Tracing Mandela’s legacy through Urban Graphic Heritage

In June 2026, Doctor Yolandi Burger completed a Joint Institute of Advanced Studies Fellowship hosted by Loughborough University and the University of Leicester. The fellowship built on the Named after Nelson project and allowed her to think more deeply about how places named after Nelson Mandela carry stories of memory, identity and civic meaning. A central focus was Nelson Mandela Park in Leicester, where the project first started. Together with Doctor Robert Harland and Doctor Everardt Burger, Yolandi presented the origins of the project to a local audience at the United Nations Academic Impact Hub for Sustainable Development Goal 11 at De Montfort University.

The discussion showed the importance of taking research back to the communities from which it emerges. Local participants shared valuable memories about the renaming of the park, its links to anti-apartheid activism, and the wider political context of Leicester in the 1980s. Yolandi also delivered a Joint Loughborough-Leicester Institute of Advanced Studies Fellow Seminar titled Nelson Mandela’s Narrative Spaces, where she discussed how Mandela-named places can operate as narrative infrastructures.

The fellowship further included participation in the Madiba Walk in Handsworth, Birmingham, offered by the Black Heritage Walks Network, attendance at the Windrush Celebrations at the University of Leicester, and attendance at the launch of the Methods Hub at the University of Warwick. Across these activities, the idea emerged that cities can be understood through the stories people attach to places, as well as through visible traces such as street names, signs, plaques, memorials and walking routes. This work offers useful ways to think about the Gauteng City-Region as a layered narrative space and strengthens an emerging research agenda on urban graphic heritage, oral history, cultural mapping and public storytelling in the South African urban environment.