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L-R: Nelson Mandela's grandaughter Ndileka Mandela, daughter Makaziwe Mandela and grandson Ndaba Mandela on July 2, 2013/AFP

Africa

Mandela doctors advised family to turn off life support

Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison for fighting white minority rule and went on to lead the process of racial reconciliation as South Africa’s first black president, has now spent a month in hospital after being admitted with a recurrent lung infection.

His wife Graca Machel said Thursday that while occasionally Mandela has been uncomfortable, he has seldom been in pain.

Mandela’s grandson has meanwhile thrust the increasingly acerbic family feud over the gravesites firmly into the public eye.

Mandla Mandela launched a tirade at close family members who took him to court to force him to reinter Mandela’s children at the revered former South African leader’s proposed burial ground in Qunu, his childhood village.

Mandla, who had moved the graves from Qunu to his own nearby homestead in Mvezo two years ago without the family’s permission, accused one of his brothers of impregnating his wife and said others were born out of wedlock.

He also accused other close relatives of money-grabbing, and said Mandela’s daughter Makaziwe was trying to “sow divisions and destruction” in her family.

The anti-apartheid hero’s ex wife Winnie, who has regularly visited him in hospital, “has no business in the matters of the Mandelas,” Mandla added.

He also lashed out at his own brother Ndaba for claiming he was born out of wedlock.

“I don’t want to hang out our dirty linen as a family in public but he knows very well that my father impregnated a married woman of which he is the result of that act. As for the remaining of my two brothers we all know that they are not my father’s children.”

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The three bodies were reburied Thursday in Qunu, but the fall-out from the dispute continued to reverberate.

South African Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu pleaded with Mandela’s family not to “besmirch” the former president’s name.

“Please, please, please may we think not only of ourselves. It’s like spitting in Madiba’s face,” said Tutu in a statement, using Mandela’s clan name.

Presidential spokesman Maharaj also urged the family to solve the increasingly bitter dispute “amicably”.

“It is regrettable that there is a dispute going on amongst family members and we’d like that dispute to be resolved as amicably and as soon as possible,” he said.

 

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