As we walk down the hill towards the rock, two African women are foraging on the bone-dry slopes in front of us. They have collected two sackfuls of grass and one of them is casually holding a large, encrusted pat of cow dung, which she will use to get a cooking fire going back home in Qunu later this afternoon.
Their village – its name properly enounced with an extravagant Xhosa click on the first syllable – sits beneath us at the foot of the epic hills that meander away to the horizon in all directions. Here and there are clusters of cattle and goats, watched over by herd boys or, more often these days, young men hired for the task while the children are schooled.
There seems little doubt that, unlike their famous former neighbour, these women’s lives have been defined by the hills. Nomisile is 67 years old and Nophikile is 41. Speaking through an interpreter, Nomisile explains that she knew Nelson Mandela’s mother, Nosekeni Fanny, who died 40 years ago while her son was in prison on Robben Island. He was denied permission to go to her funeral. Nomisile remembers her as a kind, generous person who wore traditional dress and a goatskin pouch, and sometimes used to smoke a pipe.
I file Nomisile’s memories away for future use. I am here to research a new biography of Mandela that will focus on his early years, before his arrest and imprisonment. The challenge is to reclaim the man from the mythology that has grown around him. ‘I am not a saint,’ he has said, ‘unless you count a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.’ Mandela sins! What a shocking and exciting thought – and not just to me, apparently. Hollywood has already come calling about the book, before a word has been written, with a number of film production companies showing interest, including Brad Pitt’s.
We have reached the rock, which rises up from the veld, following the steep incline of the hill. The women laugh and nod when I ask if they, too, played here as children, as the young Mandela did. It was the sliding stone of his and many other childhoods across countless generations. Sitting on a flattened piece of tin you can careen down the rock at an accelerating speed, crashing perilously off the bottom lip. ‘We did this until our backsides were so sore we could hardly sit down,’ Mandela wrote in his memoir, Long Walk to Freedom.
From a distance, the rock had seemed flat and unremarkable, but when we stand below it, something magical happens – the sunlight catches the glassy sheen of the sliding path down its centre where it has been smoothed by a million tin rides. The sun brings it to life, makes it shimmer like a mirage, adding a supernatural glow of wonder to the magnificent landscape of Mandela’s past. Suddenly, it seems a privilege to be standing here on this quiet hill, far from the overdeveloped, well-travelled South Africa of game parks and wine routes.
OK, it is easy to get carried away. It is not hard to romanticise the homeland of perhaps the world’s greatest living icon, especially in this, his 90th-birthday year, when the mania for nostalgia is in full swing. But hidden here among the beautiful primary colours of the pastoral idyll – blue skies, green hills, red roads – are hard lives shaped by their landscape, where the modern South Africa that Mandela has helped to create is working overtime to make an impact.
