JOHANNESBURG // South Africans of all races and religions united in prayer and song for their beloved Nelson Mandela on Sunday, hearing calls to keep his dream of a Rainbow Nation alive.
Churches, mosques, temples and synagogues rang out with hymn and homily, a nationwide day of prayer to begin a week of remembrance for the anti-apartheid hero.
From a Methodist Church in Johannesburg, Jacob Zuma, the president, implored this still deeply scarred nation to keep lit Mandela’s flame of freedom and justice.
“He preached and practised reconciliation, to make those who had been fighting forgive one another and become one nation,” Mr Zuma told a congregation of more than 1,000 worshippers.
“He preached and believed in peace, that we should live in peace, that we should live in unity.”
In the congregation Mandela’s former wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and his grandson Mandla looked on, often appearing to recede deep into their sadness.
Sunday marked the formal start of a week-long state funeral for the man who forged a new multiracial South Africa from the discredited remnants of the white-minority ruled apartheid era he helped dismantle.
Reflecting a life that transcended race and religion, prayers were said not only in the churches of the Soweto township, but also in those of the Dutch Reformed Church — once an Afrikaner pillar of the apartheid system.
Palestinians joined global prayers for Mandela, remembering his staunch support for their struggle to end the Israeli occupation.
There is some concern that the loss of such a talismanic leader might expose social divisions that Mandela’s huge moral authority had kept in check.
In the Regina Mundi Catholic church in Soweto, the parish priest Sebastian Rossouw called Mandela “a light in the darkness” and praised his capacity for “humility and forgiveness”.
Inside the church, once used as a sanctuary by anti-apartheid activists during police raids, a single candle illuminated a portrait of Mandela with a raised-fist salute.
“He fought for us then, now he needs to rest,” said Olga Mbeke, 60, who was born in Soweto.
In Johannesburg, speaking to an exclusively white, Afrikaans congregation at Melville Dutch Reformed Church, the Reverend Andre Bartlett asked them to “think back to the 1990s”, when the old order was crumbling and a newly freed Mandela was preparing his successful run for the presidency.
“Remember the fears we had over what would happen to the country: under the leadership of Mr Mandela, none of those fears came true,” Rev Bartlett said.
Since Mandela passed away late Thursday, aged 95, large crowds have gathered day and night outside his Johannesburg residence.
On Saturday night, they lit candles and linked arms in silent remembrance, but then, as if to lift the mood, they burst into song danced in celebration of a life that transformed their country and inspired the world.
“To me it’s not a sad day. It’s a day of hope, for us to be able to determine the future,” said Khabile Mgangame, a salesman.
Sunday’s prayers were echoed a continent away in Ramallah, where senior Palestine Liberation Organisation officials joined about 200 members of the public at a mass in the Holy Family Roman Catholic church celebrated by former Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah.
The church was decorated with a photograph of Mandela and another showing him with the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
“To him Palestine was not a question of solidarity or advocacy, but was one that he internalised and participated in as one of us,” said the PLO executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi, calling Mandela an “embodiment of the conscience of the world”.
In Bethlehem, an estimated 250-300 people attended mass at Saint Catherine’s Catholic Church, part of the Church of the Nativity complex marking the traditional site of Jesus Christ’s birth.
In London, where Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, spiritual leader of the world’s 80 million Anglicans, praised Mandela for his “extraordinary” courage at a service of thanksgiving.
* Agence France-Presse
