Soweto remembers Mandela

By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times

Friday, Dec. 6, 2013 | 10:37 a.m.

JOHANNESBURG — On a street corner in Soweto, David Mohale sat in the warm summer sun Friday, remembering the life of the man who brought him freedom, the hero of the nation’s anti-apartheid struggle, Nelson Mandela.

He also thought of his youth, and his own mortality.

“You see what I am. I’m old too. I can go any time myself,” said Mohale, 86. “He’s waiting for me there.

“I feel so much sorrow because he was a good man, who learned the people how to live together. He want everybody must be free, you see, and respect each other.

“I respect and I like what he done to get the people together, not fighting like other countries.”

In another part of Soweto, on Vilakazi Street, outside Mandela’s former home, evangelical church bishop Madela Mashinini, 47, sheltered from the sun under a large purple umbrella, watching young people dancing, singing and chanting as they paid tribute to Mandela. He said it reminded him of his childhood, when Mandela was in prison, when young people chanted and demonstrated for freedom.

“In prison, he inspired us, and in his passing, he inspires us too,” said Mashinini.

To him, Mandela was an almost Christ-like figure, with qualities that personified the divine side of being human, as well as human weaknesses.

“He was fully human, with all his weaknesses. He was not a saint, in the sense that he was sinless. But Mandela showed us humans have a divine side in all of us. He was able to inspire us to be the best we can, in terms of embodying the values of love, forgiveness, transformation and humanity.”

People thronged to Mandela’s former home, many wearing their best clothes, or clothed in African National Congress branded dress. Children wandered through the crowds, holding photographs of Mandela, pasted on cardboard, with the words “RIP Mandela.”

Women in the ANC colors — green, gold and black — ululated, sang and danced.

A mother of two, Annalice Govender, said Mandela changed her life because, as a woman who otherwise would have been confined in a “colored” or mixed-race area under apartheid, she was able to marry and live with a black South African in Soweto.

She said she saw Mandela visit his former house on Vilakazi Street in 1995, a year after he became president in 1994.

What struck her about him was “the calmness in his eye. He had such honest eyes.”

“If we can just strive to be half the person he was, with his humble forgiving soul, then I think this country would be a lot better.”

Meanwhile, Mashinini said he was considering the theme for his Sunday sermon. “I’m still wrestling with that, but it should be about the freedom to be. That’s what he symbolized.”