June Mashiya, a Pretoria petrol attendant said news of Mandela’s hospitalisation left him “very very worried, because that person is a very important person to us. Everybody in South Africa loves Mandela.”
Despite the mudslinging by the opposition aimed at the ruling African National Congress in the build-up to the party’s key conference, political parties have bandied in the chorus of prayers to wish Mandela well.
“When Mandela is admitted to hospital, all of us get affected because we love and care for him,” said the main opposition Democratic Alliance spokesman Mmusi Maimane.
But there was also a level of resignation about Mandela’s fate – in contrast to the panic of previous health scares – and a sense that Mandela must now be left in peace.
“Dear South Africans Please let Nelson Mandela go, he is old now and deserves to rest,” @ComradeESETHU from Cape Town wrote on Twitter.
Mandela, revered for wrestling the apartheid rule and then reconciling what was a deeply divided nation, was elected South Africa’s president in 1994 after 27 years of incarceration.
The previous year, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the country’s last apartheid president F.W. de Klerk, an award granted this date 19 years ago.
After leaving office he has since retired to his rural childhood village.
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