MILESTONES
Beyond the madding crowd
world-wide slump affected every country, but in South
Very little of all this, however, percolated into the
The 30’s were grim years in which to grow up. The
gentle hills and valleys of the Transkei, where people lived in
Africa it was compounded by long years of drought which
pretty little ‘beehive’ houses made of sticks, the women and
devastated the land and impoverished tens of thousands of
children wore ochre-dyed blankets, and, in Nelson Mandela’s
tenant farmers. The government did what it could for the ‘poor
words, ‘the concept of education was still foreign to many’.
whites’, but practically nothing about the grievous suffering
At the age of five he became a herd-boy, his life ‘shaped by
of the black people. Their story remains untold.
custom, ritual, and taboo. This was the alpha and omega of our existence, and went unquestioned’. He also remembers that ‘whites appeared as grand as gods to me, and I was aware that they were to be treated with a mixture of fear and respect’.
Here, the war had been seen as a remote and
irrelevant affair, although some sons of the Tembu had taken part and a few had died. Many of the dead – a tragic 700 of them – had been passengers aboard the Mendi, a troopship which struck a mine and went down in the English Channel in February 1917. Eerily, news of the disaster reached the victims’ families 6 000 miles away before the official announcement was made.
Mandela learned his ABCs at the local Wesleyan
the public education system afforded few chances to black
INPRA
mission school (located next to the palace). In those days
The Great Depression - Food handouts in New York,1930
children, but the various Church establishments did a
relatively good job – and would continue to do so until the
Healdtown, the Wesleyan college at Fort Beaufort, alma mater
infamous Bantu Education Act did away with them in the
of most Tembu royalty and very British in its pretensions.
fifties.
Mandela was luckier than most. He took his place at
‘The educated Englishman was our model’, he recalls.
When he was 16, Mandela underwent the customary
‘What we aspired to be were “black Englishmen.”’ Here he
initiation into manhood; and then boarded at the nearby
matriculated, and went on to Fort Hare University, to sporting
Clarkebury Institute to complete his junior certificate. He
excellence – and to student activism. The vision was already
had already absorbed a lot, and would soon go on to higher
taking shape.
things.
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