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It’s a magnificent, but poor and remote part of the South Africa, an area of high green hills and traditional green-painted huts that overlook the Bashee River in the valley below. His father was a local chief and the grandson of the king of the Xhosa-speaking Tembu people, who controlled the area down to the river. Today, the hut where he was born is no longer standing, but it’s still possible to drive out along a dirt road through the hills to the spot where his father’s kraal, or collection of huts, once stood.
As a child he moved to another village, Qunu, where he would later build himself a house near the highway, and where he planned to be buried alongside other members of his family, in the family graveyard out among the maize fields. He looked after the cattle and sheep and became something of an expert at stick fighting, a sport still popular in the rural areas of South Africa in which opponents spar and parry with clubs made from hard thorn-wood. Mandela hated to be beaten. According to one of his childhood friends, who still lives in Qunu, he would always fight to the bitter end, and if he came off worse he would pick a fight the following the day with whoever had beaten him. This time round, the young Mandela would make sure that he was the winner.
Though he was brought up in a remote rural community Mandela was groomed to be far more than just a herdsman. He came from a royal family, and after his father died he was sent off to be educated in the court of the Regent, the acting Tembu king. Along with his mother, he had to take the long journey, on foot, to Mqhekezweni, the ‘Great Place’ where the Regent held court. Here, the young Mandela was treated as a member of the royal family. He lived in a hut with the Regent’s son, and carefully watched the Regent as he presided over tribal meetings and managed to reach consensus between those with different views. Mandela later wrote ‘one of the marks of a great chief is the ability to keep together all sections of his people…the Regent was able to carry the whole community because the court was representative of all shades of opinion’. Years later, as President, Mandela would try to achieve the same consensus within his cabinet. Watching the Regent at work was one of his first steps in becoming one of the world’s greatest politicians.
His education continued when he was sent by the Regent to the Methodist school at Clarkebury, across the Bashee River, and later to Healdtown. The religious teaching had little impression on him as he was far more influenced by the mental training and discipline encouraged by schools that offered a then typically British education. He moved on to the ‘South African Native College’ at Fort Hare, then the only black university in South Africa. It was a great opportunity, but Mandela deliberately gave it up – he was expelled after resigning from the Students’ Council after a row over conditions and food. The Regent was furious.
The story continues...
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