Mandela's 82nd birthday -- a pause in a hectic schedule
by Bronwen Roberts
JOHANNESBURG, July 17 (AFP) - South Africa's popular former president
Nelson Mandela will pause from his busy schedule Tuesday to quietly
celebrate
his 82nd birthday, before travelling to Tanzania the next day to work on a
peace accord to end Burundi's seven-year war.
Mandela will spend his birthday, also the second anniversary of his
marriage to former Mozambican first lady Graca Machel, at home in
Johannesburg
with his family, which includes some 32 grandchildren and great-
grandchildren,
his aide Zelda la Grange said.
The sprightly Mandela has been making jokes about his age for the past
two
weeks.
"I feel almost 80 again," he told an investment conference a week ago.
"As you know, I am 100 years old, but today I feel 82 years," he quipped
later in the week, after receiving a grant to support South African
children
orphaned by AIDS, a pet project.
He joked later that, since resigning after a five-year term as president
in
June 1999, he was an "unemployed pensioner walking up and down the street
looking for work."
This is far from the truth: since handing over to President Thabo Mbeki,
Mandela has maintained a busy work schedule.
In the past six months he has travelled widely, including to Britain,
the
United States, Nigeria, Dubai, Tanzania and Burundi.
Despite his international engagements -- which include meetings with
most
visiting foreign dignitaries -- Mandela has been tireless in his work to
involve South Africa's private sector in development projects in destitute,
rural areas.
His calm and rational voice has also made impact in debates raging at
home,
including when, in the closing address to the 13th International AIDS
Conference in Durban last week, he calmed the controversy stirred up by
Mbeki's flirtation with the notion that HIV is not the cause of AIDS.
This debate should be forgotten, he said, so that South Africa can focus
on
the plights of its estimated 4.2 million people living with HIV.
Although this was seen as an oblique criticism of Mbeki, Mandela has
been
unfailing in his support of his successor.
"I do not think there is anybody in the history of South Africa who has
put
South Africa on the map as has President Mbeki," he said in June, marking
Mbeki's first year in power.
Many would say that it is Mandela himself who deserves this credit for
inspiring South Africa to become a "rainbow nation" in which reconciliation
heals the racial gulf engineered by apartheid.
He revisited this theme in February, during celebrations to commemorate
the
10th anniversary of his release from 27 years in apartheid jails.
"The need to unite the people of our country is as important a task now
as
it always has been," he said.
He admitted then that he finds little time for himself in his retirement.
He told reporters that "you know you work from morning to 12 midnight
and
when you get home you are too tired, you only have time to sleep, and
dream."
He added, however: "I have started jotting down my memoirs of the
presidential years, so I use most of the time in writing."
Mandela escapes, when he can, to his home in Qunu, in Eastern Cape
province, where he was born July 18, 1918 to a royal clan of the Xhosa
people.
As a young man he moved to Johannesburg and worked as a lawyer, fighting
apartheid and later going underground to build the armed wing of the
African
National Congress, activities for which he received a life sentence in 1964.
Three years after his release in 1990, he was awarded with the Nobel
Peace
Prize with his adversary Frederik de Klerk, apartheid South Africa's last
white president, defeated in the first all-race elections on April 27, 1994.
He has won a reputation as one of the world's best mediators and
intervened
in several international disputes, leading to his appointment in December
as
the chief facilitator of the Burundi peace process.
The signing of the Burundi peace accord was due this week but has been
delayed to August 28 to allow for its completion.
Sidi Sanneh
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