skill when he led the 1976 Soweto uprising to his grandfather.) The imbongi commanded respect not only for his talents, but also because of his relationship to the chief. He was among the latter’s most trusted counsellors; the praise singer could, if he deemed it necessary, publicly criticize the chief in the poems he recited. Thus the imbongi acted as a kind of social conscience for the community.
Daniel was imbongi to Chief Valelo Mhlontlo, who ruled over an area that corresponded roughly to the provincial district of Glen Grey. A chief is born to his position: Mhlontlo was a lesser member of the royal house of the Thembu tribe, the most prominent in the Transkei. (Nelson Mandela’s father was a counsellor to the Thembu royal family.) Daniel, as the imbongi, preceded the chief in his travels through the Glen Grey region. Tall and handsome, wearing a leopard-skin headdress, English riding boots and britches (of which he was very proud), Daniel cut a striking figure as he galloped on his horse across the countryside, singing the chief’s praises and announcing his arrival.
The court was conducted at the Great Place, as the royal residence was called. It stood on a high hill and commanded a stunning view of Bengu’s tiny, pastel-coloured huts splayed out below. The chief’s house was, of course, the best in the district: a long, low whitewashed dwelling, adorned with a tin roof and a veranda. Those were the living quarters; the cooking was done in a nearby mud-and-wattle hut. A set of yellow, thatch-roofed rondavels, guest huts for visiting counsellors and dignitaries, completed the compound. There was also a small cemetery not far from the main house. Here the chiefs were buried, facing downhill towards their people; their wives occupied plots behind them.
The court sessions were held next to the stone kraal. The chief, wrapped in a wool blanket, sat in front; his dozen or so counsellors, elderly men chosen for their wisdom and integrity, flanked him. In an atmosphere of great solemnity, they heard all manner of cases: marital breakdowns, property disputes, disagreements about dowries. These they weighed and dissected and examined from every angle. The chief and his aides attempted to settle matters themselves so that the disputants would not have to go before the government’s magistrate – a costly and often bewildering experience.
The Great Place was also the venue for traditional ceremonies and concerts. Nomkhitha attended many such grand occasions as a child; the chief’s compound seemed to her a live thing then, an amorphous moving mass of colour and sound. She particularly admired the dancers: their swathes of pastel-coloured cloth, their intricate necklaces and collars strung with beads; their long, swirling skirts fashioned from cow hides; the knobkerries they brandished with great shouts; their bare feet, adorned with ankle bracelets, that pounded the dusty earth with a frenzied rhythm. The dances evoked ancient Xhosa tales of birth and death, love and war.
Thus Nomkhitha passed her childhood: immersed in her heritage, secure in her privileged status. The racist rules of the white world barely touched her. Later, in adulthood, Nomkhitha would liken the certainties of that time to the architecture of her village. Houses there were always placed in the same manner: first the main hut, then the secondary huts, all in a row. Nomkhitha loved the exactness of it, the reliability. The world was as it should be.
Nomkhitha carried these beliefs with her when, at the age of thirteen, she left Bengu for boarding school. She attended a black, all-girls institution in Mt Arthur, near Lady Frere, which was run by the Methodist Church. Because of the distance from Bengu, Nomkhitha returned only during the December and June holidays. She was not homesick; Olive stuffed an enormous suitcase full of clothes and bedding and mementos that Nomkhitha dragged onto the bus to Mt Arthur. And the family visited her on their monthly outings to Lady Frere.
The Methodists were strict schoolmasters. The girls woke at five o’clock every morning, washed, dressed in their uniforms, ate breakfast, then attended classes until two o’clock in the afternoon; afterwards, they had several hours of homework. Nomkhitha flourished under the regimen. She studied biology, geography, history, arithmetic and English; for sport, she played tennis. Her vivacity and self-assurance attracted a large circle of friends.
For the first couple of years at school, the trajectory of Nomkhitha’s life remained unaltered. She decided she would study nursing after finishing at Mt Arthur. There were only two professions open to blacks at that time: teaching and nursing. Although Olive had imbued her with a fierce desire for education, Nomkhitha rejected her mother’s career; she was, in fact, alone among her friends in opting to become a nurse. To Nomkhitha, nursing seemed glamorous. The medical studies, smart uniform, the contribution to the community – they all captured her imagination in a way teaching never did. Nomkhitha firmly believed, with the certainty that described her childhood, that she would study nursing and return to Bengu to practise her profession for the rest of her life.
By Nomkhitha’s third year at Mt Arthur, however, everything had changed. Daniel was getting too old to farm, his chief means of income; he started selling off cattle to pay for her school fees. That source would soon be depleted. Daniel was not satisfied with Nomkhitha being half-educated, as he put it, so he devised a plan to send her to live with her Aunt Letitia, Olive’s sister, in Johannesburg. Letitia had promised to help Nomkhitha get into nursing school and to find a way to support her.
Nomkhitha was thrilled. Her best friend at Mt Arthur came from Johannesburg and had regaled her with tales of eGoli, as it was known, the City of Gold. Young people from the countryside dreamed of going to South Africa’s biggest city. Nomkhitha was seventeen years old on the night that she and Olive boarded the train for Johannesburg; too excited to sleep, she could only imagine the life that lay before her.
If Nomkhitha’s childhood seemed golden, Joseph’s, by contrast, was bleak. He grew up feeling the full brunt of the poverty and cruelty inflicted on blacks. As a youth, his father, Hendrik Mashinini, had moved to South Africa from neighbouring Swaziland. A tall, muscular man with a stern countenance, Hendrik worked as a contract labourer, moving from farm to farm as the seasonal employment finished. He and his wife Sara were living in Orange Free State province in 1932 when their fourth and penultimate child, a son, was born. Sara named him Ramothibe – shepherd – in her native Sotho. And because she was a devout Christian, she also gave him a biblical name, Joseph, in English. (He would use this name with everyone except his immediate family.)
A couple of years later, Hendrik moved his family to a farm near Vereeniging, about twenty-five miles from Johannesburg. Sara’s sister lived there with her husband and eight children; she had told Sara that a job was available. Hendrik disliked the vicissitudes of agricultural work, but neither he nor Sara had much education, and being a hired hand was about the best position he could hope to secure. Once again, Hendrik had to build a home for his family. This time, it consisted of a series of squat, stifling rooms made from mud. The doors were wooden boards; big stones held the tin roofs in place. The tiny structures formed a kind of compound: one was for sitting in, one for cooking, one for sleeping. Sara furnished them with odd bits of furniture and old rugs. Outside, Hendrik fashioned a kraal from discarded chicken wire; here he kept hens, doves and rabbits. The latrine was outside too, dug on the edge of what was considered his family’s area. Sara used candles or paraffin to light the rooms; she cooked over firewood, which also heated the house. Water came from the taps at the nearby stables. The pipes there often froze in winter and the family sometimes would not have water until ten or eleven o’clock in the morning, when the sun finally thawed the ice.
There were a dozen or so other families living and working on the farm. Hendrik shared with them a patch of land allotted by the farmer; on it, they grazed their meagre herds of cattle. The rest of the vast acreage was given over to the farmer’s 400 head of dairy cattle and the maize, or mealies, to feed them. The cows were housed in stone barns. Inside, they had rows of rather crude stalls and a feed box in the centre. A big bin stood in the nearby kraal; here the workers stored the harvested green mealies to ferment during the summer. They dug out the mash and fed it to the cattle in the dead of winter, when the pastures were sparse. No one liked working in the mealie fields: winters turned the earth into a listless, desiccated moonscape; summers engulfed
