Mandela House: The Soweto Museum, the Houghton Homes and Qunu

“Mandela House” usually means the small red-brick house on Vilakazi Street in Soweto, now a museum. But Nelson Mandela lived in four houses that matter, and each has had a very different fate: one became a national heritage site, one a boutique hotel, one the subject of a family court battle, and one, a copy of his last prison quarters, is where he is buried.

The Soweto House on Vilakazi Street

The house at 8115 Vilakazi Street, on the corner of Ngakane Street in Orlando West, is a single-story “matchbox” house built in 1945, the standard municipal design of the era. Mandela moved in in 1946 with his first wife, Evelyn, and it remained his home until 1962, the year of the arrest that led to 27 years in prison. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela raised their daughters there while he was away, and the walls still carry bullet holes and scorch marks from petrol-bomb attacks during those years.

After his release in 1990 he returned to the house only briefly. On 1 September 1997 he donated it to the Soweto Heritage Trust, which he had founded, to be run as a museum, and it was declared a national heritage site in 1999. It closed for restoration in April 2008 and reopened on 19 March 2009 with a new visitor centre. Inside are original furnishings, family photographs, honorary citations and the championship belt Sugar Ray Leonard gave him.

Vilakazi Street has a distinction no other street can claim: two Nobel Peace Prize laureates lived on it. Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s house stands a short walk away.

The Houghton House That Became a Hotel

The house most people picture when they think of the “president’s house” in Johannesburg is often confused with a second Houghton property a few streets away. The first, on 13th Avenue, was Mandela’s main home from 1992 to 1998 and his first house in the city after his release. Much of the work behind the multiparty negotiations that ended apartheid was done there, and guests included Ahmed Kathrada, his fellow Rivonia trialist, the lawyer George Bizos and the model Naomi Campbell.

Restoration began in 2018 in a partnership between the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Motsamayi Tourism Group, and the house opened as the Sanctuary Mandela boutique hotel in September 2021. It has nine bedrooms; the presidential suite is his former bedroom. When it opened, rates were reported at about R14,000 a night.

The Houghton Home Where He Died

From 1998 Mandela lived in a larger house in Houghton Estate, and he died there on 5 December 2013. His will left it to the Nelson Mandela Trust with an instruction that it be used for “a special purpose”, and that phrase has never been settled. Some relatives want a museum; others want it kept as a family residence; in November 2020 a family vote went nine to five in favour of selling.

The court papers set out the family’s positions. According to the Sunday Times, the will gives grandsons Mbuso, Ndaba and Andile conditional rights to occupy the house under the trustees’ control, while only Mandla Mandela has an unconditional right. Tukwini’s application alleges damaged carpets, a stripped laundry and a gate motor forced open with a grinder; Ndaba filed papers opposing the eviction in March 2026. Trustee Wim Trengove has said any decision on the house’s future will be made in consultation with the family.

Qunu: A Copy of His Last Prison House

Mandela spent the last 14 months of his imprisonment in a warder’s cottage at Victor Verster Prison, near Paarl. He later said it was the first spacious, comfortable home he had ever lived in, and when he built a retirement house in Qunu, the Eastern Cape village where he grew up, he asked for the same floor plan. It was completed in 1993. He was buried on the family’s land at Qunu in December 2013. The original prison cottage, at what is now Drakenstein Correctional Centre, has been the subject of plans to turn it into a museum.

Which Mandela House Can You Visit?

Only two are open in any sense. The Soweto museum on Vilakazi Street takes visitors with guided tours, and it is the one that officially carries the name. Sanctuary Mandela on 13th Avenue can be experienced by staying, eating or holding a meeting there. The Houghton Estate house and the Qunu homestead are private family property.

Homes turned into museums face the same question everywhere: how much of a private life to put on display. The answer looks different at Frederick Douglass’s Cedar Hill in Washington and at Helen Keller’s Ivy Green in Alabama.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Mandela House: construction, years of residence, 1997 donation, 1999 heritage status, 2008 to 2009 restoration, exhibits.
• South African History Online: the Vilakazi Street house and its location.
• Travel Weekly and Good Things Guy: Sanctuary Mandela, the 1992 to 1998 residence, guests, rooms and opening.
• The Citizen: room rates at opening.
• News24 and BusinessDay: the January 2025 raid and arrests.
• Sunday Times, 4 April 2026: the eviction application, occupation rights and the 2020 family vote.
• City Press and Joburg Heritage: the museum dispute and the house’s condition.
• Cape Argus: the Victor Verster house and the Qunu replica.