NELSON Mandela yesterday attended a colourful ceremony in the village of his birth where the royal chieftainship due to him by blood and custom was restored to his family, after being stripped from them nine decades ago by South Africa's British colonial rulers.
The ceremony was mainly in honour of the increasingly frail former president, now in his 89th year and walking with the aid of a stick and supported by his wife, Graça, and aides. But he waived his right to the chieftainship in favour of his grandson
, Mandla Mandela, 33.
It was reported that Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo, 42, the king of all the Thembu clans and a nephew of Nelson Mandela, had decreed the restoration ceremony in an attempt to repair the damage inflicted on the tribe by the murder charge that he is facing.
The king was charged last year with murder, incitement to murder, kidnapping, extortion and arson, and the trial has been dragging on for a year. Dalindyebo is alleged to have ordered his bodyguards to beat to death a youth of 18. Three other subjects of the king were allegedly beaten near to death with sjamboks - rhino leather whips. They have testified that they were summoned to a hut, forced to strip naked and lie face down, before the monarch and his men began their assaults.
Yesterday, Dalindyebo installed Mandla Mandela, whose father, Makgatho, died of AIDS two years ago, as the royal Thembu chieftain of Mvezo, a village in the rolling hills of the Transkei beneath the Drakensberg mountains. Nelson Mandela was born in Mvezo in 1918 to a former chief of the Thembu royal tribe, part of the Xhosa nation. He was given the Xhosa name Rolihlahla, meaning "troublemaker".
Soon after, the British deposed his father, Gadla, after he refused a summons to appear before a magistrate with the words: "Andizi, ndisaqula [I will not come, I am still girding for battle]."
"Rolihlahla" - Mr Mandela - should have succeeded to the Thembu chieftainship, but he renounced the traditional post to migrate to Johannesburg, where he became a lawyer and devoted his life to fighting apartheid.
Mr Mandela, wearing a black and white animal print shirt, smiled broadly yesterday as he watched his grandson being draped in a lion skin by King Dalindyebo, as the family's chieftainship was restored.
"This is about the returning of our dignity and the restoring of our history," the king said, amid drumming and ululating from hundreds of well-wishers, including tribal royalty from across the country. Ten oxen were slaughtered to feed the guests.
Mandla Mandela, who graduated in political science from Rhodes University, Grahamstown, last week, can now decide local disputes and try certain minor criminal and civil cases. However, his powers are mainly ceremonial.
"He is the link between the king, the ancestors and his people," Patekile Holomisa, the head of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa, said. "This is really Nelson's position, but because of his advanced age, it was decided that the honour would be bestowed on his successor."
The young Mandela chief said his priority would be to push education and employment for the tribe, which is among the many black communities that continue to struggle with desperate poverty 13 years after the end of white rule. "There are no jobs at all around here. People used to be reliant on agriculture and now most of them rely on government grants," he said.
