Mourners pay respects for second day
For a second day, droves of mourners filed past the body of Nelson Mandela on Thursday as it lay in state in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria. Mandela’s casket was in the amphitheater at the Union Buildings, the seat of government where Mandela was inaugurated as the country’s first black and democratically elected president in 1994. Some mourners sobbed after passing the casket while others accepted the grief of losing their revered leader. “Now that I’ve seen his face, I think I’m OK now,” Freda Mamemena said. “I see that the old man has rested at long last. He’s at peace.” Today is the final day of viewing. Mandela will be buried Sunday in the village of Qunu, where he spent his childhood.
Associated Press
The sign language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s memorial says he suffers from schizophrenia and hallucinated and saw angels while gesturing incoherently just 3 feet away from President Barack Obama and other world leaders, outraging deaf people worldwide who said his signs amounted to gibberish.
South African officials scrambled Thursday to explain how they came to hire the man and said they were investigating what vetting process, if any, he underwent for his security clearance.
“In the process, and in the speed of the event, a mistake happened,” deputy Cabinet minister Hendrietta Bogopane-Zulu said.
She apologized to deaf people around the world who were offended by the incomprehensible signing.
However, she declined to say whether a government department, the presidency or the ruling African National Congress party was responsible for hiring the sign interpreter.
The man at the center of the controversy said Thursday that he began hallucinating while onstage in the stadium filled with tens of thousands of people and that he tried not to panic because there were “armed policemen around me.”
Thamsanqa Jantjie added that he has schizophrenia, was once hospitalized in a mental health facility for 19 months and has been violent in the past.
The disclosures raised serious security concerns for Obama, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other dignitaries who stood next to Jantjie as they eulogized Mandela at FNB Stadium in Soweto, the black township at the center of the struggle against racist white rule. Mandela died on Dec. 5 at 95.
In Washington, Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan said vetting for criminal history and other appropriate background checks of the people onstage were the responsibility of the South Africans. He added that Secret Service agents are “always in close proximity to the president.”
White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to comment on how South Africa handled the hiring of the translator.
However, he added: “If in fact the individual was not signing, that’s unfortunate because that meant that people who rely on sign language to follow the speeches were not able to.”
Jantjie has been seen on video performing sign language interpretation at other prominent events in South Africa criticized as fake by advocates for the deaf, including at an appearance last December with South African President Jacob Zuma.
He insisted he did proper sign language interpretation of the world leaders’ speeches. But he also apologized for a performance dismissed by many experts as gibberish.
“I would like to tell everybody that if I’ve offended anyone, please, forgive me,” Jantjie said.
“What happened that day, I see angels come to the stadium … I start realizing that the problem is here. And the problem, I don’t know the attack of this problem, how will it comes. Sometimes I react violent. … Sometimes I will see things that chase me,” he said.
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