In 1934 Clarkebury was near the peak of its achievement. It was run by a formidable pedagogue, the Reverend Cecil Harris, who was closely involved with the local Xhosa communities and their chiefs. The Regent warned Mandela to treat Harris with suitable respect as ‘a Tembu at heart’, and Mandela shook his hand with awe – the first white hand he had ever shaken. Harris ruled Clarkebury with an iron hand, more like a field commander than a school head.13 He had an aristocratic style, and walked like a soldier, which he had been in the First World War. ‘He was very stern dealing with the students,’ Mandela recalled; ‘severe with no levity.’14 But Mandela also saw a much more human and friendly side of Harris and his wife when he worked in their garden. Years later, while in jail, he traced the address of the Harrises’ daughter Mavis Knipe, who had been a child when he was at Clarkebury. She was ‘flabbergasted’ to receive a letter from the famous prisoner.15 Mandela reminded her how her mother would often bring him ‘a buttered scone or bread with jam, which to a boy of sixteen was like a royal feast’, and asked her for information about the Dalindyebo family: ‘At our age one becomes deeply interested in facts and events which as youths we brushed aside as uninteresting.’16
Mandela was expecting the other pupils to treat him with respect, as a royal whose great-grandfather had founded the school. Instead he was mocked by one girl pupil for his country-boy’s accent, his slowness in class and for walking in his brand-new boots ‘like a horse in spurs’.17 He found himself in a community which respected merit and intelligence more than hereditary status. But after the first shock he held his own, and with the benefit of his retentive memory he passed the Junior Certificate in two years. He also made some lasting friends, including Honourbrook Bala, later a prosperous doctor who joined the opposition in the Transkei and corresponded with Mandela in jail; Arthur Damane, who became a journalist on the radical paper the Guardian and was in jail with Mandela in Pretoria in 1960; Sidney Sidyiyo, the son of a teacher at Clarkebury who became a prominent musician; and Reuben Mfecane, who became a trades unionist in Port Elizabeth and, like Mandela, ended up on Robben Island.18
Mandela was occasionally critical of the hierarchy at Clarkebury, and particularly of the food, which was minimal and at times almost inedible. But his first alma mater opened his eyes to the value of scientific knowledge, and introduced him to a much wider world than Tembuland, including as it did students from Johannesburg and beyond of both sexes – for unlike British public schools Clarkebury was co-educational. Even so, he still saw himself as a Tembu at heart, destined to advise his royal family, and continued to believe that ‘My roots were my destiny.’19
After two years at Clarkebury Mandela was sent further away to Healdtown, a bigger Methodist institution, again following in the footsteps of Justice, the Regent’s son. Healdtown was almost as remote as Clarkebury: to reach it students had to walk ten miles from Fort Beaufort along a dirt road which wound through the valley, crossing and recrossing the stream, until it reached a cluster of fine Victorian buildings with red corrugated roofs, looking over a ravine. Today, like Clarkebury, the school is largely ruined. The handsome central block, with its picturesque clock-tower, has been restored and, sponsored by Coca-Cola, revived as the comprehensive high school; but most of the schoolrooms and houses are empty shells with smashed windows, rusty roofs and overgrown gardens, occupied by nothing but the ghosts of the old community on the hillside.
Healdtown, thirty years younger than Clarkebury, had an even more resonant history. It was established in 1855, after Sir Harry Smith had subjugated the surrounding Xhosa tribes, in the midst of the battle-areas. It was well placed as a British outpost, below the great escarpment of the Amatola hills where the defeated Xhosa had taken refuge, and surrounded by old military frontier-posts – Fort Beaufort, Fort Hare, Fort Brown. It was strictly Methodist, named after James Heald, a prominent Wesleyan Methodist British Member of Parliament, but it was also intended to serve as a practical experiment in training Fingo Christians in crafts and industry. That first experiment failed, but the college widened its scope and intake to become a teacher-training college and an important secondary school. By the 1930s it had over eight hundred boarders.20 It was close to other great missionary educational centres such as Lovedale, St Matthew’s and Fort Hare, and together they comprised the greatest concentration of well-educated black students in Southern Africa.
Healdtown, like Clarkebury, offered an uncompromising British education with few concessions to Xhosa culture. The missionary and imperialist traditions often converged, particularly on Sundays, when the schoolboys and girls, in separate ranks, marched to church in their white shirts, black blazers and maroon-and-gold ties. The Union Jack was hoisted and they all sang ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’, accompanied by the school brass band and watched by admiring visitors who came from far and wide.21 The school governor since 1927 had been the Reverend Arthur Wellington – whom Mandela would always enjoy mimicking – a diehard English patriot who boasted of his descent from the victor of Waterloo. Wellington inculcated British history and literature in his students, assisted by a mainly English staff, and publicised the school by inviting eminent Britons to visit it, among them Lord Clarendon, the Governor-General of South Africa, who shortly before Mandela’s arrival had laid the foundation stones for the new dormitories and dining hall.22 Wellington was a hard-driving autocrat – though he protested that he was naturally lazy – who claimed to run the largest educational institution south of the Sahara (Lovedale was in fact bigger).23 He banned alcohol at Healdtown. His staff called him ‘the Duke’, and regarded him as a missionary-statesman. Under Wellington, wrote Jack Dugard, who ran the teacher-training school after 1932, ‘within a short time the once rather dowdy mission was transformed into an attractive education centre’.24
The Methodism of Healdtown and Clarkebury did not make a deep religious impact on Mandela. He would never be a true believer, although many of his later friends, including his present wife, were educated by Methodists. But he would always be influenced by the schools’ puritanical atmosphere, the strict discipline and mental training, the Wesleyan emphasis on paring down ideas to their bare essentials, avoiding frills and distractions. He would always disapprove of heavy drinking or swearing; and the self-reliance in these boarding-school surroundings would add to his fortitude.
Mandela was immersed not just in Methodism, but in British history and geography. ‘As a teenager in the countryside I knew about London and Glasgow as much as I knew about Cape Town and Johannesburg,’ he would recall from jail fifty years later, writing to the Provost of Glasgow and mentioning Scots patriots like William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and the Earl of Argyll.25 But he was resistant to becoming a ‘black Englishman’, and took great pride in his own Xhosa culture, encouraged by his history teacher, the much-liked Weaver Newana, who added his own oral history to the accounts of the Xhosa wars already familiar to the boy. Mandela won the prize for the best Xhosa essay in 1938; and he was thrilled when the famous Xhosa poet Krune Mkwayi visited the college, appearing in a kaross of