On the edge of the village of Mvezo in South Africa's Eastern Cape, on the spur of a hill looking out over a bend in the Mbashe River, there used to be a simple open-sided museum with four plaques inscribed with passages. One was about growing up inspired by the elders' war stories. Another about how "1,000 slights, 1,000 indignities and 1,000 unremembered moments" had produced a slow awakening of rebellious anger in the author. The third was about being prepared to die for the idea of racial equality. The fourth was about how the road to freedom is long. When I visited Nelson Mandela's birthplace in 2009, it was a place of simple beauty that inspired contemplation and reflection of an extraordinary, exemplary life. Today, it is a wreck. The tin roof hangs loose and some of the inscriptions have been broken or removed, while a rank smell indicates goats use what remains of it as a shed. A few hundred meters away, there is a monstrous thatched construction big enough to be a hotel. When I last visited, the villagers of Mvezo said that a hotel, in fact, had been the original purpose of the construction. It was built, they said, by Nelson Mandela's grandson Mandla for the same reason that Mandla had allowed the small museum to fall into ruin and for the same reason that he had unearthed the bones of three of Mandela's children -- two daughters and a son -- and reburied them close by: to make Mandela's birthplace into a lucrative attraction. In July a court ordered Mandla to return to the bones to his family so they could be reburied outside Mandela's home in Qunu, an hour's drive away. Why was the family squabbling over the bones of Mandela's children? Because Mandela had requested to be buried next to them. Whoever had the bones could profit from the tourists Mandela's grave is expected to attract. Mandla was once doted on by Mandela, and hailed by the former South African President when he
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