We had a driver take us around Johannesburg today. We saw the stately home where Nelson Mandela lived while he was president and married to his third wife, the modest home he lived in with his famous second wife, Winnie (anti-apartheid activist), and the law office he worked out of with O.R. Tambo.
Images of Mandela are scrambled in my head between the actual man and Morgan Freeman. I think I’ve seen Invictus one too many times.
I have a lot to learn about Johannesburg but I kept seeing parallels between its history and ours: their official apartheid and our racial segregation and Jim Crow, white flight from Johannesburg after apartheid ended and the same in our nations’ cities during the civil rights movement.
We got a slice of many different areas of Johannesburg today, as Patrick drove us up and down the rolling hills of the upper class neighborhood, where gated homes sat largely obscured on wide, jacaranda-lined streets; squeezed through downtown trash-littered streets and into a shop filled with dried animals, herbs, and drums traditional doctors use to ward off sickness; around the historic neighborhood of Soweto, where the Blacks settled when the government blamed them for the plague and forced them out of Johannesburg in the 1930’s.
One figure loomed large throughout every stop we made: the late, great Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, lovingly referred to as “Tata” by his people, which is Xhosa for father.
My Corner of the Village 