(David Harrison)
Before I started my own transport business, I worked for this guy who had me drive these journalists around. Journalists from the BBC, Al Jazeera, Sky News – those kinds of places.
That was when [former president Nelson] Mandela was sick, so there were all these journalists here. When he died, I had to drive those journalists to the Pretoria legislature. Because, remember, after he died, they allowed people to come in and view his body there – I think to prove to people that he really was dead.
So because I was with all these journalists, I was the first member of the public to see his body. But after I saw him there in his coffin, I was kind of shocked because it didn’t really look like him. He looked fatter. And his skin was … Eish, I don’t know how to describe it. It was very light. His skin was, like, white, white, white. I was shocked.
I told myself: “Hey, you must go back and look again.” I wanted to make sure it was really his body lying there. You know how sometimes you must look at something twice just to make sure that it is that thing? It was like that.
So I went back and some of the photographers I drove there started taking pictures of me looking at Madiba. Yoh, my brother, the next morning, I go out to buy the Sowetan and there’s a picture of me – on the front page. I was like “Hawu!”
I still have that picture because when my child grows up, at least he can have something good to say about his father. Because if you look at that picture, it’s history.
Bongani Ntimbane (37), as told to Carl Collison, the Other Foundation’s Rainbow fellow at the Mail & Guardian