Prayers for an ailing Nelson Mandela continued to pour in from metro Atlanta and the world as the first democratically elected president of South Africa battles a serious lung infection in Pretoria.
Former Atlanta Mayor and United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young has known Mandela, who is 94, for decades. Young planned to travel to Gabon on Tuesday, but he will not extend the trip to South Africa because Mandela is too sick to see visitors. Young said he will be thinking of and praying for his old friend.
Young said that as far back as 2007, Mandela had been frail. One of the last times Young saw Mandela was at the grand opening of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls.
“He was very frail then,” Young remembers. “They had to pick him up and carry him to the stage.”
Roswell’s Felicia Mabuza-Suttle, a popular talk show host who was one of many South African expatriates who answered Mandela’s call in the 1990s to return home to help build a new country, recently sent a message to members of Mandela’s family telling them to remain strong.
“We want him to be at peace but not to be in pain,” said Mabuza-Suttle, who is also an author and now hosts a show on the Africa Channel. “We will continue to pray for him.”
There are many ties between Atlanta and the Nobel Peace Prize laureate. A granddaughter attended Clark Atlanta University.
In one of his most important stops during a 1990 tour of the United States, Nelson and Winnie Mandela paid tribute to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. by placing a wreath of yellow chrysanthemums at his crypt. Mandela said he felt a kinship and affinity with the slain civil rights leader, whom he called a “giant among giants,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
During that trip, he also greeted more than 50,000 people at Georgia Tech’s Bobby Dodd Stadium/Grant Field and received the university’s first human rights award.
He returned to Atlanta a few years later to reach out to the city’s African-American leadership and base, plus corporate leaders, on a fundraising tour.
Mabuza-Suttle said she has been glued to social media and news on the Internet to keep updated on Mandela’s condition.
“It seems that people are at peace with whatever happens,” she said. “Despite the fact that he has not been active recently, it is just knowing that he is there. We would not do anything that our father would not want us to do.”
South Africa-born Nadia Bilchik, who works at CNN and is also a professional speaker and communications consultant, said she is close to Mandela’s grandchildren and has interviewed him several times. There is a lot of concern, she said, because he is still “very much a public icon. That is why people care so much.”
Mandela will turn 95 on July 18.
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