Nelson Mandela

We visited the Nelson Mandela museum in Mthata today which was quite an affecting place. To read and hear about so many of the facts and finer detail I wasn’t aware of. The conditions on Robben Island, his time living as ‘The Black Pimpernel’ in hiding and on the run. It so hard to imagine living in a country with such oppression and also a country of such huge change and passion. The photo of the queue in 1994 when black people got to vote, it snaked around, going on for miles across the landscape. To imagine being the man who personified the struggle and fight for freedom, and to think he’s retired now and able to relax finally and say, “cool... I did it.” He says something about the garden at Robben Island and how he saw it as some kind of metaphor for what he’d started. How if you plant a seed and watch it grow you must be responsible for looking after it, watering it etc... in the hope one day it’ll bloom. And the responsibility that comes with that. We went to his birth place, a rural place called Qunu and I slid down the rock he used to play on as a child, my bum is now sacred.