Community | July 18, 2008 | 8 comments

Birthday wishes pour in for Mandela

source: http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Nelson-Mandela-90th-Birthday-Many-South-Africans...

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Messages of congratulations, tributes and good wishes are pouring in from home and abroad, from ordinary people and influential leaders alike for former South African president Nelson Mandela on his 90th birthday.

President Thabo Mbeki extended his message on behalf of the entire nation to the internationally revered statesman and former political prisoner on Friday.

"We are proud as South Africans that Mr Mandela and his generation of fighters embraced with both passion and reason the mission that history imposed on them and more than met the demands that it enjoined them to fulfil," he said in Pretoria on Friday.

Mbeki said South Africans glowed in the light of fame because the country stood on the shoulders of icons such as Mandela.
Harmony and equality

He recalled Mandela's statement at the opening of the defence case in the Rivonia Trial in the Pretoria Supreme Court on 20 April 1964: "I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities," Mandela said back then.

"It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

Mbeki urged the current generation to return to the question of their mission and how to fulfil it, as conditions and circumstances evolved, much in the same way that Mandela's generation had to discover and fulfil its mission.

"Finding answers to this question simultaneously as we celebrate his birthday is perhaps the biggest present we can give to Nelson Mandela," said Mbeki. "Many happy returns - ukhule ukhokhobe!"

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