To the Western visitor today the Great Place may seem small and remote, but to the young Mandela in 1927 it was the center of the world, and Mqhekezweni was a metropolis compared to the huts of Qunu. It was here that Mandela spent his most formative years and gained the impressions of kingship which were to influence his whole life. He would never forget the moment when he first saw the Regent arriving in a spectacular motorcar, welcomed by his people with shouts of “Aaah! Jongintaba!” (The scene would be reenacted seventy years later, when President Mandela was hailed by cries of “Aaah! Dalibunga!”) Mqhekezweni was more prosperous then, and almost self-sufficient; its chief was then also regent, attracting tribesmen from all over Tembuland to consult him.
The nine-year-old boy arrived with only a tin trunk, wearing an old shirt and khaki shorts roughly cut from his father’s old riding breeches, with a piece of string as a belt. His cousin Ntombizodwa, four years older, remembered him as shy, lonely and quite silent, but he was immediately welcomed by Jongintaba and his wife No-England.10 Mandela shared with their son Justice a small whitewashed rondavel containing two beds, a table and an oil lamp. He was treated as one of the family, together with Jongintaba’s daughter, Nomafu, and later with Nxeo, the elder brother of Sabata, the heir to the kingdom. He saw himself as a member of a royal family, with a much grander style of life than that of Qunu; but he did not altogether belong to it—which may have spurred his ambition.
The Regent, Jongintaba, otherwise known as David Dalindyebo, became Mandela’s new father figure. He was a handsome man, always very well dressed; Mandela lovingly pressed his trousers, inspiring his lifelong respect for clothes. Jongintaba was a committed Methodist—though he enjoyed his drink—and prayed every day at the nearby church run by his relative the Reverend Matyolo. His son Justice, four years Mandela’s elder, was to be Mandela’s role model for the next decade, the ideal of worldly prowess and elegance, as sportsman, dandy and ladies’ man. Justice was an all-rounder, excelling in team sports like cricket, soccer and rugby. Mandela, less well coordinated, made his mark in more rugged and individual sports like boxing and long-distance running. A photograph shows Justice as bright-eyed, confident and combative, while the young Mandela was less assertive, and strove to acquire Justice’s assurance. Justice was, after all, the heir to the chieftaincy, while Mandela depended on the Regent’s favors.
Mandela loved the country pleasures at Mqhekezweni, which were more numerous in those days than they are now, and included riding horses and dancing to the tribal songs of Xhosa girls (how different, he reflected in jail, from his later delight in Miriam Makeba, Eartha Kitt or Margot Fonteyn). But Mandela was also more serious and harder-working than the other boys. He thrived at the local mission school, where he began to learn English from Chambers’ English Reader, writing on a slate and speaking the words carefully, with a slow formality and the local accent which never left him.
Whites were hardly visible at Mqhekezweni, except for occasional passersby. Mandela’s sister Mabel remembers being impressed when he and his schoolfriends met a white man who needed help because his motorbike had broken down, and Mandela was able to speak to him in English.11 But Mabel could also be quite frightened of Mandela: “He didn’t like to be provoked. If you provoked him he would tell you directly.… He had no time to fool around. We could see he had leadership qualities.”12
A crucial part of Mandela’s education lay in observing the Regent. He was fascinated by Jongintaba’s exercise of his kingship at the periodic tribal meetings, to which Tembu people would travel scores of miles on foot or on horseback. Mandela loved to watch the tribesmen, whether laborers or landowners, as they complained candidly and often fiercely to the Regent, who listened for hours impassively and silently, until finally at sunset he tried to produce a consensus from the contrasting views. Later, in jail, Mandela would reflect:
One of the marks of a great chief is the ability to keep together all sections of his people, the traditionalists and reformers, conservatives and liberals, and on major questions there are sometimes sharp differences of opinion. The Mqhekezweni court was particularly strong, and the Regent was able to carry the whole community because the court was representative of all shades of opinion.13
As President, Mandela would seek to reach the same kind of consensus in cabinet; and he would always remember Jongintaba’s advice that a leader should be like a shepherd, directing his flock from behind by skillful persuasion: “If one or two animals stray, you go out and draw them back to the flock,” he would say. “That’s an important lesson in politics.”14
Mandela was brought up with the African notion of human brotherhood, or ubuntu, which described a quality of mutual responsibility and compassion. He often quoted the proverb “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu,” which he would translate as “A person is a person because of other people,” or “You can do nothing if you don’t get the support of other people.” This was a concept common to other rural communities around the world, but Africans would define it more sharply as a contrast to the individualism and restlessness of whites, and over the following decades ubuntu would loom large in black politics. As Archbishop Tutu defined it in 1986: “It refers to gentleness, to compassion, to hospitality, to openness to others, to vulnerability, to be available to others and to know that you are bound up with them in the bundle of life.”15
Mandela regarded ubuntu as part of the general philosophy of serving one’s fellowmen. From his adolescence, he recalled, he was viewed as being unusually ready to see the best in others. To him this was a natural inheritance: “People like ourselves brought up in a rural atmosphere get used to interacting with people at an early age.” But he conceded that “It may be a combination of instinct and deliberate planning.” In any case, it was to become a prevailing principle throughout his political career: “People are human beings, produced by the society in which they live. You encourage people by seeing good in them.”16
Mandela’s admiration for tribal traditions and democracy was reinforced by the Xhosa history that he picked up from visiting old chiefs and headmen. Many of them were illiterate, but they were masters of the oral tradition, declaiming the epics of past battles like Homeric bards. The most vivid storyteller, Chief Joyi, like Mandela a descendant of the great King Ngubengcuka, described how the unity and peace of the Xhosa people had been broken by the coming of the white men, who had divided them, dispossessed them and undermined their ubuntu.17 Mandela would often look back to this idealized picture of African tribal society. He described it in a long speech in 1962, shortly before he began his prison sentence:
Then our people lived peacefully, under the democratic rule of their kings and their amapakati, and moved freely and confidently up and down the country without let or hindrance. Then the country was ours, in our own name and right. We occupied the land, the forests, the rivers; we extracted the mineral wealth below the soil and all the riches of this beautiful country. We set up and operated our own government, we controlled our own armies and we organized our own trade and commerce.
It was, in his eyes, a golden age without classes, exploitation or inequality, in which the tribal council was a model of democracy:
The council was so completely democratic that all members of the tribe could participate in its deliberations. Chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, all took part and endeavoured to influence its decisions. It was so weighty and influential a body that no step of any importance could ever be taken by the tribe without reference to it.18
The history of the Xhosas was very much alive when Mandela was a child, and old men could remember the time when they were still undefeated. The pride and autonomy of the Transkei and its Xhosa-speaking tribes—the Tembus, the Pondos, the Fingoes and the Xhosas themselves—had survived despite the humiliations of conquest and subjection over the previous century. Some Xhosas had intermarried with other peoples, including the Khoikhoi (called “Hottentots” by white settlers), which helped to give a wide variety to their physica
l features: Mandela’s own distinctive face, with his narrow eyes and strong cheekbones, has sometimes been explained by Khoikhoi blood.19 But the Xhosas retained their distinctive culture and language. Many white colonists who first encountered them in the late eighteenth century were impressed by their physique, their light skin and sensitive faces, and their democratic system of debate and government: “They are equal to any English lawyers in discussing questions which relate to their own laws and customs,” wrote the missionary William Holden in 1866. In the 1830s the British Commander Harry Smith called the Xhosa King Hintsa “the very image of poor dear George IV.”20 But, over the course of a hundred years and nine Xhosa wars, the British forces moving east from the Cape gradually deprived the Xhosas of their independence and their land. By 1835 Harry Smith had crossed the river Kei to begin the subjugation of the Transkei. By 1848 he had imposed his own English system on the Xhosa chiefs, informing them that their land “shall be divided into counties, towns and villages, bearing English names. You shall all learn to speak English at the schools which I shall establish for you.… You may no longer be naked and wicked barbarians which you will ever be unless you labour and become industrious.”21 In the eighth Xhosa war in 1850 the British Army—after setbacks which strained it to its limit and atrocities committed by both sides—drove the Xhosa chiefs out of their mountain fastnesses and firmly occupied “British Kaffraria,” later called the Ciskei. The Tembu chiefs who ruled the southern part of the Transkei had been relatively unscathed by the earlier wars, but now they were subjugated and sent to the terrible prison on Robben Island, just off the coast from Cape Town, which became notorious in Xhosa folklore.
After this humiliation and impoverishment, in 1856 the Xhosas accomplished their own self-destruction. A young prophetess, Nongqawuse, told them to kill all their cattle and to prepare for a resurrection. As a result, over half the population of the Ciskei starved to death. By the end of the ninth Xhosa war in 1878 the two chief houses of the Xhosa people, the Ngqika and the Gcaleka, had been subjugated and were forced into a new exodus across the Kei. Successive leaders were sent to Robben Island, in keeping with the order of Sir George Grey, the Governor of the Cape, “for the submission of every chief of consequence; or his disgrace if he were obdurate.”22
It was not till 1894 that Pondoland, in the northern part of the Transkei, came under the Cape administration. But after the Union of South Africa came into being in 1910, the Xhosas faced growing controls by white magistrates. The whites, as Mandela came to see it, captured the institution of the chieftaincy and “used it to suppress the aspirations of their own tribesmen. So they almost destroyed the chieftaincy.”23
In the later nineteenth century the Zulus, the other major tribal power to the north, became more famous among whites and foreigners as ruthless fighters than the Xhosas, particularly the Zulu warrior-king Shaka, who had set out to conquer and unify all the southern tribes in the 1820s. The Zulus attracted the admiration of many British churchmen, including the dissident Bishop John William Colenso of Natal; but they acquired unique military fame in January 1879, when the British provoked a war with Shaka’s successor, Cetewayo, whose army completely destroyed a British force of 1,200 at the battle of Isandhlwana. When the British sent out reinforcements they included the Prince Imperial, son of Louis Napoleon, who was ambushed and speared to death by Zulu assegais. (“A very remarkable people the Zulus,” said Disraeli. “They defeat our generals, they convert our bishops, they have settled the fate of a great European dynasty.”24) The humiliation of Isandhlwana was finally avenged in July, when the British crushed Cetewayo at the battle of Ulundi and subjugated the Zulus; but their reputation for fighting spirit remained.
The Xhosa chiefs appeared less martial and intransigent than the Zulus, and after the Xhosa wars they seemed defeated and demoralized—sometimes with the help of alcohol. But out of the desolation of the Xhosa wars another tradition was growing up, that of mission schools and Christian culture, which gradually produced a new Xhosa elite of disciplined, well-educated young men and women. While embracing Western ideas, they still aspired to restore the rights and dignity of their own people. The British liberal tradition was reasserting itself in the Cape, with the expansion of the mission stations and the introduction of a qualified vote for blacks. Educated young Xhosas were exploiting the aptitude for legal argument, analysis and debate which early white visitors had observed. It was a route that would in time lead some of them into the political campaigns of the black opposition in the 1960s—sometimes called the tenth Xhosa war—and, like their predecessors, to Robben Island; but they would win their battle, and not through military might, but through their skills in argument and reasoning.
Like other conquered peoples such as the Scots or the American Indians, the Xhosas retained their own version of history, which, being largely oral, was easily ignored by the outside world. “The European insisted that we accept his version of the past,” said Z. K. Matthews, the African professor who would teach Mandela. But “it was utterly impossible to accept his judgements on the actions and behaviour of Africans, of our own grandfathers in our own lands.”25 Mandela, despite all his Western education, would always champion oral historians, and would continue to be inspired by the spoken stories of the Xhosas which he had heard from his elders: “I knew that our society had produced black heroes and this filled me with pride: I did not know how to channel it, but I carried this raw material with me when I went to college.”26 While most white historians regarded the Xhosa rebellions as firmly placed in the past, overlaid by the relentless logic of Western conquest and technology, Mandela, like other educated Xhosas, saw the white occupation as a recent interlude, and would never forget that his great-grandfather ruled a whole region a century before he was born.
2
Mission Boy
1934–1940
IN 1934, when he was sixteen, Mandela went with twenty-five other Tembu boys, led by the Regent’s son Justice, to an isolated valley on the banks of the Bashee River, the traditional setting for the circumcision of future Tembu kings. No rural Xhosa could take office without this ritual. Mandela would vividly remember the ceremony which marked the coming of manhood: the days spent beforehand with the other boys in the “seclusion lodges”; singing and dancing with local women on the night before the ceremony; bathing in the river at dawn; parading in blankets before the elders and the Regent himself, who watched the boys to see that they behaved with courage.
The old circumcisor (incibi) appeared with his assegai, and when their turn came the boys had to cry out “I am a man!”1 Mandela was tense and anxious, and when the assegai cut off his foreskin he remembered it as feeling like molten lead flowing through his veins. He briefly forgot his words as he pressed his head into the grass, before he too shouted out, “I am a man!” But he was conscious that he was not naturally brave: “I was not as forthright and strong as the other boys.”2
After the ceremony was over, when they had buried their foreskins, covered their faces in white ocher and then washed it off in the river, Mandela was proud of his new status as a man, with a new name—Dalibunga, meaning the founder of the council—who could walk tall and face the challenges of life. He still felt himself to be part of a proud tribe, and was shocked when Chief Meligqili told the boys that they would never really be men because they were a conquered people who were slaves in their own country.3 It was not until ten years later that Mandela would recognize that chief as the forerunner of brave politicians like Alfred Xuma and Yusuf Dadoo, James Phillips and Michael Harmel. In the meantime he would take great pride in his circumcised manliness and the superiority it implied; at university he was shocked to learn that one of his friends had not been circumcised. Only when he later became immersed in politics in Johannesburg did he, as he put it, “crawl out of the prejudice of my youth and accept all people as equals.”4
Mandela soon had to make a more fundamental social transition—into the midst of a rigorous missionary scho
oling. The Regent was determined to have him properly educated, as a prospective counselor to Sabata, the future king, so he sent him to board at the great Methodist institution of Clarkebury, across the Bashee River, which had educated both the Regent and his son Justice, and would educate Sabata. For the Tembu royal family Clarkebury had a special resonance: it was founded in 1825, when King Ngubengcuka, Mandela’s great-grandfather, had met the pioneering Methodist William Shaw and promised to give him land to set up a mission.5 The station was duly founded by the Reverend Richard Hadey, some miles from the king’s Great Place, and named in honor of a distinguished British theologian, Dr. Adam Clarke.
The Methodists were the most adventurous and influential of the missionaries who had penetrated the Eastern Cape at the same time as the British armies—sometimes in league with them, sometimes at odds. To many Xhosa patriots missionaries were essentially the agents of British governments, who used them to divide and disarm the rival chiefs: the Trotskyist writer Nosipho Majeke wrote in 1952 that the Wesleyan missions were “ready at all times to co-operate with the Government,” and were able to surround the great King Hintsa, turning other chiefs against him.6 But the mission teachers were frequently in opposition to white administrations, and played an independent role in the development of the Xhosa people. By 1935 the mission schools throughout South Africa registered 342,181 African pupils, and as the historian Leonard Thompson records, they “reached into every African reserve community.”7
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