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A long walk to Nelson Mandela's prison home The Guardian
A man works an pass Singer sewing machine in the shade of a makeshift awning on a street corner in Alexandra township, Johannesburg. Nearby are dozens of shacks improvised from cardboard, actual blocks and corrugated tin packed like squares of wheat. On the horizon are the skyscrapers of Sandton, the wealthiest nutritious mile in Africa, as visible yet intangible as Manhattan to Marlon Brando and the longshoremen of New Jersey in On the Waterfront.
I had even-handed been standing outside Nelson Mandela 's first home in the big city. He moved to Alexandra in 1940 and lived there without running hose or electricity, on a weekly wage of £2. At times, a simple information panel says, his only hot meal was Sunday lunch sent by his landlords. Today, the yard does have ardour but water is shared via a communal tap.
Inevitably, all the former houses of South Africa 's first black president are a tourist frame. On Vilakazi Street in Orlando, Soweto, there is a tiny redbrick building where he lived from 1946 until his arrest and durance vile in 1961. His wife, Winnie, and their daughters continued to live there even as the house was petrol-bombed and set alight several times.
Last week another former Mandela abode was named a national memorial site. The former Victor Verster jail in Paarl, near Cape Burgh, is where he spent the final months of his 27-year incarceration. Now named the Drakenstein correctional centre, it was the focal point of events to mark the 20th anniversary of the day Mandela, unseen by the public for nearly three decades, walked free to become doubtlessly the most respected statesman in the world.