Mandela
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Mandela would retain a respect for the missionary tradition, while criticizing its paternalism and links with imperialism. “Britain exercised a tremendous influence on our generation, at least,” he has said, “because it was British liberals, missionaries, who started education in this country.”8 Sixty years after his schooling, in a speech at Oxford University, he explained: “Until very recently the government of our country took no interest whatsoever in the education of blacks. Religious institutions built schools, equipped them, employed teachers and paid them salaries; therefore religion is in our blood. Without missionary institutions there would have been no Robert Mugabe, no Seretse Khama, no Oliver Tambo.”9 In jail he would argue with Trotskyists who quoted Majeke’s attacks on the missionaries, and would welcome priests who brought encouragement and news from outside.10 And he would write to some of his old mission teachers, to reminisce and to thank them. In prison he became more aware of the political influence of both the chieftaincy and the missions: “I have always considered it dangerous to underestimate the influence of both institutions amongst the people,” he wrote. “And for this reason I have repeatedly urged caution in dealing with them.”11
By the time of Mandela’s matriculation in 1934, Clarkebury had become the biggest educational center in Tembuland, with a proud tradition of teaching, mainly by British missionaries. It had expanded into an imposing group of solid stone buildings, including a teacher-training college, a secondary school and training shops for practical courses, with boys’ and girls’ hostels, sports fields and tennis courts—a self-contained settlement dominating an isolated hillside in the Engcobo district, with its own busy community. Its past achievement would look all the more remarkable after the coming of Bantu Education in 1953, when it lost its funds and became a ruined shell, with only a small school and a Methodist chapel to maintain its continuity. Today it presents a tragic vista of crumbling buildings, collapsed roofs and gutted schoolrooms, burned down by pupils rioting against the Transkei Bantustan government. There are still memorials of its past glory, including a plaque commemorating the Dalindyebo Mission School built in 1929. And some of the buildings are being restored, to provide a revived school: the rector explains that it will train Xhosas in how to create jobs, rather than to seek them, and that Mandela inspires local people to realize that small communities can produce great leaders. Mandela still revisits Clarkebury, talks and writes about it with warmth and chose it as the location from which to launch a new version of his autobiography.12
In 1934 Clarkebury was near the peak of its achievement. It was run by a formidable pedagogue, the Reverend Cecil Harris, who was closely involved with the local Xhosa communities and their chiefs. The Regent warned Mandela to treat Harris with suitable respect as “a Tembu at heart,” and Mandela shook his hand with awe—the first white hand he had ever shaken. Harris ruled Clarkebury with an iron hand, more like a field commander than a school head.13 He had an aristocratic style, and walked like a soldier, which he had been in the First World War. “He was very stern dealing with the students,” Mandela recalled; “severe with no levity.”14 But Mandela also saw a much more human and friendly side of Harris and his wife when he worked in their garden. Years later, while in jail, he traced the address of the Harrises’ daughter Mavis Knipe, who had been a child when he was at Clarkebury. She was “flabbergasted” to receive a letter from the famous prisoner.15 Mandela reminded her how her mother would often bring him “a buttered scone or bread with jam, which to a boy of sixteen was like a royal feast,” and asked her for information about the Dalindyebo family: “At our age one becomes deeply interested in facts and events which as youths we brushed aside as uninteresting.”16
Mandela was expecting the other pupils to treat him with respect, as a royal whose great-grandfather had founded the school. Instead he was mocked by one girl pupil for his country boy’s accent, his slowness in class and for walking in his brand-new boots “like a horse in spurs.”17 He found himself in a community which respected merit and intelligence more than hereditary status. But after the first shock he held his own, and with the benefit of his retentive memory he passed the Junior Certificate in two years. He also made some lasting friends, including Honourbrook Bala, later a prosperous doctor who joined the opposition in the Transkei and corresponded with Mandela in jail; Arthur Damane, who became a journalist on the radical paper the Guardian and was in jail with Mandela in Pretoria in 1960; Sidney Sidyiyo, the son of a teacher at Clarkebury, who became a prominent musician; and Reuben Mfecane, who became a trade unionist in Port Elizabeth and, like Mandela, ended up on Robben Island.18
Mandela was occasionally critical of the hierarchy at Clarkebury, and particularly of the food, which was minimal and at times almost inedible. But his first alma mater opened his eyes to the value of scientific knowledge, and introduced him to a much wider world than Tembuland, including as it did students from Johannesburg and beyond of both sexes—for unlike British public schools Clarkebury was coeducational. Even so, he still saw himself as a Tembu at heart, destined to advise his royal family, and continued to believe that “My roots were my destiny.”19
After two years at Clarkebury Mandela was sent farther away to Healdtown, a bigger Methodist institution, again following in the footsteps of Justice, the Regent’s son. Healdtown was almost as remote as Clarkebury: to reach it students had to walk ten miles from Fort Beaufort along a dirt road which wound through the valley, crossing and recrossing the stream, until it reached a cluster of fine Victorian buildings with red corrugated roofs, looking over a ravine. Today, like Clarkebury, the school is largely ruined. The handsome central block, with its picturesque clock tower, has been restored and, sponsored by Coca-Cola, revived as the comprehensive high school; but most of the schoolrooms and houses are empty shells with smashed windows, rusty roofs and overgrown gardens, occupied by nothing but the ghosts of the old community on the hillside.
Healdtown, thirty years younger than Clarkebury, had an even more resonant history. It was established in 1855, after Sir Harry Smith had subjugated the surrounding Xhosa tribes, in the midst of the battle areas. It was well placed as a British outpost, below the great escarpment of the Amatola hills, where the defeated Xhosa had taken refuge, and surrounded by old military frontier posts—Fort Beaufort, Fort Hare, Fort Brown. It was strictly Methodist, named after James Heald, a prominent Wesleyan Methodist British Member of Parliament, but it was also intended to serve as a practical experiment in training Fingo Christians in crafts and industry. That first experiment failed, but the college widened its scope and intake to become a teacher-training college and an important secondary school. By the 1930s it had over eight hundred boarders.20 It was close to other great missionary educational centers such as Lovedale, St. Matthew’s and Fort Hare, and together they comprised the greatest concentration of well-educated black students in southern Africa.
Healdtown, like Clarkebury, offered an uncompromising British education with few concessions to Xhosa culture. The missionary and imperialist traditions often converged, particularly on Sundays, when the schoolboys and -girls, in separate ranks, marched to church in their white shirts, black blazers and maroon-and-gold ties. The Union Jack was hoisted and they all sang “God Save the King” and “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika,” accompanied by the school brass band and watched by admiring visitors who came from far and wide.21 The school governor since 1927 had been the Reverend Arthur Wellington—whom Mandela would always enjoy mimicking—a die-hard English patriot who boasted of his descent from the victor of Waterloo. Wellington inculcated British history and literature in his students, assisted by a mainly English staff, and publicized the school by inviting eminent Britons to visit it, among them Lord Clarendon, the Governor-General of South Africa, who shortly before Mandela’s arrival had laid the foundation stones for the new dormitories and dining hall.22 Wellington was a hard-driving autocrat—though he protested that he was naturally lazy—who claimed to run the largest educational institution s
outh of the Sahara (Lovedale was in fact bigger).23 He banned alcohol at Healdtown. His staff called him “the Duke,” and regarded him as a missionary-statesman. Under Wellington, wrote Jack Dugard, who ran the teacher-training school after 1932, “within a short time the once rather dowdy mission was transformed into an attractive education centre.”24
The Methodism of Healdtown and Clarkebury did not make a deep religious impact on Mandela. He would never be a true believer, although many of his later friends, including his present wife, were educated by Methodists. But he would always be influenced by the schools’ puritanical atmosphere, the strict discipline and mental training, the Wesleyan emphasis on paring down ideas to their bare essentials, avoiding frills and distractions. He would always disapprove of heavy drinking or swearing; and the self-reliance in these boarding-school surroundings would add to his fortitude.
Mandela was immersed not just in Methodism, but in British history and geography. “As a teenager in the countryside I knew about London and Glasgow as much as I knew about Cape Town and Johannesburg,” he would recall from jail fifty years later, writing to the Lord Provost of Glasgow and mentioning Scots patriots like William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and the Earl of Argyll.25 But he was resistant to becoming a “black Englishman,” and took great pride in his own Xhosa culture, encouraged by his history teacher, the much-liked Weaver Newana, who added his own oral history to the accounts of the Xhosa wars already familiar to the boy. Mandela won the prize for the best Xhosa essay in 1938; and he was thrilled when the famous Xhosa poet Krune Mkwayi visited the college, appearing in a kaross of hide, with two spears, to recite his dramatic poems in praise of the Xhosas.
Mandela made close friendships with several Xhosa boys who subsequently joined the ANC, including Jimmy Njongwe, with whom he later “starved and suffered in Johannesburg,” and who became a doctor and later a key organizer of the Defiance Campaign.26 He also made friends outside his tribe among Sotho speakers like Zachariah Molete, who later befriended him in Alexandra Township in Johannesburg, and the zoology teacher Frank Lebentlele.27 Mandela was much impressed by another Sotho speaker, his housemaster, the Reverend Seth Mokitimi, who later became the first black president of the Methodist Church; Mokitimi pushed through reforms to give students more freedom and better food.28
The white teachers at Healdtown kept aloof from the black teachers, eating separately: one even had to resign after other teachers complained that he was fraternizing with blacks. “What a racist place Healdtown was and continued to be!” wrote Phyllis Ntantala, who was a student till 1935, and whose son Pallo Jordan would later join Mandela’s cabinet.29 A few of the younger white teachers, though, were beginning to make friends with black colleagues and some students.30 Like Clarkebury, the school was coeducational, but girls and boys were strictly separated outside the schoolrooms, and could be expelled for talking to each other. By 1935, however, the Reverend Mokitimi had instituted mixed dinners every Sunday, where girls and boys sat together wearing their best clothes. The more sophisticated and prosperous students loved to show off; as Phyllis Ntantala wrote, “They went to those dinners dressed to kill.”31 But for those from simpler homes the European etiquette of knives and forks was a strain. Mandela recalled: “We left the table hungry and depressed.”32
The Duke and his white staff had little sense that they were educating future black leaders. They were exasperated by the students’ periodic protests and strikes, usually starting over the poor food, but which they suspected were really based on conflicts between tribes, or between town and country. In 1936 there were more serious political protests when the government’s new “Hertzog Bills” removed blacks from the common voters’ roll and abolished the title deeds of the local Fingo people, who were in turn disillusioned by the failure of the missionary staff to defend their interests.33 But Mandela was only vaguely aware of black politics. At Healdtown he first heard about the African National Congress, which was set up in 1912; the Tembu king had paid thirty cattle to enroll his own tribe in it. Yet to Mandela “it was something vague located in the distant past.”34 The mission teachers were inclined to ascribe any political protests to “agitators” stirred up by communism, and most saw themselves as educating a small elite who were quite different from ordinary blacks: as one envious government official explained to them, they were dealing with the layer of fertile soil on top, while he dealt with the hard rock which was impervious to change.35
Mandela was still torn between the two aspects of the British presence in South Africa: the brutal military subjugation of the Xhosas and the enlightened influence of liberal English education. This contradiction had been summed up in a poem, “The Prince of Britain,” by Mandela’s favorite poet, Mkwayi, written to celebrate the visit of the Prince of Wales to the Ciskei in 1925:
You sent us the truth, denied us the truth;
You sent us the life, deprived us of life;
You sent us the light, we sit in the dark,
Shivering, benighted in the bright noonday sun.36
Mandela graduated from Healdtown in 1938, and the next year went on to the university at Fort Hare, a few miles from Healdtown and a mile from the great missionary school of Lovedale, to which it was linked. The Regent bought him a three-piece suit: “We thought there could never be anyone smarter than him at Fort Hare,” said Mandela’s cousin Ntombizodwa.37
The South African Native College at Fort Hare was a tiny black university, the only one in South Africa, but it was destined to be a seedbed of the revolution that followed. In 1939 it was only twenty-three years old, having been set up, surprisingly, in the midst of the First World War, and opened by Prime Minister Louis Botha himself. The first principal, Alexander Kerr, suspected that Botha had regarded it as a sop, a gesture to the blacks in wartime, when the whites feared “native trouble.” But after white governments hardened their attitudes to blacks in the 1920s, the anomaly of its existence was even more remarkable.38 The later Prime Minister General Jan Smuts worried little about its revolutionary potential; he viewed Fort Hare in the context of his policy of trusteeship. When he addressed the university’s graduates in 1938, the year before Mandela arrived, he argued: “The Europeans have come here as the bearers of the higher culture. They have been in some sense a missionary race, but if salvation is ever to come to the native peoples of South Africa it will finally have to come from themselves.”39
The university’s start had been very modest, with twenty students preparing for matriculation (the first four candidates all failed).40 When Mandela arrived there were still fewer than two hundred students (of whom sixty-seven were Xhosa-speaking), including ten Indians and sixteen Coloureds.41 But the influence of Fort Hare already went far beyond its student numbers. Supported by the surrounding schools, it had become the focus for the intellectual elite of black South Africans. Its student body was both aristocratic and meritocratic, bringing together royal and mission families. It had been founded not only by white missionaries but by black educationalists from pioneering mission families, including the Jabavus, the Makiwanes and the Bokwes, all of whom were linked by marriage. The great teacher John Tengo Jabavu, editor of the black newspaper Imvo, was a promoter of Fort Hare: his son “Jili” was its first black professor, and married the daughter of the Reverend Tennyson Makiwane. Jili Jabavu was later joined as professor by Z. K. Matthews, the son of a Kimberley miner, who had become the first graduate of Fort Hare; he called himself “a new specimen in the zoo of African mankind.”42 Matthews in turn married Frieda Bokwe, the sister of his college friend Rosebery Bokwe, from another prominent mission family.
This small elite was all the better educated because Fort Hare had admitted women students from the beginning. The principal had objected, but the African members declared that “there was little point in educating their young men if their future wives were unable to offer them the companionship and community of interest which only an educated woman could give.”43 By the late thirties, when Mandela arrived, Fort H
are still had only a handful of women students, housed in a separate hostel in an old farmhouse. They were correspondingly in demand, and were often cleverer than the men—which came as a shock to Mandela. But he was aware of the strong women among his Xhosa forebears, including the mother of the Mandela who founded his clan. “Women have been monarchs and leaders,” he explained later, “in some of the most difficult times in our history.”44
Generations of students from Fort Hare and Lovedale, many connected with the chiefly families of the Transkei, would develop formidable family networks, often with strong Christian values, self-disciplined and frequently teetotal, reminiscent of early Victorian British networks like the Clapham Sect. Jili Jabavu’s daughter Noni, who spent some years in Britain, described her own extended family’s “all-embracing net” as spreading out from Fort Hare and Lovedale, reminding her of the English old school ties.45 That network was to be tragically torn apart during the apartheid years by political persecution and exile. But the black professional middle class with its missionary influence would never be destroyed or bypassed, as it was in other parts of Africa like Ghana or Uganda; and some of its offspring—including Pallo Jordan, the son of Phyllis Ntantala and A. C. Jordan, and Stella Sigcau, daughter of the King of East Pondoland—would join Nelson Mandela’s government in 1994.
Mandela was never at the heart of this intellectual elite, but it included many of his friends and relations. And he always respected Z. K. Matthews, with whom he had family links. The big, square-jawed professor, who taught generations of black students at Fort Hare, infuriated many rebels with his political moderation, but usually came to influence them with his powers of reasoning and quiet argument. Mandela was to admire Matthews still more after he originated the ANC’s Freedom Charter in the fifties. “There are some people inside and outside the movement who are critical of his cautious attitude,” he wrote to Matthews’s widow after he died in 1970, “but I am not sure now whether they were not wild.”