US President Barack Obama leaves Wednesday on a much-awaited tour of Africa that will take him to South Africa as well as Senegal and Tanzania.
The White House said it was monitoring Mandela’s condition and could not yet say whether his ill health would affect the visit.
Other well-wishers included Swiss tennis great Roger Federer, who hailed the former South African president as “influential and amazing”.
Mandela – who is due to celebrate his 95th birthday on July 18 – has been hospitalised four times since December, and South Africans have been coming to terms with his increasing frailty.
In Soweto, the township where Mandela lived for more than a decade, James Nhlapo said South Africa must accept Mandela will not live forever.
“There will soon come a time when all the medical help won’t work. We have to face that sad reality now,” he said as he served customers in his grocery store.
Upon his release from jail in 1990 in one of the defining moments of the 20th century, Mandela negotiated an end to apartheid and won the country’s first fully democratic elections.
He served a single term as president, guiding the country away from internecine racial and tribal violence, before taking up a new role as a roving elder statesman and leading AIDS campaigner. He retired from public life in 2004.
The South African government has been criticised following revelations that the military ambulance that carried Mandela to hospital developed engine trouble, resulting in a 40-minute delay until a replacement vehicle arrived.
The presidency said Mandela suffered no harm during the wait for another ambulance to take him from his Johannesburg home to a specialist heart clinic in Pretoria 55 kilometres (30 miles) away.
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