Been thinking a lot about Nelson Mandela this past week. Here is a little something from Madiba lore that I don’t think many people know about…
In 2009 a good friend of mine named Greg Urquhart and I were tooling around South Africa and, while I was photographing some stuff in a prison in a town called Paarl, our guard braggingly said something to us that was intriguing: “Hey, I can take you into the house where Nelson Mandela was kept before his final release from prison.” I had already seen his cell on Robben Island and was thinking he was referring to some place there.
But I was mistaken.
It was a house there in the prison at Paarl. According to nelsonmandela.org, “on 12 August 1988 he was taken to hospital where he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. After more than three months in two hospitals he was transferred on 7 December 1988 to a house at Victor Verster Prison near Paarl where he spent his last 14 months of imprisonment. He was released from its gates on Sunday 11 February 1990.”
This was the house the guard was talking about.
“Let’s go,” Greg and I said at the same moment. And so in a sort of sneaky “dark” sort of fashion, this guard proceeds to quietly lift the key to the house out of a locked box on the wall and motions for us to follow.
I know enough in these types of situations to keep my mouth shut and just go. Here is what we saw, and what I had the good sense to shoot on a half a roll of film I had left in my Nikon F5:
The guard let us in and stood outside. We were alone in Mandela’s house. I sat in his chair, jumped on his bed, and if it had been a hot day (which it wasn’t), would have jumped in his pool.
Suffice it say I felt the spirit of the man. And it was good.
