Mandela: our hero and our neighbour

Long before Nelson Mandela's persistent ill health, Kekana Mangqwambi would drop in on his famous neighbour and rib the revered icon about his love life. The 92-year-old, Mandela's junior by just two years, met South Africa's first black leader after he returned to his childhood village Qunu once freed from an apartheid jail. "We used to spend time together. I normally arrived at night," said Mangqwambi sittingoutside a thatched mud hut in the winter sun. "I used to say "vuka sishumani ndini" (wake up manwith no girlfriend) and he would wake up, laugh, stand up and shake hands. Then I would sit down and we would chat the entire night." To the world, Nelson Mandela is a near-mythical peacesymbol who reconciled a fractured nation after decades of apartheid. Here in Qunu's gentle hills, he is no less a hero. But he is also a neighbour and fellow villager. "He's not my friend, he's more than a friend to me. He's like my brother," said Mangqwambi, who went on his first helicopter ride with Mandela. Despite being one of the world's most recognisable faces, Mandela was always down to earth. "You will never realise even if you came while we werestaying together that he is important," Mangqwambi told AFP. Stories tell of Mandela walking through the village's scattered homesteads with no airs and graces --no matter whom he met. "He's a hero," said Masiviwe Geledwana, who described him as "somebody like a god" who was incomparable to someone like himself.