Move to Qunu- defeating oPPonents Without dishonouring theM

Because of their ‘’straitened circumstances’’, his mother moved to the village of Qunu to ‘’have the support of friends and relations’’. Mandela was no more than 5 when he became a herd-boy, looking after sheep and calves in the field. he ‘’learned to stick-fight - essential knowledge for any rural African boy - and became adept at its various techniques, parrying blows, feinting in one direction and striking in another...’’ there, too, he learned an important lesson from an unruly donkey that bolted into a thorn bush and unseated him, the thorns pricking and scratching his face, ‘’embarrassing (him) in front of (his) friends’’. Mandela points out that because ‘’Africans have a highly developed sense of dignity’’ the incident made him lose face in front of his friends but taught him a lifelong lesson: ‘’...to humiliate another person is to make him suffer an unnecessarily cruel fate. Even as a boy, I defeated my opponents without dishonouring them’’.

At that time, his life and ‘’that of most Xhosa... was shaped by custom, ritual, and taboo.’’ there were a small number of AmaMfengu who were not originally Xhosa speakers, they had been refugees fleeing Shaka Zulu’s armies during the period 1820 to 1840 known as the iMfecane. they had been forced to do jobs that no other Africans would do and had worked on white farms and in white businesses.