It has been a year and half since Nelson Mandela died at the impressive age of 95, but there's no way his influence will be forgotten anytime soon. People traveling to South Africa still want to walk in his footsteps, and they want to do so for generations to come. South African Tourism, the official government body promoting visitorship to the county, has intelligently thought to cater to this keen public interest by issuing a special smartphone app that helps visitors do it better.
Called "Madiba's Journey," after his nickname, the app senses the location of tourists and lets them know how far away they are from one of 27 Mandela-related historical sights spread around the nation. There are audio clips, photo galleries, itinerary builders, maps, and other learning and planning tools covering everything from his grave site to one of his political safe houses to Robben Island, the most famous of the prisons where he was an inmate.
There's a lot of ground to cover if you want to follow his steps—there are nearly 800 miles between Soweto and Cape Town—but the app is a welcome tool nonetheless, and there's an offline mode so travelers won't have to access data as they roam.
The app is available for iOS (click here for that version) as well as via Google Play (click here for that). Ironically, at the moment it's only available in English, a mother tongue of the colonizing nation that hatched the miserable concept of apartheid, but the makers promise that translations in Zulu, Xhosa, and yes, in Afrikaans, are all in the works.
