The Fort Hare which Mandela joined in 1939 was a small, compact institution with a quadrangle of simple Italianate buildings surrounded by student hostels. It was still dominated by its first principal, Alexander Kerr, a strict and austere Scot who avoided public controversy but was dedicated to the advancement and academic standards of the university, without color prejudice: “He dealt with every student as he was,” said Z. K. Matthews, “and colour did not enter the relationship.” Kerr was a passionate teacher of the English language, imbuing his students with a love of its literature—above all of Shakespeare, whom he taught with a vividness which made him seem totally relevant to contemporary Africa.46 Mandela would always remember verses from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” which Kerr declaimed in his Scots accent:
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove …47
The rigorous but liberal scholarship of Kerr and the two African professors, Jabavu and Matthews, fortified the students throughout their later revolutionary phases. As well as its Coloured and Indian students Fort Hare included a few local whites, but it was dominated by Africans. A young African-American academic, Ralph Bunche—later Undersecretary-General of the United Nations and a Nobel Prize winner—visited Fort Hare in 1938, and declared that “the good native student is the equal of any Indian or Coloured student.”48
Mandela was proud to be at Fort Hare, and the Regent was glad to have a member of his clan at the famous college. The teachers told their students that they would become the leaders of their people, and when Mandela arrived as a freshman of twenty-one he was daunted by the sophistication and confidence of his seniors. His friend Justice had stayed behind at Healdtown, but Mandela now found a new ally and idol in Kaiser Matanzima, his nephew from the Tembu royal family. Like Mandela, Kaiser (or K.D., as he was called) was descended from King Ngubengcuka, but through the senior line, the “Great House,” and he was destined to be a king or paramount chief. Technically he was Mandela’s nephew, but he was older and more confident as both leader and scholar: he would be the first chief to take a degree.49 He became Mandela’s mentor, encouraging him in his future role as royal counselor. In later years the two cousins were to become political opponents, but at Fort Hare they were best friends. They both lived in the Methodist hostel, went to church together, played football, went dancing and did not drink. They were both very tall, with courtly manners, fond of clothes and quite vain. “The two of us were very handsome young men,” Kaiser would recall, “and all the women wanted us.”50 Even the tribal circumcision names by which they called each other, Dalibunga and Daliwonga, made them sound like twins. Sixty years later, from his Great Place in the Transkei, Kaiser looked back with gratitude on that youthful friendship: “We were always together: when someone saw me alone, they would say, ‘Where’s Nelson?’ … We had warm hearts together.” Mandela even found Kaiser his wife, Agrineth, the daughter of Chief Sangoni, which was all the more important since Kaiser had forsworn polygamy.51 And despite their later political differences, Mandela would never deny his earlier admiration of Matanzima: “You probably will not believe it,” he wrote to Fatima Meer from prison in 1985, “when I tell you he was once my idol.”52
Mandela, though less grand than K.D., was nevertheless also seen as a young prince; and royal families still had a special status even in the intellectual atmosphere of Fort Hare, which inspired both respect and resentment. “Xhosa princes think the world belongs to them,” said Joe Matthews, the professor’s son who would follow Mandela to Fort Hare. “Some would kick tribesmen out of their way, thinking everyone else unimportant. Aristocrats can’t believe you’ll contradict them—as in Britain, like the women in Harrods who ignore everyone else and say loudly: ‘I’ll have some of that.’ ”53 Mandela never displayed that arrogance, and always respected commoners like Oliver Tambo who were cleverer than he; but he became accustomed to people treating him like a prince.
Mandela blossomed at Fort Hare. He loved the university’s beautiful setting on the banks of the Tyume River, below the Amatola Hills, and would later reminisce about the journey by the railway line curving along the hillside, and the magnificent landscape: “the green bushes and singing streams after the summer rains, the open veldt and clean air.”54 He excelled at cross-country running and boxing, and his heroes were sportsmen and athletes rather than intellectuals: later, from jail, he would ask about his rival in the mile races, “Sosthenes” Mokgokong.55 He enjoyed ballroom dancing and the drama society: he once played John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. And he made new friends from many backgrounds in this meeting place for blacks from all over the country. “You saw the tribes welding into a new nation,” remembered Noni Jabavu. “You had only to listen to the exclamations and shouts. Their various English accents gave you a sense of the vast spread of South Africa.”56
Some of Mandela’s friends were already active in politics: Paul Mahabane, who spent holidays with him, was the son of a former president of the ANC; Ntsu Mokhehle, a brilliant scientist, would become head of the Basutoland Congress Party; Nyathi Khongisa stirred up the students by attacking Prime Minister Smuts as a racialist and publicly hoping that Nazi Germany would defeat Britain, so that Africans could overthrow European domination; Lincoln Mkentane, from another prominent Transkei family, joined the ANC and was imprisoned; Oliver Tambo, an outstanding scholar in both science and the arts, was already a keen political debater.57 But Mandela himself was not then politically aware. He was not close to Tambo, and was embarrassed by the rebelliousness of friends like Mahabane. His immediate ambition was to be a court interpreter, a much-esteemed profession in the rural areas, which promised both influence and status: “I could not resist the glitter of a civil service career.”58 He studied interpreting at Fort Hare, together with law, native administration, politics and English. He saw a degree as his passport not to political leadership, but to a position in the community which would enable him to support his family.
Most of the other students were not very political either, and expected to become civil servants or, most often, teachers, which worried the university’s Governing Council: “It cannot be expected that the teaching profession will continue to absorb all grades,” the council reported in 1940.59 There had been a time when Fort Hare was more revolutionary. In the early 1930s the young communist Eddie Roux had pitched a tent on the hill near the university, and given courses in Marxism-Leninism which fascinated African students, including the young Govan Mbeki, while the black American Max Yergan taught Mbeki about dialectical materialism.60 But by Mandela’s time most students were preoccupied with their careers, and the Red Star had waned after Stalin made his pact with Hitler in August 1939. Soon after Mandela arrived at Fort Hare, Britain declared war on Germany, and Prime Minister Jan Smuts immediately announced that South Africa was entering the war on Britain’s side. When Smuts came to talk to the students at Fort Hare they nearly all applauded him—including Mandela, who was relieved that Smuts’s English accent was almost as poor as his own.61 Mandela eagerly supported Britain’s stand against Hitler, and would remain fascinated by Winston Churchill. Over fifty years later he would tell Churchill’s daughter Mary Soames how he listened to his wartime broadcasts at Fort Hare, and recalled how Churchill had escaped from the Afrikaners during the Boer War.62 But at twenty-two, Mandela remembered, “Neither war nor politics were my concern.”63
Mandela seemed to have golden prospects as a future civil servant, but they were to be smashed by his rebelliousness. This did not concern politics, but a more immediate cause—the terrible food. The meals at Fort Hare were spartan, and the African students felt all the more hard done by after they discovered that the white students at Rhodes University, which they visited for sporting contests and debates, were much better fed.64 In his second year Mandela had been elected to the Students’ Representative Council, but on
ly a quarter of the eligible students had voted, the majority having boycotted the elections and demanded improvements in the college diet and more powers for the council. Mandela and the other five elected representatives resigned, and the shrewd principal, Dr. Kerr, ordered new elections, to be held at dinner, when all the students would be present. But again only a quarter voted, electing the same six representatives. The other five agreed to stay on the council, but Mandela felt he could not ignore the views of the majority, and resigned again. He was encouraged in his stand by Kaiser Matanzima, who had previously been on the council.
Dr. Kerr summoned Mandela, and warned him sympathetically but firmly that if he continued to resist he would be expelled. Mandela spent a sleepless night, torn between his ambition and his duty to his fellow students: “I was frightened,” he said later. “I feared K.D. more than Dr. Kerr.”65 The next day he confirmed that he would not serve. Kerr gave him one last chance to think again, and told him to return to his studies. Believing that Kerr was infringing students’ rights, Mandela refused, and was expelled. He went home to the Great Place, where the Regent, angry with him for throwing away his career, told him to apologize and go back to Fort Hare. But Mandela’s stubbornness came to the fore. “He was very obstinate,” said his cousin Ntombizodwa. “He would never go back.”66
Soon the Regent dropped a bombshell which brought their relationship to a head. He believed he would not live much longer, and had arranged for both his son Justice and Mandela to marry and to settle down with their own families. Mandela was horrified: the girl chosen for him was rather fat and did not attract him, and he also knew she was in love with Justice: “She was probably no more anxious to be burdened with me than I with her.”67 It was the breaking point. Mandela knew he owed a great deal to the Regent, who had adopted him as his own child and had paid for his education, and who was now ill and in need of support. But he was determined to have his own freedom: he would secretly run away with Justice, to try his fortunes in Johannesburg.
“Life has its own way of forcing decisions on those who hesitate,” he wrote afterward. This was his own choice, which put an abrupt end both to his tribal expectations and, it seemed, to his university career: “Suddenly all my beautiful dreams crumbled and the prize that was so near my grasp vanished like snow in the summer sun.” But the decision had even greater repercussions than he realized at the time. If he had not defied Fort Hare’s principal, he reflected four decades later from jail, “perhaps I would have been safe from all the storms that have blown me from pillar to post over the last thirty years.” As it was, he was plunged into a much more dangerous sea; but it rapidly opened up much wider horizons, through which “I could see the history and culture of my own people as part and parcel of the history and culture of the entire human race.”68
3
Big City
1941–1945
IN APRIL 1941, aged twenty-two, Mandela left the Great Place for Johannesburg with Justice. He was one of the thousands of rural blacks who arrived every year in the “City of Gold,” most of them in blankets or tattered clothes, hoping to find jobs as mineworkers, servants or laborers. They were a familiar sight to white Johannesburgers, commemorated in contemporary films and novels, from Jim Comes to Jo-burg to Cry, the Beloved Country.1 Their arrival seemed an extreme example of the transition from rural poverty to metropolitan sophistication, typified by the recurring image of a bewildered tribesman gazing in wonder at the skyscrapers, fast cars and bright lights of the white man’s city. But it was a misleading image: rural Africans from rooted homes could have a deeper sense of security and a clearer ambition in the city jungle than rootless urbanites, who took its confusion for granted. And few whites realized that the country bumpkins included highly educated, ambitious young people with proud traditions, who were to prove capable of overturning white supremacy within their lifetime.
Johannesburg was only fifty-five years old, but was already one of the major cities of Africa, with a confident center including grand hotels and a stone cathedral, wealthy suburbs spreading to the north and sprawling black townships in the southwest. The Second World War was now creating a boom economy in South Africa, as in other industrial centers across the world: the cutback of imports stimulated local production, and created an urgent need for black labor to replace white workers, many of whom were fighting overseas. Between the censuses of 1936 and 1946 the black population in South Africa’s cities increased by almost 50 percent, from 1,142,000 to 1,689,000. When the rural tribal areas were devastated by droughts the flow into Johannesburg turned into a flood, and for two years the government abandoned influx control and its enforcement by pass laws. The inrush created chaotic new shantytowns around the fringes of the city, but also new opportunities and hopes for ambitious young blacks—and new political aspirations encouraged by the war.
The South African government needed the support of blacks in wartime, and 120,000 Africans and Coloureds had been recruited by the armed forces as drivers, servants and guards. They were armed with spears, not guns, but felt themselves to be part of the fight against Nazism and racism. In the middle of the war the government even began to relax the traditional policy of segregation that confined blacks to their own townships, schools and buses. In a major speech in February 1942, Prime Minister Smuts described how the high white expectations of segregation had been sadly disappointed, as the rest of the world moved in the opposite direction: “Isolation has gone and segregation has fallen on evil days too.” It was fruitless to attempt to resist the movement to the cities: “You might as well try to sweep the oceans back with a broom.”
But the African migration into the cities was provoking Afrikaner nationalists, who felt threatened by black competition. They campaigned all the more fiercely against the “black peril,” and demanded a more extreme segregation, which they called apartheid—literally “separateness.” Smuts dared not make concessions to the blacks which would risk frightening white voters into the nationalists’ camp. “What will it profit this country,” he wrote to a friend in June 1943, “if justice is done to the underdog and the whole caboodle then, including the underdog, is handed over to the Wreckers?”2
It was in the gold mines that Mandela and Justice first looked for work. The mines, which were at the center of Johannesburg’s economy, were strictly segregated, with enclosed compounds and hostels for the black workers who made up the vast majority of their labor force cut off from the rest of the city. The mining companies maintained close links with chiefs in the rural areas, who helped provide their cheap labor, and reproduced the tribal hierarchies and divisions within the mines in order to bolster discipline and allegiance. The Regent had written some months earlier to arrange a job for Justice as a clerk with Crown Mines, one of the oldest and biggest; and Justice persuaded the headman to give Mandela a humbler job as a mine policeman, with the prospect of a clerical job in three months.3 For a short time Mandela worked as a night watchman, with a helmet, whistle and knobkerrie, or club—the very picture of the loyal company employee—patrolling the entrance to the compound, which bore notices reading “Natives Cross Here” (one was amended to “Natives Very Cross Here”).4 At the time the mine workers were seething with discontent about their conditions and wages—anger which later erupted in the mine strike of 1946.5 Mandela kept aloof from the politics, but would always remain proud of having been a mine worker, as he would later tell the union.6
However important Mandela may have felt in Qunu, he was quite insignificant in Johannesburg, and he soon found himself in trouble for boasting that he had run away from home and deceived the Regent. He and Justice were ordered to return home, and fired from the mine. Mandela, who had no wish to return to the country, now had to find a job urgently. A cousin sent him to see a black real estate agent, Walter Sisulu, who had an office—before Johannesburg was as strictly segregated as it later became—in the Berkeley Arcade in the city center.
Sisulu was a short, energetic man of twenty-eight, wit
h light skin, gap-teeth, spectacles and a habit of chewing his lip. He lacked great presence, but he had extraordinary inner confidence—“superconfidence,” he called it—and was to be the most important political influence in Mandela’s life.7 He had already shown unusual resilience. Like Mandela, he came from a poor region of the Transkei—in his case the Engcobo district—but he lacked Mandela’s status. His father was a white magistrate called Victor Dickinson, who had fallen in love with Walter’s mother in Engcobo, but had left her with two children.8 Walter’s mother talked respectfully about his father, but Walter realized that he had failed in his duty to his family.9 Walter was brought up by his mother and his uncle, a headman, to be God-fearing and respectful toward whites. He enjoyed reading the Bible, and identified with underdogs like David and Moses, but he rebelled against the conservatism of his mission teachers and his family, who once warned him: “I doubt if you’ll be allowed to work for the white man.”
Sisulu left school at sixteen, became a cowherd and then tried his luck in Johannesburg. He worked for four months in a gold mine, hacking rock a mile underground, where he came to be enraged by the brutality of the system. After working in a kitchen in East London he returned to Johannesburg with a new interest in trade unionism. He stayed with his mother, who was now working as a washerwoman for white housewives, and was fired from a succession of factory jobs for insolence and disobedience. He took refuge from his humiliations by learning Xhosa history from a great-grandson of Hintsa, the great chieftain who had also inspired Mandela, but at the same time he broadened his outlook to embrace a wider African unity. After working for two years in a bank he had recently set up his own estate agency with five black friends, which he hoped would make him independent of whites (it was to be taken over by a white firm two years later).10
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