Going to the Mountain Read online

  Inzondo is the Xhosa word for hatred, but the word ngcikivo has a whole additional level of connotation. It’s more like contempt—that deeply ingrained refusal to accept the humanity of another person, a stubborn blindness to their suffering, a self-comforting belief that they don’t really matter. Racism on that level—whether it’s legal, institutional, cultural, or personal—does not change in the course of a rugby match. Or a rugby season. Or a generation. I’m not sure it will ever go away completely. Perhaps the most we can hope for is to make it socially unacceptable and economically imprudent so people keep racist comments and actions to themselves. But I know this, as surely as I know my last name: We have to try. We have to call out racism when we see it—even when we see it in ourselves.

  Madiba’s response to contempt was compassion. Relentless compassion. Compassion that rolled over their hatred like a Hippo. He said more than once, “Nonviolence is a strategy.” He referred to “the Gandhian strategy” of noncooperation and peaceful but unstoppable resistance. He wasn’t a saint who loved everyone and wouldn’t smack a flea. He was a judicious leader who understood the power of doing the right thing until it overwhelms the wrong thing. Overwhelming racism with love and mutual respect is an ongoing process in South Africa, as it is in the United States and Europe and everywhere else in the world, and we, as a world community, have a long way to go.

  From time to time, I hear about an ugly incident of racism—something a white person does to a black person here in South Africa or an African American man being brutalized by the police in the United States—and it makes my heart sink. People get outraged, as they should, but think about how it was ten years ago when there was no social media and incidents like these were ignored, not even reported as newsworthy. It’s rotten that these things still happen, but at least we’re hearing about it now. I see some very clear parallels between the liberation movement that occurred in South Africa and what’s happening now in the United States with the Black Lives Matter movement and football players “taking a knee” in a peaceful but very public protest. There is an awakening taking place—about racism, about sexism, about xenophobia. The general consensus has shifted from “that’s just the way it is” to “that’s not acceptable.” It’s a starting point. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Barak Obama both liked to quote Theodore Parker, a transcendentalist minister who fought for the liberation of slaves in America in the 1800s: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I believe that’s true, but I’m not as patient as the Old Man. Sometimes I feel like we could all be bending a little harder.

  When I was in grade three, one of eight black boys in my class, my good friend Selema started a gang that we called Bendoda (the Gents). We had matching pens and wore matching badges on our lapels. Selema was like a little Napoleon. He was tiny, but he was tough. Michael Jackson was everything back then, and we fancied ourselves to be very much like the agile dudes in the “Bad” video. During recess and after school, we fought with the white boys, who had their own crew, and most of the time, we won. We chased them up trees, and all they could do was try to spit on us from up there, because they were afraid to come down. It was crazy. We frequently ended up in the principal’s office, but our parents would show up, and they always had our backs.

  Selema’s mom was Barbara Masekela. Before she became head of the ANC’s Department of Arts and Culture, she taught English literature at Rutgers. (She was also the younger sister of the famous jazz musician, Hugh Masekela, and later on, after my granddad became president, she was his head of staff.) So the Gents would be in the principal’s office with the white parents raining down trouble, and Mama Barbara would come in, and that was it. She’d shut them down with some hard truth about what it was like for these eight little black boys who were just trying to protect themselves.

  I remember an essay I wrote in school that year. It said something like, “I want to have a nice car and a nice house, but I don’t want to be rich. White people are rich.” That’s how it seemed to me at that age. I wanted what white people had, but I didn’t want to be like them, and rugby was a white people thing. My friends and I had played soccer since we were little, but we never paid any attention to rugby. We grew up hearing various versions of the saying: “Rugby is a thug’s game played by gentlemen. Soccer is a gentlemen’s game played by thugs.” We were cast as the thugs in that scenario, and we wanted to be rebels. All through our early years, we’d heard stories about our parents and their comrades in the ANC liberation movement, and for us, that was the epitome of cool: to be a rebel, to go against the system. In our minds, when we were children being raised in the crucible of apartheid, everything broke down to black against white. Madiba saw the struggle as justice against injustice, right against wrong, giving against greed, unity against division. These were the far more nuanced discussions that needed to take place. There were no simple answers, but the disconnect between people was not so stark.

  The 1995 World Cup was the first rugby match I ever watched. I suspect it was a first for a lot of black people. I wasn’t there; I saw it on TV with a few cousins and friends. For me, the thing that made it a special occasion was that my dad came over and watched it with us. I didn’t know it at the time, but he’d been in and out of rehab. He was trying hard in school and in life. All I knew was that having him there made the rugby match a lot more of an event than it would have been otherwise. He thought it was exciting to have South Africa represent like that.

  “Hey, one year of independence, and we made it to World Cup finals!” That sort of thing.

  And it was fun to see Madiba on television, smiling in a Springbok jersey. He was the reason most black people were watching, and I believe this is what made the event important. When he stepped up as a leader who cared about all the people in his country, including the white minority, his clear intention was to make us one country. This was a Herculean undertaking that many people thought was impossible until Madiba stepped out onto the field and reminded us: Kuhlangene isanga nenkohla. The wonderful and the impossible sometimes collide.

  FOR BOTH HUMANITARIAN AND strategic reasons, children were a priority for Madiba. Just a few weeks after he took office, he established the Presidential Trust Fund that laid the foundation for the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, to which he donated R150,000 (about $12,000 American) every year. This was a third of his salary as president. When he made this announcement, he told parliament members, “The emancipation of people from poverty and deprivation is most centrally linked to the provision of education of quality.”

  The stripping away of opportunity from the vast majority of black people for generations left one of the deepest scars of apartheid, and the end of apartheid could not undo that damage. The memories were seared into us from earliest childhood. All around us was civil strife, domestic unrest, grinding poverty, and a sense of hopelessness that weighed our parents down. In the big picture, the Old Man saw education as part of the ongoing fight for the liberation of black people, their only avenue to economic and social equality. In the small picture, he saw me.

  My granddad let me know from the start that he expected me to be an A student, which blew my mind, because I had always gotten Cs and Ds. Maybe a B here and there. He didn’t dog me about my homework on a daily basis; he cared about results. I dreaded showing him my test papers and reports.

  “You’re smarter than this, Ndaba,” he said. “You have to do better. You’re a Mandela. People expect you to be a leader. You should be getting the best marks in the class.”

  “Yes, Granddad.”

  Like any kid, I’m going to say that, but inside, I’m like, Pssh! Whatever! I didn’t want to be a leader. I was proud of my bad boy vibe. I was getting quite tall and considered myself to be pretty smooth in social situations. I had zero interest in studying. I was happy to chill at the back of the class, playing pranks, copying other people’s homework, and sailing by. I was smart enough to muddle through with passing marks on tests mos
t of the time, and that was good enough for me. It was not good enough for Madiba. It irked him terribly to see anyone blow off their own potential, and it was especially frustrating that he couldn’t seem to make me care about school. He was an extremely busy man with extremely high standards, and he certainly did not have time to keep a constant eye on a stubborn twelve-year-old, but my education was very important to him.

  One evening at dinner, he informed me that I would be going to The Ridge School, a private prep school for boys. A boarding school. This was a bit of a gut punch. I’d settled into my new home and was basically pretty happy there, but the Old Man traveled a lot, so I was left in the care of Rochelle and Mama Xoli and the security guys. In retrospect, I understand why he thought I’d be better off boarding at The Ridge. Perhaps he thought I was lonely when he was gone, and I was sometimes, but I preferred to be lonely in my own room rather than lonely in the middle of a crowd of boys I didn’t know.

  “It’s not far away,” the Old Man said. “You’ll come home every weekend.”

  I nodded. My stomach felt hollow and strange.

  “You’ll be responsible for your school uniform,” he said. “You must keep it clean and pressed. You must apply yourself to your studies, Ndaba. You’re a very intelligent boy, capable of top marks, and top marks are what I expect.”

  “Yes, Granddad.”

  He patted my hand firmly. “Don’t be gloomy. You’ll have fun. You’ll play tennis and rugby.”

  Rugby, I cringed inside. Awesome.

  The following Monday morning, the driver took me there instead of taking me to school at Sacred Heart. As we made our way through the city traffic, I thought about my friends arriving at school and wondering where I was. The driver turned in, past a wide iron gate in a long fieldstone wall, and I went through all the motions of orientation and registration. I received my uniform: a pale blue shirt with a royal blue tie, gray shorts, gray vest, gray blazer. On the crisp lapel of the scratchy blazer was the school crest, which featured the thin outline of a shield with an R and an S inside it. The R and the S were twined together like they were trying to strangle each other. In my dormitory, I put on my uniform, and then I went to class, where I sat counting the minutes until I could go home again.

  The Ridge School was first established in 1919. The beautiful grounds sprawl out over nineteen acres on Westcliff Ridge, overlooking the upscale suburbs north of Johannesburg. The grand old buildings of stucco and stone are an excellent example of Cape Dutch architecture. There was a swimming pool and tennis courts, and stretched between stonewalled terraces, there was a big grassy field where boys played rugby and cricket. I sat across from the headmaster, who smiled at me over his huge desk and told me about the school’s determination to grow high-achieving boys who think for themselves, speak their minds, excel at sport, and pass the matric with flying colors. (The matric is an exam you have to pass to graduate high school and get into college.) The Ridge offered grades one through seven, so age-wise, I was somewhere in the middle of the boarding school population. In its long, proud history, only a handful of black boys had attended the school. It was integrated just a few years before I was sent there, so I was in a vanishingly thin minority, and I quickly discovered that I was even more isolated by my famous last name. I’m sure The Ridge School is a very fine school, but for me, it was intensely lonely, and I hated it. One Sunday evening at dinner, I told Madiba, “Granddad, I don’t want to go back there.”

  “Ndaba, it’s one of the finest preparatory schools in South Africa,” he said. “Give it a bit more time. You’ll get used to living there. You’ll make friends.”

  “I have friends at my school.”

  “Is it possible to have too many friends?” He smiled and opened his hands in an expansive gesture. “Ndaba, you’ll get the finest education. It’s just a few years. Just through grade seven.”

  “Granddad, I hate it!” I struggled to explain it to him in English. In isiXhosa it would have sounded more manly, not like I was afraid or on the verge of tears. “Something gets broken—must be the black kid who broke it. Something goes missing—oh, must be that the black kid stole it.”

  Madiba sat quietly and took this in. His face settled into a frown.

  My granddad had a way of listening that I have tried to emulate as an adult. He listened, motionless and focused, as if he was studying each word with a microscope. He didn’t attempt to tell me that I was wrong or that my position was in some way irrelevant because I was a kid, and he didn’t force me to return to The Ridge. He offered as a compromise that I should stay at home and attend Houghton Primary, where there were both boys and girls, and several black children, and I did try that for a while, but I missed my friends and cousins at Sacred Heart. I kept presenting my case—that Sacred Heart was only a few blocks farther for the driver to take me, that I would apply myself and get better grades, that I would work hard and gain his confidence—and eventually, Madiba relented.

  Interesting thing about that “Bad” video: The extended version, a short film directed by Martin Scorsese, is actually the story of a black kid who goes to a mostly white boarding school and comes home to find that he has a difficult time connecting to his old crew. I returned to Sacred Heart, and my friends were glad to see me, but there was a subtle shift in things over the next few years. Even when I was back with my crew, my clique, I felt very much alone.

  Aunt Makaziwe summed it up with a shrug. “You’re a Mandela.”

  “My friends don’t care about that,” I said. These were the Gents, guys who’d known me most of my life.

  “You’ll know many people in your life,” said Auntie Maki. “At my age, if one or two of them are real friends, you are very lucky.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m not a loser! I have at least a dozen friends.”

  “Mm-hmm.” She just smiled and nodded. She didn’t need me to know right then that she was right. She knew I would grow up and discover it for myself.

  Having spent some time away, I had a whole new appreciation for my room, my Sega, and Mama Xoli’s roasted chicken, salmon croquettes, and salted cod with potatoes. I suspect Mama Xoli was happy to have me back, as a great artist always enjoys seeing their work appreciated, and she never had to encourage me to eat. She and Mama Gloria had children of their own, and sometimes we all sat around the kitchen table together—a much noisier supper than the largely silent dinners I shared with Madiba. He was traveling a great deal, coping with the enormous issues that confronted him day after day.

  Beyond the seemingly small matter of which song should be our national anthem, there was his standing on the stage of world politics. It may startle some Americans to know that the Old Man remained on the US government’s terrorist watch list until 2008. Madiba’s very first television interview happened in 1961, when he allowed Brian Widlake of ITN to meet him in a house where he was hiding from police. Widlake said, “Do you see Africans being able to develop in this country without the Europeans being pushed out?”

  “We have made it very clear in our policy,” said Madiba, “that South Africa is a country of many races. There is room for all the various races in this country.”

  He stated then, very clearly, that the only goal of the ANC was democracy: one person, one vote. He never wavered from that stance and spoke out consistently in favor of peace and nonviolence, but he was arrested a year after this interview and sentenced to life in prison. Now he was in this position of power to do whatever he wanted, and it was difficult for people to accept that he was still advocating for people to be cool. I myself have a hard time with it, simply because I know I don’t have it in me to spend three decades in prison and come out with a mouthful of forgiveness for the people who put me there. It seemed superhuman to me at the time, and while my understanding of the situation has evolved since then, my awe for him is still the same.

  At the time of that 1961 interview, Madiba was only about five years older than I am now, and already he had that Madiba way of list
ening that I observed so much later in his life. He was as inscrutable as the Sphinx, but there is one moment—just a fraction of a second—when I detect a little side-eye. Check it out on YouTube. You’ll see what I’m saying. Widlake asks that question about Europeans being pushed out if Africans are “able to develop” in Africa, and in the split second between question and answer, it’s like, Really? The question came, quite obviously, from a place of fear; Widlake was saying what everybody else was already thinking. But Africans had “developed” the continent for thousands of years before the Europeans came. The Africans had a rich culture, strong social and familial bonds, and a wealth of natural resources before Europeans came in, appropriated the land, and spread diseases. (Is any of this sounding vaguely familiar, America?)

  So the suggestion of Europeans getting “pushed out” and Africans being “allowed to develop” was beyond ironic. Madiba could have gone off on that, and as I mentioned before, he could scold proper. He could shut a person down. His extraordinary superpower was that he chose not to. In that moment and a million other moments when he found himself sitting across from somebody who just didn’t get it, he chose to go forward instead of back. He chose to find common ground rather than refight a battle his ancestors had already lost. He talked about the possibility of peace instead of the go-nowhere cycle of conflict. I wonder how the overall tone of the Internet would shift if more people were able to shut off their need to be right about everything at any given moment. What would happen if the desire to do right won out over the desire to prove somebody else wrong?

  Madiba loved to repeat The Story of the Lady on the Phone: During the campaign, before he was elected president, he was trying to get some business done and placed a call.

  He asks the lady who answered the phone, “To whom am I speaking?”

  She gets feisty and answers, “You’re speaking to me.”