South Africa’s Mandela Back Home After Long Hospital Stay

Anti-apartheid leader and former South African President Nelson Mandela returned to his home on Sunday where he will continue to receive intensive care after three months in hospital with a lung ailment.

Mandela, 95, had spent 87 days in a Pretoria hospital after he was rushed there in early June suffering from a recurring infection of the lungs, a legacy of the nearly three decades he spent in jail under apartheid.

“Madiba’s condition remains critical and is at times unstable. Nevertheless, his team of doctors are convinced that he will receive the same level of intensive care at his Houghton home that he received in Pretoria,” South Africa’s presidency said in a statement. It referred to Mandela by the traditional clan name by which he is affectionately known.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s latest hospitalization in June had attracted a wave of attention and sympathy at home and across the world.

His home in Johannesburg’s Houghton suburb had been “reconfigured” to allow him to receive special care there, the presidency added. Police blocked off a section of the street in the upscale neighborhood, where a crowd of reporters and camera crews had gathered.

For more than a decade Mandela has been out of politics, dividing his time in retirement between his home in Houghton and Qunu, the village in the impoverished Eastern Cape province where he was born.

This article appeared in print on page 2 of the September 2nd, 2013 edition of Hamodia.