Jozi Tours - The Nelson Mandela Family Museum - Official Local Tourism Attractions on Waymarking.com

A must see for any tourist or anyone wanting to learn about South Africa's rich history.

Nelson Mandela first moved into this house in 1946 with his wife at the time, Evelyn Ntoko Mase. In 1956 they divorced and he remarried Winnie Madikizela in 1958.
He spent many years on the run being a freedom fighter with the ANC until 1962 when he was arrested. Winnie Madikizela continued to live in the small house with her two daugthers, while Mandela was still in jail.

The house was petrol bombed and set alight many times during Mandela's time in jail. When he was released he refused to move into a more opulent home in Orlando West that Madikizela had built during his incarceration. He wanted to only return to his house of memories. However, after his release, he stayed there for a mere 11 days, as he was moved around from one location to the next until he settled into his Houghton residence.

Mandela separated from Madikizela shortly after his release in 1992 and were divorced by 1996. But, although her ex-husband handed the house to the Soweto Heritage Trust, Madikizela-Mandela refused to relinquish it. Instead she turned it into the Mandela Family Museum and set up a pub and restaurant across the road. During the inauguration of the museum, where bottles of "Mandela garden soil" were sold, Madikizela-Mandela said: "A lot of history was made here. This is where the 1976 students' uprising began, where the youth leadership met to change the face of South Africa."

The museum is now back in the hands of the Soweto Heritage Trust. Currently the museum does not make the grade as a high quality tourist experience and the tour guides would certainly benefit from more training. The Soweto Heritage Trust is keen to make the museum more tourist-friendly and monitor access to it more closely. This will entail building an additional room onto the tiny house and creating a controlled access point nearby. Tourists frequently arrive in busloads, take pictures of the outside and then depart, without paying the R20 access fee. Furniture and carpets, which have deteriorated under the incessant traffic, must be replaced and parts of the house restored.

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