Former South African President Nelson Mandela. PHOTO/AFP
He has had streets, parks, a landfill
and even a non-existent sub-atomic particle named after him: rarely has a
man been so honoured during his lifetime as Nelson Mandela.
Long
before Mandela’s death brought a global outpouring of tributes to the
man who led South Africa out of apartheid, his name had been
memorialised on places, projects and discoveries ranging from the
profound to the quirky.
In July 2012, French and German
biologists who had discovered the fossil of a prehistoric woodpecker —
the oldest ever found on the African continent — baptised it
Australopicus nelsonmandelai.
“We have named the new
species after Nelson Mandela — a sort of scientific present for his 94th
birthday,” said Albrecht Manegold from the Senckenberg Research
Institute in Frankfurt. In 2005, a Dutch horticultural company named a
line of chrysanthemums “Madiba”, the clan name by which Mandela is
affectionately known.
There is also a Madiba protea plant in South Africa whose hot pink flowers bloom between August and October.
And
in 1994, the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town named a
yellow variety of strelitzia, or bird of paradise flower, “Mandela’s
Gold”.
The honour came the same year Mandela was
elected South Africa’s first black president, and just four years after
he was freed from nearly three decades in prison for his fight against
white-minority rule.
In 1973 — when Mandela was still
in jail on Robben Island — researchers at the University of Leeds in
Britain named a newly discovered nuclear particle after him. But it
turned out their equipment was faulty and the “discovery” actually
wasn’t.
The West Yorkshire city of Leeds decided in
2001 to pay another tribute to Mandela when he visited, holding a
rededication ceremony for public gardens that had been named in his
honour two decades earlier. Mandela mistakenly told the crowd of 5,000
people how pleased he was to be in Liverpool.
Then 82,
he thanked the “people of Liverpool” — located about 70 miles (115
kilometres) distant — for making him an honorary citizen of “this famous
city”.
But few harboured any hard feelings, and the
local authority this week paid tribute to an “extraordinary man” whose
visit to the town was “an enormous honour”.
In British
TV series Only Fools and Horses, which aired from 1981 to 2003, the main
characters lived in the Mandela House high-rise. And a statue of him
was erected outside the British parliament in 2007.
The
list of tributes also includes the airport in Cape Verde’s capital,
Praia; a favela, or shantytown, in Rio de Janeiro; and the Mandela
landfill in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, which regularly frightens
locals by catching fire.
In 2009, the United Nations
declared his birthday, July 18, Nelson Mandela International Day,
calling on people around the world to spend 67 minutes helping others on
that date each year, in memory of Mandela’s 67 years of public service.
As
Mandela’s body was carried to lie in state this week, it was
transported to the newly rebaptised Nelson Mandela amphitheatre via
Madiba Street, crossing Nelson Mandela Drive.
In Eastern Cape province, where he will be laid to rest Sunday, the main municipality is named Nelson Mandela Bay.
And
the tributes aren’t finished. Public gardens now under construction in
central Paris are to be named for Mandela, as is a square in central
Berlin. (AFP)
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Ex-wife Winnie’s last moments with the anti-aparthied fighter
Nelson
Mandela “drew his last breath and just rested”, his ex-wife Winnie said
on Thursday in her first public comments on his death. Winnie
Madikizela-Mandela said she rushed to the former South African
president’s bedside for his final moments, in an interview with
Britain’s ITV television.
She said: “I went close to
him and I noticed he was breathing really slowly. I was holding him
trying to feel his temperature and he felt cold. Then he drew his last
breath and just rested... He was gone.”
Mandela’s second wife said doctors had assured the family that the anti-apartheid icon was not in pain in his final days.
She
said the sacrifices of their relationship through his 27 years in jail
were worth it for a liberated South Africa and she would go through the
same again “100 times more”.
The 77-year-old said she was now the senior head of the family but had no plans to inherit his political position.
“I consider myself very blessed to have been there when he drew his last breath,” she said.
“I
had been there sitting next to him for more than three-and-a-half
hours, and all that time he was going. Then I realised that God was very
kind to us. He had given us such a long time for us to say goodbye.
“I knew we had reached the end. You get this numb feeling. You don’t react to that. I can’t describe that kind of sorrow.
“Even
though he was 95 and had done so much, there was so much that was still
not done. I felt in his case, he had completed his journey.”
Mandela
was receiving intensive care for a respiratory illness at his
Johannesburg home after being discharged on September 1 following an
86-day stay in a Pretoria hospital. In his final days, Mandela could not
speak due to the tubes in his mouth.
“Tata had been in pain for so long, he was actually described by his doctors as a medical miracle,” Madikizela-Mandela said.
Mandela’s
third wife, Graca Machel, told her that when he was discharged, “the
doctors were sceptical and... thought it wouldn’t take longer than three
days.
“But they assured us all the time he was not in pain, he had enough medication.”
Madikizela-Mandela
said the hardest moment of all was when the military came to remove his
body. She tried to close his mouth but the doctors told her they would
do it.
“The whole thing was so official. It struck me then, he was gone and that was the last journey for him.
“That was very difficult to take. I couldn’t contain myself.”
Mandela married Winnie in 1958 and they had two daughters. They separated in 1992 and divorced four years later.
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