Nelson Mandela's coffin lay in his childhood home of Qunu on Saturday, draped in the flag of the new South Africa that he helped to create; the colours of the African National Congress, which he led to power; and the skin of a lion, an honour normally reserved for kings of his native Xhosa people.
The funeral cortege of the country's first democratically elected president was met by a popular honour guard of ordinary South Africans, who lined the 20-mile final homecoming from the provincial city of Mthatha to Qunu.
The plain black hearse, declining to slow down even for a moment, was greeted with cheers and whoops and ululations as if for a film star walking down the red carpet. For many, even the fleeting glimpse had been worth the long wait behind a blue line of police.
Bonga Dlali, 32, brought his two-year-old twins so that they would later be able to say they had been there. "It's final closure for most of us," he said. "This is the last time we'll come close to the gentleman who inspired so many things."
In the different coloured faces among the army, navy and air force personnel who lined the Mthatha airstrip to receive his coffin, there were signs of the transformation that Mandela wrought after emerging from 27 years in prison under white rule.
Even the cortege offered reminders of the sometimes violent anti-apartheid struggle as his hearse was accompanied by the once notorious Casspir armoured personnel carriers. Known as "hippos" in the apartheid-era townships, the vehicles were often used to crush riots and sometimes people.
Outside the Mandela family's imposing home in Qunu, villagers, who were heavily outnumbered by security forces, gamely waved and called out "Aah Dalibhunga", meaning "welcome home" in Xhosa.
Earlier in the day, the ruling ANC party had bid its farewell in a sombre ceremony at the Waterkloof air base outside Pretoria before the coffin was put aboard a military transport plane and flown to Mthatha. Mandela's widow, Graça Machel, dressed in the mourning black she must wear for the next year according to the Xhosa custom of ukuzila, wept and wiped tears from under her glasses.
Source: theguardian
