Mandela vigil turns into celebration of life

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VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – The space in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery was bathed in candlelight Friday evening as Vancouverites said goodbye to Nelson Mandela.

Music, South African flags and chants of ‘Mandela’ marked the occasion.

Some people in the crowd were South African expats who said Mandela has remained close to their hearts.

One woman recalled her time in the country. “The fact that I was born in South Africa was good enough reason to come and mourn, probably the greatest man that nation could have produced.”

Cecil Abrahams, who heads the Vancouver campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University, says he first met Mandela when he was an 11-year-old soccer player in South Africa.

He says Mandela and members of the African National Congress once stopped his soccer match so they could use the field for a political rally.

Abrahams says when he told Mandela about the incident in 1995, the then-South African president laughed and shook his hand, which Abrahams says he didn’t want to wash for a week.

Johannes Nonyane of the South African Cultural Association of British Columbia says when he was growing up and Mandela was imprisoned, he and his friends would visit the leader’s vacant home for inspiration.

“I’m not sad, I’m grateful and humbled to have experienced such a wealth of human being in my lifetime,” said the sitting president of the National Congress of Black Women Foundation.
Larry King of the BC Teachers Federation recalled for the crowd how BC unions banded together to help fight Apartheid.

“We boycotted Shell. We convinced city hall to boycott Shell. We sent funds to South Africa through an underground route to support families of political prisoners.”

Mandela died Thursday at the age of 95. A a state funeral is planned for next weekend.

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