Mandela’s grandfather was the second son of the Left-Hand house of Ngubengcuka so there was no question of the grandfather or any of his descendants acceding to the royal throne. They were merely cast in the role of court counselors or advisers and this, in turn, was the position Mandela would have been raised to fulfill.
The Thembu occupied a sizeable area of the vast region then known as the Transkei, between the Kei River and the border of Natal in the east, stretching down to the Indian Ocean. It was, and still is, an area of inspiring scale and beauty, with rolling green hills and scattered village communities surrounded by grazing cattle.
The traditional homes were round buildings with thatched roofs, known as rondavels, constructed from a mixture of mud, clay and cow dung, often painted on the outside, typically in shades of white, blue or green. Near the rondavel is the kraal, the pen for the animals. The source of water could be some distance away so that, even today, it is not unusual to see someone, invariably a woman, walking seemingly in the middle of nowhere with a heavy, water-filled pot balanced on her head.
Part of the challenge of reconstruction in post-apartheid South Africa is extending development programs—water, electricity, brick-housing—across rural South Africa. Although it looks like a gentle and unchanging way of life in a glorious landscape, for most people it was back then, as it continues to be today, a struggle to survive. From early in the twentieth century many people, mostly men at first, began flocking to the city of Johannesburg in search of prospects. Eventually Mandela too would follow that path.
Nelson Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, in the village of Mvezo, a small community beside the horseshoe turns of the Mbashe River in the district of Mthatha. He was named Rolihlahla by his father, the word meaning “pulling the branch of a tree” or, more colloquially, as Mandela himself has explained, “troublemaker.”
The Great Place, the home of the Thembu king, was some forty miles or so away in Mqhekezweni, but this should not be imagined, in Western terms, as a palace of many rooms, fitted with marble floors or shag-pile carpets, and filled with riches. It was simply a larger than usual group of rondavels set beside an ancient tree beneath which the king and his advisers would meet to settle local affairs.
By the time of Mandela’s birth, white authority was already firmly imposed throughout South Africa. The lives of the black African people were rigidly administered by the Native Affairs department in Pretoria, filtered down through a system of regional and local magistrates.
The oral tradition, with its stories of the coming of the white man, would fuel Mandela’s sense of injustice. In an unpublished autobiography written in 1964 in his familiar looping style at the time of what became known as the Rivonia Trial, he describes, in shorthand, how his
political interest first aroused when I listened to elders of the tribe in my village as a youth. Elders told of the good old days before the arrival of the white man. Then our people lived peacefully under the democratic rule of their kings and councilors and moved freely all over their country. Then the country was ours.
We occupied the land, the forest and the rivers. We set up and operated our own government. We controlled our own armies and organized our own trade and commerce. The elders would tell us about the liberation [that] was fought by our ancestors in defense of our country, as well as the acts of valor performed by generals and soldiers during those epic days.
In his memoir Mandela identifies one particular elder, Chief Joyi, as a notable raconteur who railed against the white man for turning “brother against brother” among the Xhosa and for telling the Thembu that their “true chief was the great white queen across the ocean and they were her subjects. But the white queen brought nothing but misery and perfidy to the black people; if she was a chief, she was an evil chief.” He refers here to Queen Victoria.
Before the abelungu— the white man—appeared with fire-breathing weapons, the people had lived alongside each other in peace. The white man had shattered their ubuntu, fellowship, and taken the land, which belonged to no one, as you might seize a horse.
Mandela said Chief Joyi’s tales had made him feel angry and cheated, as if his own birthright had been stolen, though he later realized that Joyi’s history was not always accurate.
When she visited the eastern Cape in the 1980s, Mandela’s first biographer, Fatima Meer, met an elderly woman, Ntombizodwa, who had grown up with Mandela. She also remembered sitting with him, listening to Chief Joyi’s stories, recalling “Tatu Joyi” evocatively as
shriveled and bent and so black that he was blue. He used to cough a lot; it would come in a convulsion and then trail off like the whine of a train whistle. He knew the history of the Thembus best of all because he had lived through a great deal of it. It was from him that we learned about King Ngangelizwe.
The years dropped from his body and he danced like a young warrior when he told us about how he fought in the King’s impi [his warriors] against the British.
Ironically, it was the Thembu paramount chief Ngangelizwe who asked the British for protection in 1872. He had ill treated his first wife, and, as a result, she fled home to her father, a rival traditional leader. Ngangelizwe went to the British because he feared retribution from his in-laws. In 1875 he caused the death of the same wife’s maid, again provoking the rival’s anger—and again he asked for protection. His adversary was “prevailed upon” by the British not to attack but Ngangelizwe still wrote seeking to become a British subject, along with his people. In 1882 he sold the government the piece of land on which the regional capital of Umtata was situated, now the home of the regional chief magistrate. In return he received £1,200 sterling. In 1885 the government formally “annexed” Thembuland.
On New Year’s Eve 1914, according to the magistrates’ archive, the headman at Mvezo, Hlakanyana, was dismissed, apparently for some corrupt practice involving land he had granted to a white man to build a trading station. It appears that the white man, Mather, may have been involved with an African woman, No-Offisi. Both Mather and the headman were charged and reprimanded. No-Offisi was removed from the land she occupied. The two men hired a lawyer who appealed against the actions taken against them.
The lawyer described Hlakanyana as having given thirty-eight years of service, thirteen as a policeman and twenty-five as headman. In spite of his past loyalty, the appeal fell on deaf ears.
A week later the magistrate came from Umtata to Mvezo to attend a village meeting that had been called for the selection of a new headman. Paramount Chief Dalindyebo (the son and heir of Ngangelizwe) was at the meeting along with just eleven others, including the sacked Headman Hlakanyana. They could not—or would not—nominate a successor, the magistrate recorded.
I then requested Chief Dalindyebo to make a nomination and he recommended his Uncle Henry Mandela as there is no man in this location suitable for the appointment. Henry Mandela will in my opinion make a good headman as he is a strong man and owing to his status should command respect.
I therefore beg to recommend that he be appointed Headman of location No. 15 called Mvezo to take effect from 6 January 1915 and that he should be granted an allowance of £12 per annum.
It appears from this note that Henry Mandela, Nelson’s father, was not actually living in Mvezo at the time of his appointment, three years and six months before the birth of his son. He may have been living in Qunu, or elsewhere with another wife.
The elder Mandela’s full name was Henry Gadla Mphakanyiswa Mandela; his dates of birth and death are unrecorded, though Mandela says in his memoir that his father died around 1928 when he believes he was in his early seventies. Mandela recalled him as a tall man, as Mandela himself became, but darker skinned than his son. He recollects, for Richard Stengel, seeing a single photograph of his father, which has since been lost.
While Henry Mandela owed his recommendation for the post of headman to the patronage of his nephew, the paramount chief, it was evidently the magistrate who had the final say. It’s
also worth noting that this was clearly not a matter of pressing concern to the Native Affairs department in Pretoria. It was not until four months later, on April 19, that an under-secretary troubled to reply to the magistrate’s note, approving the appointment of Headman Mandela.
When Paramount Chief Dalindyebo died in 1920 his son from the Great House was too young to accede so a regent had to be appointed as stand-in. On the day of the old king’s funeral, the chiefs and headmen met and nominated Jongintaba, Dalindyebo’s son by a lesser wife, to play the role.
Henry Mandela took the lead in making the decision. They went to Dalindyebo’s Great House wife to tell her, perhaps knowing the news would not be well received. The Great House wife was enraged, protesting that Jongintaba’s mother was a mere concubine and had never even been properly married to her husband.
The Great House wife wanted the regency for herself. As she later complained to the magistrate, Jongintaba’s mother had been forsaken by the old chief and, when she left, her son was helpless. The Great House wife had taken him in and raised him, while he was ignored by his father who refused to give him any status. Eventually Jongintaba became the Great House wife’s servant; she gave him his own wife, as well as stock to start his kraal. “But no sooner is his father dead than he reveals an evil trait in his character by rising up against me.” The old queen cannot have been too pleased with Henry Mandela for his role in this attempted insurrection.
She demanded a cart be harnessed to take her to the magistrate. The chiefs declined and said she should zila— mourn—instead. They eventually allowed her to leave but refused to provide her with the transport she wanted, forcing her to walk all the way to Umtata.
Henry and another chief signed their own letter to the magistrate, which, far from displaying any spirit of rebellion, was full of obsequious praise for the magistrate and the government he represented, begging the government, as if it were a benevolent father, to “maintain his safe-guidance with his children the Thembus through all generations succeeding the late chiefs and to also protect and advise them at all trying times… ”
After hearing all sides of the argument, the magistrate was sympathetic to the queen’s complaint that Jongintaba was little more than a messenger to her and accepted that it was contrary to custom for a minor-house son to become regent. But neither did the magistrate want a queen—a woman! no, thank you—as regent. He asked the chiefs and headmen to think again. They did—and reached the same decision, apparently again led by Henry Mandela.
It looks as though the elder Mandela backed the wrong horse as the magistrate overruled them and appointed another son instead. Meanwhile, Jongintaba had difficulties of his own; the magistrate noted in a postscript in a letter to a colleague in 1920 that Jongintaba was “addicted to drink, heavily in debt and quite recently there was a writ for civil imprisonment out against him.”
The too-young son of the Great House queen did eventually take over the role of paramount chief for himself but when he died suddenly of a fever in 1928 the issue of succession arose once again. This time Jongintaba fared better. The magistrate believed he was recently reformed and allowed him to assume the role. “He is forty-two, intelligent and I feel he will fulfill the role satisfactorily.”
Alas, in a few months Jongintaba was back in trouble—if he was ever actually out of it.
Meanwhile, complaints about Headman Mandela had first surfaced in 1925—when Nelson was aged seven—in reports from the local white trader, Wood, that “Headman Gadla” was still “worrying” a local man to move his kraal. In an apparent reference to Headman Mandela, the white trader said, “There is a good deal of dirty work done by headmen at times and natives look to you [the magistrate] for protection. Selling of sites by headmen is quite a common thing to do—so I am told by natives—and a good cow to the headman will often get a kraal shifted. I give you this information in the interest of justice only. I have nothing against Gadla [Mandela].”
On July 9, 1926, an inquiry began into the conduct of “Headman Mandela of Mvezo Location, Umtata.” The case against Headman Mandela opened with the testimony of a “native constable,” Amos Dinga, who had been sent to investigate allegations that Mandela had unlawfully allotted land next to the Bashee River to local people. Constable Dinga found the land ploughed, with crops growing. One of the men on it said he had paid Mandela 10 shillings for the land. A third man had been given a second piece of land, which he was not entitled to as he did not have two wives. He claimed Mandela had given him the second plot because the first did not produce good crops. He said he had given Mandela a beast—“a black bull calf, white between the legs”—in return for the land.
Three other men who had been occupying unlawful sites had been ordered to leave a year earlier, but were still there, apparently thanks to the favors of Mandela.
Still another man had asked Mandela for a piece of land and been told it was his for £4 15s which he had paid for with four one-pound notes and some silver. No sooner had he gone to possess the land than another man came along, saying he too had purchased the right to that plot from Headman Mandela.
A final witness claimed he also had given a beast to Mandela but not been assigned any land for two years. Only after paying an additional £4 5s had he received the land. He had asked Mandela for his beast back, but Mandela had refused to return it.
The report of the proceedings shows that Mandela cross-examined the witnesses to no great effect and then gave his own defense—with no witnesses—in which he claimed the beasts had been given as dowry—wedding tributes—not as payments for land. He maintained that stories had been fabricated against him because of an earlier dispute when he had brought legal claims against two locals. People were now acting “in spite against me.” He said that one of the men who had ploughed the land was a sub-headman who was supposed to be supervising the land because Mandela was in bad health and unable to look after it himself.
The magistrate who heard the case concluded that the charges against Headman Mandela were well founded and he was recommending that his services be dispensed with. The decision to sack him from his post was ratified by the chief magistrate a few days later. He had served in the post for eleven years.
In his memoir Mandela cites these events from 1926 as taking place when he “was not much more than a newborn child.” If that was true it would mean he was born much later than 1918, but since he also had three sisters, with four dates of birth to chart, it seems unlikely that his own could be so far adrift. It is also puzzling, though, that at the age of eight he was oblivious to such a cataclysmic event. Perhaps this is explained by the fact that, as has already been pointed out, he was already living many miles away in the village of Qunu, having been there for some time—perhaps from birth, and was not banished there when his father was “deposed.”
In 2008, Mandela’s grandson Mandla was installed as chief at the village of Mvezo, in a gesture intended to right a wrong done many years ago to Mandla’s great-grandfather, Henry Mandela. His position gave Mandla nominal authority over some 400 families in the area. At the time, he was holding court at a newly built rondavel of village-hall proportions. When asked whether the ongoing threat from HIV was high among his concerns, he said not; the great threat was cholera sourced from the Mbashe River, which was shared by the people and the animals. Many of the people still did not have access to safe running water.
Mandla, who has made his own study of the family history, said that local folklore favored yet another version of events, in which Headman Mandela was deposed after trying to fine a man a cow for making another man’s daughter pregnant. When he insulted the magistrate by refusing to appear before him, the magistrate sent in troops and had him forcibly removed.
Mandla was skeptical of the magistrates’ records in the archives. “For me a wrong was done and they needed to justify it so they created the paperwork to do it.” If that was true, it was an implausibly complicated stitch-up involving numerous documents. According to M
andla—whose information was gleaned from his talks with the old men of Mvezo who had grown up with these stories—Henry Mandela become very bitter at his reduced wealth and status. “It demolished his entire existence.”
Already, in his own brief tenure, Mandla has caused some consternation among archivists by razing what remained of the ruins of the rondavel in which his grandfather had been born and rebuilding it on the exact spot, as part of his plans to create a new heritage site. All that survived was an ancient utility stone.
Mandela’s mother, Nosekeni Fanny, gave birth to four of her husband’s thirteen children. She was of the Right-Hand house, not the most senior but not the most minor either, and she had three rondavels and a kraal at her home in Qunu. Mandela has memories of his childhood there, tending cattle as a herds-boy, and learning to fight, swim, catch fish and use slingshots to knock birds from the sky. He used smooth, sloping rocks as natural slides and spent most of his time out and about with other boys.
“A boy who remained at home tied to his mother’s apron strings was regarded as a sissy,” he explains in his memoir. Women, he says bluntly, were regarded as second-class citizens.
Even then, as he remembers, it was like a village of women and children, as most of the men were economic migrants, working on distant farms or gone up to the mines on the hills around Johannesburg, known as the reef. The rondavels of his mother’s home were never quiet, always busy with visits from friends and relatives. Mandela has no recall of ever being alone.
Though she must have been the dominant parental presence in his formative years, Mandela offers little by way of recollection of his mother, who died in 1968, apparently aged seventy-five. She stayed from time to time with her son in Johannesburg but otherwise lived out her life in Qunu. Mandela’s youngest sister, Leabie, remembered that her mother had herself built the rondavels she occupied, the men helping only with the thatched roofs. One was used for cooking, one for sleeping and one for storing grain and other food. There was no furniture in the properties in the European sense; they slept on mats and used their elbows for pillows. The stove was a hole in the ground covered with a grate. The rondavel would fill with smoke when they were cooking as there was no chimney, only a window through which the smoke could escape.
Young Mandela Page 3