Mandela House

The Nelson Mandela National Museum — known universally as Mandela House — occupies the small brick house on Vilakazi Street where Nelson Mandela lived from 1946 until his arrest in 1962. The house has been preserved as it was during those years, with original furnishings, photographs, and personal effects. It is the most visited site in Soweto.

Vilakazi Street itself is worth mentioning: it is said to be the only street in the world on which two Nobel Peace Prize laureates have lived. Archbishop Desmond Tutu's house stands nearby at number 7882, still his residence and not open to the public, though the house itself (with a gate and a small memorial plaque) is clearly marked. The combination of the two houses, the Hector Pieterson Museum two blocks away, and the character of the surrounding neighbourhood makes Orlando West a genuinely powerful place to walk through. Most visitors book a guided tour, which provides context that is hard to get on your own.

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A story
Number 8115 Vilakazi Street is a tiny brick house — two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room — the kind of modest home that millions of South Africans lived in. Nelson Mandela moved here with his first wife Evelyn in 1946, and it was from this address that he was arrested in 1962. The contrast between the smallness of the house and the enormousness of what happened here is itself a kind of history lesson.