Govan Mbeki

1. Home comforts and family histories

13 1 Home comforts and family histories When Govan Mbeki spoke about his childhood, his face softened and he conveyed a sense of comfort, warmth and stability. The family house – in Nyili village, Mpukane ward, in the Nqamakwe magistracy – was ‘a solid house, very well built’ and the furniture was handsomely carpentered, ‘some of the most beautiful furniture I ever saw’. He spoke with a nostalgic pride about the dining-room table, purposebuilt for his father. ‘With its extra leaf in, with all its leaves in, it could seat sixteen people – sixteen, all around it. For special occasions, yes.’ Even in its more compact form for everyday use, the table would have been ringed by a good number of chairs. Govan had a brother and three sisters – all older than him – and in addition his three half-sisters made extended stays in their father’s home. It was a house bustling with 14 women, and one can easily imagine the affection and attention directed towards the laatlammetjie. Govan recalled being ‘very close’ to his mother, and told the film-maker Bridget Thompson that when she attended a wedding, she would tuck a piece of the cake into her doek to take home for him: ‘And wherever she went, if she got anything nice, she would always bring something home for me.’ His sisters also helped raise him, teaching him games and passing on songs they learned at school, and recounting Xhosa fables. Childhood memories are often rose-tinted. It would be difficult to know, based on Govan’s account of his early years, that the family’s modest prosperity was being squeezed around the time of his birth; that his ageing father had been dismissed from his post in disgrace; or that, as he grew up, his family would begin a genteel slide: not into outright poverty, but into more straitened circumstances. But before these pressures began to tell, Govan’s father, Skelewu Mbeki, was unmistakably a member of a ‘progressive’ or modernising peasantry that enjoyed its heyday in the Cape Colony and Transkeian Territories in the second half of the 19th century. And like many others at the upper reaches of this peasantry, the Mbeki family was Mfengu; had converted to Christianity; enjoyed modest wealth through a combination of peasant farming and entrepreneurship; and channelled a 15 good portion of its income into a self-consciously modern lifestyle and the best education available for the children. Skelewu’s grandfather, Nonkasa, was an amaZizi herdsman: like many others of that clan, he was swept up in the population movements of the mfecane, leaving what is today Bergville district in KwaZuluNatal . Driven south, Nonkasa was probably among the first few thousand refugees who presented themselves at the Great Place of the Xhosa king, Hintsa, in the 1830s. (When in prison on Robben Island, Govan Mbeki was usually greeted, respectfully, as Zizi – his clan name. But he deflected my questions about the usage, and he consistently sought to underplay references to his ethnicity: ‘I would rather you avoid reference to tribal origin,’ he wrote to me. I realised only subsequently that Govan – like Oliver Tambo – washighlysensitivetothepotentialdiscordthatethnic identities might trigger in the nationalist movement.) Nonkasa entered the Cape Colony in 1836 with two sons, Mfeti and Mbeki, and the latter’s seven-year-old son, Skelewu. The family lived briefly near Peddie, then settled close to the Methodist base and school at Healdtown. Here, Skelewu attended school, converted to Christianity, and married another Mfengu convert, with whom he had three daughters. In 1866 or 1867 Skelewu was among the Mfengu 16 encouraged by the Cape government to move back across the Kei River and settle in the new British protectorate of ‘Fingoland’ between the Kei and Mbashe rivers (part of the magistracies of Nqamakwe, Tsomo, Idutywa and Butterworth). Skelewu was accompanied by a number of his amaZizi clanspeople, and they were allocated Mpukane ward (or location, as it was called at the time). Skelewu was recognised at the time as a leader of the ward. ‘My father was chief and recognised as such by the people,’ Govan Mbeki wrote subsequently. He exercised the authority of a headman for a number of years before his official appointment in July 1890. It was not only by virtue of office that Skelewu commanded respect in Mpukane. He was also one of the most prosperous men in the ward, and demonstrated this by building a...