Mandela's "sliding stone" is still visible today, a big granite boulder with a track worn smooth

Nelson Mandela's house, in the village of Qunu

Nature was our playground," wrote Nelson Mandela in his memoir, Long Walk to Freedom. "The hills above Qunu were dotted with large smooth rocks which we transformed into
our own rollercoaster. We sat on flat stones and slid down the face of the rocks. We did this until our backsides were so sore we could hardly sit down."

Mandela's "sliding stone" is still visible today, a big granite boulder with a track worn smooth and shiny by his childhood sport nearly a century ago. It is one of the rocky outcrops overlooking the bucolic valley of Qunu, the place where he grew up and always returned.

"Some of the happiest years of my boyhood were spent in Qunu," Mandela wrote. The old men and women of Qunu smile to remember, remembering themselves.

If Mandela's death inspires pilgrims, it is to this modest village in Eastern Cape province, where chickens scarper at the sound of a car and maize grows ad hoc in the yards, that they will come.