With a hole in its heart, South Africa buries Mandela

By Ed Cropley QUNU, South Africa (Reuters) - South Africa buries Nelson Mandela on Sunday, closing one momentous 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 suffered 27 years in apartheid prisons before emerging to preach forgiveness and reconciliation, will be laid to rest after a state funeral mixing military pomp with the traditional rites of his Xhosa abaThembu clan. The ceremony in the rolling hills of the Eastern Cape has drawn 4,500 guests, from relatives and South African leaders to foreign guests including Britain's Prince Charles and American civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson. The anti-apartheid leader died in Johannesburg on December 5 aged 95, plunging his 53 million countrymen and millions more around the world into grief, and triggering more than a week of official memorials to the nation's first black president.

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