South Africa Day 2

Mandela was imprisoned after being convicted of terrorism offences, having been detailed to set up the first army of the ANC - the considered reaction to prolonged violence and provocation directed at black South Africans. There's footage of an interview he gave in London at the time, eloquently expressing the fact that all other avenues had been exhausted.

If any living individual embodies the notion that the pen is mightier than the sword, it is Mandela. He always had the brain of a lawyer and the linguistic skills of a poet..Young black South Africans proudly guide us around the museum - and later around the one situated near his boyhood home - with not a trace of rancour.

Daniel Malan of the National Party was elected in 1948 - in an election in which black South Africans were not allowed to vote - on a pledge to enforce apartheid. The subsequent atrocities - the result, I deduce, of extreme fear on the part of a privileged white minority - are all documented here: the torture, the show trials, the imprisonments. Mandela was incarcerated for more than 27 years and it brings a lump to my throat to see one of the matchboxes in which the early pages of Long Road To Freedom, transcribed in tiny writing, were smuggled to the outside world.

At the second museum, where you get a panoramic view of the land Mandela played on as a boy, we watch a film featuring Nelson Mandela and Barak Obama in a display comparing the history of black struggle in South Africa with that of the United States. Rosa Parks, the black woman who refused to give up her seat on a bus, is another famous figure in the battle for racial equality.

Our driver on this epic road trip across Eastern Cape is Monde Wani, an actor and director who visited Newcastle with the show Elephant, produced by the city-based Dodgy Clutch Theatre Company.

He has written a one man show about the trial of Nelson Mandela which he is to perform in front of the man himself at his birthday celebrations this year - and, next year maybe, in the North East. He is also working on a new play called Ours Was The Dawn which he is to perform later this year in Newcastle with his wife Nomsa.

We drive inland for hours through the former homeland of the Transkei, a breathtaking landscape with the same colourful scattering of tiny houses and - clearly this being home time - hundreds of schoolchildren, all in immaculate uniforms, trudging back from school.

Since, in many cases, there is no building for miles either side of them, this is clearly a long walk they take twice every day. Evil expressed in the landscape, says Peter Stark. But everyone seems very happy and some schoolgirls are interviewed by Newcastle youth drama worker Amy Golding.

Here, as Mandela has taught, education is priceless.

The day ends in drama as we turn off the main road and head up a smaller one signposted to Hogsback. We are to spend the night in the Hogsback Hotel which sounds like something out of the American West and doesn't prove too dissimilar.

But first we have to get there and, when the steep road becomes a dried up river bed full of rocks and deep fissures, it becomes clear our two people carriers won't be up to the job.

In the deep black of an African night, illuminated by a trillion trillion stars and a distant forest fire (deliberate and controlled, we are later informed), we bail out and push.

Still no joy. Peter rings ahead to the Hogsback and pretty soon a white South African in a mighty Landcruiser turns up with a rope and, in reverse, hauls each vehicle over the empty cakewalk of a track.

"Surely this is the authentic African experience," I say to Peggy Calata, Swallows Partnership supremo in Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape. "No it is not," she replies tartly, and later retires early to bed with a bowl of hot soup.

We enjoy a welcome meal tinged with a sense of relief.