Published : Aug. 31, 2011 - 19:46
JOHANNESBURG (AFP) ― Nelson Mandela covered most of South Africa during five decades fighting apartheid and five years as president, and it sometimes seems a museum has sprouted everywhere he set foot.
The 93-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner is among the world’s most famous living icons, and re-tracing his steps is one of the country’s major tourism draws.
A group of schoolchildren participate in a symbolic handover at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg to set the tone before the Mandela’s 93rd birthday and Mandela Day on July 18. (AFP-Yonhap News)
In Johannesburg alone, visitors can spend several days following the trail of “Madiba” ― the clan name by which Mandela is affectionately known.
“The most wanted attractions are linked to Nelson Mandela,” said Laura Vercueil, spokeswoman for the Johannesburg tourism office.
“The most popular request is to go to Soweto, in order to have a township experience and see Mandela’s house.”
Mandela lived in the tiny house in the black township on Johannesburg’s outskirts from 1946 until 1962 ― the year his nearly three-decade imprisonment under the apartheid regime began ― and again for 11 days after his release in 1990.
His ex-wife Winnie turned the house into a museum in 1997, and the tiny space ― totally refurbished in 2009 ― is routinely packed with visitors.
Some 15 kilometers (nine miles) away, the Apartheid Museum has a permanent exhibit dedicated to Mandela.
“Initially, it was a temporary exhibition that we had produced to mark his 90th birthday (in 2008). But it is not to come down in the foreseeable future, because it is so popular,” said curator Amelia Potenza.
“It’s magnetic. People are drawn to the figure of Mandela.”
The museum says 20 percent of visitors are foreigners, and 60 percent school children.
“Mandela is the one who helped all of us to be where we are. Here we can make the children learn where they come from actually, and who brought them freedom,” said Mamokete Anna Kibane, a teacher visiting with students from a nearby township.
The list of Mandela tourist stops in Johannesburg also includes the room he rented in Alexandra township, the building where he had his law offices in the 1950s ― newly restored and soon to open as a museum, the farm where he hid before his arrest in 1962 and the prison cell in the fort where he was then held.
Some tour guides also stop at his current house, in the leafy northern suburb of Houghton.
“It’s like it used to be in the USSR. There used to be Lenin museums everywhere,” joked American tourist John Brown.