Going to the Mountain Read online

  By the time I was ten, I’d grown used to this underlying feeling of unease in my life, but I always knew that I had people who loved me. Auntie Maki went to live in the United States for a few years, getting her PhD in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts, so Kweku was gone, and I missed hanging out with him, but I ran with a good crew of friends in Jo’burg. I went to a Catholic school, Sacred Heart College, which had opened its doors to black children—children of all races, actually—after the Soweto uprising on June 16, 1976. On that day, black South African high school students went out to protest a movement that had installed Afrikaans as the language of instruction in schools throughout the region. Their march was met with horrifying brutality. The police who mowed these children down with semi-automatic weapons reported the number of dead as 176, but in truth, the death toll was much higher—some say as high as six or seven hundred with more than a thousand wounded. The true numbers can never be known, because police ordered doctors to report all bullet wounds so that the wounded children could be prosecuted, and the doctors got around that by reporting injuries such as “abscesses” and “contusions” instead of the actual gunshots and bludgeoning.

  The violence rose and fell like a tide for several hours, and all that night, armored vehicles called Hippos prowled the streets. The Hippo was a familiar sight in many black neighborhoods in Soweto and Johannesburg. Its unmistakable bulk was painted bright yellow with a blue stripe. Hippos were designed to drive over landmines, so driving over protesters presented very little difficulty. As many as ten infantrymen could ride inside and leap out the back end as needed, but the Hippo’s double machine gun turret was intimidating enough that it was rarely necessary for the occupants to debus. The day after the uprising, a force of fifteen hundred police officers poured in, carrying stun guns and automatic rifles. The South African Army was on standby to back them up, if it came to that. The uprising was effectively put down, but things would never be the same.

  Sacred Heart College responded to all this by placing an advert welcoming all races to the school. It was one of the first schools to do this, so many members of the African National Congress sent their children there. The ANC was one big family during those years. As children, we didn’t understand the grave danger we were in, but the mamas were vigilant and smart. They knew their best hope was to support and protect each other. The grandchildren of Walter Sisulu and Jacob Zuma, ANC members who were in prison at Robben Island with my grandfather, were my friends, and we all attended Sacred Heart, which was in Observatory, a suburb about ten minutes from our house.

  My friends and I heard stories about the Soweto uprising and other pitched battles between protestors and police. We played at stick fighting—Police and Protestors instead of Cops and Robbers—acting out the violence we saw on television every day. We boasted that we would take on the whole army if it came anywhere near our houses.

  One autumn day in 1992—April is when summer ends, so this was probably May—my friends and I were out playing soccer, and we saw that a protest march was forming just up the street. We discussed the possible blowback. We were in primary school, about ten years old, so we still lived in fear of our mothers, grandmothers, and aunts. We weren’t about to make any trouble that would incur their wrath. But we decided, “Hey, we’re men! We’re warriors!” Off we went, up the street.

  It wasn’t one of the huge marches, just a small but passionate group of eighty or maybe a hundred men and women in their twenties, singing, raising signs, and shouting in unison. We fell in step and marched with them, shouting and singing, and progressed two or three blocks before we saw the hulking yellow Hippo round the corner in front of us. There was a jerking motion from the turret. Thok! Thok! Thok! Tear gas canisters hissed over our heads. The next moment, everything was chaos. People screamed and scattered. People took off in every direction, blinded by the tear gas, desperate to get away from the Hippo. Some stumbled and fell. Others helped them up.

  My friends and I, like a tight little flock of startled birds, peeled off together and beat feet toward home. We were only a few blocks from the street where we’d spent the morning playing. The Hippo roared and belched, pausing at the intersection, but we didn’t slow down long enough to do more than glance over our shoulders. We ran, eyes streaming, throats choking, sinuses full of snot that seared like hot lava. We reached our front door, coughing and spitting, retching and reassuring each other that, no, no, we weren’t crying—this was just the tear gas making our eyes water. We weren’t terrified. Quite the opposite. We were elated! This was a proud moment. Now we were real soldiers. We knew the sting of tear gas.

  This whole episode took place in a matter of minutes, and what is most remarkable about it is how unremarkable it was in the grand scheme of things. I doubt this incident even made it onto the evening news. This was a minor skirmish among a daily parade of minor skirmishes, neighborhood raids, and flurries of violent confrontation. It stands out particularly in my own memory only because it’s The Story of the First Time I Felt the Burn of Tear Gas. It certainly was not the last.

  This was life under apartheid. The police could roll into a black neighborhood and raid every house on the street whenever they pleased. People who objected were beaten and arrested. The only way the white minority could control the overwhelming black majority was to make them afraid, keep them poor, and grind them down, decade after decade, with an ugly fable about their inferiority. There were a few white people who hated apartheid and knew it was wrong, and clearly, when you look at the logistics and economics of it, apartheid was not sustainable. Those in power knew it would eventually end; they just didn’t know how. In their mind, the only possible ending was terrible violence, because that’s the only way they could see it continuing.

  Meanwhile, cultural revolution was taking place on a global scale. My grandfather was arrested in August 1962 (facing charges of inciting workers’ strikes and leaving the country without a passport) and released in February 1990. During the decades he was incarcerated, everything about the world had changed. Think of the difference between a child watching Howdy Doody on a black and white TV and a child watching Ren & Stimpy on a computer. Think of the difference between Chubby Checker doing “The Twist” and Dr. Dre dropping “The Chronic.” The Beatles happened. The Vietnam War happened. Integration became the law of the land in the United States and Europe. MTV became a thing. Michael Jackson and Prince were being played at dance clubs from Soweto to Sweden. The Iron Curtain fell. The Soviet Union crumbled. The Berlin Wall came down. A full-on cultural revolution had rewritten the world, led by artists and musicians, poets and club kids, punkers and iron-blood orphans, a new generation empowered by a tornado of technological advances.

  By the time the late 1980s rolled around, the white South African government was being loudly condemned by pretty much the whole planet. Progress was upon them, and they knew it, but they were terrified. What would happen if the white government removed its boot from the neck of the black population—which happened to outnumber the white population ten to one? How could people who’d been so oppressed, so abused, respond with anything but righteous wrath? They knew Mandela had great influence, and he consistently called for reconciliation and forgiveness, but what would happen to all his talk of peace when the opportunity for revenge was at hand? To believe in the power of forgiveness over the power of violence—that is a tremendous leap of faith. Foolishness, some would say.

  There’s an old Xhosa saying: Idolophu egqibeleleyo iyakusoloko imgama. Roughly translated, it means that Bakuba—the perfect city, Utopia, whatever you want to call it—is a long way off. No one’s ever gotten there. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or that it can’t exist in the future. It may take effort and struggle to get there, but it’s still worthwhile to work toward that great vision of peace and equality.

  When I met my grandfather, he was much closer to the end of his life than he was to the beginning. Twenty-seven years of memories, experiences, and
opportunities had been taken from him, but his ideals were intact, along with his resolve and his baseline joy at being alive. He knew change was coming. In a BBC interview, he said, “It matters very little to me whether I see it or not, but it is definitely around the corner, and that’s what motivates me.”

  My grandfather’s release from prison in 1990 was a great moment. Most of the family was there to meet him when he came out, but there was time for little more than a brief handshake. He was swept into a throng of well-wishers, people celebrating wherever he went, thousands of people who loved him and had been waiting for even a fleeting opportunity to touch him or just get a glimpse of him as his car passed by. A great sense of elation swept over South Africa, but things didn’t just change overnight. Apartheid was still very much in place. That battle was yet to be won.

  My granddad used to tell a story about a great warrior. There are different versions of this story, but essentially, this is how he told it: “Long ago, there was a brave bushman who fought the Afrikaners. Fought them long and hard. Even though they had guns, and he had only his bow and arrow. He saw his comrades fall, one after the other, until he was the only one left fighting, but still he kept on until he stood at the edge of a cliff with only one arrow left in his quiver. Well, the Afrikaners saw this, and they were impressed that he kept on fighting, even though he was the only one left. They raised the white flag and called out to him. ‘Hey, we’re all done here. We’ve defeated your people. There’s nothing left for you to do but lay down your weapon and surrender. Come on over here, and we’ll give you some food and water and call it a day.’ The bushman warrior raised his bow, shot his last arrow, and jumped off the cliff.”

  Even as a kid, I knew this story was about that moment when you choose between self-preservation and commitment to a cause greater than yourself. At his trial in 1964, Madiba said: “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” That wasn’t big talk or bravado or hyperbole. He seriously believed the government was about to sentence him and his colleagues to be hanged as terrorists. This was the shiz-got-real, jump-off-the-cliff moment when they considered themselves lucky to be going to prison for the rest of their lives.

  So they jumped off the cliff, fully prepared to die, and they fell for twenty-seven years. But then something amazing happened: Someone caught them. They found themselves in the arms of millions of people who believed in the ANC’s vision of a free and democratic South Africa. They were prepared to die for it, but more important, they were prepared to live for it. They were prepared to stand up and show up, prepared to hold fast and sacrifice.

  “Our people demand democracy,” Madiba told a joint session of the United States Congress in 1990. “Our country, which continues to bleed and suffer pain, needs democracy.”

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  Umthi omde ufunyanwa yimimoya enzima.

  “The tall tree catches the hard wind.”

  The four years following Madiba’s release from prison were some of the most turbulent years in the history of my country—and my family—as he rallied the full power and might of the people and labored to ensure an orderly election and peaceful transition away from apartheid. This left him very little opportunity to rebuild the relationships that had been severed when he went to jail.

  Many times over the years, my grandfather told me that while he was in prison, his family suffered even more than he did. He also wrote about this later on in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, saying how he was a man who had become a myth “and then that man returned home and proved to be just a man after all.” Speaking as the father of the bride at my aunt Zindzi’s wedding, he said that his children knew they had a father. They knew he would come back to them one day, and he did, but then he left them again, because now he was the father of a nation.

  “To be the father of a nation is a great honor,” said Madiba, “but to be the father of a family is a greater joy. It was a joy I had far too little of.”

  After the family visit to Victor Verster Prison, I didn’t see Madiba again until 1993, when I was eleven years old. One afternoon, a big black BMW rolled into the down-at-heel neighborhood where I lived in Soweto and pulled up in front of the house on Vilakazi Street. The driver got out and told me to get in. I had never met this guy, of course, but he was Madiba’s trusted longtime employee and friend, Mike Maponya. The way I heard it, Mike’s uncle was driving my granddad around after he got out of prison, but the uncle couldn’t accommodate Madiba’s intense schedule, so he threw the job to his nephew, Mike. Madiba liked him, and Mike ended up being Madiba’s driver for more than twenty years. On this particular day, his job was to come and pick me up. Problem is, no one had told me about it.

  “I was sent by your grandfather,” Mike said. “He sent me to fetch you.”

  I was like, Seriously? Are you kidding me? A stranger rolls up out of nowhere and tells a little kid to get in his car? That’s not happening.

  “Your grandfather,” Mike repeated. “You know who your grandfather is, right?”

  I thought, Yeah, I know my grandfather, but I don’t know you, man. My parents weren’t home from work yet, and I hadn’t seen my grandfather since he was released from prison three years earlier. I was not about to go anywhere with some random guy, but I’d been taught to respect my elders, so I said, “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t go with you.”

  “What? Are you serious? Are you mad?” Mike opened the door and said quite insistently, “Kid. Get in the car.”

  I stood on the sidewalk trying to look tough. He got frustrated and started yelling at me.

  “You want me to lose my job? Is that what you want?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then get in the car! We don’t got all day.”

  “No.”

  We went back and forth for a while until he got the point that I was not getting in the car, and I was just big enough that putting me in the car against my will wasn’t a good option. Eventually, he got back in the car, slammed the door, and drove away with all the neighbors staring after him through a cloud of yellow dust.

  When my father got home, I told him what had happened. He listened without showing surprise or emotion. He just said, “If that man comes back, you go with him.”

  I had a million questions in my head. Go with him where? Last time I’d seen my grandfather, it was in that prison house that was hundreds of miles away. I knew he’d been let out of jail, but where did he live? How long would I stay there? How would I get home again? He was the president of the ANC now, so I figured he must have a pretty nice place. Would there be a swimming pool? What about a VCR? Or Nintendo! The Nintendo was entirely possible, and I was prepared to be totally okay with all of the above for however long I was supposed to hang out there, even for as long as a week or two.

  A few days later, Mike rolled up in the big black BMW. No goodbyes. There was no one home for me to say goodbye to. I grabbed my backpack and got in the car. I figured that if I was to stay overnight, I would need my schoolbooks and some clean socks and a couple other things. As we drove out of the neighborhood, my friends paused their games in the street, pointing and hooting at the big black car. I don’t remember everything about the drive, but I must have been feeling pretty large. My old neighborhood was a slum, basically, and as we approached Houghton, things got noticeably nicer. Mike pulled into the driveway at a huge white house, and an electronic gate slid sideways to let us in. He parked outside the garage, and I got out, not knowing what I was supposed to do.

  “You hungry?” said Mike.

  I nodded.

  “Go on in.” He gestured toward the door and followed me inside the kitchen, where ladies were busy doing kitchen lady things. One of them paused to look me up and down.

  �
�Mama Xoli. Mama Gloria.” Mike nudged me forward. “The grandson.”

  “You have a name?” said Mama Xoli.

  “Ndaba.”

  She nodded and parked me at the table and set some supper in front of me. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I do remember feeling like it was the grandest feast I’d ever had. I was accustomed to comparatively humble fare like rice with ketchup and that sort of thing. The big kitchen at my grandfather’s house was full of fresh fruit and vegetables. There was something that smelled amazing in a pot on the stovetop. I suspect every person in my family has some sweet or spicy memory set in that kitchen, and you can see many of those memories in Mama Xoli’s cookbook, Ukutya Kwasekhaya: Tastes from Nelson Mandela’s Kitchen. (Ukutya kwasekhaya means “food from home.”)

  Mama Xoli was a typical African woman, sturdy and kind. She was about as wide as a hippo, but that didn’t stop her from dancing a little as she stirred a pot on the stove or chopped vegetables on the wooden cutting board. Her full name is Xoliswa Ndoyiya. She was raised on the Eastern Cape and learned to cook from her mother and grandmothers, so she was amazing at cooking all the traditional food my granddad loved, but she had also worked elsewhere for years, first for different families and then in a Jewish old folks’ home, so she could make anything from kosher potato latkes to umphokoqo, which is like a crumbly, delicious mess of maize.

  “My grandmother fed me her hopes and dreams along with this umphokoqo,” she said whenever she set a bowl of it in front of me. “Tata Mandela says every time I make him umphokoqo, he remembers how his mother cooked it with love.”