Mujahid Safodien/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A mural of Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, in downtown Johannesburg.
JOHANNESBURG — Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president, remained in serious but stable condition Wednesday after spending his fourth night in intensive care for treatment of a lung infection, the South African government said.
Speaking on national radio, Mac Maharaj, a spokesman for President Jacob Zuma, said that Mr. Mandela’s condition has remained the same since he was admitted to a Pretoria hospital early Saturday morning.
Mr. Mandela, 94, has been in frail health for several years. In the past seven months he has been hospitalized four times, once for 19 days to be treated for pneumonia and undergo gall stone surgery. His lungs are fragile as a result of contracting tuberculosis during the 27 years he spent imprisoned for fighting the government of apartheid-era South Africa.
In the days since he was taken to the hospital, some well-wishers have gathered at churches, and others have gone to the monuments built in his honor, offering prayers. Some supporters said they hoped he would recover soon, while others said that he had lived a long life and that the country must let him go.
“It is not easy, but we must think of his pain,” said Katlego Tsolanku, a 30-year-old saleswoman at a shopping center near Soweto, preparing herself to let go of the man she idolizes.
“He has given us so much,” she said. “He deserves to rest.”
Andrew Mokete Mlangeni, who was a prisoner at Robben Island with Mr. Mandela, told The Sunday Times newspaper that Mr. Mandela’s family “must release him so that God may have his own way.” He added, “We will say: ‘Thank you, God. You have given us this man.’ ”
Jabu Nkosi, 59, a teacher, said she found it hard to imagine South Africa without Mr. Mandela.
“We wish that he would recover soon,” Ms. Nkosi said. “He is the father of our nation. But it depends on God. When the time is right, God will take him, and we will be grateful that God gave us this man.”
The first time Ms. Nkosi voted was when she cast her ballot for Mr. Mandela and the African National Congress in 1994. The moment remains seared in her memory, she said.
“He has done his part to make a new South Africa,” she said. “We are grateful.”
In Sandton, a suburb north of here that is the heart of South Africa’s financial services industry, some people expressed fear for the country’s future without Mr. Mandela.
“I think the A.N.C. loses its conscience when Mandela dies,” said David Brereton, a lawyer who works in an office building just off Nelson Mandela Square, a shopping plaza in the neighborhood. “The party will be able to do whatever it pleases. The moral compass goes.”
Mr. Mandela himself resisted the notion that he held some special power that gave South Africa its largely peaceful transition from white minority rule.
“A ridiculous notion is sometimes advanced that Mandela has been exclusively responsible for these real achievements of the South African people, particularly our smooth transition,” Mr. Mandela wrote in an opinion article in The Sunday Times in 1996, while he was still president.
“If only to emphasize that I am human, and as fallible as anyone else, let me admit that these accolades do flatter me,” he wrote. “So too, does the Sunday Times editor’s attribution to me of ‘warmth of spirit and generosity,’ in the edition of 18 February. The compliment is genuinely appreciated, as long as it does not present the President as ‘superhuman’ and create the impression that the ANC — with its thousands of leaders and millions of supporters — is a mere rubber stamp of my ideas; and that the ministers, experts and others are all insignificant, under the magic spell of a single individual.”
Mr. Mandela has always been sanguine about his own mortality. In the same article, Mr. Mandela wrote: “I have long passed my teens; and the distance to my final destination is shorter than the road I have trudged over the years! What nature has decreed should not generate undue insecurity.”
Khotosokali Letsie, 29, a clothing designer who lives in Soweto, the black township near Johannesburg that was the center of resistance during the days of apartheid, said that lionizing Mr. Mandela detracted from the important roles played by others in South Africa’s struggle.
“Personally, I am uncomfortable with making a cult of personality about Madiba,” he said, referring to Mr. Mandela by his clan name. “His face is everywhere, on our money, in statues. It is too much.”
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