لخّصلي

Shortly after his initiation at the age of 16, Nelson Mandela left the Great Place to begin his secondary education, a phase of his life that was to open new vistas.Mandela's first secondary school was the somewhat elite and prestigious Clarkebury Boarding Institute, situated in the nearby district of Engcobo.His schooling would have a major impact on his ideas in later life.

Shortly after his initiation at the age of 16, Nelson Mandela left the Great Place to begin his secondary education, a phase of his life that was to open new vistas. His schooling would have a major impact on his ideas in later life.

Mandela's first secondary school was the somewhat elite and prestigious Clarkebury Boarding Institute, situated in the nearby district of Engcobo. It was "elite" in the sense of catering for the educated black stratum, but Q the term "elite" in colonized South Africa could be rather misleading, for this tiny African group lacked both political power and democratic rights and increasingly was denied opportunities to accumulate wealth or land. Moreover, black educational facilities, even for the elite, were inferior to that of whites.

Mandela enrolled at Clarkebury in January 1935, once more driven there personally by the regent in his Ford V8, a symbol of enormous status among blacks at the time. By this time, things were getting steadily harder for Africans. The whites-only government was embarking on a further set of discriminatory laws that would strip Africans of their few remaining electoral rights. Two decades of harsh segregation and discriminatory laws such as the Native Urban Areas Act of 1923 and the Native Administra- tion Act of 1927 had followed the Act of Union in 1910.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, African education had been domi- nated by Christian missions; there was in fact very little government involvement in or support for black education Clarkebury was a Methodist Wesleyan mission school. School principal Reverend Cecil C. Harris was strict and aloof from the students