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Mandela’s Death Stirs Sense of Loss Around the World

By LYDIA POLGREEN and ALAN COWELL


JOHANNESBURG — When Cliff Rosen awoke on Friday to the news that Nelson Mandela had died, he went out to the field of sunflowers growing in his garden and cut down the tallest one.

“A special flower for a special man,” said Mr. Rosen, a 40-year-old urban farmer, as he wired the towering, six-foot stalk to the fence surrounding the spontaneous memorial that has sprung up just outside the home where Mr. Mandela died Thursday night.

“I chose this flower because he towered over us all,” Mr. Rosen said. “Today it feels like the world got a little bit smaller.”

Across South Africa, people paid tribute to the man they hail as the father of their nation — a secular saint whose commitment to forgiveness and reconciliation gave birth to a nonracial democracy from a country so long riven by segregation. Indeed, people around the world paid homage, including laying flowers at a statue of him in front of the British Parliament in London.

After the long months of vigil as Mr. Mandela weakened, far from public view, many, like Mr. Rosen, rose to mourn and praise him and to ponder his legacy. There were few overtly critical voices.

In South Africa, at a service in Cape Town, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, himself a towering figure in the struggle against apartheid that defined much of Mr. Mandela’s life, spoke for the hopes and fears of many of his compatriots when he told congregants at St. George’s Anglican Cathedral early on Friday: “Let us give him the gift of a South Africa united, one.”

As flags flew at half-staff across South Africa, a sense of loss, blended with memories of inspiration, spread from President Obama in Washington to members of the British royal family and on to those who saw Mr. Mandela as an exemplar of a broader struggle.

“A giant among men has passed away,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India said. “This is as much India’s loss as South Africa’s.”

As public figures competed for superlatives to describe Mr. Mandela, Prime Minister David Cameron declared in London: “A great light has gone out in the world.” Pope Francis praised “the steadfast commitment shown by Nelson Mandela in promoting the human dignity of all the nation’s citizens and in forging a new South Africa.”

The French authorities bathed the Eiffel Tower in Paris in green, red, yellow and blue lights to symbolize the multicolored South African flag. Speaking in Cape Town after his service in the cathedral, Archbishop Tutu asked rhetorically whether Mr. Mandela was “the exception to prove the rule? I say no, emphatically,” adding that he “embodied our hopes and dreams, symbolized our enormous potential.”

Hellen Zille, the leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance, said that South Africans owed their sense of belonging to a single family to Mr. Mandela. “That is his legacy. It is why there is an unparalleled outpouring of national grief at his passing.”

The tone of the tributes reflected seemingly universal sentiments crossing racial, national, religious and political lines. In the United States, Republicans and Democrats alike rushed to embrace his legacy. In China, the government hailed him as a liberator from imperialism, even as dissidents embraced him as a symbol of resistance against repression.

In South Africa, people of all races gathered at Mr. Mandela’s home, laying wreaths, singing freedom songs, whispering prayers and performing the shuffling toyi-toyi dance in his honor. People came together in a way that seems increasingly rare in a nation where the everyday worries of a struggling economy, incessant allegations of government corruption and a sinking sense that a nation born two decades ago into such promise is slipping into despair.

“It is one of those days when everyone is united again,” said Reginald Hoskins, who brought his two young children to Mr. Mandela’s house on Friday morning. “That is what Nelson Mandela stood for, and we need to honor that in our lives every day.”

For those who knew him best, the knowledge that he has gone slowly seeped in.

“I never thought, knowing him for close to 40 years, that I would even speak of him in the past tense,” said Tokyo Sexwale, a senior member of the African National Congress who served prison time on Robben Island alongside Mr. Mandela. “The passing of an icon like Nelson Mandela signifies the end of an era.”

Britons often claim a particular bond among the many Europeans who supported South Africa’s struggle against apartheid, leading efforts to impose an international boycott on South African sports figures and gathering frequently to protest outside the country’s high commission, or embassy, in Trafalgar Square in London. A line formed outside the building on Friday as scores of people lined up to sign a condolence book.

But it was a sometimes ambivalent relationship, with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher displaying an abiding suspicion of Mr. Mandela’s role as a leader in the violent struggle to overthrow white rule. Newer generations had a different view.

Prince William, the second in line to the British throne, spoke to reporters after attending the premiere of a new movie about Mr. Mandela on Thursday, calling him “an extraordinary and inspiring man.”

The tumult of tributes to Mr. Mandela reflected both his ability after his release from prison in 1990 to reach out to people to forge bonds around the world, and the way in which many leaders and public figures sought him out. His state funeral in coming days is expected to draw a vast array of world leaders.

“His passion for freedom and justice created new hope for generations of oppressed people worldwide,” said former President Jimmy Carter.

Musicians, clerics and sports figures joined the rush to offer accolades after Mr. Mandela’s death was announced late Thursday, with a leading South African cricketer, A.B. de Villiers, echoing Archbishop Tutu’s hope for a future free of renewed racial and social division.

“Let us now, more than ever, stick together as a nation,” Mr. de Villiers said. “We owe him that much.”

Mr. Mandela was closely linked with sport, both as a boxer in his younger days and, after becoming South Africa’s first black president, as a supporter of the national Springbok rugby team — once a symbol of white exclusivism — that triumphed in the 1995 World Cup.

But his broader legacy, for some sports figures, related to his quest for reconciliation and freedom.

“He taught us forgiveness on a grand scale,” the former heavyweight champion boxer Muhammad Ali said in a statement. “His was a spirit born free, destined to soar above the rainbows. Today his spirit is soaring through the heavens. He is now forever free.”

Usain Bolt, the Jamaican Olympic sprinter, called Mr. Mandela “one of the greatest human beings ever.”


Lydia Polgreen reported from Johannesburg and Alan Cowell from London.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/07/world/africa/nelson-mandela-international-reaction.html?pagewanted=print