From a mud hut in Transkei to the Union Buildings in Pretoria is not that far, but it’s been a long road for President Mandela, writes David Beresford
Below the village of Mvezo, on the side of a hill overlooking a bend of the Mbashe River in the former Transkei, three circular mounds of earth can be discovered.
They are all that remains of the huts which once belonged to Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa. In one of these mud- walled buildings, 80 years ago, his youngest son was born. There is little else tangible which marks the arrival of Nelson Mandela in the world.
A few dozen kilometres away, on another hillside in the district of Qunu where he was raised, there is a slide on which he used to play; a granite outcrop, its surface worn smooth by generations of childish rumps. When the young Mandela careened down it, the children used aloe leaves as sledges to protect their backsides. Today a few pieces of hard board scattered on the granite testify to a technological revolution in playland.
For all the obliteration of the archaeological evidence of Mandela’s early days, little seems to have changed in Mvezo and Qunu; the piping voices of the herdboys, among whom he once numbered, still flute over the wide open spaces which were his childhood home.
What change there is, is largely of his making. In the valley below the granite slide there is an intensively cultivated field where he has set Orphalus Zidlele – the grandson of his former high-school principal – to work growing organic corn, beans and pumpkins.
And on the other side of the main road to the coast, which bisects Qunu, is the face-brick bungalow where Mandela plans to retire. With its security fences and guardhouse it looks a little like a prison, which of course is what it is in a curious way.
When Mandela made known his wish to end his days where he began them, the paramount chief of the Thembu, Duyelekhaya Dalindyebo, allocated him 98ha of tribal land and the African National Congress alerted a leading Johannesburg architect to set about planning an appropriate retirement home.
But the architect, to his mortification, never got the commission: word came from Mandela that he had grown fond of the gaol house in the grounds of Victor Verster prison, from which he had been released at the end of his glorious incarceration. So the faithful replica was built for him at Qunu.
Memory holds the door … Mandela often talks wistfully of his plans to retire to Qunu, spinning out his golden years reading and playing with his grandchildren. But there must be some suspicion as to whether the dream will ever be realised in a meaningful way.
Since his re-discovery of love, in the person of Graa Machel, he has bought another house in Houghton. The widow of the former Mozambican president has sophisticated tastes and the purchase of the Houghton home bears the hallmarks of a woman who considers a prison house a less-than-desirable setting for the spinning of one’s golden years.
But the Qunu house will at least provide a material focus for future generations seeking some evidence of a life which is no doubt destined for legend.
And if they are puzzled by the legend’s architectural taste, it can always be explained with the story of the advocate who suffered 90 days’ detention in Johannesburg’s old Marshall Street police station and later rescued his cell door from demolition squads, using it as a garden gate. It was, he used to point out, an act of liberation.
Other tangible records of Mandela’s life are in the offing. There has, in fact, been much behind-the-scenes squabbling at different levels of government over plans to build a liberation museum in his honour.
The plan now is to build what will effectively be a warehouse masquerading as a museum – a much- needed repository for the innumerable well-intentioned but burdensome gifts with which he has been saddled since his release from prison.
It is an eclectic collection – ranging from a gold-plated camera presented by Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah of Brunei (Graa Machel got a diamond-studded Rolex watch) and a pair of gold-tipped chopsticks to a work intriguingly entitled People and Democracy, courtesy of the Libyan government – which will no doubt serve as a time capsule of late 20th-century taste, as well as a reminder to future generations of the adulation Mandela enjoyed in his lifetime.
The issue now hotly debated is where it should be sited: in Mvezo, Qunu, or 20km away in the Transkei capital of Umtata. Mvezo can probably be ruled out: in a territory renowned for its potholes, the long road to Mandela’s birthplace stands particularly blessed.
The pastoral beauty of Qunu should perhaps be spared further architectural tributes to its most famous resident – leaving Umtata, which complains, with some justification, of post-liberation neglect. Umtata has developed little more than an air of shabby charm since Mandela assumed the presidency in 1994.
Transkei’s tourist potential was blighted by the gang rape of a party of British and New Zealand tourists which was given world-wide publicity in 1995. Umtata has little to lure them back, and is hoping the Mandela memorabilia collection will do the trick.
But Mandela’s legacy to the nation is quite specific. The moment produces the man, and he will be remembered above all for that moment on May 11 1994 when he took the salute from the armed forces in the forecourt of the Union Buildings: one man, armed with 27 years of silence, who destroyed an ideology.
From log cabin to the White House. From mud hut to the Union Buildings. Standing by the remnants of that hut, among the wild aloes and thorn bushes on the hillside above the Mbashe River, one thinks back over the 80 years which have been the life of Nelson Mandela and marvels at the power of lost innocence.