107 pages • 3 hours read
Nelson MandelaLong Walk to Freedom
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “A Country Childhood”
Chapters 1-4 Summary
Nelson Mandela is born in the small village of Mvezo, in the Transkei region of South Africa, on July 18, 1918. His birth name is Rolihlahla, which roughly translates as “troublemaker.” The African National Congress (ANC) is founded in the year of his birth.
Transkei is a beautiful and sparsely populated region in southeast South Africa. Most of Transkei’s residents, like Mandela, are Xhosa, an ethnic group belonging to the Bantu people. The Xhosa are, in turn, separated into several tribes; Mandela belongs to the Thembu tribe. Within the book, Mandela delineates some of the region’s traditional social and political structures to explain that he descends from a line of the Thembu royal family that provides advisors to the king.
Mandela’s father, Gadla, is a Thembu chief and close advisor to the Thembu king. When the king dies in the late 1920s, Gadla chooses one of the king’s lesser sons, Jongintaba, to act as royal regent until the king’s infant heir, Sabata, came of age. In 1926, Gadla is deposed by the British. Thereafter, Mandela’s mother, Nosekeni, moves him to Qunu, a larger village where she has friends and relations.
Qunu is a poor village of tenant farmers and herders; the government owns all the land and charges them rent. Mandela spends his early childhood in Qunu, watching the herds and stick-fighting. The population is nearly entirely African with only a handful of white people. Nosekeni converts to Christianity during their time in Qunu and has Mandela baptized in the Wesleyan (Methodist) Church. He receives the name Nelson at the local school, which is run in line with British sensibilities.
When Mandela is nine, Gadla comes home unexpectedly one night and takes ill, dying within a few hours. After a mourning period, Mandela and Nosekeni leave Qunu to travel to Mqhekezweni. It is the capital of Thembuland and a mission outpost for the Methodist Church where far more people dress in Western clothing than in Qunu. Mqhekezweni is also the residence of Thembu’s regent, Jongintaba. Since he was selected as regent by Gabia, Jongintaba offers to be Mandela’s guardian, and Nosekeni returns to Qunu. Mandela becomes fast friends with Justice, Jongintaba’s son and heir.
At this point in the story, Mandela describes Jongintaba’s leadership as consensus-building. Mandela gets exposed to wider African history and learns about the implications of colonialism in Africa and what they mean for his life.
When he turns 16, Mandela is told by Jongintaba that it is time to become a man; according to Xhosa custom, this means being circumcised. Mandela undergoes the circumcision ritual, along with Justice and a few other young men, and receives his adult Xhosa name of Dalibunga. At the celebration ceremony, one of the chiefs delivers a long diatribe about how these young men were robbed of their opportunity to be proper men because of white oppression. Mandela is at first angry, wanting to enjoy the ceremony, but later the chief’s angry speech plants a seed in his mind.
Chapters 5-8 Summary
Soon after Mandela’s circumcision, Jongintaba sends him to school at Clarkebury Boarding Institute. This will prepare Mandela to advise Sabata, who will soon be of age and become king. Clarkebury, run by a white man named Reverend Harris, is larger than Mqhekezweni and entirely Western. Mandela struggles to adapt at first; the book features an anecdote about his clumsiness in shoes at that time. A few of the teachers are Africans with university degrees, and Mandela is impressed that one of them, Mr. Mahlasela, does not treat Reverend Harris as his natural superior.
When Mandela is 19, he joins Justice at Healdtown, the Methodist college in Fort Beaufort to the southwest of Thembu. Mandela continues receiving an English education, and he and his fellow students aspire to be “black Englishmen” (36). Mandela makes his first non-Xhosa African friends at Healdtown. When his zoology teacher, who speaks Sotho, marries a Xhosa women Mandela’s sense of tribal difference is challenged: “I began to sense my identity as an African, not just a Thembu or even a Xhosa” (38).
In Mandela’s final year at Healdtown, Krune Mqhayi, a great Xhosa poet, visits the school. To the students’ great shock, Mqhayi rails against Western occupation and predicts that Africans will defeat it soon. When Mandela leaves Healdtown, he still aspires to rise within the white-ruled society but sees Africans standing up to white people and asserting their dignity. Though he is developing a greater sense of kinship with other Africans, he still considers himself a Xhosa first and an African second.
Mandela is accepted to the University College of Fort Hare, the only residential university for nonwhites in South Africa. There, he becomes close with K.D. Matanzima, his nephew. Although he is there to study law, Mandela wants a position in the Native Affairs Department because “[a]t that time, a career as a civil servant was a glittering prize for an African, the highest that a black man could aspire to” (44).
Mandela is elected to the student leadership and regularly comes into conflict with the administration. The final straw comes when he participates in a boycott over the quality of the food served at the university. Because Mandela refuses to compromise his principles, he is eventually sent home to Mqhekezweni, and the regent is furious.
During the summer, Jongintaba tells Mandela and Justice that he will die soon and must see them married. The young men are shocked that Jongintaba already has brides picked out for them, so they decide to run away to Johannesburg. After some misadventures wherein they had to circumvent obstacles orchestrated by the regent, who guessed they might try to flee, the pair reach Johannesburg—also known as eGoli, the city of gold.
Part 1 Analysis
Mandela’s early life was characterized by a growing awareness of the world and his place within it. As a small child, he identified as a member of royal family of Thembu, the Xhosa kingdom in which he was born. Therefore, he considered himself above other Africans. When he moved to the Thembu capital, Mqhekezweni, he was exposed to stories about other African kingdoms and began to understand he had interests and history in common with non-Thembu Xhosas. After being sent to boarding school, he encountered non-Xhosa Africans and made his first friends outside his ethnic group. He still felt a strong distinction between Xhosa and non-Xhosa Africans but took his first steps towards the humanist perspective that would characterize his adulthood.
Mandela had very little contact with white people during his early childhood, so he grew up with very little awareness of the political interests that all South African peoples shared. His boarding school experiences, in which brilliant Africans were treated as inherently inferior to mediocre white people, led him to understand the racialization of South Africa’s society as well as his low status within it.
Despite his burgeoning awareness of the country’s caste system, Mandela aspired to succeed within the system rather than to dismantle it. He saw higher education—an institute entirely within the control of whites—as a path to prestige and respect. As a result, he uncritically assimilated himself to an Anglo-European perspective and aspired to be a “black Englishman” (36). His sense of what was politically possible was severely limited, considering his desire to work within the Native Affairs Department, the government agency through which apartheid’s most dehumanizing policies were eventually implemented.
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