yes, that’s good. However, there were problems with all the children coming to Qunu. Although the numbers had been increasing … one morning we woke up and Graça said, “This is too much.” Because the queue was so long it disappeared. That was the children coming for the Christmas party. But some of them came with their parents and their parents were not satisfied that we only gave to their children, they also wanted us to give to them. So what we do now is give Christmas presents to schools.’
– Nelson Mandela (The Star, 23 December 2005)
From the sky, the Eastern Cape spills out wide, as if someone had emptied a bottle of green liquid felt along the great escarpment, from where it has slowly poured down, enveloping the hills and valleys on its way to the sea. It does not shine like the Emerald Isle. Instead, the green is a matt tone – a lush, wild finish, held in place by a thousand tributaries anchored in the Indian Ocean but which fan deep into the interior. From above, it is a thing of great beauty, the seemingly empty vastness of it all.
But man and nature often enjoy an inverse relationship, and so it is in the Eastern Cape. For all the land’s natural wonder, the human condition within its borders is generally a wretched one. From the ground up, the province remains wracked by deep inequality and, as one moves from its urban centres into the rural expanse, one leaves behind much of the basic infrastructure upon which the good life is built. Water, sanitation, roads, electricity – these things nature neglected to incorporate into the province’s grand design and human prejudice ensured the gap was never meaningfully bridged.
Yet this beautiful monster has produced a significant political legacy. The Eastern Cape is the ANC’s heartland and many of its greatest heroes have emerged from here. Of these, both party and province would claim Nelson Mandela as their greatest son. Soon after he was born in the remote village of Mvezo, near Mthatha, Mandela’s family moved to the nearby homestead of Qunu and there he would spend much of his childhood. Today, almost a century later, his burial site stands in Qunu.
Mandela opens his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, with a romantic reminiscence of his childhood home: ‘[It] was situated in a narrow, grassy valley crisscrossed by clear streams, and overlooked by hills. It consisted of no more than a few hundred people who lived in huts, which were beehive-shaped structures of mud walls, with a wooden pole in the centre holding up a peaked grass roof.’ He explains, ‘There were no roads, only paths through the grass worn away by barefooted boys and women.’
It is a somewhat idyllic description. For Mandela, this was not a place of hardship or desolation but a quiet home. It was a rural life uninterrupted by the demands of modernity, and always enmeshed with hills and valleys, rivers and rocks.
Modernity, however, is an insidious thing. Its markers needn’t be bricks and mortar. It works the mind too. There is a subtle sense of perspective hardwired into its encroachment – a glimpse of another world, sometimes out of reach but always on offer to you. Once it has you in its grip, the inevitable result is a personal reckoning, where those things you have are measured and valued for the first time against those things you do not. Where one falls short, despair tends to follow. Modernity rips away the veil. That can be a cruel business because it doesn’t necessarily follow that in its place it will deliver a better view – only a different way of seeing the world.
On Mandela’s return to Qunu, after 27 years spent in one of modernity’s more heartless institutions, the magic of Qunu had gone and, with it, much of the serenity he had earlier recalled. As if to conclude his long walk to freedom, his description of Qunu all those years later in the book’s closing pages cuts a stark contrast: ‘What had endured was the warmth and simplicity of the community, which took me back to my days as a boy. But what disturbed me was that the villagers seemed as poor, if not poorer than they had been then. Most people lived in simple huts with dirt floors, with no electricity and no running water. When I was young, the village was tidy, the water pure and the grass green and unsullied as far as the eye could see. Kraals were swept, the topsoil was conserved, fields were neatly divided. But now the village was unswept, the water polluted and the countryside littered with plastic bags and wrappers. We had not known of plastic when I was a boy, and though it surely improved life in some ways, its presence in Qunu appeared to me to be a kind of blight. Pride in the community seemed to have vanished.’
Christmas cares little for such contradictions. If anything, it thrives in such an environment because it is something of a contradiction itself. ‘Peace on earth and good will to all men,’ the saying goes. But such grand gestures are trapped in time, a fleeting moment. And with its arrival and departure, much like modernity itself, it is the inevitable contrast with an often far harsher reality to which one’s attention is drawn. Good will to all men: but tomorrow there is just our will, refocused, as ever, on those things that might best secure our self-interest.
There is a wealth of literature that suggests Mandela was different, that the Christmas spirit stayed with him throughout the year. It was infectious, his generosity of spirit. Reunited with his home, he would bring this spirit with him but it would be during those hot December days that he would come to formalise his kindness on an annual basis.
What happens, though, when you introduce into a desperate wilderness good will and munificence? Charity demands of us to give what we can afford. Give until it hurts, the more radical altruist suggests. Mandela did both. But the Eastern Cape, the beautiful monster, had in his absence developed an insatiable hunger. And the Christmas spirit, so exemplified by Mandela, would be made to compete with those other apparitions that roamed the countryside. Not quite the four horsemen, but their emissaries.
It was 1993 when Mandela first threw a Christmas party, although, at the time, the purpose was not festivity but food. His grandson Mandla Mandela recalls the family sitting round the Christmas table when a 75-year-old Mandela, amid all the cheer, withdrew from the conversation, revisiting that internal universe that must have kept him company all those years on Robben Island. Asked what was bothering him, he responded, ‘I was just wondering what the rest of the community is doing while we are having a huge meal.’
So, despite the late hour, his family went out into the countryside to invite people for some food. About 60 people were quickly found and fed. And from that simple gesture, a tradition was born: Christmas in Qunu. In the years to come, it would grow into an event on international scale.
It didn’t take long for the occasion to adopt the rites and rituals that define most traditions. The venue would be Mandela’s private residence; the event would be held on Christmas Day. Invitations were spread by word of mouth and, to the best of his ability, he would provide as much as he could to as many as he could. No one would be turned away and children would hold pride of place.
By 1995, such was the response that two tents had to be erected outside his home and, after walking in the morning countryside he so admired, cheered and celebrated by old and young alike, in steady rain and a persistent fog, Mandela himself would help serve the food for the guests. Children first – a rule with the old man – then adults. A small choir in traditional dress would welcome him, and a group of young girls provided some dancing.
That year there were some 200 people in attendance, according to reports: ‘We have made preparations at home,’ Mandela said, ‘to entertain as many people in the surrounding villages as possible.’
But he had been pained by the prospect of many who had been eager to squeeze what enjoyment they could from the holiday by slaughtering their own cattle, of which they had but a few. ‘It is a forlorn attempt,’ he reflected. ‘They go back to their squalor, their misery, and you feel really deeply moved. You have to see the way in which people live to really understand the evil of racial oppression in this country, how evil it is for human beings to be so cruel to other human beings.’
Mandela would return to his past, telling the media
