The real tributes

   This morning, I went to the Houghton, Johannesburg house of Nelson Mandela, to say my personal goodbye to Madiba on the day of his funeral. I set out bright and early at 7am, hoping to get there ahead of the crowds, but the street was already filling up with visitors, each on a private pilgrimage of their own.

   The path to his door and the pavement and road outside his house were overflowing with tributes of love and appreciation and grief. At the back, the candles placed there by the first visitors ten days ago have burned down to wax puddles, and the first flowers are disintegrating after a week in the extremes of the baking African sun and the violent Highveld thunderstorms.

   But more gifts are laid over the old, hour by hour, day by day, person by person. Flowers, teddy bears, poems by children, a bright yellow toy car, letters in every language, signed T-shirts and posters and banners, photographs and mosaic pictures, and ribbons in the colours of the South African flag wound around the trunks of trees.

   But, for me at least, all of these were not the real tribute. The real story had more to do with the accessibility and unifying inclusivity, than with the tangible tributes.

   As I left, an elderly lady on her way to the house stopped to ask me, “Can you just go in?”

   “Yes,” I said.

   “And do you have to go through a security check?”

   “No, nothing like that.”

   We smiled, a silent acknowledgement that even in death, Madiba remains one of the people, as ready to be right in our midst, without barrier or distancing self-importance, as he was to shake any and every hand while he lived. Where else in the world could this happen? This man was a politician, a leader of a country divided by strife, once labelled a terrorist by the ruling regime, and yet anyone can walk up to the end of the pathway to his door to say goodbye.

   And everyone, it seems, does. Scruffy street children and privileged tots in prams, domestic workers and corporate CEOs, black and white and every colour in between, folks old enough to remember the times before apartheid and three born-free boys sharing a posy of chrysanthemums, energetic young joggers, tired uniformed nurses just off the night shift alongside police officers starting theirs, reporters from the first TV news crew of the day, and those who have travelled in from remote Limpopo and Mpumalanga, in cars and on trains and in rattletrap taxis – standing silently, praying, embracing each other, sharing our grief and our hope. To every single of us, Mandela meant, continues to mean, something deeply personal. And yet we each understand that we’re witnessing history, privileged to have shared in these momentous times.

   These were our tributes to Madiba – that we could, and did, come to say goodbye. That we were able – due in no small part to his efforts – to do so together, irrespective of colour or history or belief.

   Resting against the bank of flowers was a letter written on orange paper from an Afrikaans family from Pretoria, thanking Madiba and quoting scripture: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”