Roots

But where did apartheid come from? How could a minority suppress the vast majority of South Africans simply because their skin color wasn't white? Mandela's people were and are the indigenous black people of the southern tip of Africa that came to be known as South Africa. It was their homeland. They farmed the countryside, they fished in the rivers and they moved their livestock over the mountains onto the plains and down through the valleys. The story of how that world was thrown upside down, how the people who used to be its masters became its slaves, goes back four centuries to when the first permanent white settlers from Europe, seeking a new life, landed at the Cape of Good Hope and found a land populated by Nelson Mandela's ancestors.

In 1652, the Dutch East India Company established the first settlement there, on the southwestern tip of Africa, to supply fresh food to the ships sailing to the Indies and back. Further bands of whites followed: Huguenot refugees from France in 1688 and later German immigrants. The Afrikaner people (who nearly three centuries later became the architects of apartheid) derived mainly from these three white ethnic groups.

In the Western Cape was the land of the indigenous nomadic herdsmen, the Khoikhoi (or Hottentots), which was progressively expropriated by the settlers. Eventually they, together with Malay slaves from the Dutch East Indies and the offspring of mixed-race marriages, became the Cape Coloured people (or "Coloureds").

The other indigenous inhabitants, the San hunter-gatherers (Bushmen), were virtually eliminated by being hunted down and killed by whites. Additionally, from 1860 Indian indentured labor was imported by white entrepreneurs to work the sugarcane plantations in Natal, and they formed another significant racial group.

After Britain annexed the Cape in 1806, British settlement grew.

In 1820, some five thousand immigrants, including my mother's ancestors, were settled along the "white" side of the Fish River, about five hundred miles (800 km) east of the Cape, as a bulwark against the black chiefdoms (including Mandela's) that occupied most of the remaining area of the country.

By the 1830s, many Afrikaners (Boers) had become dissatisfied with British rule in the Cape. A major reason was the abolition of slavery, which for generations had provided the economic basis for Boer agriculture, together with the low compensation to slave owners paid by the British. So, in what became known as the "Great Trek", they moved north-eastward into black territory, using the advantage conferred by their guns and horses to subdue any black chiefdoms that resisted them, and eventually established their own independent Boer states. Ultimately, almost the whole of the land of what is now known as South Africa had been expropriated and was under white dominance.

The home of the Zulu people, Natal, on the east coast and north of the lands inhabited by Mandela's Xhosa-speaking people, came under British rule in 1845, and most Boers living there then moved north into two Boer states: the Orange Free State in the middle and Transvaal to the north. Later, however, when the British attempted to interfere with the running of the two states, the First Boer War broke out. Britain was defeated and made peace in 1881.

Meanwhile, in 1871, diamonds had been discovered in the Cape near the border with the Orange Free State, and they attracted a large influx of workers including blacks. This was followed in 1886 by the discovery of vast gold reserves in the Transvaal. Huge numbers of black workers from the many traditional African communities, as well as white immigrants from Europe, were drawn into these two Boer republics.

So, by the beginning of the Second Boer War, in 1899, South Africa consisted of two British colonies — the Cape and Natal — plus the independent Boer (Afrikaner) republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. This Second Boer War resulted from Britain's wish to gain control of the northern gold mines (under the pretext of obtaining the vote for the foreigners who had flocked in to work them). It was a bloody conflict, finally ending with the defeat of the Boers in 1902; during it were established the first concentration camps. The British moved Boer families off the farms that provided bases for the marauding Boer guerrillas, crowding them into camps where sanitary conditions were primitive and disease was rife. Some twenty-six thousand Afrikaner women and children died, leaving an understandably deep scar on the Afrikaner psyche that still endures.

However, despite Britain's victory, Afrikaner nationalism would not be extinguished. The treaty that ended the war led to negotiations and the eventual granting of South Africa's independence in 1910. Under the Act of Union, political equality was given to all whites, but restrictions on the rights of blacks, Indians and Coloureds continued. So the conquest of the country ended with whites occupying 88 percent of the land they had chosen to farm and settle (and that just happened to contain all the country's known natural resources). The main black chiefdoms, such as Nelson Mandela's Thembu (part of the Xhosa-speaking people), were shouldered aside into scattered and poor pockets of land away from the "white" areas and called "native reserves".

The 1913 Natives Land Act, a cornerstone of South Africa's racist legislation, prevented blacks from acquiring land in "white" areas — all but 13 percent of the country. The act also enabled the eviction of "surplus natives" who had lived on "white" farms before their acquisition by the white owner. As a result, thousands of black families were driven off farms to wander homeless and starving. Blacks also lived in squalid townships called "locations" outside the urban areas. The main body of Indian people was in Natal, and most Coloureds were in the Western Cape; all of them lived in deprived conditions, albeit better than blacks.

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Out of this history of gradual white domination of a traditional black African land developed apartheid with all its misery, oppression and injustice. Rejecting ancestral divisions and demanding equal rights and justice for all "Africans" (blacks, the indigenous people), Mandela's African National Congress was established in 1912. The first gathering opened with the hymn "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika" (God bless Africa), which became the ANC's national anthem; its flag, adopted in 1925, was black for the people, green for the land and gold for the resources.

Mandela's story is an extraordinary one and an inspiration for humanity: from barefoot herd boy to world leader, from freedom fighter to revered statesman and from prisoner to president.

Grooming a Chief

Born Rolihlahla ("troublemaker") Mandela on July 18, 1918, Mandela was a Thembu, one of the groups of the Xhosa-speaking people in the Transkei Native Reserve, some five hundred miles (800 km) east of Cape Town and six hundred miles (965 km) south of Johannesburg.

It was a country of rolling hills, green grass, rondavels (round thatched huts) and herd boys driving cattle and sheep to graze. But by then it was overpopulated with eroded soil that could only sustain scattered groups of scrawny livestock and sporadic crops of maize, so most young men were obliged to leave and work in the white towns outside the reserves.

Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa (Henry), his father, was a hereditary chief in the Madiba clan of the Thembu. Mandela's mother, Nosekeni Fanny, was the third of Henry's four wives in the ancestral kraal (group of huts), with its own fields, livestock and vegetables in the village of Mvezo. Each wife had her own kraal some distance from the others, and Henry would rotate his time between them.

In 1919, Mandela's father was removed from his chieftainship by a white magistrate for not showing sufficient respect, and the family moved away to the nearby village of Qunu. There the children's lives revolved around the three round huts of their mother's kraal — one for sleeping, one for cooking and one for storing food. There were no beds or tables, only mats. Boys like Mandela spent the day herding cattle in the veld (fields); girls and mothers fetched water, tilled land and prepared food, with the main meal shared in the evening. Mandela thrived among the extended family of stepmothers, half-brothers and half-sisters.

The Transkei ... is a beautiful country of rolling hills, fertile valleys and a thousand rivers and streams. ... It was in the fields that I learned how to knock birds out of the sky with a slingshot, to gather wild honey and fruits and edible roots, to drink warm, sweet milk straight from the udder of a cow; to swim in the clear, cold streams and to catch fish.

... From these days I date my love of the veld, of open spaces, the simple beauties of nature, the clean line of the horizon.

His mother converted to Methodism, and, aged seven, he was sent to the local mission school, where his teacher gave him a new first name of Nelson. He became known simply as Nelson Mandela and, to his close friends, as Madiba (the name of his chiefdom). He was the only one in his family to go to school.

Tragedy struck when he was a child: his father died, having entrusted Mandela to the care of his cousin and friend Jongintaba, regent of the Thembu people. In 1927, Mandela was taken to live with the regent at the "Great Place" of Mqhekezweni. Also as the head of the Madiba clan, Jongintaba presided over the Thembus as acting king and paramount chief.

The Great Place was accessible only over a rough dirt road and was a settlement of two plain houses facing a group of rondavels, with a garden between, a school building and some huts beyond. But people from all over Thembuland came miles on foot or horseback to consult the regent, who became Mandela's father figure. His son Justice, four years Mandela's elder, was to be the young Nelson's role model for the next decade.

He was brought up there within the African concept of human brotherhood, or ubuntu, which described a quality of mutual responsibility and compassion. Africans defined this as a contrast to the individualism and restlessness of the whites. One of the old chiefs whom Mandela visited said that the unity and peace of the Xhosa people had been broken by the coming of the white man, who had divided them, dispossessed them and undermined their ubuntu, which Mandela regarded as part of the general philosophy of serving one's fellow men and women.

The history of his people was very much alive when Mandela was a child, and old men could remember the time when the Xhosa-speaking groups were still undefeated and they retained their distinctive culture and language. But over the course of a hundred years in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and nine Xhosa wars, the British had gradually deprived the Xhosas of their independence and lands. Successive leaders were banished to Robben Island, and after the Union of South Africa came into being in 1910, all the Xhosas, and other groups, faced increasing control by white magistrates.

When Mandela was sixteen, in 1934, the regent decided it was time for him "to become a man," only achieved in the Xhosa tradition by circumcision. Males not circumcised could not inherit their father's wealth, marry or officiate at chiefdom rituals. He went with twenty-five other Thembu boys, led by his friend Justice, to the traditional place for circumcision of future Thembu kings, which was two grass huts in a remote valley near the Mbashe River.

At dawn they were escorted to the river to bathe, Mandela painfully remembering the whole episode: 'Circumcision is a trial of bravery and stoicism; a man must suffer in silence. I felt as if fire was shooting through my veins; the pain was so intense that I buried my chin in my chest'. The recently circumcised boys lived in the two huts as their wounds healed, and women were prevented from seeing them.

At a ceremony afterward, Mandela heard the main speaker, Chief Meligqili, denounce their predicament as a people:

We Xhosas, and all Black South Africans, are a conquered people. We are slaves in our own country. We are tenants on our own soil. We have no strength, no power, no control over our own destiny in the land of our birth. ... The abilities, the promise of these young men will be squandered in their attempt to eke out a living doing the simplest, most mindless chores for the White man.

It was a sacred time; I felt happy and fulfilled taking part in my people's customs and ready to make the transition from boyhood to manhood. It was a period of quietude, a kind of spiritual preparation for the trials of manhood that lay ahead.

This powerful call for freedom and independence made an impact on the teenager: 'Without exactly understanding why, the chief 's words began to work on me. He had sown a seed, and though I let that seed lie dormant for a long season, it eventually began to grow'.

Mandela was still very much rooted in his Thembu group, proud that he was different to non-Thembu classmates he encountered when he was then sent to the remote rural Methodist boarding school of Clarkebury, where the regent and Justice had been educated. By then it was the biggest educational centre in Thembuland, a coeducational boarding school with sports fields and tennis courts, and he was introduced to a whole new world.

But he was surprised not to be treated with the deference to which he had been accustomed in his home villages: 'I quickly realized that I had to make my way on the basis of my ability, not my heritage'. When Mandela shook the principal's hand, it was the first white one he'd ever shaken. He passed his junior certificate in two years and then, aged nineteen, was sent in 1937 to Healdtown, a bigger Methodist institution, which was almost as remote to reach as Clarkebury and was also coeducational.

Mandela was therefore inducted into Christianity and was influenced by the school's strict discipline, mental training and avoidance of thrills and distractions. The white teachers kept aloof from the black teachers and ate separately, and boys and girls were widely separated outside classrooms but attended mixed dinners every Sunday, wearing their best clothes. Attending a boarding school also introduced Mandela to pajamas, flush toilets and showers.

But although his awareness of the harsh predicament of his Xhosa people had been roused by the speeches of Thembu chiefs at community gatherings, he first heard of the ANC at Healdtown and was not interested in politics. His main interest outside his studies was sport: he took up boxing and football and especially enjoyed the discipline and solitude of long-distance running — which would stand him in good stead decades later.

Mandela graduated from Healdtown in 1938 and a year later, prompted by his regent, went to the South African Native College of Fort Hare, a few miles away, which was the only black university in South Africa. With just 150 students, it had been set up in 1916 by Scottish missionaries, and it attracted students from all over Africa. He found a few Indians and Coloureds but mainly the intellectual elite of black South Africans and only a handful of women students, often cleverer than the men — something that surprised Mandela whose traditional upbringing had been about the alleged superiority of men.

Mandela, however, was never at the heart of the Fort Hare intellectuals, who included many of his friends and relations. The student body brought together both royal and mission families, and when he arrived as a fresher of twenty-one he was daunted by the sophistication and confidence of his seniors. The regent had bought him his first suit: 'Double breasted and gray, the suit made me feel grown up and sophisticated', he remembered. However, the regent gave him no pocket money, and he had something to spend only because a relative shared a parental allowance.

Although never arrogant, Mandela was treated as a young prince, with a special status even in Fort Hare's intellectual atmosphere, which inspired both respect and resentment. Some of his friends were already active in politics, and he met Oliver Tambo (much later to be a fellow ANC leader) there. He saw Tambo and others as more able, and his immediate ambition was to be a court interpreter, with a degree and a position in the community that would enable him to support his family. There was no inkling here of the dominant political leader Mandela would later become.

But he had a rebellious streak: in his second year, he was elected to lead student protests against the Spartan and terrible meals they were served. Here there were signs of the stubbornness, uncompromising strength of principle and resilience he would later display. When five of the students elected with him to lead the protests backed down, Mandela alone held out, feeling that was his moral duty as an elected representative; he was also upset about what he saw as divide-and-rule "trickery" by the university principal. The principal tried to dissuade him, stating that otherwise he would be expelled and urging him to sleep on it.