NELSON Mandela yesterday celebrated his 90th birthday in his rural birthplace in the Transkei as a torrent of nostalgic praise poured out for him in a South Africa currently torn by doubts about its future.
In a symbol of how deeply he is respected, the Beeld newspaper, the daily that in the apartheid era was the voice of white Afrikaans-speakers who supported racial segregation, ran 12 pages of tributes to South Africa's first black president.
In
one of the most fulsome eulogies, FW de Klerk, the country's last white president, who released Mr Mandela from life imprisonment in 1990 and with whom he shared a Nobel Peace Prize said:
"Whenever the situation demanded it, we were able to overcome our differences and take concerted action to defuse the crises as they arose.
"It is now the task of a subsequent generation of leaders to preserve that legacy and to build on the foundations of goodwill, tolerance and reconciliation that he helped to lay."
After six months of international celebrations, the frail Mr Mandela spent his birthday quietly with family and friends at his childhood home at Qunu, where he built a house – among surrounding mud huts – which is a precise copy of the bungalow, in the grounds of Victor Verster Prison in the Cape, where he spent the final year of his imprisonment.
The full article contains 230 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
