8115 Vilakazi Street, the four room house Mandela called home

Vilakazi Street in Soweto is the only street in the world that has been home to two Nobel Peace Prize winners. Desmond Tutu lived at one end. At number 8115 stood a small matchbox house of the type built for Black South Africans under apartheid, four rooms, brick, tin roof, an outside tap.

Nelson Mandela moved in with his first wife Evelyn in 1946. He later lived there with Winnie Madikizela Mandela. He left it in 1962 when he went underground, and he did not sleep in it again for twenty eight years.

Winnie stayed. The house was raided repeatedly by security police, firebombed, and shot at. Scorch marks and bullet damage remain in the brickwork, and the guides point them out without drama.

When Mandela was released in February 1990 he came home to 8115 Vilakazi Street. Crowds filled the road for days. He stayed eleven nights and then moved out. He wrote later that the house had become a place of pilgrimage rather than a home, that he could not have a private moment in it, and that it no longer felt like the place he had left.

Still, he said, it was the only place where he knew he belonged, because a man is not a man until he has a house of his own.

The house became a museum in 2009. It holds boxing belts, honorary doctorates, family photographs and the burn marks. What surprises most visitors is the scale. You can cross the whole house in a few steps.

The street outside is now full of restaurants and music and people posing at the gate.

It is a very small house in which a very large part of the twentieth century was decided.