Desmond Tutu

📍Vilakazi Street, Orlando West, Soweto, Johannesburg, South Africa

“I grew up in Klerksdorp in the western Transvaal, but it was Soweto — specifically the small house on Vilakazi Street in Orlando West where I lived with Leah and our children — that was my true home, and the place from which I fought apartheid for decades. Vilakazi Street is the only street in the world to have housed two Nobel Peace Prize winners: Nelson Mandela lived a few doors away. Our house was modest — four small rooms, no garden to speak of — but it was the centre of a community that was engaged in the most important struggle of our time. The Security Police raided it regularly. It was petrol-bombed twice. Through all of it Leah kept it a home, kept it warm, kept it the place our children could return to. I have lived in bishops' palaces and archbishops' residences since, and none of them has meant what that small house on Vilakazi Street meant.”

Sources: Tutu, D. No Future Without Forgiveness (1999), Doubleday; Allen, J. Rabble-Rouser for Peace: The Authorised Biography of Desmond Tutu (2006), Free Press; Nobel Peace Prize lecture (1984)