A Long Walk To Freedom

As South Africa Celebrates Nelson Mandela's Birth Centenary, Phorum Dalal Visits the Iconic Spots That Narrate His Struggle and Triumph Over Apartheid.

The Nelson Mandela Youth and Heritage Centre sits on a hill in Qunu, a small village in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. It is enveloped by a vast expanse of hills, grasslands dotted with thatched, conical-roofed houses of the Thembu community the freedom fighter belonged to.

At the spot where we stand is a rock, the same one on which Mandela sat as a young herdsman. “He’d slide down this very same rock,” our guide tells us, coaxing us to sit on a plastic seat and give it a try. I sit on the worn-out tray and propel myself into motion with my hand and feet. It easily picks up momentum and for the next five seconds I feel like a bird, landing on the soft, auburn grass bed.

As South Africa celebrates Mandela’s centenary year, this is an ideal place to begin our journey, a three-hour, country-road drive from East London. He grew up here, a few kilometres from Mvezo, where he was born. In 1941, he fled to Johannesburg to work in the city around its gold mines. That’s where we are headed.

The entry point to the Apartheid Museum has two distinctly demarcated lines. My ticket reads ‘Blankes’ which means whites in Afrikaans and allows me to enter through the first corridor. Others have tickets that say ‘Nie-Blankes’ (non-whites) . A taste of racism is my first understanding of Apartheid. Between 1948 until the early 1990s, when Apartheid was in full effect, people were categorised as: African, coloured, Asian and white.