Qunu, where Mandela got his English name “Nelson”
Mandela From the confines of apartheid prison and during the ill health that stalked his last years, Nelson Mandela yearned for the rolling hills and open spaces of his boyhood village of Qunu. It was here, in South Africa’s rural hinterland, that the man who went on to shape the destiny of the country took up his first responsibility as a five-year-old herd boy. The young Mandela’s days were filled with stick-fighting, sipping warm milk from cows’ udders, fishing and sliding down a rocky slope with friends. Bed was a mat on the floor of one of the three thatched, mud-walled round huts in his mother’s homestead. Meals were cooked on open fires with food harvested from the family garden. “From these days I date my love of the veld (grassland), of open spaces, the simple beauties of nature, the clean lines of the horizon,” Mandela wrote in his memoir “Long Walk to Freedom”. Qunu, he said in an unpublished draft of the memoir, was “the sweet home where I had spent the happiest days ...
