former president and liberation leader passed away on Thursday evening.
“We are not here to mourn but to commemorate, honour, and celebrate him because of everything he has done,” said Lerato Hlongwane of Dobsonville.
She said she felt relieved that the country’s former president had died because the pain and emotional trauma the family had been going through “was too much”.
“I think it was time that God excused him,” Hlongwane said.
She was among a handful of people who sang and danced in the chilly weather until daylight after Mandela’s death was announced.
People wishing to pay last respects gather outside former president Nelson Mandela’s home on December 5 2013 in Soweto. (Pic: Gallo)
Ernestina Matshaka, a 70-year-old grandmother, brought some relief to mourners at the former president’s old house in Vilakazi Street.
Matshaka danced like a youngster to a freedom song about Mandela.
“As Africans when we are happy, depressed or mourning we sing. Singing relieves us,” she said.
“I am relieved that Madiba passed. It was unfair to expect him to jump out of his sick bed and run around like a boy.”
Matshaka said she would be very happy if South Africans could remain calm at this time and respect the legacy Mandela left. The crowd of young and old were energised by Matshaka, dancing and singing with abandon.
Police officers in about 10 vehicles kept watch.
Candles were lit and roses placed in front of the house in Vilakazi Street that was closed to traffic.
An old man kept lighting the candles the wind blew out. Throughout the night, people passed by the house to take pictures and leave messages of support.
Ofentse Nakedi, from Rockville, decided to visit the home and leave a message before going to work.
“I am very sad. My heart goes out to the Mandela family,” she said with tears in her eyes.
Nakedi said when death struck, it was custom to visit the family. “Unfortunately here you can’t really go in and say a prayer so I think leaving a message is the least we can do.”
Security guards at the house set up a large whiteboard for the public to write messages on.
People who had been singing fell silent when a car playing Johnny Clegg’s song Asimbonanga (isiZulu for “We have not seen him”) passed by.
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, the father of the nation, died on December 5 2013 at the age of 95.
President Jacob Zuma made the announcement from the Union Buildings in Pretoria on Thursday night. He said Mandela passed away at 20:50 in his Houghton home surrounded by his wife, Graça Machel and members of his family.
Nelson Mandela. (Pic: AFP)
Zuma said Mandela would have a state funeral and that the flags would fly half-mast from December 6 until after the funeral.
Zuma called on South Africans to “recall the values for which Madiba fought”.
Long illness
Mandela was hospitalised on June 8 with a recurring lung infection. Initial reports from the Presidency suggestedMandela was stable, although his condition was serious. But on June 23, the Presidency announced that Mandela’scondition had deteriorated and he was critical.
Court affidavits soon confirmed that the former statesman was on an assisted-breathing, life support machine. More reports emerged about Nelson Mandela in the days that followed, that he was in a “permanent vegetative state“, although the presidency denied these, maintaining that he was “critical yet stable”.
On his 95th birthday, July 18, President Jacob Zuma announced an improvement in Mandela’s health. Mandela wasdischarged from hospital in September and transported to his home in Houghton. In November, his family said he remained “quite ill”, but his pneumonia had cleared up. President Jacob Zuma visited Mandela on November 18 and said Mandela was still in a critical condition, but that he continued to respond to treatment.
On December 3 his daughter, Makaziwe Mandela, said the former president was “strong” and “courageous”, although he was “on his death bed”. Mandela’s grandson, Ndaba Mandela, said his grandfather was “not doing well”, although, “he is still with us”.
His declining health has been the subject of much speculation over the past few years. He was diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer in 2001 but made a full recovery. In 2011, he was admitted to hospital following a severe respiratory infection and a year later underwent a scheduled surgery for a longstanding abdominal complaint.
Mandela was plagued by recurring lung ailments in recent years. He spent 18 days in hospital at the end of 2012 and, despite receiving home-based high care thereafter, was back in hospital in March and April 2013.
There were renewed fears for his health when he returned to hospital in June. Despite assurances from the presidency that he was in a “serious but stable” condition, South Africans began preparing themselves for the worst as Mandela’s family members flocked to Johannesburg, struggle stalwarts paid visits to the icon, and the world’s media gathered in Qunu, Houghton and at the Pretoria hospital where he was treated.
The much-loved Mandela, known affectionately as Tata Madiba, became increasingly frail and retired from public life in 2004 at the age of 85.
Mandela’s last public appearance was a brief one, at the end of the 2010 soccer World Cup. Since then, he has split his time between his home in Houghton, Johannesburg, and his ancestral home in Qunu in the Eastern Cape.
Mandela became the symbol of the struggle against apartheid after he was convicted in the Rivonia Trial of charges of sabotage and was sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island.
At the end of his trial, Mandela gave a now iconic speech in which he said: “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal, which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
Mandela, a key figure in the African National Congress, who helped found the party’s youth league and armed wing,Umkhonto We Sizwe, was imprisoned for 27 years before he was finally released in 1990 at the age of 71.
Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, together with former president FW De Klerk, for the “peaceful termination of the apartheid regime and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa”. A year later, he was elected president in the country’s first democratic election.
He stepped down from the presidency in 1999 after one term in office but continued with a busy public schedule. He brokered negotiations for peace in Rwanda, established the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation for educational scholarship, and launched the 46664 Aids fundraising foundation.
A thousand women staged a silent rally outside Parliament in the strife-torn Central African Republic on Monday, their mouths bandaged in a mute protest against violence towards women.
Civilians including women and children are bearing the brunt of a surge in violence in the country, aid agencies have warned, with torched villages and abuses including murder, rape and torture.
“Stop violence against women. I am not an object,” or “No to murders, torture, rape” read banners held by women of all ages and religions who planned to cover their mouths with white tape from 6am to 6pm to make their case.
Women with their mouths covered with pieces of cloth gather on the steps of the National Assembly in Bangui as part of an anti-violence demonstration. (Pic: AFP)
Held in Bangui as part of International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the rally aimed to raise awareness of the spike in violence between unidentified armed groups and former rebel fighters.
It is the deadliest the country has experienced since March, when a coalition of rebel groups known as Seleka deposed president Francois Bozize, who had ruled since a 2003 coup.
In his place they installed the mostly-Christian country’s first Muslim leader, President Michel Djotodia.
Djotodia received a delegation of women at the presidential palace on Monday, but said he would wait until the protest was over before discussing their concerns.
“Since you are not talking we will wait until the time comes to organise a meeting and discuss the problems women are facing,” he said, before donating two cattle and $6 000 to the movement.
The president said his wife should have been present “but since this morning she has not said a word”.
“I talk to her and she doesn’t reply. I ask myself: Why isn’t my wife speaking? And I am told she is observing the movement of Central Africa’s women.”
The Rex, a single-storey, slope-roofed movie house was once the hotspot for film fans in Ghana, but, like many of the country’s cinemas, it hardly shows movies anymore.
The building is now abandoned, except on Sundays when dozens of evangelical Christians cram through its century-old walls for weekly, boisterous prayers sessions.
The Rex theatre in Accra, Ghana. (Pic: AFP)
The Rex’s fate is part of a wider decay of film-going culture in Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence and which become the hub for the continent’s film industry in the immediate post-colonial era, experts said.
But a 29-year-old Ghanaian-American filmmaker, Akosua Adoma Owusu, has launched a plucky grassroots effort to save the picture house and fight the trend.
The “save-your-local-landmark” campaign is commonplace in the West but remains a rarity in some developing countries like Ghana.
For Owusu, the motivation behind “Damn the Man, Save the Rex” was partly personal: after building a reputation abroad as a maker of short films, she realised there was nowhere to show her work in the country of her birth.
“Whether it’s short films or performance or anything, you have to kind of pay a venue to screen your work,” Owusu said.
Owusu, who won the best short film award at the 2013 African Movie Academy Awards and whose productions have been added to the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum in New York, managed to raise $9 000 online.
It was enough to hire out the old movie hall for a night and show her latest work.
But she has bigger plans and wants to convert the Rex into a dedicated artistic space.
If “Save the Rex” succeeds and the structure built in the early 20th century by Lebanese immigrants becomes a permanent film-screening venue, it would double the number of functioning cinemas in Ghana’s capital.
Currently, the only working movie theatre is an American-style cineplex embedded in an upscale shopping centre.
But more are planned to serve the country’s growing consumer class, with Ghana boasting one of the world’s fastest growing economies, fuelled by gold and cocoa exports as well as a nascent offshore oil industry.
Experts voiced frustration at the current state of film culture in the west African nation, recalling a time when the head of state personally oversaw the industry.
At independence in 1957, when Kwame Nkrumah was president, “Ghana was the hub for filmmaking in west Africa and generally Africa,” said Anita Afonu, a director and expert of Ghanaian film history.
Nkrumah believed he could shape opinions in the new nation through indigenous films and personally read scripts and viewed pre-release cuts, she added.
The former president, ousted by the military in 1966, had set up the Ghana Film Industry Corporation, which helped aspiring artists access film and editing equipment.
“His ability to change the mindset of Ghanaians … to tell them (they) are equally worth what the white man thinks he is worth… and to be able to teach them to do things for themselves was very, very paramount,” Afonu said.
After the coup, Ghana’s once-burgeoning film industry crumbled. Military rulers imposed curfews in the capital, keeping people indoors and away from cinemas.
The film corporation’s properties were eventually sold to Malaysian investors, who sloughed off the movie theatres to private owners who gradually converted most of the halls to churches.
As in other countries, the proliferation of DVD technology also devastated historic movie houses such as the Rex.
But the impact has been more acute in Ghana, which is flooded by straight-to-DVD productions from Nollywood, Nigeria’s film industry, which pumps out more than 1 000 titles per year.
Mark Amoonaquah, owner of the Roxy in Accra, said he held on as long as he could, showing movies to the dozen or so people who would sit on the outdoor cinema’s faded blue benches.
Ultimately he had to close temporarily, he said, because unless “a strange movie or a very interesting movie” came out, Ghanaians had effectively abandoned going to the cinema.
Owusu’s films bear little of the shaky camerawork and screaming matches that typify Ghana’s current indigenous productions.
Her latest film, Kwaku Ananse, is a semi-autobiographical imagination of an old Ghanaian folktale and was awarded best short film at this year’s African Movie Academy Awards.
Owusu organised a special screening a local French cultural institute for the film’s debut.
Her next work, she hopes, will open at a renovated Rex.
“I think it would be like the mecca, the place to be,” Owusu said. “Who knows? Perhaps it could make a trend of reviving cinema houses all over that are abandoned.”
Arsenal lost 1-0 to Manchester United in the English Premier League on Sunday but an Arsenal fan in Uganda lost a lot more. Henry Dhabasani is now homeless after betting his two-bedroom house that the Gunners would defeat the Red Devils, The Observer in Uganda reported.
Before the match, he put the bet with Rashid Yiga in writing. Yiga had a lot to lose too – he reportedly staked his wife and new car on a Man United victory so he’s probably thanking Robin van Persie and his lucky stars.
Dhabasani, though, has big problems. According to The Observer, Man United fans stormed his house in Iganga on Monday and forced him and his family out.
Manchester United’s Robin van Persie celebrates after scoring against Arsenal during their league match at Old Trafford Stadium on November 10. (Pic: AP Exchange)
