Friend and foe meet at Mandela’s funeral

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

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More than 70 leaders from across the world, some of them locked in enmity, are flying to South Africa for memorials to Nelson Mandela that will hail one of humanity’s great peacemakers, officials said Monday.

US President Barack Obama and Raul Castro from Cuba, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Britain’s David Cameron will be among those attending Tuesday’s main send-off in Johannesburg’s Soccer City Stadium, reflecting the global appeal of South Africa’s first black leader, who died on Thursday aged 95.

“The whole world is coming to South Africa,” Foreign ministry spokesman Clayson Monyela said, playing down concerns about the logistics and security of such a large event organised at only five days’ notice.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani would also be there, Monyela said, raising the prospect of a first face-to-face meeting with Obama. However, Rouhani’s name was not on an initial official list of attendees.

Much of the logistical plan is based on South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 Soccer World Cup. And though Pretoria refused to talk about Mandela’s funeral arrangements before his death, it has been laying the preparations for years.

“We’re obviously not starting from scratch in terms of organisation,” Monyela said. “We’ve got a system that kicks into play whenever you’ve got events of this magnitude.”

DIPLOMATIC MINEFIELD

Besides security, the memorial at the 95,000-seat stadium near Soweto presents officials with a diplomatic minefield – trying to avoid a chance stand-off in the rest rooms, say, between Mugabe and Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister whom he has denounced as a “little boy” and a “liar”. Those close to Madiba say he would have wanted handshakes, not head-butts.

“Tomorrow, people should all be honoring their relationship with Madiba. If it means shaking hands with the enemy, yes, I would like to see that,” Zelda la Grange, his former personal assistant for more than a decade, told Reuters.

“That is what Nelson Mandela was and actually is – bringing people together despite their differences.”

On the day, diplomacy is unlikely to detract from the outpouring of emotion expected at the seven-hour ceremony at Soccer City, a gigantic bowl, steeped in Mandela symbolism.

It was there that Madiba made his last public appearance three years ago, waving to fans from the back of a golf cart at the World Cup final.

It was also there, 20 years earlier, that he addressed tens of thousands of supporters two days after his release from prison, eliciting a deafening roar from the crowd with a clenched fist raised to the sky and a single word: ‘Amandla’, the Zulu and Xhosa word for ‘power’.

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