Nelson Mandela obituary chapters one to three: from herding sheep to Robben Island

 
6 December 2013

Chapter One - Childhood

The boy who grew up to lead his country to freedom began his life herding sheep and cattle in a remote part of the South African countryside.

Rolihlahla Mandela (the name Nelson was imposed later by a Christian teacher who would not let her charges use African names) was born on July 19, 1918 in a tiny village called Mvezo on the banks of the Mbashe River in the Transkei.

To the child who spent his days roaming with the other boys outside the village, it was an idyllic existence that gave no hint of the struggles to come in his life.

“I was not born with a hunger to be free,” he later wrote in his autobiography. “I was born free. Free in every way I could know. Free to run in the fields near my mother’s hut, free to swim in the clear stream that ran through my village, free to roast mealies under the stars and ride the broad backs of slow-moving bulls.

“It was only when I began to learn that my boyhood freedom was an illusion, when I discovered as a young man that my freedom had already been taken from me, that I began to hunger for it.”

His name “Rolihlahla” was prescient. In the Xhosa language it literally means “pulling the branch of a tree”, or, in other words, Troublemaker.

Mandela’s family was noble. Although his parents were illiterate, his father Gadla, a tall and stately figure, belonged to the Thembu royal family that ruled the region and was a local chief and counsellor to the monarch and his son was groomed to counsel rulers in turn. However, the family suffered a disaster when Gadla fell out with the local magistrate, one of the few white people, who stripped him of his title and fortune.

The family was forced to move to an even smaller village, Qunu. They lived simply and frugally in huts in a narrow valley without roads, eating local crops of maize, sorghum, pumpkin and beans. “Nature was my playground,” Mandela recalled fondly. Their lives were regulated by “custom, ritual and taboo”.

Gadla had four wives and Mandela was the son of number three, Nosekeni Fanny, a Christian who sent him to the local Methodist school at the age of seven. “No one in my family had ever attended school,” Mandela later wrote. He was given a pair of his father’s trousers, cut off at the knees and held up with string.

On his first day at school, he was renamed after the British naval hero. “The lady teacher, Miss Mdingame, asked, ‘what is your name?’ I told her my African name She said, ‘No, I don’t want that one, you must have a Christian name.’ So I said, ‘no, I don’t have one.’ She said: ‘From today, you are to be Nelson.’” It was a British education that taught the superiority of British values and ignored African culture altogether.

Mandela’s father died of lung cancer when he was nine, and his tranquil rural life ended. He was sent to Mqhekezweni, the provincial capital, to be given the best education a black youngster could hope for, living as a guest in the royal palace of Chief Jongintaba DalinDyebo, who became his guardian.

“Suddenly a new world opened before me,” Mandela recalled. He finally glimpsed a world where his life hold more than the loftiest ambition he had nurtured at Qunu, which was to be the best stick fighter in the area.

Jongintaba treated him the same as his own children. As well as schooling, Mandela was able to see politics first hand and learned his first lessons in practical leadership, crediting his guardian with teaching him the value of listening and consensus.

He also learned about African history for the first time, and fell in love with a clergyman’s daughter, Winnie, despite her sister advising her to ignore such a “backward” yokel.

At 16, the Mandela passed to manhood through the rite of circumcision, followed by days of celebrations where he was presented with two heifers and four sheep. It was at one of these events that he was forced to think about the true plight of black Africans.

A guest speaker, Chief Meligqili, said their manhood was an empty promise because they were in reality “slaves in our own country ... doing the mindless chores for the white man”.

Mandela was annoyed that the radical speech had upset the day. He regarded the white man as a benefactor, not an oppressor. “But without exactly understanding why, his words soon began to work on me,” Mandela wrote in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. “He had sown a seed and, though I let that seed lie dormant for a long season, it eventually began to grow.”

Mandela’s academic studies continued at boarding school and college, as did his gradual political awakening. In 1939, aged 21, he took up a place at Fort Hare university, the only higher education available to black people in South Africa. He still intended to go home and serve as counsellor to a Xhosa chief, but a growing passion to fight injustice would soon become irresistible.

Chapter Two - The Young Lawyer and Activist

Nelson Mandela might never have become a lawyer and political campaigner if his guardian had not decided to force him into an arranged marriage.

Aged 22, Mandela was told of his intended fate while at home from university. He promptly ran away, finding work as a nightwatchman at the Crown Mines gold mine. Fired when his overseer discovered he was a runaway, he moved to Johannesburg in 1941, and was confronted by the daily horrors of racism in white-ruled South Africa.

Until then, the young student’s ambitions were to be an official in the area he grew up. Now he became embroiled in the law and politics.

A tall and striking figure, Mandela was now a keen sportsman, a ballroom dancer and had even acted in a play about Abraham Lincoln, playing the part of the assassin, Booth. But he had been sent home early from Fort Hare for taking part in a student protest, so continued to study by correspondence course.

Walter Sisulu, an activist with the African National Congress, helped him get a clerk’s job at a law firm run by a run by a liberal Jew, Lazar Sidelsky. He enrolled at the University of Witwatersrand to study law - the only native African student in the faculty.

Mandela now had a circle of friends that spanned ANC members, Communists and white students who would be allies for life, including Ruth First and Joe Slovo. He joined his first march in protest, against bus fare rises, and became an elected official of the ANC. In 1944 he married Evelyn Mase, an ANC activist and nurse and they had their first child, Madiba “Thembi” Thembekile, in February 1946.

The general election of 1948, where only whites could vote, saw the openly racist National Party take power and enact the Apartheid laws, which entrenched racism into the law of the land. Mandela became more militant, getting a reputation as a rabble-rousing speaker.

In August 1953, he and Oliver Tambo opened the first African law firm in the country, Mandela and Tambo, often dealing with cases of police brutality. He had to push his way through the crowds queuing at his office each morning. Although white witnesses could refuse with impunity to be grilled by a “kaffir lawyer”, Mandela rose in confidence, a flamboyant attorney who delighted the crowds.

But his marriage was failing. Evelyn told him his son Thembi had asked her: “Where does Daddy live?” She also suspected him of having affairs. As soon as he was divorced in 1958, Mandela married Winnie Madikizela, a social worker he politicised. Over the following decades, Winnie Mandela became infamous for her militancy.

Outraged by Mandela’s success, the white authorities tried to ban him from practising law. Then in 1956 he was among 150 ANC organisers charged with high treason for a Freedom Charter demanding equality. Four long years passed before they were found not guilty.

Mandela was changing. For two decades from 1941, he has been dedicated to peaceful defiance, influenced by India’s first premier Jawaharlal Nehru. But the ANC was being challenged by a new breed of militant black activists who regarded pacifism as ineffective.

Impatient for change, Mandela concluded in 1961 that armed struggle might be the only way to smash Apartheid. His life was about to become more dangerous.

Chapter Three - The Freedom Fighter

In 1961, as the western world enjoyed the unprecedented liberties of the Swinging Sixties, Nelson Mandela went underground.

He slept in safe houses by night, and disguised himself as a chauffeur, chef or “garden boy” in overalls to evade the police by day. His success earned a new nickname in the papers: The Black Pimpernell.

1964: women demonstrate in front of the Law Courts in Pretoria on 16 June after the verdict of the Rivonia trial, in which eight men, among them Mandela, were sentenced to life imprisonment. The eight men were accused of conspiracy, sabotage and treason
Getty Images

It followed a vicious new crackdown on the black rights movement, including the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, when unarmed protesters were attacked. When Mandela and his co-accused were finally found not guilty of treason by three fair-minded white judges, he dared not linger to celebrate, knowing the enraged authorities could strike at any moment. “I became a creature of the night,” he wrote in his memoirs.

He had already masterminded a new cell-structure for the ANC leadership to continue in secret if it was banned. Now he became its most celebrated organiser, popping up across the country to rally Africans and liberal white supporters for a three-day strike.

One evening, wearing overalls and a chauffeur’s cap, he pulled up at traffic lights alongside Colonel Spengler, the local head of security. “He never looked my way,” Mandela wrote. “Even so, the seconds I spent waiting for the lights to change seemed like hours.”

16 June 1964: Mandela is among eight men with their fists raised in defiance as they are taken away in a prison van after being sentenced to life imprisonment in the Rivonia trial in Pretoria. The eight were accused of conspiracy, sabotage and treason
Getty Images

After a threatened police clampdown dissuaded many strikers, Mandela began campaigning for the ANC to embrace armed struggle. “If the government is to crush by naked force our non-violent struggle, we will have to reconsider our tactics,” he insisted. He was authorised to form Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), also known as MK, to carry out guerilla warfare against the forces of apartheid. “The struggle is my life,” he declared in a statement on Freedom Day. “I will continue fighting for freedom until the end of my days.”

Mandela travelled to win support, training and funding, even visiting London where he met party leaders and joked that his statue might one day stand in Parliament Square. Today it does.

He stayed six months in Ethiopia being trained how to shoot a gun, lay mines, make bombs and command a guerilla force. Although wife Winnie had given him two young children, he had hardly seen them. Back in South Africa, his car was pulled over and he was arrested. Someone had informed.

Jailed five years for organising a strike and travelling illegally, Mandela preached his anti-racist message from the dock of the court. “I was made, by the law, into a criminal, not because of what I stood for, because of what I thought, because of my conscience,” he said.

1964: Mandela, President of the African National Congress, in discussion with C Andrews, a Cape Town teacher
Getty Images

One day a warder suddenly told Mandela to pack. Asked why, he was told: “Die Eiland.” It meant Robben Island, the offshore prison. After an uncomfortable journey Mandela was greeted by burly white wardens jeering: “Dis die Eiland! Hier gaan julle vrek!” It meant: “This is the island. Here you will die.”

Meanwhile, the police raided an MK headquarters and found documents that implicated Mandela in planning guerilla warfare. The wardens taunted him that he would hang.

Again, Mandela used the court as a platform for his anti-racist message. His passionate speech was reported around the world: “During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people,” he said. “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination.

“I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Under international pressure, South Africa did not dare hang Mandela. Instead he was to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

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