Mandela a reconciler, remarkable leader: S. African publisher

MANILA - South Africa held a state funeral for Nelson Mandela on Sunday, closing one chapter in its tortured history and opening another in which the multi-racial democracy he founded will have to discover if it can thrive without its central pillar. The Nobel peace laureate, who was held in apartheid prisons for 27 years before emerging to preach forgiveness and reconciliation, was honored with a mixture of military pomp and the traditional rites of his Xhosa abaThembu clan. Tom Nkosi,a newspaper publisher in South Africa and former member of the anti-apartheid movement, said Mandela was a remarkable leader who played a pivotal role in ending apartheid in South Africa. He said that while Mandela started out as very militant, "he realized that the country cannot go ahead with all the hostility." "He was this remarkable leader who was able to make very unpopular decisions," he said, referring to the negotiations between the African National Congress and the apartheid government. He said the ANC managed to rally the struggles of the South African people around Mandela even when he was in prison. Mandela served just one term as leader of Africa's biggest and most sophisticated economy, and formally withdrew from public life in 2004. He died in Johannesburg on December 5, plunging his 53 million countrymen and millions more around the world into mourning, and triggering more than a week of official memorials to South Africa's first black president. ANC, December 15, 2013