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In the eastern port city of Durban Sir Alex Ferguson, manager of England's Manchester United football team that is widely followed in Africa, sang Happy Birthday over a cake iced with the image of the team's yellow and red badge. Ferguson, who met Mandela on previous visits, said "his presence and personality exudes all around." Manchester United plays the first game of its South African tour later Wednesday. South African churchmen and politicians urged people across the country "to make every day a Mandela Day." Former U.S. President Bill Clinton got the celebrations off to an early start Tuesday. He and daughter Chelsea met with Mandela in Qunu. Photographs tweeted by one of Mandela's grandsons showed the Nobel Peace Prize winner comfortably seated in an armchair with a blanket over his knees and with the Clintons and his wife, Graca Machel, at his side. Nobel laureate Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said the greatest gift the nation could give Mandela on Wednesday would be "to emulate his magnanimity and grace." "Mr. Mandela taught us to love ourselves, to love one another and to love our country," Tutu said. Mandela's activism helped bring democracy and freedom to the once white-ruled South Africa. But the country remains beset by tensions over continued white minority domination of the economy, massive unemployment, poor education and health services and the millions who remain homeless or in shacks
[Associated
Press;
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