World pays tribute as 'improving' Mandela turns 95

Well-wishers sing as they gather to wish former President Nelson Mandela happy birthday outside the hospital where he is being treated in Pretoria, July 18, 2013.

(Reuters) - South Africa and the world showered tributes on Nelson Mandela on Thursday as the anti-apartheid leader turned 95 in hospital and his doctors reported he was "steadily improving" from a six-week lung infection.

The country has been on edge since the former president and father of the multi-racial 'Rainbow Nation' established at the end of apartheid in 1994 was admitted to hospital on June 8 with recurring lung problems that kept him in a critical condition.

It was his fourth stay in hospital in six months and has reminded South Africans that the man who is globally admired as a moral beacon against injustice and a symbol of racial reconciliation will not be with them forever.

But the mood was of celebration on Thursday as thousands of South Africans sang "Happy Birthday" and took part in charitable initiatives in a global outpouring of support for the Nobel Peace Prize laureate on U.N.-designated 'Nelson Mandela Day'.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hailed Mandela as "a giant of our times" and called on people around the world to pay tribute to him through community service.

South Africans young and old commemorated the birthday with 67 minutes of public service to honor the 67 years Mandela served humanity by first fighting against white-minority rule and then consolidating racial harmony when he was president.

Many offered birthday wishes outside the Pretoria hospital where Mandela has been receiving treatment, singing songs and holding up signs wishing him a speedy recovery.

"Thank you for all that you have done for this country," said one well-wisher, Margaret Chechie.

President Jacob Zuma visited Mandela at the hospital and said he was making steady progress. "I was able to say 'Happy Birthday' to him and he was able to smile," he told reporters.

Hours earlier, his office had cited Mandela's doctors saying "his health is steadily improving."

Mandela's victory in the first multiracial elections in 1994 put an end to the apartheid system. Four years earlier, he was released from 27 years spent in prison under white minority rule, 18 of them at the notorious Robben Island penal colony.

His former wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela called the 95th birthday "a gift to the nation".

"FATHER OF AFRICA"

Across South Africa, office workers, students, soldiers and ordinary citizens marked Mandela Day by sprucing up orphanages, painting walls at schools and delivering food to the poor.

Ethiopian and Nigerian asylum seekers who had settled in South Africa fleeing persecution and conflict in their own countries cleaned streets in Johannesburg to pay tribute to a figure widely praised as "a father of Africa".

"In this country, Mandela is the reason all of us blacks are free, so that's why we love him as the first citizen," said Kennedy Uzondu, 30, a Nigerian trader who has lived in South Africa for three years.

The United Nations declared July 18 as Nelson Mandela International Day in 2009 and will celebrate with speeches from figures such as former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

The day will also be marked in nearly 20 U.S. cities with ceremonies around Capitol Hill in Washington and by volunteers handing out South African oranges in New York.

"Tata (our father) is making this remarkable progress and we look forward to having him back home soon," Mandela's daughter Zindzi told reporters.

Zindzi said the family planned to give Mandela a collage of family photographs for a present and have lunch together at the hospital where their patriarch is being treated.

Despite the adulation on his birthday, Mandela's post-apartheid 'Rainbow Nation' has not fulfilled all expectations.

Enormous gaps still persist in income, employment and access to education and these inequalities largely follow racial lines, according to the government's own data. White households in 2012 earn on average about six times more than black households.

Nevertheless, quality education and employment opportunities have also been opened up to tens of thousands of blacks.

This has meant the 'Rainbow Nation' becoming a reality at integrated universities and in major city suburbs, where a new professional class of college-educated blacks has been moving into once almost exclusively-white neighborhoods.

"The middle class is the incubator for a more tolerant and more integrated society. But that middle class is also very small compared to the working class and the underclass," said Georgina Alexander, a researcher at the South African Institute of Race Relations.

(Additional reporting by Reuters TV, Benon Okula in Johannesburg, Michelle Nichols and Stephanie Ulmer-Nebehay at the United Nations; Writing by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Pascal Fletcher and Gareth Jones)