I had lived in South Africa for a couple of years when I went back home to visit my mother and walking about our old town with its medieval towers and the baroque castle and the 1000-year- old castle ruin on the hill I suddenly realised that in Johannesburg the oldest building I could come across was barely 50 years old. Whereas in my old home history seemed to stare at me from every corner, my new home seemed devoid of it.

Which is of course, the wrong definition of history. I saw the height of the fight against apartheid, I saw the end of this terrible system (even helped in the tiniest amount – I served tea to a few of the protagonists). I lived through history. Today, this is history. So much so that a statue of one of the heroes of the time, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, stands surrounded by gravestones and garden ornaments in the lot of a stonemason in a little town in the Odenwald and is instantly recognised.

The Ragtag Daily Prompt: History.