As Mandela Retires, His Boyhood Home Beckons

Life is much improved in this village since Nelson Mandela spent the happy days of his boyhood here. The last few years have brought electricity, running water, a new school, even the promise of telephones.

Now a new sense of anticipation is in the air: The great man is coming home.

Mandela, 80, says he will retire to his presidential compound in Qunu sometime after the June 2 elections that will mark the end of his term as South Africa’s first democratically elected president.

While the rest of the country is preparing to bid him farewell, the village elders are discussing what sort of welcome to give.

Workers are finishing up a tunnel underneath the highway that divides his home from the rest of the village of several dozen houses so speeding cars won’t mow down any more livestock on the presidential doorstep.

Relatives want to sit down and talk to the village son who helped end apartheid and became a hero to much of humanity.

“We will be curious to know how he feels and if his dreams have been fulfilled,” said a nephew, 60-year-old Napilisi Mandela.

Residents are proud of the village’s favorite son. “He has brought us freedom and changed our lives,” said Mandlankosi Ngcebetshana, 67, Qunu’s headman. But there is little explanation how a poor village in the rolling pastureland of southern Africa produced such a man.

“He has been just like Jesus. He came to us from heaven and fortunately he just landed in our village,” Ngcebetshana said.

In many ways, the rhythms of life remain the same since Mandela lived in Qunu. Herd boys still tend cattle, much as Mandela did. A chief--unusually, a young woman now--still oversees the district. Boys and girls gather at the site of the old school Mandela attended and sing the pungently joyous Xhosa-language songs in the school courtyard. As they have for decades, many men still work in mines hundreds of miles away.

Mandela’s government has brought improvements to many of the surrounding villages in the Eastern Cape, the country’s poorest province and home to Mandela’s Xhosa people.

Qunu has had some special benefits. After a gentle suggestion from Mandela, the Caltex petroleum company donated money for a new school. Mandela’s half-brother Morris, a retired miner who takes care of the compound, has a solid new brick home paid for by the president. Mandela provides support for several relatives.

There is little of the brazen commercialism typical of celebrity hometowns. That could change if a long-planned visitors center, coupled with a projected Mandela museum nearby, is ever built by the Culture Ministry.

Just how much time Mandela will spend in Qunu is in doubt. He is building a large house in Maputo, Mozambique, native land of his wife, Graca Machel, widow of a Mozambican president.

The couple also have a luxury home in Houghton, a wealthy, mainly white neighborhood of Johannesburg. Mandela says he wants to be there while his grandchildren’s schools are in session.

His sprawling brick house in Qunu has the air of a prison compound, since the floor plan matches that of Mandela’s last prison, the Victor Verster farmhouse near Cape Town. In his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom,” Mandela explains why:

“The Victor Verster house was the first spacious and comfortable home I ever stayed in and I liked it very much. I was familiar with its dimensions, so at Qunu I would not have to wander at night looking for the kitchen.”

Mandela’s 47 head of cattle graze behind the house. A Mandela family graveyard is surrounded on three sides by cornfields.

Mandela seems to have an almost mystical attraction to the village, which he left at age 9 when his father died. “Every blade of grass and the cackle of water [there] is something which goes to my heart,” he said in an interview broadcast on state television May 4.

In his autobiography, he wrote: “It was in that village . . . that I spent some of the happiest years of my boyhood and whence I trace my earliest memories.”

He lived in a beehive-shaped hut and passed an idyllic childhood gathering wild honey, swimming, drinking milk from the udder, downing birds with a slingshot and stick-fighting with other boys.

Family members and boyhood companions remember him as a keen reader who loved school.

“Even at the river he liked to wear a suit. He was a gentleman,” recalled Ludidi Ngxekena, 80.