EXCERPT
Mandela
The Authorized Biography
By ANTHONY SAMPSON
Knopf
Read the Review
Country Boy: 1918-1934
Few parts of South Africa are more remote from city life than the Transkei, six
hundred miles south of Johannesburg. It is one of the most beautiful but also one of
the poorest regions of the country. The limitless vistas of rolling hills, pale green
grass and round thatched huts, with herdboys and shepherds driving their flocks
between them, present an almost Biblical vision of a timeless, idyllic, pastoral
life. But the beauty is skin-deep: the land is desperately overpopulated, and the
thin soil is so eroded that it can only sustain scattered groups of scrawny cattle or
sheep and sporadic crops of maize.
It is here that Nelson Mandela was born and brought up, and here that he has built
the house to which he retreats for Christmases and holidays, and where he intends to
retire. It is a large red-brick bungalow with Spanish-style arches alongside the main
road, the N2 from Durban to Cape Town, a few miles south of Umtata, Transkei's
biggest town. It stands at the end of an avenue of cypresses, surrounded by a wall
and a bushy garden which cuts it off from the open countryside. Mandela conceived the
house during his last year in jail, and based its floor-plan on the warder's house in
the prison compound where he was living. He chose the site, which looks over his home
district of Qunu, in the belief that "a man should die near where he was born."
Mandela's actual birthplace is several miles south, in the small village of Mvezo on
the banks of the winding Mbashe (Bashee) river, where his father was hereditary
chief. (The family's group of huts, or kraal, is no longer there: in 1988 Mandela,
then in jail, would ask a local lawyer to locate it, but he could find no trace.)
Rolihlahla Mandela was born in Mvezo on 18 July 1918at a time, he would later
reflect, when the First World War was coming to an end, the Bolshevik revolution in
Russia was being consolidated, and the newly-formed African National Congress sent a
deputation to London to plead for the rights of black South Africans. The British
Cape Colony, which included the "native reserve" of the Transkei, had been absorbed
into the Union of South Africa in 1910, and three years later the Native Land Act
dispossessed hundreds of thousands of black farmers, many of whom trekked to the
Transkei, the only large area where Africans could own land. The Transkei has
produced more black leaders than any other region of South Africa, and it was with
this history that they were brought up.
Rolihlahla's father, Hendry Mandela, suffered his own dispossession. The year after
his son was born the local white magistrate summoned Hendry to answer a tribesman's
complaint about an ox. Hendry refused to come, and was promptly charged with
insubordination and deposed from the chieftainship, losing most of his cattle, land
and income. The family moved from their ancestral kraal in Mvezo to the nearby
village of Qunu, where the boy Mandela would spend his next few years. Although their
fortunes had suddenly declined, they kept together without too much hardship. They
shared food and simple pleasures with cousins and friends, and Mandela never felt
alone: in later life he would look back warmly on that collective spirit and sense of
shared responsibility, before Western influences began to introduce competition and
individualism.
Hendry Mandela was a strict father, with a stubbornness which his son suspects he
inherited. He was illiterate, pagan and polygamous; but he was tall and dignified,
darker than his son, and with no sense of inferiority toward whites. He inhabited a
self-contained rural world with its own established customs and rituals. He had four
wives, of whom Mandela's mother, Nosekeni Fanny, was the third. Each had her own
kraal, which was more or less self-sufficient, with its own fields, livestock and
vegetables. Hendry would move between the different kraals visiting his wives, who
appear to have been on good terms with each other. He kept some home-brewed liquor in
his hut, with a bottle of brandy in the cupboard which would last three or four
months. He respected tribal customs: when a baby was born he slaughtered a goat and
erected its horns in the house.
Hendry never became a Christian, but he had some Christian friends, including the
Reverend Tennyson Makiwane, a scholarly community leader who was part of the elite of
the Transkei (his offspring were later to be controversial members of the ANC). He
was also close to the Mbekela brothers, George and Ben, who belonged to the separate
tribal group called Amamfengu, or "Fingoes"; this group remained apart from the Xhosa
people, and were more influenced by missionaries and Western customs, many of them
becoming teachers, clergymen or policemen. The Mbekela brothers converted Mandela's
mother to Methodism, after which she began wearing Western dresses instead of Xhosa
garb. She had her son baptized as a Methodist, and later the brothers persuaded both
parents that Mandela should go to the local mission schoolthe first member of the
family to do so.
Mandela's sisters Mabel and Leabie would recall with pleasure the simple country life
of their childhood in Qunu, revolving around the three round huts or rondavels in
their mother's kraalone for sleeping, one for cooking, one for storing foodfenced
off with poles. The rondavels were made by their mother from soil molded into bricks;
the simple chairs and cupboards were also made of soil, and the stove was a hole in
the ground. There were no beds or tables, only mats. The roofs were made of grass
held together with ropes. They lived largely on maize, which was stored in holes
(izisele) in the kraals. The boys spent the day herding the cattle, and the girls and
women of the family prepared the food together in one of the houses, grinding the
maize between stones, cooking it in black three-legged metal pots and mixing it with
sour milk. The family would all take the main meal together in the evening, sitting
on the ground eating from a single dish.
Mandela's father already had three sons by other wives, but they had already left
home. As a boy, he had much more freedom than his sisters. He was very close to his
mother, but would often stay with another of his father's wives, with whom he felt
the same security and love as with Nosekeni Fanny. Throughout his life he would
always feel most at ease with womenparticularly with strong women who could provide
rewarding friendships, which may be linked to his childhood experience. He thrived
within his extended family of cousins, stepmothers and half-brothers and -sisters
(Bantu languages have no words for stepsisters or stepmothers, so he called all his
father's wives his "mothers"). "I had mothers who were very supportive and regarded
me as their son," he recalled. "Not as their stepson or half-son, as you would say in
the culture amongst whites. They were mothers in the proper sense of the word." His
happy experience as a son loved by four mothers made his childhood very secure, and
he sometimes talks nostalgically about polygamy at that time, although he firmly
rejects it in today's conditions: "Quite inexcusable. It shows contempt for women,
and it's something I discourage totally."
In his letters and memoirs Mandela often harks back to his life as a country boy.
From his prison cell he wrote vividly about the splendor of the hills and streams,
the pleasures of swimming in the pools, drinking milk straight from the cows' udders
or eating maize roasted on the cob. Many world leaders, caught up in power-politics
in the capitals, have played up their romantic rural roots, like Lloyd George
revisiting his Welsh village or Lyndon Johnson longing for his Texas ranch. But
President Mandela would be more insistent in calling himself a country boy; and with
more reason, for the security and simplicity of his rural upbringing played a crucial
part in forming his political confidence.
He was also fortified by his knowledge of his ancestors. His father was the grandson
of Ngubengcuka, the great king of the Tembu people who died in 1832, before the
British finally imposed their power on Tembuland, the southern part of the Transkei.
The Tembu royal family, however poor and dependent they might seem to whites,
retained a special grandeur in the Transkei, commanding the loyalty and respect of
their people. Mandela was a minor royal, and he always stressed that he was never in
the line of succession to the throne. He was only one of scores of descendants of
King Ngubengcuka, and he came from a junior line. But his father was a trusted friend
and confidant of King Dalindyebo, who had succeeded to the Tembu throne, and later of
his son King Jongilizwe. Hendry in fact was a kind of prime minister, and the boy
Mandela commanded respect in his community.
His was a royal family, as they saw it, but under an occupying force, for since the
time of Ngubengcuka their powers had been circumscribedfirst by the British
government, then after 1910 by the new Union of South Africaand the Transkei
monarchs were torn between their duties to their people and the demands of an alien
power. However proud and respected the Tembu royals remained, they were always
conscious that the new patricians, the British and the Afrikaners, had deprived them
of their authority and wealth. When the young Mandela began to travel beyond his home
district, he saw that the towns in the Eastern CapePort Shepstone, King William's
Town, Port Elizabeth, Alicewere named after British, not Xhosa, heroes, and that
the white men were the real overlords.
Many mission-educated children of Mandela's generation were named after British
imperial heroes and heroines like Wellington, Kitchener, Adelaide or Victoria, and at
the age of seven Mandela acquired a new first name, to precede Rolihlahla. "From now
on you will be Nelson," said his teacher. His mother pronounced it "Nelisile," while
others would later call him "Dalibunga," his circumcision name. His later city
friends called him "Nelson" or "Nel," until he expressed a preference for his clan
name, "Madiba," which the whole nation was to adopt.
In 1927 Mandela, then aged nine, came closer to royalty. His father had been
suffering from lung disease, and was staying in Mandela's mother's house. His friend
Jongintaba, the Regent of the Tembu people, was visiting, and Mandela's sister Mabel
overheard Hendry telling him: "Sir, I leave my orphan to you to educate. I can see he
is progressing and aims high. Teach him and he will respect you." The Regent replied:
"I will take Rolihlahla and educate him." Soon afterward Hendry died. His body was
carried on a sledge to his first wife's house, and a cow was slaughtered; but he was
also given a Christian funeral conducted by the Mbekela brothers, and was buried in
the local cemetery.
Mandela was taken by his mother on a long journey by foot from Qunu to the "Great
Place" of Mqhekezweni. It was from here that the Regent presided over his people as
acting king, since the heir apparent, Sabata, was too young to rule. Jongintaba, who
was also head of the Madiba clan, was indebted to Mandela's father for recommending
him as Regent, which may explain why he so readily agreed to adopt Mandela as if he
were his own son. But the tradition of the extended family was much stronger in rural
areas than in the towns, for which Mandela remained grateful. As he wrote from jail:
"it caters for all those who are descended from one ancestor and holds them together
as one family."
The Great Place at Mqhekezweni hardly conforms to the European image of a royal
palace. Even today it remains ruggedly inaccessible, and is difficult to reach by
car. From the main road a rough, deeply rutted dirt track twists across the
landscape, down into dried-up riverbeds and up stony banks, passing isolated clusters
of rondavels and huts and a deserted railway station. At last a small settlement
appears: two plain houses facing a group of rondavels, with an overgrown garden
between them, a school building and some huts beyond. From one house a fine-looking,
naturally dignified man emerges and reveals himself as the local chief, the grandson
of Jongintaba; he still presides over the local community. He points out the plain
rondavel where President Mandela lived as a boy. A photograph on the wall of one of
the houses shows the fine face of Jongintaba, with a trim mustache. Nearby is a
solemn-looking young Mandela, alongside his smiling face on an election poster of
1994.
To the Western visitor today the Great Place may seem small and remote, but to the
young Mandela in 1927 it was the center of the world, and Mqhekezweni was a
metropolis compared to the huts of Qunu. It was here that Mandela spent his most
formative years and gained the impressions of kingship which were to influence his
whole life. He would never forget the moment when he first saw the Regent arriving in
a spectacular motorcar, welcomed by his people with shouts of "Aaah! Jongintaba!"
(The scene would be reenacted seventy years later, when President Mandela was hailed
by cries of "Aaah! Dalibunga!") Mqhekezweni was more prosperous then, and almost
self-sufficient; its chief was then also regent, attracting tribesmen from all over
Tembuland to consult him.
The nine-year-old boy arrived with only a tin trunk, wearing an old shirt and khaki
shorts roughly cut from his father's old riding breeches, with a piece of string as a
belt. His cousin Ntombizodwa, four years older, remembered him as shy, lonely and
quite silent, but he was immediately welcomed by Jongintaba and his wife No-England.
Mandela shared with their son Justice a small whitewashed rondavel containing two
beds, a table and an oil lamp. He was treated as one of the family, together with
Jongintaba's daughter, Nomafu, and later with Nxexo, the elder brother of Sabata, the
heir to the kingdom. He saw himself as a member of a royal family, with a much
grander style of life than that of Qunu; but he did not altogether belong to
itwhich may have spurred his ambition.
The Regent, Jongintaba, otherwise known as David Dalindyebo, became Mandela's new
father figure. He was a handsome man, always very well dressed; Mandela lovingly
pressed his trousers, inspiring his lifelong respect for clothes. Jongintaba was a
committed Methodistthough he enjoyed his drinkand prayed every day at the nearby
church run by his relative the Reverend Matyolo. His son Justice, four years
Mandela's elder, was to be Mandela's role model for the next decade, the ideal of
worldly prowess and elegance, as sportsman, dandy and ladies' man. Justice was an
all-rounder, excelling in team sports like cricket, soccer and rugby. Mandela, less
well coordinated, made his mark in more rugged and individual sports like boxing and
long-distance running. A photograph shows Justice as bright-eyed, confident and
combative, while the young Mandela was less assertive, and strove to acquire
Justice's assurance. Justice was, after all, the heir to the chieftaincy, while
Mandela depended on the Regent's favors.
Mandela loved the country pleasures at Mqhekezweni, which were more numerous in those
days than they are now, and included riding horses and dancing to the tribal songs of
Xhosa girls (how different, he reflected in jail, from his later delight in Miriam
Makeba, Eartha Kitt or Margot Fonteyn). But Mandela was also more serious and
harder-working than the other boys. He thrived at the local mission school, where he
began to learn English from Chambers' English Reader, writing on a slate and speaking
the words carefully, with a slow formality and the local accent which never left him.
Whites were hardly visible at Mqhekezweni, except for occasional passersby. Mandela's
sister Mabel remembers being impressed when he and his schoolfriends met a white man
who needed help because his motorbike had broken down, and Mandela was able to speak
to him in English.11 But Mabel could also be quite frightened of Mandela: "He didn't
like to be provoked. If you provoked him he would tell you directly. . . . He had no
time to fool around. We could see he had leadership qualities."
A crucial part of Mandela's education lay in observing the Regent. He was fascinated
by Jongintaba's exercise of his kingship at the periodic tribal meetings, to which
Tembu people would travel scores of miles on foot or on horseback. Mandela loved to
watch the tribesmen, whether laborers or landowners, as they complained candidly and
often fiercely to the Regent, who listened for hours impassively and silently, until
finally at sunset he tried to produce a consensus from the contrasting views. Later,
in jail, Mandela would reflect:
One of the marks of a great chief is the ability to keep together all sections of his
people, the traditionalists and reformers, conservatives and liberals, and on major
questions there are sometimes sharp differences of opinion. The Mqhekezweni court was
particularly strong, and the Regent was able to carry the whole community because the
court was representative of all shades of opinion.
As President, Mandela would seek to reach the same kind of consensus in cabinet; and
he would always remember Jongintaba's advice that a leader should be like a shepherd,
directing his flock from behind by skillful persuasion: "If one or two animals stray,
you go out and draw them back to the flock," he would say. "That's an important
lesson in politics."
Mandela was brought up with the African notion of human brotherhood, or ubuntu, which
described a quality of mutual responsibility and compassion. He often quoted the
proverb "Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu," which he would translate as "A person is a person
because of other people," or "You can do nothing if you don't get the support of
other people." This was a concept common to other rural communities around the world,
but Africans would define it more sharply as a contrast to the individualism and
restlessness of whites, and over the following decades ubuntu would loom large in
black politics. As Archbishop Tutu defined it in 1986: "It refers to gentleness, to
compassion, to hospitality, to openness to others, to vulnerability, to be available
to others and to know that you are bound up with them in the bundle of life."
Mandela regarded ubuntu as part of the general philosophy of serving one's fellowmen.
From his adolescence, he recalled, he was viewed as being unusually ready to see the
best in others. To him this was a natural inheritance: "People like ourselves brought
up in a rural atmosphere get used to interacting with people at an early age." But he
conceded that "It may be a combination of instinct and deliberate planning." In any
case, it was to become a prevailing principle throughout his political career:
"People are human beings, produced by the society in which they live. You encourage
people by seeing good in them."
Mandela's admiration for tribal traditions and democracy was reinforced by the Xhosa
history that he picked up from visiting old chiefs and headmen. Many of them were
illiterate, but they were masters of the oral tradition, declaiming the epics of past
battles like Homeric bards. The most vivid storyteller, Chief Joyi, like Mandela a
descendant of the great King Ngubengcuka, described how the unity and peace of the
Xhosa people had been broken by the coming of the white men, who had divided them,
dispossessed them and undermined their ubuntu. Mandela would often look back to this
idealized picture of African tribal society. He described it in a long speech in
1962, shortly before he began his prison sentence:
"Then our people lived peacefully, under the democratic rule of their kings and their
amapakati, and moved freely and confidently up and down the country without let or
hindrance. Then the country was ours, in our own name and right. We occupied the
land, the forests, the rivers; we extracted the mineral wealth below the soil and all
the riches of this beautiful country. We set up and operated our own government, we
controlled our own armies and we organized our own trade and commerce."
It was, in his eyes, a golden age without classes, exploitation or inequality, in
which the tribal council was a model of democracy:
The council was so completely democratic that all members of the tribe could
participate in its deliberations. Chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, all
took part and endeavoured to influence its decisions. It was so weighty and
influential a body that no step of any importance could ever be taken by the tribe
without reference to it.
The history of the Xhosas was very much alive when Mandela was a child, and old men
could remember the time when they were still undefeated. The pride and autonomy of
the Transkei and its Xhosa-speaking tribesthe Tembus, the Pondos, the Fingoes and
the Xhosas themselveshad survived despite the humiliations of conquest and
subjection over the previous century.
Some Xhosas had intermarried with other peoples, including the Khoikhoi (called
"Hottentots" by white settlers), which helped to give a wide variety to their
physical features: Mandela's own distinctive face, with his narrow eyes and strong
cheekbones, has sometimes been explained by Khoikhoi blood. But the Xhosas retained
their distinctive culture and language. Many white colonists who first encountered
them in the late eighteenth century were impressed by their physique, their light
skin and sensitive faces, and their democratic system of debate and government: "They
are equal to any English lawyers in discussing questions which relate to their own
laws and customs," wrote the missionary William Holden in 1866. In the 1830s the
British Commander Harry Smith called the Xhosa King Hintsa "the very image of poor
dear George IV."
But, over the course of a hundred years and nine Xhosa wars, the British forces
moving east from the Cape gradually deprived the Xhosas of their independence and
their land. By 1835 Harry Smith had crossed the river Kei to begin the subjugation of
the Transkei. By 1848 he had imposed his own English system on the Xhosa chiefs,
informing them that their land "shall be divided into counties, towns and villages,
bearing English names. You shall all learn to speak English at the schools which I
shall establish for you. . . . You may no longer be naked and wicked barbarians which
you will ever be unless you labour and become industrious." In the eighth Xhosa war
in 1850 the British Armyafter setbacks which strained it to its limit and
atrocities committed by both sidesdrove the Xhosa chiefs out of their mountain
fastnesses and firmly occupied "British Kaffraria," later called the Ciskei. The
Tembu chiefs who ruled the southern part of the Transkei had been relatively
unscathed by the earlier wars, but now they were subjugated and sent to the terrible
prison on Robben Island, just off the coast from Cape Town, which became notorious in
Xhosa folklore.
After this humiliation and impoverishment, in 1856 the Xhosas accomplished their own
self-destruction. A young prophetess, Nongqawuse, told them to kill all their cattle
and to prepare for a resurrection. As a result, over half the population of the
Ciskei starved to death. By the end of the ninth Xhosa war in 1878 the two chief
houses of the Xhosa people, the Ngqika and the Gcaleka, had been subjugated and were
forced into a new exodus across the Kei. Successive leaders were sent to Robben
Island, in keeping with the order of Sir George Grey, the Governor of the Cape, "for
the submission of every chief of consequence; or his disgrace if he were obdurate."
It was not till 1894 that Pondoland, in the northern part of the Transkei, came under
the Cape administration. But after the Union of South Africa came into being in 1910,
the Xhosas faced growing controls by white magistrates. The whites, as Mandela came
to see it, captured the institution of the chieftaincy and "used it to suppress the
aspirations of their own tribesmen. So they almost destroyed the chieftaincy."
In the later nineteenth century the Zulus, the other major tribal power to the north,
became more famous among whites and foreigners as ruthless fighters than the Xhosas,
particularly the Zulu warrior-king Shaka, who had set out to conquer and unify all
the southern tribes in the 1820s. The Zulus attracted the admiration of many British
churchmen, including the dissident Bishop John William Colenso of Natal; but they
acquired unique military fame in January 1879, when the British provoked a war with
Shaka's successor, Cetewayo, whose army completely destroyed a British force of 1,200
at the battle of Isandhlwana. When the British sent out reinforcements they included
the Prince Imperial, son of Louis Napoleon, who was ambushed and speared to death by
Zulu assegais. ("A very remarkable people the Zulus," said Disraeli. "They defeat our
generals, they convert our bishops, they have settled the fate of a great European
dynasty.") The humiliation of Isandhlwana was finally avenged in July, when the
British crushed Cetewayo at the battle of Ulundi and subjugated the Zulus; but their
reputation for fighting spirit remained.
The Xhosa chiefs appeared less martial and intransigent than the Zulus, and after the
Xhosa wars they seemed defeated and demoralizedsometimes with the help of alcohol.
But out of the desolation of the Xhosa wars another tradition was growing up, that of
mission schools and Christian culture, which gradually produced a new Xhosa elite of
disciplined, well-educated young men and women. While embracing Western ideas, they
still aspired to restore the rights and dignity of their own people. The British
liberal tradition was reasserting itself in the Cape, with the expansion of the
mission stations and the introduction of a qualified vote for blacks. Educated young
Xhosas were exploiting the aptitude for legal argument, analysis and debate which
early white visitors had observed. It was a route that would in time lead some of
them into the political campaigns of the black opposition in the 1960ssometimes
called the tenth Xhosa warand, like their predecessors, to Robben Island; but they
would win their battle, and not through military might, but through their skills in
argument and reasoning.
Like other conquered peoples such as the Scots or the American Indians, the Xhosas
retained their own version of history, which, being largely oral, was easily ignored
by the outside world. "The European insisted that we accept his version of the past,"
said Z. K. Matthews, the African professor who would teach Mandela. But "it was
utterly impossible to accept his judgements on the actions and behaviour of Africans,
of our own grandfathers in our own lands." Mandela, despite all his Western
education, would always champion oral historians, and would continue to be inspired
by the spoken stories of the Xhosas which he had heard from his elders: "I knew that
our society had produced black heroes and this filled me with pride: I did not know
how to channel it, but I carried this raw material with me when I went to college."
While most white historians regarded the Xhosa rebellions as firmly placed in the
past, overlaid by the relentless logic of Western conquest and technology, Mandela,
like other educated Xhosas, saw the white occupation as a recent interlude, and would
never forget that his great-grandfather ruled a whole region a century before he was
born.
(C) 1999 Anthony Sampson All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-375-40019-2