Over the next five days, the country will see scores of memorial ceremonies including a state funeral in his tiny home village of Qunu in the Eastern Cape.
But the South African government has urged people to attend local rather than national services of commemoration for Nelson Mandela as the sheer scale of the logistics involved in planning the extraordinary week ahead become clear.
On Tuesday, a memorial service will be held at the FNB football stadium in Johannesburg – where Mandela made his last public appearance, for the closing ceremony of the 2010 football World Cup. It is expected that well over the 95,000 stadium capacity will attend.
Mandela's body will lie in state in a glass coffin at the Union Buildings in Pretoria from Wednesday until Friday, with his coffin being delivered each day from the nearby 1 Military Hospital in Thaba Tshwane.
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