A bunch of archivists set out to capture the life of one of the world’s most famous people when they launched the Nelson Mandela Digital Archive in March 2012.
The archive took 18 months from conceptualization to launch. It is a joint venture between the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory (NMCM) and Google’s cultural institute, which supplied a $1.25 million grant in 2011. The archive includes 12,000 documents, photographs and sound and video clips of Mandela. These were from Mandela himself, who would constantly go to Verne Harris saying: “I think I’ve got something for you”; as well as through donations from his former lawyers and comrades. Harris refers to these as “the cherries”, offering us a taste of what’s in store. He hopes to get more content from the National Archives, the ANC archives, Fort Hare and Mayibuye archives.
<div id="attachment_849" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-849" class="size-large wp-image-849" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Obama_002_reduced-747x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="650" />US President Barack Obama greets Madiba</div>
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A recent acquisition is a diary by Mandela’s former warder at Victor Verster Prison in South Africa’s Western Cape, where he was kept in a private house for three years before his release. Days were spent alone and the diary notes every visitor, meal and notes left to him by Mandela.
Verne Harris is the head of memory programing at the NMCM. His biggest fear is that there are pieces of history rotting away in boxes, sitting in dark dingy rooms. His toughest job is telling the fish from fowl.
Lifting up boots, Harris says: “Now these boots are supposedly his [Mandela’s] boots and they were brought in by a family who claimed that their father, who’s dead now, trained Madiba to be a guerrilla and these are the boots Madiba wore during the training. We showed these boots to Madiba and he said, ‘wrong size’.”
There are a great many chancers, one of whom claimed to have Mandela’s phone from when he was on Robben Island. This, despite the fact that Mandela had no phone
on Robben Island.
There is a white, long-term prisoner in Johannesburg who sends a gift every year. He once made a papier mâché bust that he painted gold and wrote Mandela’s name on it, despite the fact that it looked nothing like the icon.
One of Mandela’s most treasured gifts is a photograph with US president, then senator, Barack Obama that sits behind the desk in his old office. Mandela was visiting the country and the moment was captured using a cellphone after Obama rushed over to meet Mandela. It is a beautiful image of Obama’s silhouette as he stood over Mandela, shaking his hand.
<div id="attachment_848" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-848" class="size-large wp-image-848" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Madiba-1024x640.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="296" />Mandela&#8217;s first legal passport, issues on February 19, 1990</div>
Also in the office is a large picture of Walter Sisulu. Harris explains how Mandela once looked over to him and said: “I want Walter in the office.” They ran around and found a Peter Magubane photo and had it framed. Mandela didn’t know and so one day he walked into the office, saw it and said: “Huh, I see Walter is here today.”
The digital archive houses a warrant of committal from when Mandela was sentenced to five years in prison, noting his release date as November 1967. He was then whisked off to the Rivonia Trial and a red pen crossed out “1967” and wrote “life” in its place.
There is a room at the NMCM filled with small treasures, like his first legal passport, issued on February 19, 1990—a week after his release. He filled it up in four months. There are desk calendars with detailed notes about his blood pressure, staff issues and every movie he saw—including six reels of a film called Reds. This is all written in a handwriting that seems neat from a distance but is hard to read close up. The same handwriting wrote long notes on miniature slips of paper, which were smuggled out of Robben Island.
The earliest photograph of Mandela is a class shot at Healdtown. Harris recalls how they enlarged it and showed it to Mandela, who said: “This young man improved with age.”
In a packed room in the NMCM there are piles of souvenirs and gifts from all over the world—from a soccer shirt signed by Maradona to a Nobel Peace Prize to bottles of wine and homemade cards from children.
Setting up the NMCM was no easy task and necessity proved the mother of invention. When Mandela’s term in office ended in 1999, it did not mean retirement for him. He is said to have kept calling his old staff to give them instructions. Eventually, fellow activist Professor Jakes Gerwel reminded him gently that there was a new sheriff in town and that the staff no longer worked for him.
No one had thought ahead to what Mandela would need once he stopped running the country. A foundation was set up as a trust to allow him to continue with his work.
By 2002, the foundation outgrew Mandela’s old 13th Avenue house in Houghton, in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs. Two years later, the veteran called a memorable ‘don’t call me, I’ll call you’ press conference announcing that he would be “retiring from retirement”, something that took five years to actually happen. It raised more questions about life after Mandela, leading to the idea of a centre of memory in 2004. The plan is to turn the NMCM into a public facility and create a permanent exhibition that includes a reading room for researchers.
“The legacy belongs to everyone,” says Harris.
The preservation of the legacy is overseen by the eight members on the board of trustees, chosen by the man himself. Mandela had initially appointed 27 members to sit on the board, but unfortunately, hardly ever attended any meetings. So when the transition and restructuring process came about, it was time to clean house and choose members based on their level of commitment. The board includes some old friends, struggle veterans and former colleagues such as Ahmed Kathrada, Dr. Mamphela Ramphele and Professor Gerwel.
The Centre of Memory aims to make an integrated information resource available to ensure that Mandela’s legacy is a living one and accessible to everyone, and to use dialogue as a way of finding solutions to social problems.
Harris says the Dialogue for Justice “uses Madiba’s legacy’s capability to create a space for people to talk to each other that don’t want to and for that space to be safe enough for them to say the unsayable”.
This is in line with Mandela’s work during the critical negotiations between the National Party (NP) and the African National Congress (ANC) for a transitional government.
Mandela’s living legacy is the internationally celebrated Nelson Mandela Day, his birthday, on July 18. It’s a day the center feels people should feel free to interpret any way they like, whether it is helping someone cross the street, painting a school or donating food.
The legacy lives on and the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory invites you to discover the man behind the legend.

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From The Wrong Boots To Barack Obama