Legacy defines Chief’s path
As tickets went on sale this week for a massive Nelson Mandela exhibition at Eden Park, his grandson explains how he’s trying to carry on his heritage
The first time he met his grandfather, Nkosi “Chief” Zwelivelile Mandela was 9 years old. He had heard his own name — “Viva Mandela! Viva!” — chanted in the dusty streets of Soweto, South Africa, and asked his father, Makgatho, what it meant. Without explanation, Makgatho arranged for Chief to travel 1400km to Pollsmoor Prison, near Cape Town, escorted by his step-grandmother Winnie.
As he waited in a visitors’ room, unaware of the history he was steeped in, Chief heard a voice: “How are you warden?” It was Nelson Mandela: a “giant” 1.98m figure who slipped into the room and greeted an excited Winnie, before turning to Chief and saying, “You must be my grandson”.
“Did I hear right? Did this man say that I’m his grandson?” Chief recalls thinking. He was Mandela’s eldest grandchild, born to Rose Rayne Perry and Makgatho, the statesman’s third child with his first wife Evelyn Mase. A young child, he was ashamed to be related to someone in prison, a place he associated with “people who have done wrong in society”. Chief withdrew from Mandela, answering with single words and hating every precious first moment with his grandfather.
“But thank goodness for my grandfather’s wisdom,” says Chief, three decades later in a snug corner of a hotel in London’s West End. “He understood very well what was going on in my head.” Mandela sent a coded letter to Sussex-born anti-apartheid campaigner Helen Joseph asking her to teach his grandson about the “ideals and principles he stood for — and his commitment to the struggle for liberation”. Joseph invited Chief and his mother to her house, showed them the letter and said, “Let me educate you”.
“Growing up in Soweto, a racially constructed township only for black people, any representation of a white person expressed the apartheid regime to me: they were either police or officials,” says Chief. “But here was my grandfather reaching out to a white woman and asking her to assist in my development. It changed my entire perspective of what the struggle for liberation was.”
Now 44, Chief is head of the Mandela clan, member of the South African and Pan-African parliaments and chief of the Traditional Council in Mvezo — the South African village where Mandela was born. He accepted this title in 2007 after it was returned to the family after nearly 70 years, having been revoked in 1918 when Mandela’s father defied a magistrate. Rather than taking the post himself, Mandela nominated Chief.
With clear family resemblances, Chief is an imposing 1.95m with warm eyes and a white-flecked goatee beard. It is an unseasonably warm morning in October, and we are inside, but he is wearing a suit with a keffiyeh around his neck; a symbol of his 2016 conversion to Islam, and of his solidarity with Palestine.
Chief and Mandela used to joke about their similarity in appearance.
“I’m very concerned,”
Chief would say to his grandfather. “When he asked what was bothering me,
I would reply, ‘Everywhere I go people tell me I look just like you. Am I that old?’ Mandela would protest: ‘Who you calling old?’ ‘It was one of those light moments we used to have together.”
Chief is in London to retrace his grandfather’s steps before the opening of Mandela: The Official Exhibition, which he helped curate to celebrate the statesman’s tribal roots.
Tickets for a New Zealand exhibition, Mandela My Life: The Official Exhibition went on sale this week for when it travels to Auckland from Australia on April 13.
Eden Park, where in 1981 flour bombs were dropped in protest at the apartheid regime and the ongoing imprisonment of the future South African President, will play host to the exhibition which runs until August.
In what has been billed as the most comprehensive collection ever to be shown outside of South Africa, it features over 200 original artefacts and personal items from The Nelson Mandela Foundation and Nelson Mandela’s private collection. It features film and sound recordings of Mandela’s famous speeches, a detailed replica of his prison cell, artworks and manuscripts from his writings from prison, as well as the famous pen which signed away apartheid.
There were two sides to Mandela, Chief says, the second of which most people aren’t acquainted with. To most, he was a symbol of freedom and peace; at home, he upheld tribal values.
“Madiba [Mandela’s clan name] was applauded publicly as the best statesman of the 21st century,” says Chief. “But to his family he was a traditional and cultural man. He put a lot of emphasis on his eldest son because of the patriarchal system that resonates in our family.”
It is for this reason that Chief, Mandela’s third grandchild and eldest grandson, was eventually nominated to play an important role in the family and South African politics. When Chief’s mother, Perry, moved to the UK in 1986 after divorcing his father, Mandela from prison forbade her from taking his 11-year-old grandson with her, maintaining that he needed to stay in South Africa to witness its challenges first hand. Mandela then sent Chief to live with the royal family in Swaziland, where he went to boarding school.
“Education was always so important to him,” says Chief. “He regarded it as the weapon by which one could change the world.”
In London his mother became an anti-apartheid activist, and it was only then, during visits to her, that Chief learned how important his grandfather really was, attending protests alongside hundreds of thousands of others in front of Trafalgar Square’s South Africa House, the site of a nonstop picket in the 1980s. “Being around people leading the fight from exile I witnessed the passion they had for the release Mandela campaign.”
In 1990 their hopes came to pass. Chief was 16 and at boarding school in Swaziland when a group of his peers who were gathered around a television asked if he had heard Mandela was going to be released. “No such thing,” Chief replied. “I recently paid him a visit and there was no mention of that.” The crowd around the TV grew as did that outside Victor Verster Prison until a car approached the gates. Out stepped Mandela and Winnie. “They were holding hands with their fists held high,” Chief says. “I don’t even recall seeing them walk