To my sorrow I never met Nelson Mandela, but in a visit to his modest home on Vilakazi Street in Soweto in the 1990s there were a number of artifacts remaining that voiced much about the man. The one bedroom brick home was small with a brick wall between the kitchen in the rear and the living room in the front. The living room was a dangerous place. One can still see the ridge of higher ground blocks away where state security service officers regularly fired high power rifles into their living room. (The outside bricks are still chipped from target practice.) The Mandelas were forced to sleep on the kitchen floor in the back of the house in order to assure that they would wake up in the morning.
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