December 8, 2013.

South Africa Begins Farewell to Nelson Mandela

When they met in the church tower the gaps in their fragmentary conversation were filled up. It was a blazing afternoon. The air in the little square chamber above the bells was hot and stagnant, and smelt overpoweringly of pigeon dung. They sat talking for hours on the dusty, twig-littered floor, one or other of them getting up from time to time to cast a glance through the narrow slits and make sure that no one was coming.

QUNU, South Africa----The country Sunday began to bid a collective goodbye to its first democratically elected president, Nelson Mandela, whose death last week sparked a logistical scramble to mark his passing in places that ranged from a massive soccer stadium to a rural town with no airport.

Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with thirty other girls ("Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!" she said parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. She was "not clever," but was fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery. She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She "didn't much care for reading," she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

President Jacob Zuma had designated a day of prayer and reflection on the life of Mr. Mandela. The 95-year-old statesman, who died Thursday evening at his Johannesburg home, was seen as the great hope for a racially divided country. On Sunday, South African officials fanned out to different churches, in what amounted to a fresh campaign to use Mr. Mandela's spirit to bring people together.

She had no memories of anything before the early sixties and the only person she had ever known who talked frequently of the days before the Revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight. At school she had been captain of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics trophy two years running. She had been a troop-leader in the Spies and a branch secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior Anti-Sex League. She had always borne an excellent character. She had even (an infallible mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in Pornosec, the subsection of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girls' School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.

"We should not forget the values that Madiba stood for and sacrificed his life for," President Zuma told those gathered at a church in Johannesburg, using the clan name of Mr. Mandela. "He actively participated to remove the oppressor to liberate the people of this country. When our struggle came to an end, he preached and practiced reconciliation to make those who had been fighting to forgive one another and become one nation."