David Smith: How Will Mandela-Land Cope When the World Arrives?

David Smith is the Guardian's Africa correspondent.

'Nature was our playground," writes 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."

Walking down the grassy slope into a breeze, I came upon it: Mandela's "sliding stone". The big granite boulder has an unmissable track worn smooth and shiny by his childhood sport. It is one of the rocky outcrops overlooking the bucolic valley of Qunu, where South Africa's first black president grew up and which, at 93, he still calls home.

I had come here on the "Mandela trail" in the rolling hills of the area formerly known as the Transkei. I've previously stood in the pokey bed chamber where it is thought William Shakepeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, the grander birthplace of Winston Churchill at Blenheim Palace and the cramped abode where Stan Laurel breathed his first in Ulverston, Cumbria. Thus I could hardly neglect one of the most famous people on the planet, a man who, in South Africa, has been canonised in his own lifetime. Johannesburg alone boasts a Mandela statue in Mandela Square, a Mandela bridge, Mandela house, Mandela theatre and Mandela foundation.

Indeed, if he wasn't so authentically loved, such idolatry could look North Korean. When it was recently announced that Mandela's face will replace the Big Five wild animals on the national currency, one columnist described it as "a bit banana republic".

Have those rocky outcrops in Qunu already been carved out like Mount Rushmore?..