Mandela Lying in State

Updated Dec. 11, 2013 11:08 a.m. ET

President Jacob Zuma pays his respects to Nelson Mandela, whose body lies in state in Pretoria Wednesday. Associated Press

PRETORIA— Nelson Mandela’s death hit home on Wednesday for thousands of South Africans who filed past his body lying in state at a federal compound on a hill overlooking the capital.
“I couldn’t really believe it until I saw it,” said Lesego Lebepe, a 24-year-old student who woke before dawn to navigate six hours of bus rides and lines before paying his respects to South Africa’s first black president. “I never saw him with my own eyes until today, and it was to say farewell.”
Mr. Mandela, who died on Thursday at 95 years of age, spent nearly three decades in jail for opposing South Africa’s formerly white-minority regime. He is lauded among blacks and whites for ushering in an era of peace and racial reconciliation.
After winning South Africa’s first multiracial elections in 1994, he was sworn in under the same rotunda in the Union Buildings where he will lie in state each day through Friday. The space was renamed on Wednesday in his honor.

People react as the hearse carrying the coffin of former South African President Nelson Mandela travels through a street in Pretoria Wednesday. Reuters

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Military personnel carried the remains of Nelson Mandela through the streets of Pretoria Wednesday. Reuters

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Police motorcycles and a military helicopter guarded the black van that brought Mr. Mandela’s body from a military hospital to the Union Buildings on Wednesday morning. Crowds along the curb whistled and broke into old antiapartheid songs praising him.
“I feel moved. I feel that greatness, that spirit,” said Frans Manamela, a 53-year-old newspaper distributor who drove 200 miles from South Africa’s Limpopo province to watch Mr. Mandela’s dark-wood coffin, draped in a South African flag, driven past.
Not all were elated with the prolonged memorial.
Some business owners were frustrated that the heavy security around the route included a directive to close for much of the morning. Kilford Samaneka, a 40-year-old bakery owner, said he would lose $6,000 in revenue over the three days. “I salute Mandela as a hero, but it’s too much to close us down here,” he said. “It could have been managed differently.”
At the Union Buildings, eight military officers carried Mr. Mandela’s coffin up the stone steps and into a large wooden structure draped in white cloth.
Inside, the casket was opened to reveal Mr. Mandela’s body under a plate of glass. His shock of white hair was combed back, and he wore one of his trademark silk shirts in a black and gold pattern.
Officials said as many as 2,000 mourners can file past in each of the roughly nine hours that Mr. Mandela’s body will be displayed each day, and on Wednesday the line moved briskly.
South Africa’s current president, Jacob Zuma, was among the first to view the body along with Mr. Mandela’s wife, Graça Machel, and his former wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Behind them came family members, veterans of the struggle against apartheid, and leaders from Africa and beyond.
F.W. de Klerk, the last apartheid-era president and a leader who, with Mr. Mandela, helped demolish the system of racial segregation, sobbed as he walked away from the rotunda. Mr. de Klerk shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Mandela.
“Yesterday was for celebration,” Mr. de Klerk said, referring to a mass memorial in Mr. Mandela’s honor on Tuesday at a Johannesburg soccer stadium. “Today is for sadness.”
On Saturday, Mr. Mandela’s body will be taken from Pretoria to his ancestral home of Qunu, in the Eastern Cape province. He will be buried there on Sunday in a funeral attended by his family and other South African and foreign dignitaries.
“To see our icon, even in his coffin, to see a person who changed the whole world, that I could not miss,” said Emily Selebano, a 45-year-old nurse who traveled several hundred miles by minibus taxi from the Free State Province to attend Tuesday’s memorial and to pay her respects to Mr. Mandela on Wednesday.
“Now that I saw, I’m at peace,” she said. “And I wish him the same now: to rest in peace.”

Write to Patrick McGroarty at patrick.mcgroarty@wsj.com

Originally posted here: Mandela Lying in State