The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘It’s the door that Mandela really opened’
Pippa de Bruyn is moved by a visit to the South African leader’s former home
‘Everything has meaning,” says Dimitri Maritz of the transformation of No 4 Thirteenth Avenue in Houghton, Johannesburg – the first home Nelson Mandela bought as a free man – into a boutique hotel.
He is not wrong. In the garden there are roses and strelitzias, named in Mandela’s honour, and the succulents spekboom and botterboom, planted for their resilience. A sculpture on the porch is based on a photograph (hanging inside the entrance) of Mandela on that same porch, shaking out the morning papers, scanning the stock exchange figures to see who next to call for a donation to one of his philanthropic organisations. Inside are Cape Island fragrance diffusers, chosen because he loved the smell of bergamot. Each of the nine rooms signifies a period in his life and features a corresponding numbered print from the artist John Meyer’s series of paintings Mandela: A Life’s Journey.
“This house was a refuge for Tata and for the people who travelled from all over the world to see him,” says Maritz, the hotel’s general manager, using a term of endearment for Mandela (it means “father” in Xhosa). He points at a Meyer painting of Mandela seated on a bench beside Bill Clinton, a centrepiece surrounded by framed photographs of Mandela the father, friend and statesman. “So in a sense we are just formalising what has always been.”
After his release from prison in 1990, Nelson Mandela returned with his wife Winnie to 8115 Vilakazi Street, the tiny house they last shared before his arrest in 1962. But he liked Houghton, an old-money suburb in the leafy belt between the old and new business heart of Johannesburg, and in 1992 purchased a two-storey house here, moving in with four of his grandsons. During his peripatetic presidency, 4 Thirteenth Avenue remained his favoured home, providing him with a sense of family life and affording him the space to reflect on his next move. Stepping down as president, he established the Nelson Mandela Foundation here, a non-profit organisation devoted to pursuing social justice. It was a project that quickly outgrew the confines of a residential home, and would keep the octogenarian busy for another decade, until he half-jokingly stated that he was now “retiring from retirement”.
Standing in Room 9, named the President, where Mandela slept, is a curious experience. “His grandson Mandla told us that it was nerve-wrecking being summoned into this room,” says Maritz (referring to Mandla Mandela, now an African National Congress MP). “When he asked to see you here, you knew you were in trouble.” The room has been gutted and redecorated in a contemporary style – oval frameless mirror; pendant lights; leather club chairs – but still, this is the door Mandela opened; the window he looked through. That said, I prefer the cosy loft-like space where Mandla slept: Room 3, now named Tata, with a photograph of the happy father reunited with his children beaming down at you in the bath.
But I am most moved in Room 5, called Nel (the moniker his fellow ANC member and Robben Island prisoner Walter Sisulu gave him). In it is a framed reproduction of a 1969 letter written by Mandela to his daughters Zenani and Zindzi, then aged 10 and nine. Aged three and two when he was jailed, neither would be allowed to visit until they were 16. He writes in his neat script: “Zindzi says her heart is sore because I am not at home and wants to know when I will come back. I do not know, my darlings, when I will return. You will remember that in the letter I wrote in 1966, I told you that the white judge had said that I should stay in jail for the rest of my life. But I am certain one day I will be back at home to live in happiness with you until the end of my days.”
If the way to soothe a squeezed heart is through the stomach, I am happy to dine at the restaurant, where Xolisa Ndoyiya, Mandela’s personal chef for 22 years, once again reigns in the kitchen. I feast on (slightly dry) pan-fried kingklip served with a Cape Malay-spiced pawpaw salad with pickled pumpkin, followed by lentil frikkadel served on a tahini and chickpea velouté with apple, fennel and radish salad.
Nowadays Ndoyiya spoons her tender slow-cooked oxtail stew – “Tata’s alltime favourite” – into ravioli parcels. “Tata loved traditional Xhosa food,” she says. “But for the new guests we wanted to mix in something more modern.”
The property was bequeathed to the Nelson Mandela Foundation, but it was Jerry Mabena, chief executive of the Motsamayi Tourism Group, who suggested it be run like a hotel. “Running a museum is costly,” he said. “We wanted to create a living extension of the Nelson Mandela Foundation. A contemplative space we hope will inspire others with his memory.”
The final clincher is a private tour of the nearby Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Centre of Memory, available to all Sanctuary guests. Take it. Exhibition curator Ann-young Maharaj will take you past a fascinating display of objects and photographs and you can view Mandela’s office – unlike the Sanctuary, completely unchanged – and
archives, where his many notebooks, letters, gifts and awards reveal the man’s tireless industry and the devotion he inspired. It’s a refresher course on the life and teachings of an extraordinary human – and if a stay at Joburg’s newest boutique hotel does only this, it has served its purpose well.
Sanctuary Mandela (0027 1 0035 0368; sanctuarymandela.com) has double rooms from £196 including breakfast.
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