Mandela: The Authorised Biography

Healdtown, like Clarkebury, offered an uncompromising British education with few concessions to Xhosa culture. The missionary and imperialist traditions often converged, particularly on Sundays, when the schoolboys and girls, in separate ranks, marched to church in their white shirts, black blazers and maroon-and-gold ties. The Union Jack was hoisted and they all sang ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’, accompanied by the school brass band and watched by admiring visitors who came from far and wide.21 The school governor since 1927 had been the Reverend Arthur Wellington – whom Mandela would always enjoy mimicking – a diehard English patriot who boasted of his descent from the victor of Waterloo. Wellington inculcated British history and literature in his students, assisted by a mainly English staff, and publicised the school by inviting eminent Britons to visit it, among them Lord Clarendon, the Governor-General of South Africa, who shortly before Mandela’s arrival had laid the foundation stones for the new dormitories and dining hall.22 Wellington was a hard-driving autocrat – though he protested that he was naturally lazy – who claimed to run the largest educational institution south of the Sahara (Lovedale was in fact bigger).23 He banned alcohol at Healdtown. His staff called him ‘the Duke’, and regarded him as a missionary-statesman. Under Wellington, wrote Jack Dugard, who ran the teacher-training school after 1932, ‘within a short time the once rather dowdy mission was transformed into an attractive education centre’.24

The Methodism of Healdtown and Clarkebury did not make a deep religious impact on Mandela. He would never be a true believer, although many of his later friends, including his present wife, were educated by Methodists. But he would always be influenced by the schools’ puritanical atmosphere, the strict discipline and mental training, the Wesleyan emphasis on paring down ideas to their bare essentials, avoiding frills and distractions. He would always disapprove of heavy drinking or swearing; and the self-reliance in these boarding-school surroundings would add to his fortitude.

Mandela was immersed not just in Methodism, but in British history and geography. ‘As a teenager in the countryside I knew about London and Glasgow as much as I knew about Cape Town and Johannesburg,’ he would recall from jail fifty years later, writing to the Provost of Glasgow and mentioning Scots patriots like William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and the Earl of Argyll.25 But he was resistant to becoming a ‘black Englishman’, and took great pride in his own Xhosa culture, encouraged by his history teacher, the much-liked Weaver Newana, who added his own oral history to the accounts of the Xhosa wars already familiar to the boy. Mandela won the prize for the best Xhosa essay in 1938; and he was thrilled when the famous Xhosa poet Krune Mkwayi visited the college, appearing in a kaross of hide, with two spears, to recite his dramatic poems in praise of the Xhosas.

Mandela made close friendships with several Xhosa boys who subsequently joined the ANC, including Jimmy Njongwe, with whom he later ‘starved and suffered in Johannesburg’, and who became a doctor and later a key organiser of the Defiance Campaign.26 He also made friends outside his tribe among Sotho-speakers like Zachariah Molete, who later befriended him in Alexandra township in Johannesburg, and the zoology teacher Frank Lebentlele.27 Mandela was much impressed by another Sotho-speaker, his housemaster the Reverend Seth Mokitimi, who later became the first black president of the Methodist Church; Mokitimi pushed through reforms to give students more freedom and better food.28

The white teachers at Healdtown kept aloof from the black teachers, eating separately: one even had to resign after other teachers complained that he was fraternising with blacks. ‘What a racist place Healdtown was and continued to be!’ wrote Phyllis Ntantala, who was a student till 1935, and whose son Pallo Jordan would later join Mandela’s cabinet.29 A few of the younger white teachers, though, were beginning to make friends with black colleagues and some students.30 Like Clarkebury, the school was co-educational, but girls and boys were strictly separated outside the schoolrooms, and could be expelled for talking to each other. By 1935, however, the Reverend Mokitimi had instituted mixed dinners every Sunday, where girls and boys sat together wearing their best clothes. The more sophisticated and prosperous students loved to show off: as Phyllis Ntantala wrote, ‘They went to those dinners dressed to kill.’31 But for those from simpler homes the European etiquette of knives and forks was a strain. Mandela recalled: ‘We left the table hungry and depressed.’32

The Duke and his white staff had little sense that they were educating future black leaders. They were exasperated by the students’ periodic protests and strikes, usually starting over the poor food, but which they suspected were really based on conflicts between tribes, or between town and country. In 1936 there were more serious political protests when the government’s new ‘Hertzog Bills’ removed blacks from the common voters’ roll and abolished the title deeds of the local Fingo people, who were in turn disillusioned by the failure of the missionary staff to defend their interests.33 But Mandela was only vaguely aware of black politics. At Healdtown he first heard about the African National Congress, which was set up in 1912; the Tembu king had paid thirty cattle to enrol his own tribe in it. Yet to Mandela ‘it was something vague located in the distant past’.34 The mission teachers were inclined to ascribe any political protests to ‘agitators’ stirred up by communism, and most saw themselves as educating a small elite who were quite different from ordinary blacks: as one envious government official explained to them, they were dealing with the layer of fertile soil on top, while he dealt with the hard rock which was impervious to change.35

Mandela was still torn between the two aspects of the British presence in South Africa: the brutal military subjugation of the Xhosas and the enlightened influence of liberal English education. This contradiction had been summed up in a poem, ‘The Prince of Britain’, by Mandela’s favourite poet Mkwayi, written to celebrate the visit of the Prince of Wales to the Ciskei in 1925:

You sent us the truth, denied us the truth;

You sent us the life, deprived us of life;

You sent us the light, we sit in the dark,

Shivering, benighted in the bright noonday sun.36

Mandela graduated from Healdtown in 1938, and the next year went on to the university at Fort Hare, a few miles from Healdtown and a mile from the great missionary school of Lovedale, to which it was linked. The Regent bought him a three-piece suit: ‘We thought there could never be anyone smarter than him at Fort Hare,’ said Mandela’s cousin Ntombizodwa.37

The ‘South African Native College’ at Fort Hare was a tiny black university, the only one in South Africa, but it was destined to be a seedbed of the revolution that followed. In 1939 it was only twenty-three years old, having been set up, surprisingly, in the midst of the First World War, and opened by the Prime Minister Louis Botha himself. The first principal, Alexander Kerr, suspected that Botha had regarded it as a sop, a gesture to the blacks in wartime, when the whites feared ‘native trouble’. But after white governments hardened their attitudes to blacks in the 1920s, the anomaly of its existence was even more remarkable.38 The later Prime Minister General Jan Smuts worried little about its revolutionary potential; he viewed Fort Hare in the context of his policy of trusteeship. When he addressed the university’s graduates in 1938, the year before Mandela arrived, he argued: ‘The Europeans have come here as the bearers of the higher culture. They have been in some sense a missionary race, but if salvation is ever to come to the native peoples of South Africa it will finally have to come from themselves.’39

The university’s start had been very modest, with twenty students preparing for matriculation (the first four candidates all failed).40 When Mandela arrived there were still fewer than two hundred students (of whom sixty-seven were Xhosa-speaking), including ten Indians and sixteen Coloureds.41 But the influence of Fort Hare already went far beyond its student numbers. Supported by the surrounding schools, it had become the focus for the intellectual elite of black South Africans. Its student body was both aristocratic and meritocratic, bringing together royal and mission families. It had been founded not only by white missionaries but by black educationalists from pioneering mission families, including the Jabavus, the Makiwanes and the Bokwes, all of whom were linked by marriage. The great teacher John Tengo Jabavu, editor of the black newspaper Imvo, was a promoter of Fort Hare: his son ‘Jili’ was its first black professor, and married the daughter of the Reverend Tennyson Makiwane. Jili Jabavu was later joined as professor by Z.K. Matthews, the son of a Kimberley miner, who had become the first graduate of Fort Hare; he called himself ‘a new specimen in the zoo of African mankind’.42 Matthews in turn married Frieda Bokwe, the sister of his college friend Rosebery Bokwe, from another prominent mission family.

This small elite was all the better educated because Fort Hare had admitted women students from the beginning. The principal had objected, but the African members declared that ‘there was little point in educating their young men if their future wives were unable to offer them the companionship and community of interest which only an educated woman could give’.43 By the late thirties, when Mandela arrived, Fort Hare still had only a handful of women students, housed in a separate hostel in an old farmhouse. They were correspondingly in demand, and were often cleverer than the men – which came as a shock to Mandela. But he was aware of the strong women among his Xhosa forebears, including the mother of the Mandela who founded his clan. ‘Women have been monarchs and leaders,’ he explained later, ‘in some of the most difficult times in our history.’44

Generations of students from Fort Hare and Lovedale, many connected with the chiefly families of the Transkei, would develop formidable family networks, often with strong Christian values, self-disciplined and frequently teetotal, reminiscent of early Victorian British networks like the Clapham Sect. Jili Jabavu’s daughter Noni, who spent some years in Britain, described her own extended family’s ‘all-embracing net’ as spreading out from Fort Hare and Lovedale, reminding her of the English old school ties.45 That network was to be tragically torn apart during the apartheid years by political persecution and exile. But the black professional middle class with its missionary influence would never be destroyed or bypassed, as it was in other parts of Africa like Ghana or Uganda; and some of its offspring – including Pallo Jordan, the son of Phyllis Ntantala and A.C. Jordan, and Stella Sigcau, daughter of the King of East Pondoland – would join Nelson Mandela’s government in 1994.

Mandela was never at the heart of this intellectual elite, but it included many of his friends and relations. And he always respected Z.K. Matthews, with whom he had family links. The big, square-jawed professor, who taught generations of black students at Fort Hare, infuriated many rebels with his political moderation, but usually came to influence them with his powers of reasoning and quiet argument. Mandela was to admire Matthews still more after he originated the ANC’s Freedom Charter in the fifties. ‘There are some people inside and outside the movement who are critical of his cautious attitude,’ he wrote to Matthews’s widow after he died in 1970, ‘but I am not sure now whether they were not wild.’

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 colour 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, which 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’, 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 Under-Secretary 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 fresher 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 counsellor. 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 him; 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 by 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 only 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 apologise 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 afterwards. 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 realised 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 labourers. 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 realised 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.