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Mandela’s Grandson Ends Battle Over Burials As Mandela Lies Dying, Disputes Over His Legacy Are Taking Hold
(about 9 hours later)
JOHANNESBURG — Mandla Mandela, the eldest grandson of the ailing Nelson Mandela, said Thursday that he would give up his battle with other members of his family over where to bury three of the former president’s children and, eventually, Mr. Mandela himself. JOHANNESBURG — The nasty family squabble over where three of former President Nelson Mandela’s children, and eventually the leader himself, will be buried drew to a close on Thursday morning in a small village on the Eastern Cape.
“I will not challenge this further, it will serve no purpose,” he said at a news conference at his compound in the small village of Mvezo in Eastern Cape Province that was broadcast on South African television. But not before it had thrown into relief the perhaps inevitable disputes over the revered leader’s legacy — both the financial legacy, which his family is wrestling over, and more broadly, the political legacy of how Mr. Mandela will be remembered and how his story will guide the country he led.
He spoke as the South African presidency offered its latest update on Mr. Mandela, who has been treated at the Mediclinic Heart Hospital in the capital, Pretoria, since June 8 for a serious lung infection, saying he was still in “critical but stable” condition. Mandla Mandela, the former president’s eldest grandson and heir as tribal leader in the region, held a news conference in his compound in Mvezo saying that he would cease his legal battles to have the bodies kept there. In 2011, he moved the bodies to Mvezo from another small village, Qunu, where the rest of the Mandela family wanted them and where the anti-apartheid leader is said to wish to be buried himself. By late afternoon, the bodies were reburied in Qunu.
As Mr. Mandela, 94, the former South African president and anti-apartheid leader, remains in the hospital, the family dispute — culminating in the spectacle of police officers breaking down a gate to a cemetery on Wednesday to exhume the bodies — has riveted South Africans, but drawn criticism from the ruling African National Congress and others. “The battle within the family is a battle that is going on politically, as well,” said Justice Malala, a political analyst and former publisher of the newspaper The Sowetan. “Who does Nelson Mandela belong to? To the African National Congress or to the country?”
In 2011, the grandson ordered the transfer of the bodies from the nearby village of Qunu, where Mr. Mandela was raised, to his own compound in Mvezo, the village where Mr. Mandela was born. The Youth League of the governing A.N.C. drew criticism just last week for showing up outside the hospital where Mr. Mandela has been battling a lung infection since June 8 with a truck plastered with election posters — South Africa will have national elections next year. Before that, the opposition Democratic Alliance drew fire for billboards in Cape Town and elsewhere showing Mr. Mandela embracing the party’s former leader, Helen Suzman.
The remains of the three family members — Makaziwe Mandela, who died as an infant in 1948; Madiba Thembekile Mandela, who was killed in a car accident in 1969; and Mandla Mandela’s own father, Makgatho Mandela, who died in 2005 — were taken Wednesday from their unmarked graves in Mvezo to a nearby hospital, where local health officials conducted DNA tests Thursday to determine which body was which. And no less a figure than Mr. Mandela’s ex-wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, took a swipe this week at South Africa’s current president, Jacob Zuma, for an incident earlier this year in which Mr. Zuma and other A.N.C. leaders visited the ailing Mr. Mandela to have their photos taken with him. Mr. Zuma said he found Mr. Mandela “in good shape.” But the images showed a clearly ailing man, almost unresponsive as the politicians beamed on all sides of him, prompting complaints from the family that they had exploited his fragile state to be seen in his company one more time.
Finally, by late afternoon, the bodies were reburied in the Mandela family graveyard in Qunu. “I honestly cannot put in words how hurt the family was,” Mrs. Madikizela-Mandela said in an interview with Britain’s ITV this week. “It was one of the most insensitive things for anyone to have done.”
Several members of Mr. Mandela’s family members, including his eldest daughter, also named Makaziwe Mandela, had taken Mandla Mandela to court and charged that the bodies had been moved without their knowledge or consent. This week, the battle over Mr. Mandela’s legacy shifted from politics to family.
A judge in the Eastern Cape High Court in Mthatha, near the villages of Qunu and Mvezo, ruled Wednesday that the bodies be returned to Qunu immediately, and turned down two appeals from Mandla Mandela. The fight over the grave sites was both an intimate matter and a public struggle over a national landmark. Mandla Mandela claimed his rights as Mr. Mandela’s eldest male heir to decide such important considerations, but the anti-apartheid leader’s wife, Graça Machel, and daughters, along with a coterie of grandchildren, were having none of that.
“In the past few days I have been the subject of attacks from all sorts of individuals wanting a few minutes of fame and media attention at my expense,” the grandson said at the news conference, criticizing several family members by name. At stake was the future. Mr. Mandela’s grave site is certain to become one of the country’s main tourist attractions, and the village where he rests will reap the benefits.
An affidavit filed in the Mvezo court case last Friday by the Mandela family maintained that Nelson Mandela was in “perilous” shape and connected to a life support machine. Mr. Mandela’s relatives, led by his eldest daughter, Makaziwe Mandela, asserted that Mandla Mandela was interested only in the money that would come from the grave site. At his news conference Thursday, Mandla Mandela asserted that they were the ones fighting over control of companies set up by the anti-apartheid leader — and were therefore the ones interested in money.
But Mr. Mandela’s wife, Graça Machel, said at a gathering Thursday morning at the opening of the Nelson Mandela Sport and Culture Day in Johannesburg that he was actually in much better condition at the moment. “This is the very family who has taken their own grandfather to court for his money,” he said.
“Madiba is sometimes uncomfortable,” she said, referring to Mr. Mandela by his clan name. “But he is fine.” The flare-up within the Mandela family was merely the most recent one.
A limited edition of Mr. Mandela’s handprints, inscribed with an image of the African continent, are at the center of a legal dispute between Mr. Mandela’s two eldest daughters and some of his closest surviving allies from the struggle against white minority rule.
The handprint paintings — of which an estimated 1,000 were made, each signed individually by Mr. Mandela — are the most valuable items in a series of artworks that Mr. Mandela started 10 years ago. The collection includes sketches from Robben Island, where Mr. Mandela spent 18 years in jail, but it is the handprints that have become most valued: they sell for over $10,000 each on the private market, according to art dealers who trade in the work.
But two of his daughters — Makaziwe Mandela and Zenani Dlamini, South Africa’s ambassador to Argentina and Paraguay — and several of his grandchildren brought a lawsuit to remove directors from the boards of two companies set up to disburse the proceeds from the artwork.
The most prominent director is George Bizos, a lawyer who defended Mr. Mandela during the Rivonia trial of the early 1960s, which ended with Mr. Mandela being jailed for 27 years.
And there have been other episodes that have unsettled South Africans. Makaziwe Mandela started a “House of Mandela” wine label. And two of his granddaughters have appeared in a reality television show called “Being Mandela,” about their materialistic lifestyle, as well as starting a clothing line called LWTF, an acronym for Mr. Mandela’s autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom.”
The legal suit over the Mandela trusts has divided Mr. Mandela’s family and highlighted a delicate issue in South Africa: Who should control Mr. Mandela’s image, and how much they should profit from it?
Such financial squabbles, as ill-timed as they may be while Mr. Mandela lies near death, are likely to fade against the larger issue of who will control his political legacy.
“For the A.N.C., it’s not ‘Vote for us on the basis of what we are doing,’ it is ‘Vote for us because of Nelson Mandela and what he did,’ ” Mr. Malala said. “This will all continue into the election next year and maybe the one after that. And then it will become history.”