Finally, Nelson Mandela buried in childhood village
16 Dec 2013 5:37 AM IST
Mandela’s casket was lowered into the earth after military pallbearers carried it to the family gravesite in the rolling hills of Qunu, the rural village in eastern South Africa which was the childhood home of the anti-apartheid leader who became the country’s first democratically-elected president.
Banyanda Nyengule, head of the Nelson Mandela Museum in Mthatha and Qunu, was one of the eyewitnesses to the private burial and said it hit him hard.
‘I realized that the old man is no more, no more with us you know,’ Nyengule said.
‘The moment when the coffin went down into the ground I felt too... emotional.’
South African television showed Mandela’s casket at the family gravesite, but the broadcast went to a different scene just before the coffin was lowered at the request of the Mandela family.
It was South Africa’s final goodbye to the man who reconciled the country in its most volatile period.
Several hundred people attended the burial. Earlier, more than 4,000, some singing and dancing, gathered for a funeral service in a huge tent at the family compound of Mandela, who died on 5 December at the age of 95 after a long illness.
They sang the national anthem in an emotional rendition in which some mourners placed fists over their chests. Mandela’s portrait looked over the assembly in the white tent from behind a bank of 95 candles representing each year of his remarkable life.
His casket, transported to the tent on a gun carriage and draped in the national flag, rested on a carpet of cow skins below a lectern where speakers delivered eulogies.
Banyanda Nyengule, head of the Nelson Mandela Museum in Mthatha and Qunu, was one of the eyewitnesses to the private burial and said it hit him hard.
‘I realized that the old man is no more, no more with us you know,’ Nyengule said.
‘The moment when the coffin went down into the ground I felt too... emotional.’
South African television showed Mandela’s casket at the family gravesite, but the broadcast went to a different scene just before the coffin was lowered at the request of the Mandela family.
It was South Africa’s final goodbye to the man who reconciled the country in its most volatile period.
Several hundred people attended the burial. Earlier, more than 4,000, some singing and dancing, gathered for a funeral service in a huge tent at the family compound of Mandela, who died on 5 December at the age of 95 after a long illness.
They sang the national anthem in an emotional rendition in which some mourners placed fists over their chests. Mandela’s portrait looked over the assembly in the white tent from behind a bank of 95 candles representing each year of his remarkable life.
His casket, transported to the tent on a gun carriage and draped in the national flag, rested on a carpet of cow skins below a lectern where speakers delivered eulogies.
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