At the front of the yard stands a half-destroyed red-brick structure matching a similar one behind the main house in the yard. A new addition around the compound is a silvery mesh-wire fence. The main house is unpainted and corrugated iron-roofed, with a black tag identifying the house as No. 03290. It is at this address that Africa's favourite statesman Nelson Mandela spent some days back in 1962 in transit to the Tanzanian capital of Dar-es-Salaam, at the hospitality of Fish Keitseng.
Keitseng, born in Kanye in 1919, was co-accused with Mandela and 153 others in the notorious Treason Trial that lasted from 1956-1961. After his 1959 deportation from South Africa, Keitseng settled in Lobatse, and for years provided a safe house and transit for African National Congress (ANC) freedom fighters. Keitseng died in 2005, and was posthumously awarded the Order of Luthuli in Silver by the South African presidency.In his memoirs, Comrade Fish: Memories In The Anc Underground (compiled by Jeff Ramsay and Barry Morton), Keitseng writes that the house that went on to provide temporary refuge for people like Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Oliver Tambo cost him only 21 pounds."It was just made out of soil, wood plus thatch," he writes in the book.
