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to be tragically torn apart during the apartheid years by political persecution and exile. But the black professional middle class with its missionary influence would never be destroyed or bypassed, as it was in other parts of Africa like Ghana or Uganda; and some of its offspring – including Pallo Jordan, the son of Phyllis Ntantala and A.C. Jordan, and Stella Sigcau, daughter of the King of East Pondoland – would join Nelson Mandela’s government in 1994.

      Mandela was never at the heart of this intellectual elite, but it included many of his friends and relations. And he always respected Z.K. Matthews, with whom he had family links. The big, square-jawed professor, who taught generations of black students at Fort Hare, infuriated many rebels with his political moderation, but usually came to influence them with his powers of reasoning and quiet argument. Mandela was to admire Matthews still more after he originated the ANC’s Freedom Charter in the fifties. ‘There are some people inside and outside the movement who are critical of his cautious attitude,’ he wrote to Matthews’s widow after he died in 1970, ‘but I am not sure now whether they were not wild.’

      The Fort Hare which Mandela joined in 1939 was a small, compact institution with a quadrangle of simple Italianate buildings surrounded by student hostels. It was still dominated by its first principal, Alexander Kerr, a strict and austere Scot who avoided public controversy but was dedicated to the advancement and academic standards of the university, without colour prejudice: ‘He dealt with every student as he was,’ said Z.K. Matthews, ‘and colour did not enter the relationship.’ Kerr was a passionate teacher of the English language, imbuing his students with a love of its literature – above all of Shakespeare, which he taught with a vividness which made him seem totally relevant to contemporary Africa.⁴⁶ Mandela would always remember verses from Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’, which Kerr declaimed in his Scots accent:

      Strong Son of God, immortal Love,

      Whom we, that have not seen thy face,

      By faith, and faith alone, embrace,

      Believing where we cannot prove … ⁴⁷

      The rigorous but liberal scholarship of Kerr and the two African professors Jabavu and Matthews fortified the students throughout their later revolutionary phases. As well as its Coloured and Indian students Fort Hare included a few local whites, but it was dominated by Africans. A young African-American academic, Ralph Bunche – later Under-Secretary General of the United Nations and a Nobel Prize-winner – visited Fort Hare in 1938, and declared that ‘the good native student is the equal of any Indian or Coloured student.’⁴⁸

      Mandela was proud to be at Fort Hare, and the Regent was glad to have a member of his clan at the famous college. The teachers told their students that they would become the leaders of their people, and when Mandela arrived as a fresher of twenty-one he was daunted by the sophistication and confidence of his seniors. His friend Justice had stayed behind at Healdtown, but Mandela now found a new ally and idol in Kaiser Matanzima, his nephew from the Tembu royal family. Like Mandela, Kaiser (or K.D., as he was called) was descended from King Ngubengcuka, but through the senior line, the ‘Great House’, and he was destined to be a king or paramount chief. Technically he was Mandela’s nephew, but he was older and more confident as both leader and scholar: he would be the first chief to take a degree.⁴⁹ He became Mandela’s mentor, encouraging him in his future role as royal counsellor. In later years the two cousins were to become political opponents, but at Fort Hare they were best friends. They both lived in the Methodist hostel, went to church together, played football, went dancing, and did not drink. They were both very tall, with courtly manners, fond of clothes and quite vain. ‘The two of us were very handsome young men,’ Kaiser would recall, ‘and all the women wanted us.’⁵⁰ Even the tribal circumcision names by which they called each other, Dalibunga and Daliwonga, made them sound like twins. Sixty years later, from his Great Place in the Transkei, Kaiser looked back with gratitude on that youthful friendship: ‘We were always together: when someone saw me alone, they would say, “Where’s Nelson?”… We had warm hearts together.’ Mandela even found Kaiser his wife, Agrineth, the daughter of Chief Sangoni, which was all the more important since Kaiser had forsworn polygamy.⁵¹ And despite their later political differences, Mandela would never deny his earlier admiration of Matanzima: ‘You probably will not believe it,’ he wrote to Fatima Meer from prison in 1985, ‘when I tell you he was once my idol.’⁵²

      Mandela, though less grand than K.D., was nevertheless also seen as a young prince; and royal families still had a special status even in the intellectual atmosphere of Fort Hare, which inspired both respect and resentment. ‘Xhosa princes think the world belongs to them,’ said Joe Matthews, the professor’s son who would follow Mandela to Fort Hare. ‘Some would kick tribesmen out of their way, thinking everyone else unimportant. Aristocrats can’t believe you’ll contradict them – as in Britain, like the women in Harrods who ignore everyone else and say loudly: “I’ll have some of that.”’⁵³ Mandela never displayed that arrogance, and always respected commoners like Oliver Tambo who were cleverer than him; but he became accustomed to people treating him like a prince.

      Mandela blossomed at Fort Hare. He loved the university’s beautiful setting on the banks of the Tyume river, below the Amatola Hills, and would later reminisce about the journey by the railway line curving along the hillside, and the magnificent landscape: ‘the green bushes and singing streams after the summer rains, the open veldt and clean air’.⁵⁴ He excelled at cross-country running and boxing, and his heroes were sportsmen and athletes rather than intellectuals: later, from jail, he would ask about his rival in the mile races, ‘Sosthenes’ Mokgokong.⁵⁵ He enjoyed ballroom dancing and the drama society: he once played John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. And he made new friends from many backgrounds in this meeting-place for blacks from all over the country. ‘You saw the tribes welding into a new nation,’ remembered Noni Jabavu. ‘You had only to listen to the exclamations and shouts. Their various English accents gave you a sense of the vast spread of South Africa.’⁵⁶

      Some of Mandela’s friends were already active in politics: Paul Mahabane, who spent holidays with him, was the son of a former president of the ANC; Ntsu Mokhehle, a brilliant scientist, would become head of the Basutoland Congress Party; Nyathi Khongisa stirred up the students by attacking Prime Minister Smuts as a racialist and publicly hoping that Nazi Germany would defeat Britain, so that Africans could overthrow European domination; Lincoln Mkentane, from another prominent Transkei family, joined the ANC and was imprisoned; Oliver Tambo, an outstanding scholar in both science and the arts, was already a keen political debater.⁵⁷ But Mandela himself was not then politically aware. He was not close to Tambo, and was embarrassed by the rebelliousness of friends like Mahabane. His immediate ambition was to be a court interpreter, a much esteemed profession in the rural areas, which promised both influence and status: ‘I could not resist the glitter of a civil service career.’⁵⁸ He studied interpreting at Fort Hare, together with law, native administration, politics and English. He saw a degree as his passport not to political leadership, but to a position in the community which would enable him to support his family.

      Most of the other students were not very political either, and expected to become civil servants or, most often, teachers, which worried the university’s Governing Council: ‘It cannot be expected that the teaching profession will continue to absorb all grades,’ the council reported in 1940.⁵⁹ There had been a time when Fort Hare was more revolutionary. In

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