But the full extent of control and concerns is best illustrated by a letter – Foucault meets St Trinian’s – written by Watkinson to a Miss Boden the very month Govan arrived at the school: ‘Will you kindly enforce the following rules: No girls are to leave the Boarding Department except for school purposes. They must not pass the middle gate in the Avenue until the clock has struck a quarter past eight. No permission is to be given to visit the Location except under very special circumstances … No girls under any circumstances are to have their meals away from the dining hall … No variation from the prescribed dietary is allowed for any girl … Girls may be allowed to go to Stuart’s shop between four and five on Thursday afternoon and at no other time. No girls are allowed to go to Dick’s shop under any circumstances … All girls speaking any language except English must be reported to the Governor. All shouting and screaming must be rigidly suppressed. No girls are to be allowed through the gate leading to the bottom camp except on the regular washing day. The wash house is available for the girls on Wednesday afternoons and all washing must be done then.’
Yet Govan Mbeki’s own memories of Healdtown were benign. He relished the academic challenge and completed his Junior Certificate. His accounts of those years are couched in warmth and humour. ‘Ah,’ he ended an anecdote, ‘how one has quite – some nice memories of those days.’ Flashes of schoolboy observation and merriment surface in the interviews. He mimicked the delivery of the hard-of-hearing Mr Wellington addressing the students – a heavily stressed ‘Wise men learn before experience, fools after’; and the lilting Welsh cadences of Mr Ball: ‘a native child cannot afford to fail: I am going to pull you from the front and Mr Caley is going to push you from behind. You must pass.’
Govan passed. His Junior Certificate subjects were English, Latin, History, Physical Science, Biology and Xhosa. All the tuition was in English, including the Xhosa lessons. He maintained Healdtown’s successful record in Junior Certificate passes, performing well enough to win a Bhunga scholarship from the Transkeian Territories General Council to proceed to Fort Hare. Yet, even while he buckled down to the demands of the school syllabus, like his contemporaries he was also open to an alternative curriculum. Alongside the pleasures of school life came (as Z.K. Matthews put it) ‘the discoveries, slowly accumulating at the same time, of what it meant to be black in a white man’s world’. Healdtown – like the other leading mission schools – drew students from all over southern Africa. They pooled information so that the country could be mapped anew. Students learned from each other a topography of racial oppression, shading in local details of injustice, tracing the contours of domination, and poring over possible routes of resistance.
Govan also learned a series of impromptu lessons from the counter-curriculum of experience. In 1925 he attended several concerts organised by a Rev. Mr Mhlongo, of the Independent Methodist Church, in Mpukane. These were fundraising events on behalf of the ANC – the first time he heard of the organisation. A couple of years later, home on holiday from Healdtown, the lanky teenager encountered a more radical politics. His cousin Robert Mbeki was sent to the Transkei by the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) to recruit members and set up branches. Robert opted to speak in English and have Govan, at his elbow, translate his speeches into Xhosa. In 1929 Govan travelled by train to Johannesburg to spend the summer with his half-sister Fanny. It was his first visit to the Rand, his first time outside the rural quietude of the Eastern Cape – and he came face to face with some of the harshest aspects of ghetto life. He saw police raid the yards of City and Suburban for illicit stills and scour the location for pass law offenders. Sixty years after the event, his voice thickened with emotion when he described the menace of the police and the fear of township residents. It ‘aroused my anger as nothing else did and determined me to join the struggle to end such a system,’ he said. When he left Healdtown to do his Senior Certificate at Fort Hare, he took with him these memories as well as his accomplishments in literature, grammar, Latin and science.
Paying attention to politics: Fort Hare, 1932–1937
For half a century, the South African Native College – its official name, although it was always called Fort Hare – was the only university for black South Africans. Its propinquity to Lovedale – a couple of miles away, across the Tyhume River – made the small town of Alice the centre of black education in the Eastern Cape. Fort Hare educated many of South Africa’s best-known black intellectuals and political leaders in the decades before it was eviscerated as a university by Verwoerd; and the campus was a cradle of assertive African nationalism from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s. It shaped Govan Mbeki profoundly, intellectually and politically. His years there gave him the formal skills that fuelled his output as journalist and author; they also politicised him, deeply and dually.
In the 1930s the campus was a modest cluster of buildings, straddling the road before it crossed the Tyhume into Alice. The college grounds – thick with trees and brush – ran to the banks of the river. This was the setting that Phyllis Ntantala evokes: Fort Hare was ‘a beautiful campus, a good and healthy place for young people … I was young; life was good.’ There were about 150 students at Fort Hare, a community small enough for all its members to know one another. As they all lived on campus, it was a close-knit and highly interactive community. Students in the 1930s took their studies seriously, and they also had a range of recreational and social activities. It is unsurprising that those who studied in the 1930s later recalled their Fort Hare days with unmistakable affection.
Govan entered Fort Hare in 1931, his fees covered by a Bhunga scholarship worth £28 a year, initially to study for his matriculation. In 1934 he commenced a Bachelor’s degree. This required eleven courses: Mbeki did two years of Latin, a year each of English, Xhosa, Ethics and Zoology, and he majored in Psychology and Political Studies (Administration). His choice of subject was significant. ‘When we got to Fort Hare students majored in English, most of them in English … Now we became the first group that paid attention to politics, round about 1933, 1934. We ran a campaign against English – against majoring in English – now firstly we attacked the Administration. We said the fellows who taught at Lovedale, Healdtown and of course [D.D.T.] Jabavu at Fort Hare were drawn by the missionaries into their lifestyles so they became sort of black Englishmen … We said fellows must find other subjects to major in, like Political Science.’
Mbeki and McLeod Mabude were the first two students to major in Political Studies. In 1935 Mbeki also completed the requirements for a College Diploma in Education, a post-matriculation teaching certificate. In addition to his studies, Govan served on the Athletic Union, and was secretary of the rugby club. He was very proud of the unbeaten 1935 rugby side, for which he played at lock forward: it was ‘the strongest team from Port Elizabeth to Queenstown!’ He attended music evenings and learned ballroom dancing. Years later, in solitary confinement in North End prison in Port Elizabeth, he exercised by twirling through the remembered steps with an invisible partner on the cement floor of his tiny cell.
Mbeki credits two people for deepening his political awareness, and for introducing him to Marxism. In the winter of 1933 there took place an encounter he regarded as a decisive political moment in his life. Eddie Roux, a member of the Communist Party of South Africa, and his new bride Win set off on ‘a sort of busman’s honeymoon’. They had recently begun to bring out a monthly magazine, Indlela Yenkululeko (The Road to Freedom), which they dispatched to schools and to Fort Hare. Now, with tents and a donkey, they tramped through the Ciskei – pitching camp by the Tyhume River – and held a series of outdoor meetings. The students (wrote the Rouxs) ‘told us of their life in college and of how they were disciplined and treated as schoolboys. We told them of the movement and of Indlela Yenkululeko.’ Among their audience was a rapt Mbeki, won by the clarity and radicalism of what he heard.
A less likely impetus to left-wing politics came from Max Yergan. Yergan, an African American, worked in South Africa between 1922 and 1936 as an employee of the YMCA. His biographer has argued that Yergan underwent a ‘shift from evangelical Protestantism