''There were presidents and prime ministers, tens of thousands of people and an endless torrent of words. But one man was missing, both physically and figuratively: Nelson Mandela himself".
"The former South African president's body was not brought to the national memorial service in Johannesburg. His voice was not heard over the loudspeakers, though many others' were. And in a peculiarly rambling, rain-soaked event that got bogged down in domestic politics and ended in a near empty stadium, at times it felt as if Mandela's soul was absent too.
Nearly a hundred heads of state had travelled from all corners of the world to remember Mandela, who died last week aged 95, at what had been billed as the biggest funeral ever seen . As he arrived, Sir John Major, the former British prime minister, said: "This is unique. I don't think we've seen anything like this before and I don't think we'll see anything like it again."
But it was a tribute that did not match the monumental stature of the man, nor ride the spontaneous wave of emotion witnessed on the streets in recent days. What should have been a poetic tribute to a giant of 20th century history was soon infected with the prose of local politics. Every time South African president Jacob Zuma's face appeared on the giant TV screens, sections of the crowd booed and whistled.
There was only one speaker who made everyone stop and listen. The cacophony of cheers and applause for Barack Obama – who on his way to the podium stopped for a historic handshake with Cuban president Raúl Castro – left no doubt of his continued political rock star status, at least in Africa.
Officials had predicted that the 95,000-seat FNB Stadium would be filled and some spectators turned away but, in the end, it only reached about two-thirds capacity. Constant rain drove people into the top tier, leaving thousands of empty seats exposed to the TV cameras. Some of the dozens of trains reserved to take people to the stadium were delayed because of a power failure. Umbrella-wielding spectators who sprinted to their seats from 6am – hours before proceedings got under way – danced and sang with gusto, creating an atmosphere more akin to a football match than a wake. "It's more of a celebration that I expected," David Cameron told the Guardian before taking his seat. "You can see the atmosphere in the stadium is really something else."
The vast venue arguably called for a spectacle of Mandela's life involving music, dance and archive footage on the scale of an Olympic opening ceremony . But instead it was a programme heavy laden with speeches by politicians that were not always audible over the sound system. As the crowd became restless, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the chair of the African Union, was drowned out by songs and vuvuzelas, the plastic horn widely used during the World Cup here in 2010.
For a long spell a section of the crowd turned their backs to the stage and instead stared upwards at a balcony containing Barack and Michelle Obama and former president Bill Clinton, wife Hillary and daughter Chelsea. VIPs and members of the public began filing out well before the end. When, after four hours, retired archbishop Desmond Tutu stood up to address a virtually empty stadium, it summed up the frustrated sense of what might have been".
Source: theguardian
