Madiba lookalike vows to carry on the legacy

QUNU, South Africa: Ayanda Mbatyothi, who bears a striking resemblance to a young Nelson Mandela, vowed Sunday to carry on the legacy of the icon who had unwittingly launched his career.
The 37-year-old, who hails from an impoverished township in eastern South Africa, is the spitting image of Mandela in the days before his arrest by the apartheid state in 1962.
Mbatyothi even sounds like Mandela, and makes a living impersonating South Africa’s first black president on screen.
“Madiba never forgot about the people. I will try and carry forward the very same idea,” he told AFP, referring to South Africa’s first black president by his clan name.
“It’s a big responsibility,” Mbatyothi said ahead of Mandela’s burial in his boyhood village of Qunu in the Eastern Cape — the same province from which the impersonator hails.
He said he often caught passers-by staring at him, stopping and then turning to take a second look, before walking off perplexed.
Mandela himself was taken aback by the similarity, he recounted.