Going to the Mountain

by Ndaba Mandela

  “Oh, Ndaba.” He sat in his chair with the paper folded between his hands. “Is this true?”

  “Yes, Granddad.”

  It was hard to find words to explain the situation without sounding like I was trying to weasel out of it. He had no time for people trying to make excuses. He sat in his chair, listening in that deeply listening Madiba way as I floundered through the whole sordid tale.

  “Granddad, I’m so sorry.”

  “Oh, Ndaba, I can’t believe this. I’m shocked. This is so below you.”

  “I know, Granddad. I’m sorry.”

  “I can’t believe you would do such a thing. Are you serious about your life? Do you understand the nature of the opportunities extended to you with your name? There are opportunities to help people—to do great things—and there are equal opportunities to burn it all to the ground. To humiliate the people who love and care for you. Your name is your name, but who are you? You have a choice. Every minute of every day, the choice is yours.”

  He was angry, but more than that, he was deeply disappointed. After a while, he told me to go. Walking out of that room, leaving my granddad with this leaden expression of sadness on his face, I felt like I’d been punched in the throat. But I was determined to fix this. I would pass my matric, for starters. After that I’d be going to the mountain, and that would make me a man in his eyes. He’d be proud of me. I would redeem myself. Meanwhile, I’d lay low. Stay under the radar. Try not to stir things up.

  The matric was not a huge success, but I scraped together a passing grade and figured, It is what it is. My score wasn’t high enough to get into University of Cape Town, which would have been my first choice. I had no idea what I might be interested in studying at a fallback school, so I pitched my granddad on the idea of a gap year, but he shut that down hard.

  “No, no, no,” he said. “Straight to education. Don’t play around.”

  “Granddad, all my friends are taking gap years—going overseas, working, backpacking.”

  “Well, maybe they can afford it.”

  “If you’d let me get a job, I could pay for it myself!”

  “I mean they can afford time away from their studies. Clearly, you can not.”

  I trudged off to Rand Afrikaans University and halfheartedly declared a major in psychology. I decided that was not for me and switched to math and accounting. Not for me. I started politics, and that was more interesting, but not as interesting as going to clubs, sleeping in, and chatting up pretty girls who were up to the task of doing my homework. I hardly ever went to a lecture and never turned in an assignment, but I made a lot of friends and a lot of friends of friends, including Trevor Noah, who was hosting a radio show and working as an actor on a soap opera. I thought this was cool, but I wasn’t that motivated. I told myself that if the Old Man wasn’t going to give me a gap year, I would bloody well give myself one.

  I lived in residence during the week, and weekends were party time, so I didn’t go home very often, but when I did go home, I went to Houghton. My dad was always off with his mates on weekends, and he was not distressed to see me go back to living with Madiba and Graça. Mama Xoli was glad to have me back, as always. The Old Man provided me with a car—the cheapest little hatchback on the market—but he took it away from me when my half term results came back.

  “No more privileges,” he said. “Ndaba, this is not acceptable.”

  Out of six subjects, I had written only one of my exams. I had scored an F7, which meant I wouldn’t be allowed to return. Turns out you had to have a minimum level of credits in order to study at the institution. I didn’t even know this was the case. That’s how much I cared. My main concern was getting to enjoy my holiday. I was happily hanging out with my friend Selema when I got a call from Zelda, the secretary. Madiba had instructed her to arrange a meeting with the dean. I was to attend, present myself properly, throw myself on their mercy and pledge to get my act together. The meeting went off as he intended it to. I trudged back for the second half term, and he dogged me from a distance.

  “Where’s your report? Did you write your calculus test? When can I see your marks? This is not acceptable, Ndaba! You’re capable of much better than this.” And so on and so forth while I performed an elaborate sort of shell game, trying to show him only the passing marks. When he got on my case, I said, “Why is it that I have to do as I’m told. Where would we all be right now if you had always done as you were told?”

  When I said things like that, the Old Man sat there listening in that still, silent way. He didn’t bother to point out to me the difference between his resistance and my rebellion. Maybe he knew that I was about to discover for myself that resistance in the right ways, at the right times, and for the right reasons makes us stronger, while flailing, selfish, anger-driven rebellion makes us weak. I hadn’t yet figured out that if your freedom casts yourself and those who love you into a prison of worry and chaos, you’re probably not doing freedom right.

  Just before I turned eighteen, my dad went to Madiba to get the ball rolling on the whole going to the mountain of it all. I wasn’t in on this discussion. I was just hanging out watching TV when Mandla came in and said, “Dad and I decided it’s time for you to go to the mountain. You’re going next week.” Just like that. That’s how they do you. They don’t want you to think too much about getting your penis cut. This is an off-putting idea. It’s hardcore. It was not high on the list of things I wanted to do. My birthday is in December, and most of my friends at the time were Zulu and Sotho, tribes that have moved away from this particular tradition and don’t really do it anymore. So they were all going on holiday, and I was going to the mountain to get my penis cut. I was ambivalent, as any young man would be in those circumstances, but I knew there was no discussing it. If the men in my family decided it was my time to go, it was my time to go.

  My dad went into Madiba’s office, and he was in there a long time. Long enough for me to think about it. I knew what this would mean to my granddad, what a huge deal it was to everyone in our family. It wouldn’t be so bad. I’d be able to bring girls to lunch. I could come and go as I pleased. The Old Man and my dad and Mandla would have to respect me as an equal. I could be down with that. The respect. Respect would be nice, I decided.

  My dad came out of Madiba’s office, and he did not look happy. He said, “Your granddad says you’re not going.”

  “What?”

  “He said no. He said, ‘This boy is not ready.’ So that’s it.”

  And that was it. The Old Man was not going to change his mind. Dad and Mandla couldn’t just take me anyway, because my granddad would certainly figure it out, and that would make it worse.

  I was like, “Oh, well. If that’s what the Old Man says, we have to respect his decision.” I won’t lie. My initial reaction was, Yeeeeeesss! Thank you, God! It was a rush of relief. But while I was on holiday—the quintessential eighteenth birthday holiday, where you get all kinds of party on and nobody threatens your genitals with a sharp instrument—I started feeling weirdly disappointed. I knew my cousins who were my age and everyone back in Qunu would expect me to be there and ask why I wasn’t. I didn’t know how to explain it. I thought about the initiates gathering in the dusk on the rolling plains. I could almost hear the music.

  8

  Intyatyambo engayi kufa ayibonakali.

  “The flower that never dies is invisible.”

  I was not a big reader during my school days. Beyond the prescribed reading for school, I read comics. The first book I really devoured purely because I wanted to was The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Auntie Maki gave it to me when I was in high school, at a time when things were rather going off the rails and people who loved me were starting to worry.

  She said, “It’s about a shepherd who goes on a quest to find a great treasure that was revealed to him in a dream.” But of course, if you have read this book, you know it’s about much more than that. The shepherd’s quest got me interested, but it was the deeper m
eaning of this story that resonated and refused to let me go. Back then I hardly ever finished a book, but I finished this one because I liked the way it spoke to the way we treat others and the way we interpret our own dreams and aspirations, which are shockingly easy to discard. The shepherd’s journey was the journey of my own life. I could see it even then.

  At the start of The Alchemist, young Santiago falls asleep in an abandoned church and dreams about a treasure hidden near the pyramids in Egypt, and he’s determined to go find it. An elderly friend introduces him to the idea of Personal Legend—your blessing, your path, your passion—and says that all children know their Personal Legend, but as we grow up, people constantly tell us that our quest is silly or impractical or above our reach. And then, as we get older, we compound these doubts with “layers of prejudice, fear and guilt” until the Legend is crushed into the farthest, darkest corner of the soul. Unseen. Unheard. But it can still be felt. It’s still there.

  After my disastrous “gap year,” I found myself back at home with my granddad, sorting through my options. He suggested I return to high school, to the point when things went off the rails. This idea was not particularly attractive to me.

  I said to Aunt Maki, “I’d feel like an idiot, going back to repeat my final year of matric.”

  “You won’t repeat it,” she said. “You’ll do it differently this time. If you’re smart.”

  “I could retake my matric,” I said. “I know I could get a higher score. Then I could go to Cape Town, like I wanted to in the first place.”

  We decided together that the best course was for me to go to Damelin College and refresh that last year of high school. I was down with this, because Damelin wasn’t the typical highly regimented South African high school where you wear a uniform and comply with a lot of rules stemming from whatever religion runs the school. At Damelin, you could take high school or college courses or a combination of the two. You could wear whatever you bloody pleased and smoke in the courtyard on breaks. It was the school where a lot of “troubled” kids were sent. Yes, let’s use the word “troubled” because it would be wrong to say “bad kids” or “fuck ups.” I don’t believe that everyone who fucks up is automatically bad, and I’m certain that a lot of bad kids go through school and never make a false step.

  In any case, Damelin was a good choice for me. I did do far better on the matric. I scored high enough to go on to university in Pretoria, which is known for their Politics and International Relations department. I had become increasingly fascinated by world politics, sitting with my granddad, reading the newspaper, and listening to his take on the volatile state of global relations.

  At the end of 2002, the president of the United States, George W. Bush, had basically given the finger to the United Nations (UN) Security Council. He claimed that Iraq was developing WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) and used this as justification for launching a full-scale invasion of Iraq, even though the UN inspectors said there was no evidence that Iraq had WMDs. The secretary-general of the UN at that time was Kofi Atta Annan, a diplomat from Ghana. The Old Man took this very personally.

  He said, “I have to wonder if Bush found it easier to disregard the United Nations because the present secretary-general is an African.”

  “Granddad, if they invade, will that mean the US—and the UK too, because it’s Blair as well—are they no longer South Africa’s allies?”

  “The United States of America is a great country. We have many, many friends there and in the United Kingdom, but let’s be real, the US has committed atrocities and never expressed one whit of sorrow for it. Think about the atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ndaba, who do you think those bombs were really aimed at?”

  “The Soviet Union.”

  “Yes! The intention was to say, ‘Here! You see what happens to you if you get to cross purposes with us.’ They are so arrogant—not the people, but the government—they would kill innocent people to demonstrate their power to the rest of the world.”

  In January 2003, Madiba made statements on national TV and radio and gave a blowtorch of a speech to the International Women’s Forum. He was angry, and he didn’t hold back. When I watched the speech on YouTube, I saw the pugilist in him come out. The rock hammerer. The freedom fighter.

  “George Bush as well as Tony Blair are undermining an idea that was sponsored by their predecessors,” he said. “They do not care. Is it because the secretary-general of the United Nations is now a black man?”

  The large audience cheered.

  “They never did that when secretary-generals were white. What is the lesson of them acting outside of the United Nations? Are they saying any country which believes that they will not be able to get the support of the other countries are entitled to go outside the United Nations and ignore it? Or are they saying, ‘We, the United States of America, are the only superpower in the world now. We can act as we like’? Are they saying this is a lesson we should follow? Or are they saying, ‘We are special. What we do should not be done by anybody’?”

  He laid out his theory about Nagasaki and Hiroshima and pretty much flamed George W. Bush.

  “Who are they now to pretend that they are the policemen the world? What I’m condemning is that one power with a president who has no foresight—who cannot think properly—is now ready to plunge the world into a holocaust. And I’m happy that the people of the world, especially those of the United States of America, are standing up and opposing their own president. I hope that opposition will one day make him understand that he has made the greatest mistake of his life in trying to bring about carnage and to police the world without any authority from the international body. It is something we have to condemn without reservation.”

  The speech was all over the Internet the next day. Headlines naturally latched onto the harshest remarks, but that was fine with the Old Man; he didn’t regret a word of it. He told me that George H. W. Bush—the former president, father of George W.—called that evening.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “Oh, he asked me in a very civil manner, ‘Please, Mr. Mandela, do not say any more bad things about my son.’”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I told him, ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ve said my piece. That’s all I have to say about the matter.’”

  Having been on the receiving end of the Old Man’s anger, I almost felt sorry for both Bushes, Junior and Senior.

  DURING MY FIRST YEAR at the university—the first year that mattered, anyway—I was primarily focused on my studies, but I also made an effort to get reacquainted with my mom, who had settled down somewhat. I’d seen her only a few times during high school, but that sojourn with my father had opened my eyes to some of the hard realities of my mom’s life.

  My dad had told me, “The Old Man set her up in the East Rand—house, job, all set up. But she’s far away from me. I’m a man. What do you expect? She was angry all the time. She wanted to be with her family. So she goes back to Soweto. The Old Man is like, ‘What, she doesn’t appreciate what I’ve done for her?’ And maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she would have appreciated not being told where to go and what to do. See, Ndaba, this is the disconnect—the Old Man, he’s a great man, but he doesn’t understand things like this. He’s great at running the country. Not so great at running a family.”

  I stopped by my mother’s house one day, and she was glad to see me. She cooked for me and talked to me about her job as a social worker and asked me about my classes and the girls I dated. It was small talk. We didn’t revisit the past or delve into any big issues of why things went down the way they did. We were just hanging out together, eating supper, watching TV, reestablishing a comfortably grown-up version of the bond we had when I was a little boy. She let me be me; I let her be her. We laughed a lot. I had totally forgotten how funny and lighthearted she could be when she was happy. She’d tease and prank me and tell hilarious stories about people and places in her life. It was a good place to begin
a new relationship. I assumed there would be plenty of time for that.

  A few weeks later, I stopped by again, and then I made it a habit to come and see her once a month or so. One day, I came to my mother’s house, and Aunt Lucy was plaiting Mom’s hair. It looked strange. Aunt Lucy kept combing all this white, flaky skin from my mother’s head, like dandruff except—it was just strange. The next time I came to see my mom, I could see that she was losing weight. She didn’t tell me she was sick, never even hinted that she was scared or depressed or hurting, but one day Aunt Lucy called me and said, “Oh, Ndaba. She’s not well. She went to hospital and stayed there for a week. They gave her pills and sent her home. They said there’s nothing more they can do.”

  “Tell her I’m coming,” I said.

  My mind went immediately to tuberculosis. Maybe pneumonia. I went to see her in Soweto, and she was not in a good state. She had a relentless, wracking cough. A strange white rash had broken out on her temples and forehead.

  “I’m worried about her,” I told Mandla. “Something is very wrong.”

  “She won’t get the best care at the free hospital in Soweto,” he said. “You must take her to a private hospital.”

  That sounded like a good idea. I did some research. Mandla helped me make arrangements, and we moved her to a private hospital closer to Houghton, thinking that would make all the difference. I thought she’d get better and go home again, and meanwhile, I’d be able to see her every other day. This was my plan.