krune MQhayi - iMBongi

In his final year at healdtown, the Xhosa imbongi or praise-singer, Krune Mqhayi visited the school. For Dalibunga Mandela it was like “a comet streaking across the night sky”. In appearance he seemed “entirely ordinary” and when he spoke in Xhosa “he did so slowly and haltingly” until by chance his assegai (spear) hit the curtain wire above his head. “Newly energised” he claimed emphatically that the assegai striking the wire was a symbol of the clash between African and European culture. It was not an “overlapping of one culture and another... but a brutal clash between what (was) indigenous and good, and what (was) foreign and bad”.

the boldness of the speech while “astonishing” in the presence of whites “aroused and motivated” the African students and “began to alter (Mandela’s) perception of men like Dr. Wellington, whom he had automatically considered (his) benefactor”. toward the end of his time at healdtown, Mandela began to see that “Africans of all tribes had much in common” and that “an African might stand his ground with a white man” but he was “still eagerly seeking benefits from whites, which often required subservience”. Again this attitude was typical of life in trinidad and tobago during the colonial era.