Mandela House in Houghton

Houghton Estate is one of Johannesburg's oldest and quietest northern suburbs, a 15-minute drive from the CBD. Mandela bought the property at 4th Street shortly after his second marriage and used it as both family home and an informal head of state office through his post-presidency years.

The house itself is a single-storey, comfortable but unostentatious home set behind a high garden wall — far closer in character to the family home in Qunu than to a presidential mansion. It was here that Mandela received Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, F. W. de Klerk and a long line of statesmen, royals and friends through the 2000s, and here that the family chose to nurse him through his final illness.

On the morning of 6 December 2013 a mountain of flowers, candles, handwritten notes and South African flags began to grow against the perimeter wall. By the day of the state funeral the pavement memorial stretched the length of the block — one of the most spontaneous public mourning sites the country has ever seen.

The house remains a private family residence and is not open to the public, but it is a meaningful drive-past on our Johannesburg City Tour for visitors who want to connect Mandela's Soweto origins to the suburb where he lived his quieter post-political life. The Mandela Foundation, based a few kilometres away in Houghton, holds the official archive and is open by appointment for research visits.

We pair this stop with the original 8115 Vilakazi Street home in Soweto and with the Apartheid Museum for visitors building a fuller picture of Madiba's life — childhood, prison, presidency and a quiet retirement under the jacarandas of Houghton.