A 'Rainbow Nation' Celebrates Mandela

From World » Alex Perry | TIME.com Sun Dec 8 2013, 21:11:14

Disasters tend to be loud and bloody, but success is often quiet -- the absence of fighting, the want of an uproar, a lack of fuss. On Sunday, as South Africa came together in a national day of remembrance of Nelson Mandela, his legacy was manifest in the orderly assembly of every color in Africa at a thousand churches, mosques, synagogues and halls. At St. George's Cathedral in Cape Town -- where Desmond Tutu once led his congregation in protest against apartheid and blacks staged hunger strikes against their eviction from the city, and a short walk from where Mandela vowed to fight on for the ideal of equality in his first speech as a free man after 27 years in jail -- the "rainbow nation" came together in the pews. A blond girl with a giant rose tattoo on both her shoulders prayed next to a smartly dressed, young black woman in a black suit and an old toothless brown-skinned man in a dirty baseball cap. Behind them a white surfer boy in an African print shirt put his arm around a barefoot, brown-skinned maid in a Superman T-shirt, while next to them a middle-aged white father played with his two black twins. "We have lived in a great time," said Dean Michael Weeder in his sermon. "Madiba was more than an individual soul. He was the exposition of the African spirit of generosity. He was a martyr to the better possibilities of our humanity. The spear has fallen. So we embrace it, and carry it forward." The need to follow Mandela's example, and the failure by South Africa's current scandal-prone administration to do so under the leadership of President Jacob Zuma, was a recurrent theme of the day. In front of the steps of Cape Town city hall, where Mandela addressed the crowds on his release on Feb. 11, 1990, Mandela's former Finance Minister Trevor Manuel told a crowd of a few hundred: "If there is one thing about his values that we must take forward, it is about

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