Mandela was now living in the midst of a black slum, lodging with a minister, the Reverend Mabutho, at 46 Eighth Avenue, Alexandra, a chaotic township six miles north of the city with no electricity, called ‘the Dark City’. Alexandra was a jumble of brick houses and makeshift shacks overflowing with the wartime influx of workers from the countryside. It was insanitary and noisy with hungry dogs – a total contrast to the secluded white mansions beyond its fence. But Alexandra had a village vitality and a sense of community which they lacked. It was ‘a cauldron of black aspirations and talent, and a mirror of black frustrations’, wrote the activist Michael Dingake.19 Alexandra mixed up the tribal Xhosas, Zulus and Sothos in the scramble for urban survival, and Mandela was surprised to find himself pursuing a Swazi girl. He became more interested in other tribes, learning about the Zulus’ past glories from a property-owner called John Mngoma, who told him long stories about the heroism of the Zulu King Shaka and described events which never appeared in the whites’ history books.20
In Alexandra, Mandela was among the poorest, sometimes having to walk twelve miles a day to save the bus-fare to and from the office in the centre of town. He remembers feeling humiliated when girls noticed his shabby clothes, and was envious of the more glamorous young ‘Americans’, the dandies in sharp suits with wide hats and flashy watches, often stolen, who attracted women; but he maintained his more staid English style.21 He was helped by friends who lodged in the same house: later he felt guilty that ‘not once did I think of returning their kindness’.22
Mandela soon found his feet as an urban African, able to fend for himself. He no longer needed the support of his father-figure the Regent, who was now very frail. The Regent visited him in late 1941, and did not reprove Mandela for his past disobedience; six months later, when the old man died, Mandela went to his funeral in the Transkei, and regretted that he had not been more grateful for the Regent’s past kindness. He also wished he had taken the opportunity to ask him about white supremacy and the liberation movement.23 By now he had outgrown his purely Xhosa perspectives, but he was still torn between his tribal obligations and the opportunities offered by the big city.
Mandela completed his BA degree through a correspondence course, but soon realised it was not the key to success: ‘Hardly anything I had learned at university seemed relevant in my new environment.’ He returned to Fort Hare to receive his degree, wearing a new suit bought with a loan from Sisulu. His nephew Kaiser Matanzima, now preparing to be a chief, urged him to return as a lawyer to the Transkei, but Mandela was becoming more interested in the national stage.
He soon moved out of Alexandra. To save money he lived for a short spell in the mining compound of Wenela (Witwatersrand Native Labour Association), which provided special quarters for visiting chiefs; there he met tribal dignitaries, including the Queen Regent of Basutoland. Then he moved to Orlando (now part of Soweto), a municipal suburb twelve miles outside Johannesburg which had been planned in 1930 as a model township for ‘the better class of native’. Orlando stretched out across open farmland, overshadowed by the giant towers of a power station, a vista of two-roomed houses without floors or ceilings between bumpy dirt tracks. It was more hygienic but less intimate than Alexandra: Mandela liked to say that in Alexandra he had no house, but a home, while in Orlando he had a house without a home. But he was now close to Walter Sisulu, who lived with his mother in a house noisy with politics; and Orlando was destined to set the pace for all black South Africa.
Mandela still had to study – this time for a law degree. Early in 1943 he enrolled at the University of Witwatersrand, which stood, with its imposing columns, on a hill north of Johannesburg. ‘Wits’, unlike the Afrikaans universities, admitted a handful of black students to study alongside whites, though they could not use the sports fields, tennis courts or swimming pool. Some white lecturers strongly disapproved of black students, including Professor Hahlo, a German-Jewish lawyer who regarded law as a social science for which blacks and women lacked the mental discipline and experience.24 But other law lecturers, like Julius Lewin and Rex Welsh, were generous liberals, and many of the white students had returned from the war with a hatred of racism. Among them were several communists, including Joe Slovo and his wife Ruth First, Tony O’Dowd and Harold Wolpe. Ruth First, who was later to be a close friend and colleague, remembered Mandela as ‘good-looking, very proud, very dignified, very prickly, rather sensitive, perhaps even arrogant. But of course he was exposed to all the humiliations.’25 Joe Slovo had the impression of ‘a very proud, self-contained black man, who was very conscious of his blackness’ and very sensitive to the perception that ‘when you work with a white man, he dominates’.26 Ismail Meer, who was Ruth’s close friend, found Mandela ‘fairly unsure of himself’ and detached from student politics: ‘He was the best-dressed student, and he was not going to get involved readily in the political activities at the campus. He was very cautious.’27 Mandela ‘had a friendly dignity about him’, recalled another contemporary, Nathan Lochoff: ‘a little shy, not assertive in any way’.
Mandela was to spend six years at Wits, from 1943 to 1949, without any great distinction. He had an excellent memory, but his studies had to be squeezed in between his job as an articled clerk and his political commitments. Professor Hahlo could be scathing: ‘You call this an essay?’ ‘You know what I wish for him?’ Mandela told one of his white friends, Jules Browde: ‘That one day he has to write by paraffin light in Soweto.’28 When he failed at the end of his course he applied to Professor Hahlo for permission to resit some papers, explaining that he often arrived home in Orlando after 8 p.m., ‘feeling tired and hungry and unfit to concentrate on my studies … if I could have done my work under more suitable conditions, I would have produced better results.’29 But Hahlo, strictly following the rules, turned down his application, and Mandela was eventually to leave Wits without his LlB degree. Despite his justifications, he still felt a sense of failure.30
At Wits Mandela suffered many humiliations. When he sat at a table in the law library, a white student moved away. When he went to a café with some white students, they were kept out because there was a ‘kaffir’ among them; one of them, Julius Wulfsohn, protested, but Mandela put his hand on his shoulder and simply said, ‘Just leave it.’31 When he went on a whites-only tram with two Indians the conductor called him their ‘kaffir friend’, and had them charged in court.32 But he revealed no lasting grudges. Fifty years later, as President of the Republic, he invited the whole class of ’46 to a reunion at Wits. ‘I am what I am,’ he told them, ‘both as a result of people who respected me and helped me, and of those who did not respect me and treated me badly.’33
Back in Orlando, Mandela was seen as a man about town, and a ladies’ man. (‘I can’t help it if the ladies take note of me,’ he