An exhibition where visitors can learn about Mandela through a range of video and audio materials also opened at UN Headquarters. In Sudan’s troubled region of Darfur, the UN-African Union peacekeeping force (UNAMID) organized an event in a local girls’ school in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, where soldiers in the mission delivered school materials,planted trees, repainted walls and sang.

The UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) and the country’s Association for Historical Dialogue and Research marked the Day with the screening of the 2009 movie Invictus, which tells the story of South Africa during the 1995 Rugby World Cup, which it hosted the year after Mr. Mandela became the country’s president.

Anti-apartheid activist Gay McDougall, who is now the UN Independent Expert for Minorities, was with Mandela when he voted for the first time in his life in 1994.
“I think it [Nelson Mandela International Day] is an annual opportunity for people to celebrate to remind themselves to celebrate and recommit themselves to the kind of principled dedication to equality that Nelson Mandela represents for all of us,” she told UN Radio.

David Dinkins, the former mayor of New York, who facilitated Mandela’s first official visit to the United States in 1990, said the most interesting thing about the South Africa was his total absence of bitterness.