Nelson Mandela
Madiba's Joburg
The Freedom of the City is the highest recognition a city can pay to acknowledge a person’s contribution to the welfare of the city and its inhabitants. Nelson Mandela is the third person to receive this award from the City of Johannesburg. The other recipients – both figures in the liberation struggle – were Walter Sisulu, in 1997, and Beyers Naude, in 2001.
Mandela is being honoured for his outstanding contribution to the struggle for freedom and democracy, and for his promotion of equality.
Madiba's Joburg
Paris has its Eiffel Tower, New York its Statue of Liberty, Sydney its Harbour Bridge. Johannesburg has the largest cable-stayed bridge in southern Africa. Who else to name it after but Nelson Mandela, the man who led South Africa across the apartheid divide?
Two years and R38-million in the making, the spectacular Nelson Mandela Bridge has emerged as a new landmark in Gauteng, and holds out the promise of a rejuvenated Johannesburg inner city.
The 284-metre long bridge crosses over 42 operational railway lines in linking Braamfontein and the north of Johannesburg to Newtown in the heart of the city's central business district, and is the centre-piece of a R300-million inner city renewal project driven by the province's economic development initiative, Blue IQ.
At moment, the word 'Rivonia' became synonymous around the world with the silencing of black resistance in South Africa.
The key leaders of the armed wing of the ANC, including Nelson Mandela, had operated from its outhouses for two years. In those days, Rivonia consisted of a rural patchwork of smallholdings, riding schools and farms, with few tarred roads.
Today, it has been engulfed by the northern expansion of Johannesburg. There are plans to set up a Liliesleaf Trust, restore what's left of the farm, and perhaps even turn it into a conference retreat.
The humble abode in Alexandra township, which Nelson Mandela occupied when he first came to Joburg during the early 1940s, is being transformed into a heritage attraction site.
The yard and the room that he rented are being developed into what will be known as the Mandela Yard Interpretation Centre. The site is located at the intersection of Hofmeyer Street and 7th Avenue. At present it is unoccupied, but tourist guides are already bringing people there.