Nelson Mandela’s close family members gathered to hear a sombre prayer wishing the anti-apartheid icon a “peaceful, perfect, end” as he lay in hospital in a critical condition with life seemingly slipping away.
Cape Town Archbishop Thabo Makgoba visited Pretoria’s Mediclinic Heart Hospital on Tuesday to pray with wife Graca Machel “at this hard time of watching and waiting”.
Mandela, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, who spent 27 years behind bars for his struggle under white minority rule and went on to become South Africa’s first black president, was admitted on June 8 with a recurrent lung infection.
During a 19-day vigil his family, and the world, have watched as the 94-year-old slipped from a stable to a critical condition.
Many now fear for the man who, in defeating apartheid, bent the arc of history to his will and lit a fire that shone for millions across the world.
The archbishop’s prayer seemed to echo a growing feeling of inevitability about Mandela’s condition that is increasingly voiced by South Africans, to whom he remains a moral giant, even though he stepped back from public life a decade ago.