Nelson Mandela

Residence 1

📍Mvezo, Idutywa, Eastern Cape 5080, South Africa

“I was born at Mvezo on the eighteenth of July 1918, the son of Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa, chief of the Mvezo village. Mvezo is a small settlement on the Mbashe River in the Eastern Cape — red earth roads, rondavel huts, cattle grazing the hills. I have almost no memory of the place, because when I was still an infant my father was deposed by the local magistrate following a dispute over a missing ox. We lost the chieftainship and the house and the cattle that went with the position, and my mother Nosekeni moved us to Qunu, the small village where I spent my childhood proper. Mvezo gave me my name — Rolihlahla, which means one who pulls the branch of a tree, or more colloquially, troublemaker — and my lineage in the royal house of the Thembu. Everything else I had to build myself.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Nelson Mandela

Residence 2

📍8115 Vilakazi Street, Orlando West, Soweto, Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

“I moved to 8115 Vilakazi Street in 1946, the year I joined the ANC Youth League. The house was modest — a matchbox house, the government called such things, as if to emphasise how little they thought of us. In those rooms Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo came to plan and to argue. My daughter Zinzi was born here. When I was arrested in 1962, I left from this street. When I was released twenty-seven years later, I returned to this same street. Some returns matter more than others.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Nelson Mandela

Residence 3

📍Houghton Estate, Johannesburg, Gauteng 2198, South Africa

“When I walked out of Victor Verster Prison on the eleventh of February 1990, I was seventy-one years old and had been inside for twenty-seven years. The ANC arranged a house for me in Houghton, the northern suburb of Johannesburg where the wealthy had always lived — which I found quietly ironic, given what we had spent our lives arguing about. From this house I negotiated the end of apartheid, helped draft the constitution, and ran for and won the presidency in April 1994. Houghton became the headquarters of a government being invented by people who had never been permitted to govern anything. I tried to lead as I had always believed a leader should lead: listening first, persuading rather than commanding, and saying publicly what you had already said in private. The country was not healed — it is still not healed — but the transition happened without the civil war that everyone expected. That was the work of Houghton. I died here in December 2013.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Nelson Mandela