The previous day, we’d made the four-hour drive from East London to stay at a nearby backpackers’ lodge where drummers played in the bar at night. En route, we stopped in the village of Qunu at the gates of Nelson Mandela’s home, which he built after 27 years in prison. This was the landscape in which he was born and buried. “Nature was our playground,” wrote Mandela of his childhood here. “From these days I date my love of the veld, of open spaces, the simple beauties of nature, the clean line of the horizon.”