Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  Her mother, along with her children, worked hard planting and harvesting, taking the mealies—the corn—off the cob and then grinding them between two stones either to store or to make bread. Leabie could never remember a time when they did not have to buy mealies to supplement their own, so they were never quite self-sufficient. But they did not have to buy milk as their cows and goats always gave them a good supply.

  Unlike her husband, Nosekeni was a devout Christian, and even though the concept of formal education was alien to her, she did not resist when some fellow Methodists said her son was a bright young man and ought to go to school. At the age of about seven, Mandela was dressed for the first time in a pair of trousers—his father’s trousers, cut off at the knee and held at the waist with a piece of string.

  It was on his first day at the school that the name, Nelson, was bestowed upon him by his teacher. He has no idea why that name was chosen, except of course for its obvious imperial associations with the great admiral on top of the column in Trafalgar Square. No doubt, too, the white missionaries habitually assigned simple English names to the children because it was too much trouble to learn to pronounce their actual African names. This was a Methodist school and young Nelson too was baptized into the Methodist Church.

  Leabie recalled that her father had died when Mandela—Bhuti, she called him, meaning brother—was aged ten. Later, she told Mary Benson that her father had died in 1930, when Bhuti was aged twelve. Mandela himself has also said in the past that his father died in 1930. But in his memoir he puts the memory of his father’s dying when he was aged nine, which would be 1927, just a year after the elder Mandela was sacked. The dates can probably never be fully reconciled.

  Henry Mandela had of course referred to his bad health during the hearing and Mandela has given a vivid, if brief, account of his father dying during a visit to Qunu—he routinely circulated among his wives—when he found him lying on his back in his mother’s rondavel, coughing endlessly. Mandela believes he was dying from a lung disease, cancer perhaps, but there was never any formal diagnosis. He stayed there for several days, after which his fourth wife came to look after him, along with Mandela’s mother. He called for his tobacco and was reluctantly given a pipe, which seemed to soothe him—and then he died. Mandela could not remember any feelings of grief, more a sense of being “cut adrift.”

  Leabie said that her father called the acting paramount chief, Jongintaba—the man he had earlier helped to promote—to his deathbed and asked him to take care of his son. “I am giving you this servant Rolihlahla. This is my only son. I can see from the way he speaks to his sisters and friends that his inclination is to help the nation. I want you to make him what you would like him to be; give him education, he will follow your example.”

  Mandela’s sister claims to have heard Jongintaba give his assurance that he would do as Henry Mandela wished. She tells Benson, “The Chief bought him clothes and he became a human being”—an odd expression, as if he was not human until he donned Western dress.

  After a period of mourning, Mandela left Qunu and was walked by his mother across the hills to the Great Place at Mqhekezweni, where he was delivered into the charge of Jongintaba. “We travelled by foot and in silence until the sun was sinking into the horizon,” he says of the journey.

  Mandela was dazzled by his first look at the Great Place, from the bright white of the lime-washed walls on the seven rondavels and two rectangular houses, to the sizeable herds of cattle and sheep grazing contentedly on the rich land beyond the gardens and ploughed fields. And here comes the paramount chief, Jongintaba in his Ford V8 motorcar, the nearby men jumping to their feet at his approach and shouting, Bayete a-a-a Jongintaba— “Hail, Jongintaba!” He is a confident man in a smart suit, the owner of many such suits, which Mandela will take a particular pleasure in pressing.

  “Children from poor homes often find themselves beguiled by a host of new temptations when suddenly confronted by great wealth. I was no exception… The slender foundation built by my parents began to shake,” Mandela recalled. Still, he felt that the king and his wife, Noengland, accepted him as if he were their own child.

  So much did they love him and respect him, he told Richard Stengel, his ghost-writer (it does not appear in his memoir), that they refused to allow him to return to Qunu when he was homesick and wanted to visit his mother. “They thought that there I might be under a wrong influence and I would then not want to come back… they were so attached to me that they didn’t want me to leave.”

  Mandela did not see his mother again for many years.

  There is no reference, anywhere in Mandela’s memoirs, to the illusory nature of the chief’s wealth, the fact that he had trouble with money and alcohol.

  Mandela seems unconcerned by these aspects of his new guardian, seeing him instead, as others saw him, as the embodiment of royal authority, the very centre around which life revolved. Mandela’s admiration was especially focused on the paramount chief’s grand V8 car and his suits. No one else in the area had a car, which can only have heightened the wonder of it to Mandela.

  The magistrates’ archive makes no reference to any womanizing by Jongintaba but notes an £800 debt he had incurred and the consequent court proceedings he faced around 1930, at just the time Mandela had joined him at the Great Place. The magistrate observes that “much of this is the result of extravagance,” the chief being “unable to resist buying as long as credit is extended to him.” His car was “a particular burden.”

  The magistrate is not overtly racist or even harsh in his comments about Jongintaba. Indeed, he observes, with some sympathy, that the chief’s predicament is “unfortunate as the chief is of great service to this office and loyally and efficiently assists in executive work, but owing to judgments and writs against him he has to avoid coming to Umtata.”

  But in 1935, Jongintaba upset the magistrate by trying to borrow an additional £60, which he said was for school fees to send his children (Mandela included, no doubt) back to educational institutions. He incurred further wrath by making the same request again a year later. The magistrate protested at the “gross extravagance of his style of living,” noting that Jongintaba, who continued to face constant civil actions for debt and occasional impounding of his herds, “has the habit of intemperance.”

  Mandela became close to Jongintaba’s son, Justice, who was four years older than Mandela and, it would appear, a chip off the old block, inheriting some of his father’s less appealing traits. After initially being unfriendly towards the new arrival, Justice took a liking to Mandela and treated him as a younger brother.

  When Mandela first knew him, Justice was already at the high school, Clarkebury Boarding Institute in Engcobo. Mandela followed him there in 1933, when he was fifteen, after he had completed his primary education at the village school just beyond the Great Place and spent one year at a school in the nearby town of Qokolweni.

  The chief kitted him out with a suit and a pair of boots and drove him to Clarkebury. He introduced Mandela to a church minister who was the governor of the school. The minister held out his hand to Mandela—the first white man he had ever shaken hands with.

  Jongintaba told the minister, “I am bringing this boy here so that he can have a proper education, because I am grooming him as the councilor for Sabata the future king and I would like you to take a special interest in him.” Sabata was the heir to the throne, then still a baby. Jongintaba, his regent, had often told Mandela of his intended role: “It is not for you to spend your life mining the white man’s gold, never knowing how to write your name.”

  Mandela noted how the minister treated Jongintaba with great deference and assumed he too would be on the receiving end of some respect as a member of the royal family. But once the regent had left, after giving Mandela a pound note, the most money he had ever possessed, Mandela was treated just the same as everyone else. He later thought this had been a good lesson as he suspected that he had been “a bit stuck-up”
back then.

  He could not be stuck-up for long in his new boots, which he barely knew how to walk in. He crashed clumsily across the wooden floors at Clarkebury and was teased by a pair of young female students as a country boy not used to wearing shoes. He rushed at the girl who made the remark, wanting to choke her, but she screamed and ran. They eventually became friends and he discovered that she too was determined to get a good education.

  There was also, at the school, a black African woman teacher who was one of the first, if not the first, African woman in the country to get a BA, a Bachelor of Arts degree, though when he first heard this, Mandela did not even know what a BA was. He still had a lot to learn.

  Three

  AFTER A YEAR at Clarkebury, Mandela returned to Mqhekezweni to undergo the ritual of circumcision—an elaborate coming-of-age ceremony. In his later years he could take impish pleasure in turning world leaders ashen with his frank descriptions of the brutal procedure by which the foreskin was finally cut.

  In his memoir, Mandela recalls that the ceremony was arranged for Justice, who must then have been twenty years old—he was four years older than Mandela who recalls his age at circumcision as sixteen. Just under thirty boys took part altogether, a mixture of young royals and commoners who stayed together—for two months altogether—in two huts in a remote area beside the Mbashe River at a place called Tylahara, the traditional setting for the circumcision of the Thembu kings.

  According to custom they crept out and stole a pig, a deliberate last act of boyish mischief before becoming a man. Mandela recalled that they lured the pig away from its farmer, “… so you then catch it, slaughter it and make a fire and eat it. Oh it’s a lovely thing, man. The meat has never tasted like that again. It was nice to roast a pig.”

  On the eve of the circumcision the boys’ heads were shaved and they took part in a dance attended by young women who sang and clapped a slow beat to which the boys moved, gradually becoming faster and more frenzied.

  The next morning an audience of friends and relatives gathered to watch from a distance while the boys bathed in the river and then sat down in a row wearing just a blanket, with a drum beating. Mandela was tense, hoping he would not shame himself by crying out or flinching at the cuts to come. The ingcibi, the circumciser, advanced down the line, swishing his assegai (spear), the boys crying, ndiyindoda, “I am a man,” as their foreskins fell away.

  Mandela described it thus:

  He then takes your penis, pulls the foreskin and then with the assegai, no anesthetic, he does this… (once forward)… one back, and he cuts off the foreskin and then you say ndiyindoda and then another man who is behind the expert who circumcises you, he says, tie that foreskin, with the edge of your blanket, and you tie it in, and then they bind the wound with a type of leaf which has got little thorns but it is a very good leaf and it has got healing properties. They tie it around your penis and then they take you to the hut when everybody has been circumcised. At the hut there they build a fire but they make sure that there must be wet wood so that it should make smoke because there was a theory that smoke makes it, the wound, heal quicker. So you sleep, and also when you sleep you must sleep in a particular way. You sleep on your back, one leg is flat on the ground and the one other like this… yes, bent like this, you see, but you are on your back and this one is straight. The idea is that you should not, there should be no pressure on the wound, on the penis. The legs must be separate… and if you make a mistake, and do this, the attendant beats you with a stick so even if you have been asleep and you slip up—you immediately wake up and straighten your one leg and keep this one in this position. So then at midnight the attendant wakes you up, one by one, and says go and bury this a distance away from here and it was very dry, you dig and it is dark and you are alone and you dig and bury it and then come back and then ask the next boy to go and bury the foreskin.

  The attendant, one of the amakhankatha, also painted the bodies of the young men, now known as abakwetha, or initiates into manhood, in white ocher. In his memoir Mandela says the pain of the two cuts was so intense that he momentarily forgot to cry out ndiyindoda and felt ashamed afterwards that he had not been stronger. The men remained in the huts, in quiet contemplation, while their wounds healed, then they bathed again, washed off the white ocher and were painted anew with red ocher.

  When the ceremony was completed, the huts, and everything in them, was burned, to symbolize the destruction of their last links with childhood. They were supposed to walk away and not look back, but Mandela would tell in later life that he had broken with custom and sneaked a backward glance.

  Mandela was presented with two cows and four sheep as tokens of his manhood and then took part in a final ritual where he heard a memorable speech by a brother of Jongintaba, Chief Meligqili, who warned the young men that the promises of manhood were all an illusion because they were a conquered people, slaves in their own country. They were chiefs who would never rule, or young men who would go to the city, live in shacks and drink cheap alcohol, while they ruined their lungs in the mines so that the white man could live in unequaled prosperity.

  The children of Ngubengcuka, the flower of the Xhosa nation, were dying.

  While the chief may have meant his words as a wake-up call, a warning, perhaps even a call to arms, Mandela detected that the other young men felt as he did—angry not with the white man, but with the chief for spoiling their great day with his ignorant remarks. As Mandela then saw it, the chief had failed to appreciate the value of the education and benefits that the white man had brought to the country.

  Still, Meligqili had sown a seed inside him and over time it began to grow. He later realized that the ignorant man that day was not the chief but himself.

  Meanwhile, now that he was a man he was entitled to a new Thembu name and was given Dalibunga, which became the preferred term of address, even in future years, for his relatives as well as other visiting chiefs and guests from the eastern Cape. A friend and colleague, Joe Matthews, could recall groups of traditionally dressed visitors appearing outside Mandela’s home in Orlando in the 1950s and calling a-a-a-Dalibunga! by way of greeting.

  Living at the Great Place under the guardianship of the paramount chief, being groomed as a royal adviser, coming to manhood, having his own small herd of cattle and sheep all served to reinforce Mandela’s sense of himself as a privileged young Thembu, albeit one whose destiny remained in the Transkei. Clarkebury introduced him to students from across southern African, young men and a few women from different tribes, but he still saw himself then as part of the elite tribe, the Thembus.

  It was at Clarkebury that he first began to show promise as a student, completing his junior certificate in reduced time over two years instead of the usual three. So, by the good grace of his indebted guardian, he went on to Healdtown, the Methodist college located at Fort Beaufort, which was once an outpost of British forces during the Frontier Wars as they advanced into Thembuland and imprisoned Xhosa warrior leaders on Robben Island.

  The school was like a little slice of England, with a thousand students and a staff of all races, presided over by a Dr. Wellington. Proud of his Britishness and of his relation to the Duke of Wellington, he would boast about his forebear in speeches to the student body, telling them how his ancestor had saved civilization both for Europe and for the natives. (The students would all applaud, never then objecting to being called natives.) The African students would sometimes be derided as “black Englishmen” but, Mandela admitted, that really was their aspiration, amid the school’s strict, unforgiving regime.

  It was at Healdtown that Mandela discovered the two sports that would sustain him through his adult years, running and boxing. He was tall and lanky then, more suited to the former than the latter. He had his first taste of leadership too, as a prefect, in charge of a group of boys responsible for cleaning windows, sleeping in the same dormitory with them and seeing them properly turned out for parades.

  In his early
days at the school it seemed to Mandela that the different tribal groups kept to themselves and there were few interactions across tribal lines. So Mandela and others were amazed when a popular Sotho teacher married a Xhosa woman from Umtata. Mandela himself became pleased to make friends from other tribal backgrounds, though he remained a proud Xhosa and won the Xhosa essay prize in 1938 for his writings on a long-since forgotten theme.

  He would never forget the day when the renowned Xhosa poet, Mqhayi—a poet laureate of the African people, in Mandela’s view—came to give a talk at Healdtown. Mqhayi was a nomadic figure who traveled around creating and sharing his poetry. He had written the lyrics for the anthemic “Nkosi Sikilel’ iAfrika.”

  Mandela had seen him once at a distance when he passed through Mqhekezweni and was thrilled now to be hearing him speak. The day was declared a holiday at Healdtown. At first, when Mqhayi appeared on stage carrying two assegais, Mandela was disappointed at this average-looking man with sunken eyes. His first words seemed like a struggle too, not the poetic outpourings Mandela had expected. Then, as he talked, one of his assegais caught the curtain wire across the stage and he seized on this as symbolic of a clash of cultures, African and European. Today, he said, it was a clash producing no results, only a stalemate, but the day was coming when the African culture would prevail.