The police released Mandela’s friend and charged him instead. On the Monday morning he went to court and was given a small fine.
Mandela now went to stay with a cousin, Garlick Mbekeni, for a few days and told his relative of his ambition to become a lawyer. Mbekeni said he would take him to meet a very clever fellow, “one of our home boys.” Together they went to a suite of offices, Sitha Investments, at Barclay Arcade on the corner of West Street and Commissioner Street in the business district of the city. There they sat and waited in reception while Mandela watched an African woman secretary—the first he had ever seen—speedily type a letter.
After a while the secretary took them through to the inner office where Mandela was introduced to a “light-skinned, colored-ish” looking chap (“Colored” was an apartheid definition for people of mixed race) who appeared to be in his late twenties but seemed kind and wise beyond his years. He was wearing a double-breasted suit. Mandela didn’t know it then but the man had a white father.
He found it hard to believe later when he asked his cousin what degree the man had and was told he had not been educated past Standard Six. How could that be? “He has knowledge and skills from the university of life,” Mandela’s cousin told him, “and Johannesburg is a good place to learn.”
The man was Walter Sisulu, real estate agent, activist and communist, later to become Mandela’s greatest political influence and mentor.
Sisulu had been in Johannesburg since 1928, when he arrived at the age of sixteen—pretending to be eighteen—to work at Rose Deep Mine. At first, he lived in a dormitory with his kinsmen and was mortified, after a while, to discover that homosexual sex—sodomy—was commonplace among the laborers. He gradually reasoned that it was an inevitable consequence of the pattern of labor migration forced on young men by poverty and poor expectations in rural South Africa. Deprived of a normal family life, they sought solace and release with one another.
Johannesburg had initially sprung up as a miner’s camp in the late nineteenth century, to cope with the rush that followed the discovery of gold in 1886 on the Witwatersrand (the name of this low ridge of hills, running across central southern Africa, is often abbreviated to the rand or the reef). The camp evolved into a city, its narrow, downtown streets a tribute to the way the area was finely divided, to squeeze in the maximum number of small plots for excavations.
Miners came to the area from all over the world but it was the British and the Boers who fought for control of the region, later to become the Transvaal state and eventually a province of the Union of South Africa, formed in 1910.
The formation of the Union signaled the beginnings of the system that would later be formalized as apartheid. Anti-slavery legislation had actually enfranchised black Africans in some areas of southern Africa in the mid-nineteenth century, but those voting rights were eventually removed and restrictions on movement were effected as the colonials sought to claim the best of the region for themselves. There were early pass laws for black Africans, supplemented by restrictions for the Indians too, who had arrived in substantial numbers as indentured laborers.
The Natives Land Act of 1913 made Africans aliens on their own land, sometimes overnight in rural areas, as they lost all rights in places where they had been living and farming since time immemorial. The Act created territorial segregation between the races, forcing black people into reserves that amounted to less than 10 percent of the total area of the country and denying them the right to own land elsewhere. A succession of laws followed—the Native Affairs Act of 1920, the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923, the Native Administration Act of 1927—each reinforcing the oppression of Africans and further asserting the authority of the white minority. The restrictions, the repressive laws, just kept coming.
Migration from the rural areas to Johannesburg—Egoli, City of Gold, as it came to be called—accelerated throughout the first half of the twentieth century and few men resisted a stint in the mines with the regular income it promised. Young boys like Sisulu were swayed by the prospects. His biographer and daughter-in-law, Elinor Sisulu, described how the returning migrants “boasted about the glitter and bright lights of distant cities and proudly displayed their clothing, watches, radios and other items bought from the town to the awe and admiration of their listeners, among whom was Walter.”
Like Mandela, Sisulu was born in the eastern Cape. His mother Alice worked as a domestic servant, perhaps in Umtata, which is where research places his father, Albert Victor Dickinson, a white man who was working for the chief magistrate, possibly as an assistant magistrate.
Alice returned home to give birth to her son, Walter, in 1912 but must have gone back to Dickinson as, four years later, she gave birth to a second child by him, a daughter. They do not appear to have lived together as a couple—interracial marriage would have been socially unacceptable and later became illegal anyway—but neither does Dickinson seem to have entirely abandoned his responsibilities, paying some money to support his children.
Being a child of mixed parentage did nothing to inhibit Sisulu’s sense of injustice at the hardships imposed on black Africans and from an early age he was politically aware and active, involved in industrial action against poor labor conditions. There is some evidence, however, that his racial make-up may have influenced him to become a mentor to Mandela rather than the leader of the ANC, as he believed that many people would never accept a man of mixed race.
Acting as a real estate agent for black people in Johannesburg in the early 1940s was quite unlike being an agent in the West half a century later. According to Elinor Sisulu, her father-in-law acted more like a social worker, enabling Africans and Indians to buy and build their own homes in the township of Alexandra. Because it had already been established as a “native location” in 1912, Alexandra was excluded from the strictures of the 1913 Land Act, which prevented Africans buying or owning property in white areas.
A German businessman provided the loans, and a law firm, Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman, registered the bonds that indemnified the loans. Sisulu sourced the clients for a commission and must have noted that the law firm had no problem employing communists. Two were on the staff as clerks: Gaur Radebe, an African, and Nat Bregman, a white Jewish Marxist who was also a stand-up comedian who sometimes did turns on the radio.
When Mandela told Sisulu he had been forced to leave Fort Hare in the middle of his BA, following a protest, the older man realized that Mandela “was someone who would go far and should be encouraged. He was the kind of young man we needed to develop our organization.” No doubt, Sisulu meant the African National Congress, not the Communist Party.
Mandela told him he wanted to study law and Sisulu wished to encourage him, so they went along to Witkin’s where one of the partners, Lazar Sidelsky, agreed to take him on as a clerk while he studied law to become an Articled Clerk—a lawyer’s assistant—and completed his BA degree by correspondence with UNISA, the University of South Africa.
Back in Mqhekezweni, Chief Jongintaba certainly did not abandon his efforts to force Justice and Mandela to return. A few days after he had seen Mandela for the first time, Sisulu was contacted by the ANC president, Dr. Xuma, who warned him against helping the two escapees. It was too late now, anyway, but Sisulu decided to ignore the warning.
Finally beyond the chief’s reach, Mandela was free to settle down and found digs in Alexandra, at 46 7th Avenue, a typically overdeveloped stand, or plot, full of higgledy-piggledy rooms added on to a small central dwelling, with no electricity or water. (Such amenities were still forty years away, only finally being plumbed in and switched on in the mid-1980s. It was the lack of electricity that prompted Alexandra’s nickname, Dark City.) Mandela found the darkness an uneasy contrast with nights in the eastern Cape, as the shadows in Alexandra hid all manner of unsavory activity on the narrow, unmade, overcrowded streets: the illicit drinking dens, or shebeens, where home-brewed beer was sold, the police raids, the gangsters, the arguments, the fights, the gun
fire.
“Exhilarating and precarious” was how he characterized the life of Alexandra in his memoir.
He described it vividly in a letter to someone he had known there, in 1970.
Alexandra! That is a remarkable place. To some it is a township with a dubious reputation: famous more for its notorious gangs, slums, braziers and smoke. To others it is a perfect haven, where a person may build a dream house on his own plot of ground and be lord in his castle.
To me it is my other home. Alex introduced me into many of the intricacies of town life. It nursed and toughened me for the rough career to which I was subsequently drawn. Then my total income was £2 a month out of which I had to pay a monthly sum of 13/4 for rent. For some time I lived literally on plain bread and cold water.
Mandela must have been highly motivated, as he buckled down to complete his degree in trying circumstances, as well as studying for his Articles at Witkin’s. He had rented his room in Alexandra from the Xhoma family, John and Harriet, who had eight children. According to one of their daughters, Gladys, they embraced Mandela as one of their own, liking him even more than their own son. Gladys was only six or seven when Mandela came but remembered that, whenever they went to his room to take food or return washing or ironing, he was always reading and writing, by candlelight. Their father told them he was studying to be “a liar”—a lawyer.
Mandela always dressed formally for work and would take the bus to the city every day. Back home he was sometimes left in charge of some of the children and would read them stories and play games with them. He would smack them if they were naughty but they didn’t mind because they knew that if he did, they had done wrong.
Behind the Xhomas’ home was a small Anglican church, where Mandela used to worship and sing in the choir. The minister was the Reverend Mabutho who, according to Gladys, had brought Mandela to their home in the first place. In fact, the minister was a fellow Thembu who knew Mandela’s family so he was only too happy to put him up in his own home when Mandela first arrived. But Mandela had neglected to tell him the truth of why and how he had left the Transkei. When the minister discovered the whole story, he felt deceived and made Mandela leave, but not before arranging a room with the Xhomas. Mandela, who maintained contact with the minister and his wife, remembered Mrs. Mabutho’s disapproval when he started dating a Swazi girl. Although the relationship did not last long, the minister’s wife still made it clear she thought he should be dating only young Xhosa women.
Another one of Gladys’s most vivid recollections was of Mandela’s interest in her sister Didi who used to wash his clothes but refused him when he asked her out, saying he was more like a brother to her.
Mandela remembered her as a very beautiful girl working as a domestic servant. He would see her when she came home at weekends and he was keen to make love to her but she already had a boyfriend. In any event, Mandela felt inhibited by his own appearance, as he had only one old suit and one shirt, which he wore day in and day out. “I didn’t look tidy at all.”
Fearing rejection, Mandela did not propose a relationship to Didi as he could see she felt superior to him and did not want to give her the greater pride of saying no. Instead he tried to encourage her to go back to school, which she had left, she said, because she was bored. He urged her to think beyond her beauty and her many admirers, and to complete her education so that she could find independence in a professional job.
Poignantly, Mandela recalled how Didi and her mother came to his own law offices some years later, seeking help. Didi, heavily pregnant at the time, had been abandoned by her boyfriend and wanted to take action against him for breach of a marriage contract. Mandela couldn’t help thinking that if she had taken his advice she might have been saved from the humiliating experience.
But back then, he was very conscious of his own depleted appearance, noting how Didi’s boyfriend had well-tailored clothes in the American style with a waistcoat and a hat. He would hook his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets and stand in the yard looking really superior, greeting Mandela as if he were a nobody. Many young men, Mandela noted, used to go to the city to steal and come back to sell their booty in the township so they could have the smart, American-style clothes. Mandela would never forget another dapper young man in a hat who came to sit next to him on a bus and with evident disdain asked Mandela to move up so there would be no contact between them, so that his coat would not touch Mandela. “And at that time it was painful, you know, it was painful.”
Even his one suit had been a hand-me-down from his employer, Sidelsky, and Mandela had to get it patched to maintain it. One day when he was walking in town he saw a woman, Phyllis Maseko, who had been a student with him at Healdtown and Fort Hare. He was so ashamed of his appearance that he crossed the street to avoid her, but of course he was not so invisible. She saw him anyway and called out, “Nelson! Nelson!” The incident ended happily as she invited him to visit her home in Orlando and fed him well.
Another friend from Healdtown would give him groceries while he was living poor in Alexandra and he relied on the Sunday plates of pork and vegetables he would be served by his hosts, the Xhomas. Sometimes he would walk the five or six miles to work at Witkin’s to save the bus fare. Even then he would not have money to buy food.
Some young men in Alexandra did not trouble to go to the city to steal but went robbing on their own doorstep. They formed gangs, of which the Msomi were the most notorious. A friend warned Mandela to watch out for the Thutha Ranch gang as they were operating around his area. Thutha meant collecting and taking away, and this gang were renowned for clearing people’s homes while they slept. One night Mandela woke up and heard voices in the yard outside his room. They were arguing: “No, let’s go in” and “No, man, this chap has no money, has nothing, he’s a student.” Some wanted to break in but the dissenter was tough: “Leave the student alone, leave him alone.” Someone kicked the door so hard that the bolt snapped and they could have entered easily but instead they just passed. Mandela moved his bed against the door and slept like that afterwards, very grateful for his narrow escape.
Walter Sisulu’s daughter, Beryl Simelane, recalled that Mandela came to live with her father in Orlando because gangsters were after him in Alexandra, but in his own narrative Mandela says he left after just a year or so and spent a couple of years living in mining compounds where he had free accommodation. The chief, Jongintaba, visited him at one compound. Mandela was surprised to find that he was no longer disapproving or demanding his return, instead seemingly accepting of his new life. Feeling rehabilitated, Mandela could at last stop considering his homeland with the indifference he had affected to excuse his escape as well as to ease his sense of loss of the world in which he had been raised.
That feeling of being reconnected to his past did not, however, prevent his experiencing “stabs of guilt” when the chief died not long after his visit. Mandela was concerned that his own behavior, flouting the chief’s authority, running away to the city, might have hastened the chief’s end. Jongintaba can only have been around fifty-three when he died, but no doubt his lifestyle had taken its toll. Furthermore, according to Nozolile Mtirara, the poor bride that Justice had run away to escape, Jongintaba had been heartbroken when his son and Mandela had run away and, as a result, his health deteriorated.
It is tempting to consider that Walter Sisulu knew just what he was doing when he took Mandela along to be articled at Witkin’s. Having sensed his new friend’s potential, he may also have been aware that placing him alongside fellow clerks who were active communists might hasten his induction into radical politics.
Mandela was certainly influenced by Gaur Radebe and Nat Bregman even if he was still bound by the courtly manners he had learned as a regal Thembu and as a “black Englishman” at school. When he joined the law firm a typist told him there was no color line; they all took tea together. She said she had bought new cups for him and also for Radebe. In reality, of course, the woman had bought the cups so
that the white staff would not have to share their own cups with the Africans. Mandela realized this was the color line the woman had denied existed.
When he told Radebe he saw how his expression changed. Radebe told Mandela to follow his lead when it was time for tea at eleven. Mandela watched as Radebe ignored the two new cups and took one of the others, making great show of adding sugar and milk, pouring the tea and stirring it before drinking. Mandela did not want to disappoint Radebe but neither did he want to upset the typist, so he went without tea altogether, saying he was not thirsty, and used to have coffee on his own in the kitchen.
Like Sisulu, Radebe had little formal education but seemed to Mandela to be wiser than many graduates of Fort Hare. Surprisingly, although his employer Sidelsky did business with the former and employed the latter, he cautioned Mandela against getting involved with both men, warning him that they were troublemakers and rabble-rousers. Radebe would speak to Sidelsky as if he were personally responsible for the suffering of Africans, telling him that one day the tables would be turned and “We will dump all of you into the sea.”
Radebe was actively involved in the politics of Alexandra and it was through him that Mandela took part in his first protest, during a march of 10,000 to support a bus boycott against an increase in the fare. Mandela attended some Communist Party meetings with Radebe and also with Bregman, whom he would think of as the first white person to become a friend. Mandela remembered how Bregman had once taken a sandwich from his packed lunch and offered it to Mandela to break in half so they could share it. Years later, Bregman did not even remember this moment; to him it meant nothing. He was not a racialist and just accepted Mandela for who he was: a fellow human being, if also then, in Bregman’s eyes, a bit of a provincial, a backwoods country boy who was very serious about what he was doing and seemed determined to take the opportunity to make something of himself.
Young Mandela Page 6