(Crowd cheering and clapping hands...)
Thank you.....
Crowd cheering continues...
Thank you....
Thank you so much..
Thank you..
To ........................ and the Mandela family..
To President Zuma and the members of the government,
to heads of states and goverment, past and present,distinguished guests..
It is a singular honour to be with you today to celebrate a life like no other.
To the people of South Africa,... ( Crowd cheering)
people of every ways and every walk of life, the world thanks you for sharing Nelson Mandela with us.
His struggle was your struggle. His triumph was your triumph.
Your dignity and your hope found expression in his life and your freedom, your democracy is his cherished legacy.
It is hard to eulogize any man, to capture words, not just the facts and the dates that make a life but the essential truth of a person,
your private joys and sorrows, the quiet moments and the unique qualities that illuminates someones soul.
how much harder to do so for a giant of his .....who moved the nation towards justice
and in the process moved billions around the world.
Born during world war I, fired from the quarters of power, a boy raised by the cattle and the tutored by.................
But if I would emerge as the last great liberator of the 20th century,like I knew he would lead a resistance movement,
a movement that at it start had little prospect for success.
Like Dr King, he would give potent voice to the claims of the oppressed and the moral necessity of racial justice.
He would not do a brutal imprisonment that began in the time of Kennedy and khrushchev and reached the final days of the cold war.
Emerging from the prison without the force of arms he would, like Abraham Lincoln hold this country together ...........break apart.
and like America's founding fathers, he would erect a constitutional order to preserve freedom for future generations.
A commitment to the democracy and rule of law, ratified not only by his election, but by his willingness to step down from power after only one term.
( crowd cheeing... continues)
Given the sweep of his life, the scope of his accomplishments,the adoration that he is .......earlier,
it is tempting I think to remember Nelson Mandela as an icon, smiling and serene,
detached from the tawdry affairs of lesser men but my .....himself strongly persistant such a lifeless fortune.
(Crowd cheering.......)
Instead, Mandela insisted on sharing with us his doubts and his fears, his miscalculations along with his victories
"I am not a saint", he said unless you think I am a saint as a setter who keeps on trying.
those precisely because he could admit to imperfection. because it could be so full of good humor, even........
despite the heavy burdens that he carried that we loved him solve.
He was not a bust made of ......., he was a man of flesh and blood, a son and a husband, a father and a friend.
And that's why we learnt so much from him and that's why we can learn from him still, for nothing he achieved was inevitable.
In the arch of his life, we see a man owned his place in history through his struggle and shrewdness and persistence and faith.
He tells us what is possible not just in the pages of history books but in our own minds as well.
Mandela showed us the power of action and taking risk on behalf of our ideas.
Perhaps Mandela was right that he inherited a proud rebelliousness,a stubborn sense of fairness from his father.