Mandela's Politics Talk

Codes of Conduct: Mandela’s Politics Talk: SAVUSA, University of Groningen, 29 November, 2006; African Studies Centre, Leiden, 30 November, 2006 Tom Lodge In this talk tonight I want to explore the moral and intellectual bases of Mandela’s conciliatory politics. I am going to argue that they were well established a long time ago, instilled in the lessons learned during Mandela’s upbringing, regulatory principles that drew upon both indigenous African and British imperial notions of personal honour and public virtue. These lessons were supplemented by his experiences as a relatively young man in Johannesburg in the 1950s, in a world that suddenly seemed suffused with hope and expectation Lineage enjoys pride of place in Mandela’s testimonies about his childhood. For his friend Fatima Meer in 1988, Mandela, still then in prison, compiled a family tree and a genealogy. This indicated his line of descent in the Thembu royal chieftaincy as a member of its “left hand house”.1. 1 Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope: The Authorised Biography of Nelson Mandela, New York: Harper and Row, 1990. 1 Much is made of Mandela’s aristocratic status in the various narratives about him. In these Mandela’s genealogy is an important source of his charismatic power. “Since he was a small boy in the Transkei, Mandela was treated as someone special”, Richard Stengel, Mandela’s collaborator on his autobiography, notes. “His political confidence” was substantially derived from “the security and simplicity of his rural upbringing”2. Mandela himself maintains that much of his childhood was a form of apprenticeship shaped by a knowledge of his “destiny” for high office in the Thembu chiefdom. In the 1920s, the Transkei ‘native reserve’ could still support a peasant economy: Mandela remembers that in his mother’s household “milk was always plentiful”3. Henry Gadla, Mandela’s father, was the leader of a predominantly “red” or pagan community, though Mandela’s illiterate mother had converted to Methodism. Henry Gadla lost both wealth and position after his dismissal from his post as village headman, a dismissal prompted by a dispute with the local magistrate. Henry’s wife and children went to live with kinsfolk thirty miles away. Henry visited, once a month, as custom dictated, until his death from TB in 1928. Mandela was present when his father died, apparently, though he does not mention this in his autobiography. Mandela started attending school and was given an English name, Nelson, by his teacher, a Mrs Mdingane. 2 Richard Stengel, ‘The Mandela I came to know’ Reader’s Digest, May 1995. 3 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, Randburg: Macdonald Purnell, 1994, p. 9. 2 Mandela’s learning began well before he started attending mission school. Apparently, as “a solemn boy among the many descendants of the great Xhosa chief, Ngubengcuka”, he would listen by the fireside to his great uncles’ accounts of the Xhosa frontier wars with the British as well as stories about more recent conflicts.. His awareness of an African proto-nationalist tradition was reinforced, Mandela tells us, by the lessons he absorbed at the Great Place of Jongintaba Dalindyebo, the regent of the Thembu, who accepted Mandela as his ward and companion to his own son, Justice. At high school, that is, the two elite Methodist institutions of Clarkebury and Healdtown. Mandela claimed in 1962 that he was “bitterly disappointed” by his history lessons for his textbooks and teachers “recognized only white leaders … Africans (were) described in them as savages and thieves”4. In fact, both schools employed black as well as white teachers and amongst the former, Weaver Newana enlivened history classes with his own versions of the oral narratives Mandela had heard at his father’s fireside and Jongintaba’s Great Place. Healdtown also hosted a visit by Samuel Mqhayi, mbongi (praise- singer/poet) and historian, who spoke to the assembled students and staff on “the brutal clash between what is indigenous and good, and what is foreign and bad” before reciting the stirring call to arms he had written on the occasion of the Prince of Wales’s visit, a performance which Mandela remembers as leaving him both “galvanized and 4Nadine Gordimer, ‘Nelson Mandela’, unpublished manuscript, 1962, in Thomas Karis and Gwendolen Carter, Microfilm Collection, 12A 2: XM33, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 3 confused”. On the whole, though, the values, ideas, and principles instilled in the curriculum were “English”, Mandela recalls, and, indeed, the majority of staff were British ex-patriates, not South Africans. Not that the English ideas instilled in Healdtown pupils necessarily required a reversal of the principles around which imbongis constructed heroic narrative. During the early 1960s, mission-educated political prisoners on Robben Island would recite Macauley’s lines on Horatius to honour their fallen comrades: “And how can man die better/ Than facing fearful odds/For the Ashes of his fathers/And the temples of his Gods?”5 At Clarkebury and Healdtown, Mandela may have consciously resisted becoming a “black Englishman” but both institutions as well as his earlier schooling influenced him profoundly all the same. In the 1950s, as an ANC leader, Mandela was credited with the conception of a plan for a street based organization: much of the vocabulary that described the officials and the structures in this scheme derived from Methodist church nomenclature. The controlled daily regime of boarding school helped to instil self restraint. Boxing and athletics supplanted the child hood games of stickfighting in which he had learned, “to defeat opponents without dishonouring them”. School also augmented his respect for order, discipline, structure, and authority: as a prefect at Healdtown, classmates remember an exemplary (if uncharacteristically self righteous) occasion when 5Benjamin Pogrund, How Can Man Die Better? Sobukwe and Apartheid, London: Peter Halban, 1990. 4 Mandela “leapt onto the dining room table and exhorted his fellow students to take more responsibility for their behaviour”6. On the eve of his departure on a visit to Britain in 1993 Mandela told journalists that “he had not discarded the influence which Britain and British culture exercised on us”7. In his autobiography Mandela confesses “to being something of an anglophile… In so many ways, the very model of a gentleman for me was an Englishman … While I abhorred the notion of British imperialism, I never rejected the trappings of British style and manners”. Mandela’s first encounter with British manners was at the dining room table at the rectory near Jongintaba’s palace, to which he had been invited by one of the daughters of the manse, Winnie Matyolo. Notwithstanding hearthside history lessons, Jongintaba’s household was Christian and anglophile: Jongintaba’s wife was named NoEngland (Mother of England). From Mandela’s recollections of Xhosa oral traditions and from his own membership of a patrician dynasty, South African nationalist historians readily identify connections between pre-colonial institutions, primary resistance to colonial rule and the ANC’s struggle for modern rights. Mandela himself was to suggest in his trial speeches that “the seeds of revolutionary democracy” were present in the consensual procedures he observed at Jongintaba’s court. Mandela claims his own notions of leadership were substantially shaped by what he observed as a child of the Great Place. 6Luli Callinicos, The World that Made Mandela: A Heritage Trail, Johannesburg: STE Publishers, p. 23. 7The Star (Johannesburg), 1 May 1993. 5 But the world in which Mandela grew up was complicated by the presence of competing institutional sources of power, culture and moral authority, which moreover in their local contexts influenced each other. Thembuland had been subjected to a colonial administration since the 1880s and alongside a bureaucratic government incorporating chiefs and headmen, an elected system of representation was introduced in stages from 1895 in which a mission-educated elite again composed largely of headmen and chiefs assumed leading positions. By 1938, the anthropologist Isaac Schapera was writing about “a specifically South African culture, shared in by black and white” within which, “the missionary, administrator, trader and labour recruiter must be regarded as factors in tribal life, in the same way as the chief and the magician”8. By the time of Mandela’s schooling, a printed Xhosa literature existed, initially a product of publishing by the Glasgow Missionary Society from 1821. During Mandela’s youth, Samuel Mqhayi, to whom he had listened at Healdtown, was the most influential Xhosa writer. Mqhayi’s writing was itself an example of the cultural synthesis between English and Xhosa represented by the literary standardization of Xhosa in its adaption of the traditional genre of isibongi (praise poetry) to the formal conventions of Victorian English verse. This was a literary culture actively promoted at Healdtown. Here in 1938 Mandela won the annual prize for the best Xhosa essay. Mandela himself began to be a 8Cited in Hugh Macmillan, ‘Return to the Malungwana Drift: Max Gluckman, the Zulu Nation and the Common Society’, African Affairs, 94, 1995, p. 50. 6 favoured subject of imbongis as early as 1954 when David Yali-Manisi wrote his homage to “the one with strength, the strong iron rod, the black one of Mandela”9. The Methodist church itself, in the Transkei, was substantially African, its members, like Mandela himself, moving backwards and forwards between what they later described as “British” and “ancestral” frameworks of cultural reference. The social order at Jongintaba’s Great Place was similarly syncretic. Before dispatching his ward to the missionaries’ boarding school, the regent arranged for his passage into manhood through the customary procedures of circumcision and initiation. Mandela’s narrative concerning this experience is extremely detailed: in his autobiography it is the most vivid and introspective recollection he has of his childhood.

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