Nelson Mandela – Early life

Born in the village of Mvezo on 18 July 1918, he was given the birth name “Rolihlahla” which colloquially means” troublemaker” and it wasn’t until he went to school that he was given his English or Christian name.

His father was chief of the Thembu tribe and ” Rolihlahla” was the son born to the third wife. As a child living in the village of Qunu where he moved to with his family, he came across a few white people and their role in his childhood life was a distant one.

During his childhood he was baptized and then set to school . It was on the first day of school that his teacher gave him an English name and said that thenceforth that was the name he would answer to in school . On that day his teacher Miss Mdingane told him that his new name would be Nelson and he never know through out his life why she had bestowed that particular name on him.

Early on he began to be interested in African history learning about it from tribal chiefs and headmen – and from them he learned that the African people had lived in peace until the arrival of the white man. He learned that the white man had shattered the fellowship of the various tribes – ever greedy and hungry for land the white man was unwilling to share it with the black man and just simply took it.

At the age of 16 he began to be aware of different ideas – that the black South African people were a conquered people, slaves in their own soil. That they had no strength , no power and no control over their destiny in the land of their birth and that the concepts of freedom and independence were completely alien to them.

At the age the age of 21 Nelson Mandela attended Fort Hare .It was a university founded by Scottish missionaries but an incident there led him to leave it and he moved to Johannesburg where he worked as a night watchman in a mine compound . He then changed many jobs working as a clerk while completing his BA degree at the University of South Africa . He later on went to the University of Witwatersrand where he was the only African in the class.

There he was regarded at best as a curiosity and at worst as an interloper . Most of the whites at that University were not liberal nor colorblind . His law Professor Mr. Hahlo held the view that neither women nor Africans were meant to be lawyers!!!

Mandela’s university years opened a new world for him – where people were passionate about their politics and were firmly aligned with the liberation struggle. Many were prepared despite their relative privilege, to sacrifice themselves for the cause of the oppressed!

Source: African History, Wikipedia..

Reem Haddad