Chancellor House, which was once Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo's law office, is now a museum at the corner of Gerard Sekoto and Fox Street, down town Joburg
Johannesburg’s historic Chancellor House, once the vibrant, bustling heart of South Africa’s first Black-owned law firm, was transformed from a derelict eyesore with the help of old photographs.
When Chancellor House once again opened its doors to the public in 2010, Amos Masondo, the former Executive Mayor of Johannesburg, said that "if bricks could talk, this building would have been replete with colourful stories about the struggles for national liberation".
The freedom struggle museum today resonates with the spirit of the two remarkable men who changed South African history. The profound legal and political legacies of Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo were being reborn as a modern library, legal clinic, and open-air museum.
The human history embedded within the walls of Chancellor House is vividly captured in the memories of those who walked its halls. Writing for De Rebus magazine in an April 1999 article titled “Save Chancellor House,” attorney Norman Sher recalled his early 1950s experiences as a young clerk for Berman & Berman, a firm that occupied the building’s second floor.
