PRETORIA: US President Barack Obama headed to South Africa on Friday to pay homage to his hero Nelson Mandela, who is fighting for his life in hospital.
Mandela’s failing health has thrown into doubt prospects of a meeting between two men who shattered racial boundaries on either side of the Atlantic.
“I do not need a photo op. The last thing I want to do is to be in any way obtrusive,” Obama said before leaving Senegal when asked whether he would visit the anti-apartheid icon in hospital.
“I think that the message we’ll want to deliver is not directly to him but to his family, is simply profound gratitude for his leadership all these years,” Obama added.
Mandela, who turns 95 next month, remained critically ill in hospital, three weeks after he was admitted with a recurrent lung disease dating from his years in apartheid-era prisons.
Supporters have been gathering outside to offer prayers for the former political prisoner who negotiated an end to decades of racist white minority rule and went on to become South Africa’s first black president.
“I came to pray for our father Nelson Mandela. We are wishing for our father to be fine,” said Thabo Mahlangu, aged 12, part of a group from a home for abandoned kids who travelled to Pretoria.
A wall of handwritten notes praying for Mandela’s recovery has become the focal point for South Africans preparing to say goodbye to the father of their nation, with singing and dancing by day and candlelight vigils at night.
Reflections on Mandela’s extraordinary life will permeate Obama’s three-day stay, part of a three-nation Africa tour.
On the eve of Obama’s visit, South Africa’s first black president was said to be in a critical condition, but had stabilised since a scare forced his successor Jacob Zuma to cancel a trip to neighbouring Mozambique.
“He is much better today,” said Zuma after seeing Mandela on Thursday for the second time in less than 24 hours.
Yet South Africans, including Mandela’s family, braced for the worst.
“I won’t lie. It doesn’t look good,” daughter Makaziwe Mandela said. But “if we speak to him he responds and tries to open his eyes — he’s still there.”
Obama, the United States’s first black president, led a chorus of support for the man he called a “hero for the world”.
Mandela’s plight has lent a deeply poignant tone to the visit.
“The president will be speaking to the legacy of Nelson Mandela and that will be a significant part of our time in South Africa,” said US deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes.
A visit by Obama to Mandela’s former jail cell on Robben Island, off Cape Town on Sunday would now take on extra “profundity”, he said.
Speaking in Senegal on the first leg of his long-awaited African trip, Obama described Mandela as “a personal hero”.
“I think he is a hero for the world, and if and when he passes from this place, one thing I think we all know is that his legacy is one that will linger on throughout the ages.”
The US president recalled how Mandela had inspired him to take up political activity, when he campaigned for the anti-apartheid movement as a student in the late 1970s.
The men met in 2005, when the former South African president was in Washington, and Obama was a newly elected senator, and the two have spoken several times since by telephone.
But there has been no face-to-face meeting between them since Obama was elected in 2008.
During his trip, Obama was also due to host a town hall meeting at the University of Johannesburg’s campus in Soweto, the township where Mandela once lived, as part of the US president’s Young African Leaders Initiative.
He will visit a community centre with fellow Nobel Peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu and give a speech at the University of Cape Town.
But he will not be greeted warmly by all South Africans. “NObama” demonstrations were held in Pretoria by a coalition of leftist, pro-Palestinian and anti-drone groups.
The group was protesting against what it described as the “arrogant, selfish and oppressive foreign policies” of the United States.
Mandela has been hospitalised four times since December, mostly for a stubborn lung infection.
The man once branded a terrorist by the United States and Britain walked free from prison near Cape Town in 1990.
He won South Africa’s first fully democratic elections in 1994, forging a path of racial reconciliation during his single term as president, before taking up a new role as a roving elder statesman and leading AIDS campaigner.
He stepped back from public life in 2004 and has not been seen in public since the football World Cup finals in South Africa in 2010.
But Mandela still draws vast global interest, interest which now appears to be wearing on his family.
Mandela’s oldest daughter Makaziwe on Thursday slammed the “crass” media frenzy around her critically ill father.
“It’s like truly vultures waiting when a lion has devoured a buffalo, waiting there you know for the last carcasses.”
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