Mandela buried in home village

South Africans say farewell to anti-apartheid champion

Military personnel line the route as former South African President Nelson Mandela's casket is taken to its burial place in Qunu, South Africa, Sunday, Dec. 15, 2013. (AP Photo/Felix Dlangamandla, Pool)
Military personnel line the route as former South African President Nelson Mandela's casket is taken to its burial place in Qunu, South Africa, Sunday, Dec. 15, 2013. (AP Photo/Felix Dlangamandla, Pool)

QUNU, South Africa - Anti-apartheid champion Nelson Mandela was buried in his home village Sunday after a funeral that mixed ancient tribal rituals with a display of the might of the new, integrated South Africa.

Artillery boomed and military aircraft roared through a cloud-studded sky, as the simple and the celebratedgathered to pay their final respects in Qunu.

“Yours was truly a long walk to freedom, and now you have achieved the ultimate freedom in the bosom of your maker,” Brig. Gen. Monwabisi Jamangile, chaplain-general of the South African military, said as Mandela’s coffin was lowered into the ground at the family gravesite. “Rest in peace.”

“I realized that the old man is no more, no more with us,”said Bayanda Nyengule, head of a local Mandela museum, his voice cracking as he described the burial attended by several hundred mourners after a larger funeral ceremony attended by about 4,500 people, including heads of state, royalty and celebrities.

The burial ended a 10-day mourning period that began with Mandela’s Dec. 5 death, and included a Johannesburg memorial attended by nearly100 world leaders and three days during which tens of thousands of South Africans of all races and backgrounds filed past Mandela’s coffin in the capital, Pretoria.

For South Africans, it was also a time for reflection about the racial integration they achieved when Mandela presided over the end of apartheid, and the economic inequality and other challenges that have yet to be overcome.

The burial site marked a return to Mandela’s humble roots, but the funeral trappings were elaborate. South African honor guards from the army, navy and air force, including both black and white officers, marched in formation along a winding dirt road.

In addition to the military pomp, the service included Christian prayers - Mandela was a lifelong Methodist - and traditions and rituals of the Thembu community into which he was born. Some speakers evoked the traditions of the Xhosa tribe, to which the Thembu clan belongs.

“A great tree has fallen; he is now going home to rest with his forefathers,” said Chief Ngangomhlaba Matanzima, a representative of Mandela’s family. “We thank them for lending us such an icon.”

In keeping with Xhosa traditions, the former president’s coffin was taken to Qunu on Saturday draped in a lion skin, an honor bestowed on those of a high rank like Mandela, who is the son of a traditional clan chief. His body lay for the night in his family home before burial, a time when tradition dictates that family elders “talk” to the body to explain to his spirit what is happening.

Mandela’s attachment to Qunu, the place where he spent most of his childhood, was so deep that he used to tell his daughter Makaziwe, the oldest of his survivingchildren, that “if I am not buried there, my bones will shake,” she said earlier this year.

South African television showed Mandela’s coffin at the family gravesite, but the broadcast was stopped just before the coffin was lowered into the ground at the request of the Mandela family, which often talked of how it had to share its patriarch with the nation and the world.

His body was buried about noon, “when the sun is at its highest and the shadow at its shortest,” said Cyril Ramaphosa, deputy leader of the country’s ruling party, the African National Congress.

Mandela spent 27 years as a prisoner of apartheid, then emerged to lead a delicate transition to democracy when many South Africans feared the country would sink into all-out racial conflict. He became president in the first all-race elections in 1994 and served one five-year term.

At the funeral ceremony,Mandela’s portrait looked over the assembly from behind a bank of 95 candles representing each year of his life. His coffin, transported to the tent on a gun carriage and draped in the national flag, rested on a carpet of cowskins.

Mandela’s widow, Graca Machel, and his ex-wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, were dressed in black Xhosa head wraps and dresses. Guests included veterans of the military wing of the AfricanNational Congress, as well as U.S. Ambassador Patrick Gaspard and other foreign envoys.

Britain’s Prince Charles, Monaco’s Prince Albert II, Oprah Winfrey, billionaire businessman Richard Branson and former Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai also attended.

Funerals in South Africa are not simply a time to celebrate a person’s life; they are a forum for recounting one’s story. That tradition was on vivid display at Mandela’s funeral.

At one spot overlooking Mandela’s compound, several hundred people gathered to watch the televised ceremony. A group of Zulu traditional dancers with spears and shields gathered nearby to pay their last respects to Mandela.

“He’s a first-class guy in the world,” said dancer Musa Ngunbane.

Ahmed Kathrada, an anti-apartheid activist who was jailed on Robben Island with Mandela, remembered his oldfriend’s “abundant reserves” of love, patience and tolerance. He said it was painful when he saw Mandela for the last time, months ago in his hospital bed.

“He tightly held my hand; it was profoundly heartbreaking,” Kathrada said. “How I wish I never had to confront what I saw. I first met him 67 years ago, and I recall the tall, healthy strong man, the boxer, the prisoner who easily wielded the pick and shovel when we couldn’t do so.”

Joyce Banda, the president of neighboring Malawi, gave a plain-spoken and heartfelt tribute to Mandela as an exemplar for African leaders.

“I learned leadership is about loving the people you serve and the people you serve falling in love with you,” Banda said, recalling what she had gleaned from meeting Mandela. “It is about serving the people with selflessness, with sacrifice and with the need to put the common good ahead of personal interests.”

Recalling her grandfather’s simple roots, Nandi Mandela said he went barefoot to school as a boy in Qunu, where he herded cattle before eventually becoming president and a figure of global renown.

“It is to each of us to achieve anything you want in life,” she said.

In the Xhosa language, she referred to her grandfather by his clan name: “Go well, Madiba. Go well to the land of our ancestors. You have run your race.” Information for this article was contributed by Christopher Torchia, Gregory Katz and Alan Clendenning of The Associated Press and by Lydia Polgreen, John Eligon and Alan Cowell of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/16/2013

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