Reuters/Johannesburg
Former South African President Nelson Mandela is recovering from a lung infection that has kept the 94-year-old anti-apartheid leader in hospital for the last five days, the government said yesterday.
“Doctors attending to former President Mandela have reported that he has made progress during the past 24 hours and they are satisfied with the way he is responding to treatment,” President Jacob Zuma’s office said a statement.
Mandela, known locally by his clan name of ‘Madiba’, was admitted to Pretoria’s ‘1 Military’ Hospital on Saturday after being flown from his home village of Qunu in a remote, rural part of the Eastern Cape province.
The government only gave the first concrete details about his condition on Tuesday, saying he had suffered a recurrence of a lung infection.
When he was admitted, officials stressed there was no cause for concern although domestic media reports suggested senior members of the government and people close to him had been caught unawares.
Mandela, a global symbol of resistance to racism and injustice, spent 27 years in apartheid prisons, including 18 years on the windswept Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town.
He was released in 1990 and went on to use his unparalleled prestige to push for reconciliation between whites and blacks as the bedrock of the post-apartheid “Rainbow Nation”.