Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  Mqhayi segued into his well-known poem about the division of the stars, gesturing to the skies with his assegais and offering the Europeans the biggest cluster, the Milky Way, because they were full of greed and envy and fought over plenty, but offering different stars to other nations, races and various tribal groups, before finally becoming still and saying, now come, you, House of Xhosa, I give you the Morning Star because it is the most important star, the star for counting years, the years of manhood. He dropped down on one knee as he spoke these last words and the students, the Xhosas at least, exploded into applause, Mandela not least among them. He was learning to embrace all the African tribes, and become African himself. But he was still a Xhosa and was inspired by the message of defiance.

  By now Mandela had not merely caught up with his older “brother” Justice, but had overtaken him. Justice remained at Healdtown, still studying for his Junior Certificate, when in 1939 Mandela, aged twenty-one, became an undergraduate at the University College of Fort Hare, just a few miles away in the town of Alice. Justice enjoyed playing more than studying, says Mandela, and was an indifferent scholar.

  Fort Hare was the leading college for black Africans in southern Africa—Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale all rolled into one, as Mandela has said—and many future leaders from across the region were educated there: Seretse Khama, Kenneth Kaunda and Robert Mugabe among them. Here too battles had been fought during the Frontier Wars, before the missionary college had been created there by Scottish Methodists in 1916. The first two Africans graduated in 1924.

  It was indeed an elite institution, with just 150 students in Mandela’s time, and the seniors sometimes lorded over the new arrivals, the freshers. In spite of the privileged backgrounds of many of the students, there was a spirit of dissent at Fort Hare, perhaps fostered by the likes of Professor Z. K. Matthews, one of the leading black scholars of his generation, who had studied the early African-American civil rights activists such as Booker T. Washington and his book Up from Slavery. Like Washington, Matthews could be seen as a moderate campaigner in comparison to the radicals of the 1960s and later, but in his day he was a ground-breaking, influential figure and, in lectures, often an outspoken critic of the racist government.

  Mandela himself was no stranger to controversy during his time at Fort Hare. Early on, he took on a leading role in a minor rebellion, trying to establish a democratically elected House Committee to challenge the status of the seniors. Mandela was mocked by a senior at a meeting as a backward country boy who couldn’t even speak English properly. The same senior later broke down and cried when the freshers tried to punish him for disobeying the rules their committee had created. Mandela had no qualms about the action as he was certain it was right. It was not personal or vindictive—well, not entirely, as Mandela was well aware that he had been ridiculed.

  Mandela studied English, anthropology, law—and native administration, a subject that would have rendered him employable within the Native Affairs department up in Pretoria, or in one of its many local branches. It was a realistic goal in those days and Mandela saw himself becoming qualified as an interpreter between Xhosa and English, perhaps working with a magistrate.

  Mandela first met Oliver Tambo, his highly religious future law partner and ANC colleague, when they played football together at Fort Hare. When Mandela was not playing football he was invariably on a long-distance run. Another student, slightly older, was his own cousin, later to become his political adversary and love rival: K. D. Matanzima, a thin, handsome man known to Mandela and his family as “the Cigarette,” because of his slender physique. Matanzima could be a querulous character, inclined to take issue, and was particular about rules and regulations. He was also quite regal, like Mandela, and liked to be well dressed. “The two of us were very handsome young men and all the women wanted us,” the Cigarette told Fatima Meer.

  There was a wide range of musical activities at Fort Hare from church choirs to ballroom dancing, which Mandela took to. “We spent hours learning to dance graciously. Our hero was Victor Sylvester the world-champion of ballroom dancing.” As he said, it was all very well learning to waltz and foxtrot but the places they might go to show off their steps were all out of bounds. So they put on their suits and sneaked out to the village hall in nearby Ntselamanzi, where Mandela graciously selected an attractive young woman and invited her to dance. They moved well together and he casually asked her name. Mrs. Bokwe was the wife of one of his masters, a leading African intellectual, whom Mandela now saw at the side of the dance floor, in conversation with Professor Z. K. Matthews. Mandela returned his master’s wife to her husband’s side and the incident was never mentioned.

  In late 1940, a year after his arrival, Mandela became involved in a new dispute at the college when elections were called for the Students’ Representative Councils. He and others planned a boycott in protest against the poor conditions at Fort Hare, especially the bad food and the lack of power wielded by the Student Council.

  Perhaps Mandela was inspired by his role as John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Lincoln, in a Fort Hare drama society production. It was a small but crucial role, laden with tempting symbolism about the dangers of standing up for what you believe in—the only play in which Mandela ever participated, before prison. (He was once the king in Antigone, on Robben Island.)

  When the Student Council elections were called, only around twenty-five students turned out to vote, the rest observing the boycott. Mandela was one of the six students elected in the minority vote, all of whom promptly resigned as part of the protest. The principal tried to outwit them, saying that instead of voting in the hall they could vote again, during that evening’s communal dinner when all the students would be present.

  Once again only the same twenty-five voted and the same six students were elected. But now there was uncertainty, as the full electorate had been gathered together, even if most had not participated. Mandela consulted Matanzima, who advised him, “No, you must resign, it’s a question of principle.” Mandela told the others he would not take up the position, but as they all agreed to stand he was now isolated.

  The principal called him to his office and told him that if he refused to serve he could not come back the following year. Mandela was frightened but still Matanzima told him he must stand firm on the principle. Mandela says he was, if anything, more afraid of Matanzima than the authorities, so he again went back to repeat his refusal to the head of the college. He was effectively expelled, told he could not return unless he agreed to serve on the Student Council. Although Mandela could not bring himself to compromise, he still left for home thinking uneasily of the consequences, worried that he was sacrificing his academic career to an abstract position.

  Back in Mqhekezweni, that December 1940, the regent, Jongintaba, neither understood nor valued Mandela’s protest and insisted he would have to return to Fort Hare for the New Year. Justice was in Mqhekezweni too. He had finished school altogether and had been living, perhaps idly, in Cape Town. Possibly this troubled Jongintaba as well. He had two problems on his hands, who were both kicking their heels at the Great Place. The regent called them together to a meeting, told them he was going to die soon and proposed to see them both married. In fact, he had chosen their brides already. Justice was to marry the daughter of a Thembu leader and Mandela’s bride would be the daughter of the local priest. Mandela says he protested that he was still at school but Jongintaba brushed that obstacle aside, saying he would look after the wife, while Mandela went back to Fort Hare.

  Mandela went to the queen and told her he wanted to marry someone else, one of the queen’s own relatives, but only after he had finished his studies. He had in fact never dated the girl in question but was simply trying to find a way out of a difficult situation, made more complicated by the fact that the young woman chosen for Mandela by the regent was actually in love with Justice and had been having an affair with him—a matter about which Jongintaba was quite unaware.

  Th
e queen was sympathetic and would have backed Mandela’s alternative choice, but the regent would not compromise. He had already agreed and paid lobola (bride price), he said, and there was no turning back. As neither Mandela nor Justice wanted to marry, the two decided to run away and hatched a plan to escape to Johannesburg.

  The other side of this story emerged during a visit to Mqhekezweni in the summer of 2008. There in the Great Place was the rondavel that Mandela and Justice had shared as boys, and before it a new-built, red-brick house, paid for by the kindness of Mandela himself and occupied by the widow of Justice, Nozolile Mtirara, a friendly, though tired, elderly woman who spoke no English but was happy to talk through an interpreter.

  Nozolile was the poor bride that Justice had run away to escape. She had no memory or knowledge of a prospective wife for Mandela, she said. So far as she was concerned, she was the only proposed bride. She had never met Justice and knew nothing about him when she was assigned to become his wife, but that was not strange to her; it was the custom. The regent saw her, decided she was suitable to be his daughter-in-law and that was that.

  She believed that Justice and Mandela had run away to defy the tradition of arranged marriages. Nozolile was just twenty when she was chosen and had no option then but to sit and wait for her husband-to-be to return. She could not even go to school. Justice eventually came back and married her in 1945, four years after he had run away. (Mandela, of course, never returned to his chosen bride, if she ever existed.)

  According to Nozolile, it was not long after they married that Justice returned to his old ways and ran away again, only this time he did not go to Johannesburg, but remained in the eastern Cape, womanizing. As Nozolile put it, repeating it for emphasis, “He really was a womanizer.” They had six children between them and Justice never took any more wives, but he was very different from Mandela, apolitical and interested only in having a good time.

  On one occasion, before he went to prison in 1962, Mandela had come to the Great Place and found the house closed up, both Justice and Nozolile gone. Justice was off with a woman in East London and Nozolile had returned home to her family as a protest because she could not feed her children without her husband to support her. As Nozolile understood it, Mandela had told Matanzima, who was by now the chief minister in the Bantustan government at Umtata, that Nozolile must go back to her marital home. She had been ordered to return, although, in that patriarchal world, no one thought to order Justice to return to his responsibilities.

  Nozolile said the old chief, Jongintaba, had been heartbroken when his son and Mandela had run away and he had died little more than a year later, as his health quickly deteriorated.

  His photograph was on the wall above Nozolile, alongside images of his father, Dalindyebo, the man who had nominated Henry Mandela to become headman; Justice himself; and his brother, Sabata, who had become paramount chief and had also been active in the struggle against apartheid.

  The old chiefs had been wealthier, said Nozolile, and the role had changed. Back then the chiefs had worked for the people; nowadays they wanted the people to work for them. Nozolile’s grandson was the current chief but the traditional herds were much reduced in size and value. When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, said Nozolile, he used to visit with groceries because they were all poor now. It was his way, she thinks, of thanking the old people who raised him at the Great Place.

  Of course, Justice and Mandela had no material wealth when they hatched their plan. They needed money so they stole two of Jongintaba’s cows, sold them to the local trader and hired him and his car to drive them, with what few clothes they had, to the railway station at Mbityi.

  They had plotted carefully, waiting until the Bhunga, the local puppet parliament, was sitting at Umtata. The chief would attend the sessions, starting on Monday mornings and remaining there for the week, only coming home for the weekends.

  According to Mandela, it was usual for the chief to take one of the two young men with him to the town, apparently fearing what they would get up to if left alone together. He routinely took Justice and was happy to leave Mandela behind, in charge, but the week before the escape, he had taken Mandela instead.

  For some reason, the following Monday morning Jongintaba went off on his own. Justice and Mandela were packed now, with all their clothes in a single suitcase, and were ready to go when the chief suddenly and unexpectedly returned. They ran off and hid in the cornfields. He asked after them and was told they were somewhere around. He said he had only come back for his Epsom salts, which they thought was a suspiciously inadequate reason to return, sure now that Jongintaba knew something was going on. After he drove off, they came out of hiding and waited until his car had disappeared over the hills before they began their journey.

  When they got to the railway station, they discovered that Jongintaba really was one step ahead of them. The stationmaster told them he had been instructed not to sell them tickets as the chief believed they wanted to run away. They were stunned that he knew but would not give up. They persuaded the trader to drive them on to the next station in the town of Butterworth, a journey of some fifty miles across the Mbashe River.

  There they caught the train to Queenstown but could not continue to Johannesburg as they did not have the necessary native passes (the pass laws required black South Africans to carry an identity book which restricted their rights and their movement). They had planned to visit a clansman there and seek his help. As luck would have it, they bumped into a relative of Jongintaba, himself a chief, who said he would take them to the chief magistrate of Butterworth to get the passes. The magistrate was just completing the paperwork when he decided to make a courtesy call to his opposite number, the chief magistrate at Umtata, to tell him he was issuing passes for two young men from his area. Jongintaba was there with the magistrate and soon explained what they were up to. “Arrest those chaps, bring them back here now.” The Butterworth magistrate was furious at them for their deception: “You are crooks, you come and tell me lies here, go away from my office.” Mandela and Justice agreed that they had lied but tried to plead that they had committed no offense. Nonetheless, they were thrown out with no passes, though thankfully spared arrest.

  They went instead to a friend of Justice’s who they thought might help as he worked for an attorney. By chance the attorney’s car was being used on a trip to Johannesburg so the friend offered to arrange a lift for them. The white attorney’s mother, who was going to the city to visit her daughter, sat in the front beside the driver while Mandela and Justice sat in the back, Justice behind the attorney’s mother, which for some reason made her uncomfortable. She seemed frightened of Justice and made him swap seats with Mandela, keeping an eye on him throughout the journey.

  Mandela conceded that Justice could be wild and exuberant, and he had no fear of whites, but even so, he could not explain the woman’s attitude. Evidently he was not yet used to the common racist fear of the black man, felt by many white people in South Africa, then and now.

  After this awkward journey of a few hours they finally reached Johannesburg. It was Wednesday, April 16, 1941 (Mandela later recorded the date in the papers for his divorce from his first wife), and he was twenty-three years old.

  Four

  ON THEIR ARRIVAL in Johannesburg, Justice and Mandela headed straight to Crown Mines, one of the larger gold mining complexes on the reef. The mine was already expecting Justice as his father had earlier made an introduction for him, while the chief had been pressing Mandela to return to Fort Hare.

  Justice told the mine foreman, known as an induna, or boss-boy, that the chief wanted him to give Mandela a job too. They might have got away with that deceit, if they had not told a friend who was also working there that they had actually run away. The friend went straight to the induna and told him the truth. The next day the induna summoned Justice and Mandela to his office and demanded to see their written permission from the chief to seek work. The supervisor showed them the teleg
ram he had received from the chief: send Justice home at once!

  The induna said he was going to collect the money for their fare and send them back to the Transkei. They left the mine and went to see a family friend and associate of the chief, Dr. Xuma, then the newly appointed president of the ANC, who in turn passed them on to a contact, Mr. Wellbeloved, who worked for the organization that represented the whole mining industry. Mandela tried to impress the man, telling him he wanted to work while he continued his studies for a BA. Mr. Wellbeloved said, in that case he would send them for jobs at Crown Mines.

  So back they went to the mine, where they were accepted by a different official. But while Justice was given a trainee position in the office, Mandela was told he would have to start as a watchman. He was given a round helmet-like hat, a knobkerrie nightstick and a whistle.

  They stayed at the home of the compound manager. Mandela thinks he served for a week at the most, sitting on duty at the compound gate, monitoring the comings and goings, before another telegram arrived from the chief that went to the induna, who did not know that they had returned and begun work. When he found them at the mine he ordered them to leave immediately.

  Mandela went back to the house to collect their suitcase and as he was leaving, being helped by another man, unnamed, he was stopped by a guard who wanted to search his luggage. Mandela had an old revolver in the case that had belonged to his father and of course the guard found it. He blew his whistle and other guards came, but instead of arresting Mandela they arrested the man who was with him. Mandela followed them along to the police station where he showed his Fort Hare student papers and explained that the gun had been his father’s. He claimed he had only brought it with him because he was afraid of gangsters, having been told that Johannesburg was rife with them.