UNESCO adds apartheid massacre site to heritage protection list

The new listing is made up of 14 locations across South Africa grouped by UNESCO as "Human Rights, Liberation and Reconciliation: Nelson Mandela Legacy Sites".

They include the scene of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre when police shot dead 69 black protestors, including children, in a turning point in the struggle that led the apartheid government to ban the African National Congress (ANC) that now governs.

Also on the list is the University of Fort Hare in the Eastern Cape province where anti-apartheid figurehead Mandela studied and the remote village of Mqhekezweni where he said in his autobiography, "Long Walk to Freedom", that his political activism was first stirred.

"I congratulate South Africa on the inscription of these sites of memory, which bear witness not only to the struggle against the apartheid state, but also to Nelson Mandela's contribution to freedom, human rights and peace on behalf of us all," UNESCO director-general Audrey Azoulay said.

Mandela, who died in 2013 aged 95, become South Africa's first democratically elected president in 1994, four years after the apartheid government released him from 27 years in jail, including on Robben Island off Cape Town.

"Twenty-five years after Robben Island was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List, this new inscription ensures that the legacy of South Africa's liberation and the values it embodies will be transmitted to future generations," Azoulay said.

The addition of the sites to the World Heritage register was agreed at a UNESCO meeting in New Delhi which also approved the inscription of three locations in South Africa important in the understanding of the origins of modern humans.

Located in the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces, the sites "provide the most varied and best-preserved record known of the development of modern human behaviour, reaching back as far as 162,000 years," the UNESCO entry says.