Mr. Tambo

“I had a lot to consider,” says Chaz Alexander Coffin, who plays Mr. Tambo — the minstrel show’s traditional tambourine-shaking low comic figure — opposite Stephen Scott Wormley as Mr. Bones.

Mr Tambo has said only that it might "end up in the garden near Mandela".

The night Mr. Mandela died, I spoke with Tony Bloom, one of the white South African entrepreneurs who angered the apartheid authorities in 1985 by meeting with Mr. Tambo and other A.N.C. leaders in Zambia.

For many years, until his return to South Africa in 1990, Mr. Tambo and his wife, Adelaide, lived in a three-story home in this suburb of north London, leading the A.N.C.’s struggle from exile as Mr. Mandela languished in prison.

But, as the flowers left for Mr. Tambo showed, some had other memories to complement those that filled the newsreels and retrospectives.