Nelson Mandela looked tired and stiff as he walked down the steps in front of the National Gallery on Thursday to speak to the crowd, one careful step at a time. He looked old. Perhaps he will not come to London again.
The long black coat and the baggy fur hat against the chill — half the crowd was coughing with the bug that pervades the capital — had the look of the back cover of a life, so different from the rich sunny colours of the hero’s shirts in the latter African chapters.
Then, as he reached the podium, when he didn’t need to concentrate on not slipping, he looked up, looked at the thousands of faces filling Trafalgar Square, and smiled. The frail old man disappeared. The smile was the same as it always was, the Mandela grin, not a politician’s switched-on toothiness or a star’s eating up the adoration but a mixture of humility, majesty and plain delight.
”As you know, I recently formally announced my retirement from public life and should not really be here,” said Mandela. The crowd laughed, and listened while, with his slow, deliberate, deep voice, he read out the call to act against African poverty. ”Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity,” he said. ”It is an act of justice.”
The crowd listened, and appreciated, although many seemed to be goggling at a legend come to life, listening to the sound of his voice as much as to the words he said.
No other living statesman is a celebrity, a leader, and an object of veneration like this.
One press photographer whipped off his anorak as Mandela approached and stood there in the cold in a T-shirt from a Free Nelson Mandela concert two decades ago. Behind The Guardian a man who would hardly have been born then tried to hold his amateur’s camera steady and murmured over and over: ”Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God,” as the living Mandela filled the viewfinder.
Enough pigeons had escaped the exterminators to swirl overhead while he spoke. A few hundred yards away stood the pale bulk of South Africa House, where for more than 1 300 days in the 1980s anti-apartheid demonstrators kept up a vigil so tenacious that they acquired their own postal address.
”I can never thank the people of Britain enough for their support through those days of the struggle against apartheid,” said Mandela. ”Many stood in solidarity with us, just a few yards from this spot. Through your will and passion, you assisted in consigning that evil system for ever to history.
”But in this new century, millions of people in the world’s poorest countries remain imprisoned, enslaved, and in chains. They are trapped in the prison of poverty. It is time to set them free.”
In the press of the crowd, squeezed between the fountains and the lions, were two veterans of the struggle somewhat younger than Mandela, who will be 88 this year: the Kenya-born Jean Lafontaine (73) and her daughter Amanda Sackur (45). ”It was very moving to see him and to add support to the campaign,” said Lafontaine.
”In some respects, things in the world are better, but in other respects they’re worse. The poverty in Africa has not gone away and the despair is greater, because the hopes were so high.”
The latest campaign, Make Poverty History, is intended to unite charities in a single effort to persuade rich countries to offer Africa a better deal on trade, debt and aid in 2005.
Moved as she was to see Mandela, Sackur, a campaigner since her teens, fretted about the sucking of politics out of Thursday’s event.
”Most of it was about slogans and aid,” she said. ”I think most people would take away from this that we’ve got to increase aid rather than change the system that creates poverty.”
The lead-in to Mandela’s appearance was a curious mixture of passionate speeches, music and celebrity. Jamelia sang her hit song Stop.
The other Nelson in the square, the admiral on the column, had his back to the proceedings, but the copper cable running down his back made it look as if he was already wired for sound, and you half-expected him to turn round and join Jamelia in a duet.
The final warm-up to Mandela was Bob Geldof, who made a version of the let’s-cut-the-crap speech he has been making about aid to Africa for 20 years. He still manages to sound genuinely outraged that the crap is still there.
He urged the crowd to mob the G8 leaders when they met at Gleneagles later this year. ”When the leaders of the rich world come to our country, they must not have the luxury of isolation,” he said.
At the end of his speech Mandela, leaning on a white walking stick, took off the white band tied round his sleeve, the emblem of the new campaign, and gave it to a group of Scottish schoolchildren. It was time to say goodbye.
”Madiba wants to hang around all day, but he can’t because he’s too old,” said Geldof, referring to Mandela by his African praise name. Mandela laughed. ”Come on, let’s go and sit down,” said Geldof. ”Gleneagles!” – Guardian Unlimited Â