Heritage Cases

Nelson and Winnie Mandela House (Mandela House) has strong ties to the anti-apartheid activists of Nelson Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela but the house in itself carries weight as a site and symbol of an issue that has continuously come to plague South Africa, the housing crisis. The creation of the township Soweto was to accommodate the growing urban community within Johannesburg. With a history of land dispossession and Acts that were established to control the movement of Black people, colonialism and apartheid created a problem in which populations moving to urban areas were confronted with the issue of lack of housing: At the height of the influx of African workers to the cities in 1944, the state did not build any houses for Africans, causing a severe national housing crisis that was most concentrated on the Reef, the area, stretching west and east from Johannesburg, where gold-bearing rock was discovered at the end of the nineteenth century. The houses that the State did deliver were not decent housing: It was threaded through by dusty, unpaved roads along which were erected monotonous ranks of identical, small, temporary, single story “matchbox” houses (predominantly between 40m² and 44m² in size) lit by candles and oil lamps, where cooking was done on paraffin and coal stoves. South Africa has a long history of land dispossession but under apartheid, particularly the Group Areas Act and influx control, the urban landscape came to be racialized and the only group offered security were Whites. Therefore, Mandela House stands as a testament to the present day need to look at the spatial geography of apartheid that still exists in South Africa’s urban areas as well as the delivery of not only housing but decent housing that does not bring back memories of the ‘match box’ house. The housing crisis however is not only limited to South Africa but to the world at large as it continues to come to terms with globalization and urbanization. The Mandela House therefore as a site that was built to address the need for housing in Johannesburg 1930s bring up an international question of the value of a house. The Mandela House does also raise the opportunity and exploration of township tourism and the value that it can add back to communities.