SOUTH Africa's former president, Nelson Mandela, 94, was admitted to hospital in Pretoria last night to undergo tests.

The office of the nation's current president, Jacob Zuma, said Mandela was doing well and there was "no cause for alarm".

Mandela spent more than two decades in jail under the white minority apartheid regime.

He served as South Africa's first black president between 1994 and 1999, and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. He has appeared in public only rarely since 2004, when he retired from public life.