Mandela turns 95

CNN Online

As an ailing Nelson Mandela recuperates in a South African hospital, the world celebrates his 95th birthday Thursday, honoring his legacy in various ways, including performing 67 minutes of community service.
School children sang “Happy Birthday” to the former president while crowds left flowers and candles outside his Pretoria hospital. The day also marks 15 years since he married his wife, Graca Machel.
President Jacob Zuma said that Mandela, who has been hospitalized since June, is steadily improving following his lung ailment.
“We are proud to call this international icon our own as South Africans and wish him good health,” Zuma said in a statement.
The United Nations declared July 18 as Mandela Day four years ago to honor his role in reconciling a country torn apart by apartheid. It started as a call to promote global peace and encourage community service.
His foundation is asking people to take part in at least 67 minutes of public service on his birthday, a reference to the number of years he devoted to public service.
Birthday greetings and messages of support poured in from around the world — and even from astronauts on the International Space Station — to mark the anniversary, which many had feared Mandela would not live to see.
US President Barack Obama, who visited with Mandela’s family in South Africa last month, also sent birthday wishes.
“People everywhere have the opportunity to honor Madiba through individual and collective acts of service,” he said in a statement. “Through our own lives, by heeding his example, we can honor the man who showed his own people — and the world — the path to justice, equality and freedom.”
Other well-wishers included the Dalai Lama, former US president Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary, US actor Morgan Freeman and Mandela’s former jailer FW de Klerk, who went on to share the Nobel Peace Prize with him.
The frail icon has not appeared in public for years, but retains his popularity as the father of democracy.
His defiance of white minority rule focused the world’s attention on apartheid, the legalized racial segregation enforced by the South African government until 1994.
The festivities are not limited to South Africa. In the United States, the embassy said 18 cities, including the nation’s capital, will hold various events to celebrate his birthday.
Mandela, a Nobel peace laureate, spent 27 years in prison for fighting against oppression of minorities in South Africa. He became the nation’s first black president in 1994, four years after he was freed from prison.
He then led reconciliation in the deeply divided country.
“Never before in history was one human being so universally acknowledged in his lifetime as the embodiment of magnanimity and reconciliation as Nelson Mandela,” said retired archbishop Desmond Tutu, himself a Nobel Peace laureate.