The hamlet where Nelson Mandela spent his boyhood may have attracted big businesses keen to link up to South Africa’s most famous name but it still faces huge social and economic problems that bedevil thousands of villages in the country.
The nondescript village stands out due to a few telling signs — a large Tuscan-style villa belonging to Mandela, and several new schools and a clinic with billboards and flags carrying the logos of some of the world’s most famous brands.
Mandela’s influence in Qunu — located about 35km south of Umtata, the capital of the former Transkei black homeland set up during the apartheid era — is undeniable a decade after the end of white minority rule.
The hamlet and its environs serve as one of the best examples of public-private partnership in South Africa.
Work is in progress on a R2,4-million ($360 000) youth and cultural centre at a site of the Nelson Mandela Museum, which planners hope to finish in August this year.
The village, with its rolling green landscape dotted with mud huts, looks like any other. And locals say they share the same woes as villagers elsewhere, citing unemployment, poverty, HIV/Aids, alcohol abuse, lack of infrastructure and rising crime.
”Madiba has done a huge amount for us,” said Fikile Qengqe (54), using Mandela’s clan name.
”But something like unemployment remains a big problem … There is still a lot of poverty here. There are families that go to sleep at night on empty stomachs, while our youngsters turn to drinking and crime because they are bored.”
Qunu is situated in the Eastern Cape, one of South Africa’s poorest provinces, where unemployment is estimated at around 40%, according to latest statistics from the South African Institute for Race Relations.
In Qunu itself, unemployment is as high as 90%, some locals say.
Morrison Mandela (71) who lives in a home across the main road from his more famous brother, agreed, saying: ”A major problem here is job creation.”
Nokuzola Tetani, a guide at the Nelson Mandela Museum, said of around 60 000 people living in the 18 homesteads which make up Qunu, only some 10% were employed.
”Most of those employed now work for the government,” she added.
Since 1994, a new clinic had been built in Qunu but there is still no permanent doctor in the area. Four years ago, Mpumzi Zidlele (25)at the time, died in a car accident while training to become a general practitioner in his home village.
HIV/Aids is a huge problem in the area with an estimated 300 000 people contracting the virus last year, according to local media reports.
Even Mandela himself has said he had lost relatives to Aids.
”The problems you have here are the problems you are going to find everywhere else in the country,” said Nomvuyo Ngxambusa, headmistress of the Vukani Senior Primary School, a little way off the Mandela residence.
For years, Ngxambusa and her fellow teachers have been using three dilapidated old school buses with broken windows as classrooms to teach some 80 children.
In January, government workers started digging the foundations for six new classrooms, but work is progressing slowly, said Ngxambusa.
But she concedes that with Mandela’s help, her pupils received new uniforms, books and backpacks, given to them at the elder statesman’s annual Christmas party where he hosts some 20 000 children.
Despite the grinding poverty, things are gradually improving.
Qunu has had running water and electricity since 1997. It also stands to benefit from the shooting of a film on the life of Mandela — scheduled for later this year — in which Morgan Freeman will play the lead.
Having the honour of the village where Mandela spent ”the happiest years of his life” does not automatically bring benefits, said Khwezi Mpumlwana, chief executive of the Nelson Mandela museum in Umtata.
”Mandela is not a greedy grabber and this is most certainly not another Gbadolite,” he said referring to the home village of Mobutu sese Seko, the deceased ruler of the former Zaire, who frittered away millions of dollars to build palatial homes for himself there and improve infrastructure.
”Things don’t come here automatically just because Mandela comes from here. He is a leader for the whole of South Africa.” – Sapa-AFP