Nelson Mandela – Nelson Who?
By Rob Wheatley · Originally published 25 November 2017 · Updated 10 October 2026
Growing up as a white child in apartheid South Africa, I knew remarkably little about the man who would one day change my country. I knew even less about the society that had taught me not to ask questions.
The fog of prejudiced learning in apartheid South Africa
Nelson who?
That would probably have been my answer had you asked me, as a white South African child growing up in Johannesburg, who Nelson Mandela was.
Today, his name is recognised around the world. But back then, in my small, comfortable, carefully segregated corner of South Africa, I had no idea he existed.
Imagine that. Growing up in the very country where one of the most consequential political struggles of the twentieth century was unfolding, and knowing virtually nothing about the people at its centre.
We weren’t simply ignorant of the truth. We had been taught a version of the world in which much of the truth had no place.
And the frightening thing is that, as children, we thought it was perfectly normal.
The day I knew we were losing Madiba
I remember 25 June 2013.
News of Nelson Mandela’s failing health brought with it a soft, mournful whisper. I knew that a great man would soon be gone.
On 5 December 2013, he died.
The man who had come to represent a new South Africa was gone, and I found myself reflecting on the extraordinary irony of my own life.
Once, I had known nothing of this man. Yet I had lived to witness the power of his reconciliation.
His extraordinary willingness to preach peace, when bitterness and retribution would have been entirely understandable human responses, still astounds me.
If somebody had robbed me of 27 years of my life, separated me from those I loved and treated me like an animal, would I have walked out of prison and declared that we should all find a way to live together?
I doubt it.
In truth, I cannot pretend to possess that degree of forgiveness.
And perhaps that is why Mandela’s example affected me so profoundly.
Growing up white in apartheid South Africa
I remember the places, the people and the things I saw as a child with uncomfortable clarity.
Many people outside South Africa have struggled to understand how white South Africans could live comfortably while millions of their fellow countrymen were denied fundamental rights.
It is a fair question.
But there is something about childhood that makes this particularly disturbing.
We grew up believing that the world around us was normal.
For us, racism was not presented as a choice. Instead, it was woven into the fabric of everyday existence.
We learned it in much the same way that we learned language.
Above all, those lessons came from our parents, our schools, our surroundings and the casual conversations of adults.
As a result, black people entered our childhood world as maids and gardeners. Often, we knew their first names but not their surnames.
Meanwhile, warnings about certain people taught us that we needed to be careful.
Then came the stories of dangerous men, terrorists and enemies of the state.
Those enemies, we were led to believe, were black.
The information we were allowed to hear
Nelson Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada, Govan Mbeki, Denis Goldberg, Steve Biko, Walter Sisulu and the African National Congress were hardly the subjects of open, sympathetic discussion in my childhood world.
If Mandela’s name surfaced at all, it was likely to be wrapped in the language of terrorism, political subversion and the Rivonia Trial.
The government controlled much of the information available to us. Censorship shaped what appeared in the press, while television did not arrive in South Africa until 1976.
Even so, it would be dishonest to suggest that every white South African knew nothing, or that censorship alone explained our ignorance.
Nevertheless, some people knew. Others resisted. Still others chose not to look.
And there were children like me, growing up in the comfortable fog of prejudiced learning.
The quiet racism was perhaps the most insidious
There were different grades of racism.
There was the aggressive, angry, openly hostile racism that many of us in English-speaking white society liked to associate with the Afrikaners.
How convenient that was.
As though speaking English and knowing which fork to use at dinner somehow absolved us of the same fundamental prejudice.
Our version was often quieter.
More polite.
More socially acceptable.
And, in many ways, more insidious.
We did not necessarily shout abuse at black people. We simply accepted that they occupied a different position in our world.
For example, if our maid lived with us, she was part of the household structure.
But did we know her family?
And what about her children?
Did we ever stop to consider that she had dreams, worries, disappointments and a life beyond the walls of our home?
I certainly don’t remember giving those things much thought.
She was simply there.
A lower-ranked member of our little domestic universe, performing the functions we expected of her.
And that was that.
The tin mug in the scullery
I remember the mugs.
Our maid or gardener would have a separate mug for tea. Often, it was a tin mug.
The plate carrying thick slices of bread and jam, a sugar-laden lunch, belonged in the scullery.
Away from our china.
In other words, the workers’ plates and mugs had their own designated place.
Think about that for a moment.
We could have somebody working in our home, perhaps even living under our roof, and still regard it as perfectly acceptable that their crockery should never mingle with ours.
And yet we considered ourselves kind.
After all, we were polite. Perhaps we smiled or offered an extra slice of bread.
What thoroughly decent people we imagined ourselves to be.
Looking back, the absurdity is almost breathtaking.
What kindness is there in failing to recognise somebody’s existence beyond the service they provide?
This was not always the loud, ugly racism that announces itself with clenched fists and angry words.
It was the quiet racism that sat comfortably at the kitchen table.
And so it was accepted.
Perfectly ordinary, apparently.
And entirely ours.
Where were the adults?
And what of our parents?
Did they not know better?
I believe many did.
Both my parents had emigrated from England to what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
They belonged to that colonial English world of white lace, respectable manners and deeply embedded prejudice.
It was a curious world.
One could be terribly concerned about proper behaviour while remaining remarkably unconcerned about the rights and dignity of the people who made that comfortable life possible.
Of course, my parents were themselves products of their upbringing and their time.
But that does not mean they were unaware of the contradictions.
Even now, I remember my mother and father talking quietly about politics.
And I remember the conversations stopping when they realised I was listening.
My father feared the apartheid government. In our home, political discussion could carry an air of danger.
And there was reason to fear the state’s power. Apartheid South Africa used censorship, surveillance, detention and repression against its opponents.
Being white did not guarantee immunity from political persecution.
But let us not confuse that with the oppression experienced by black South Africans.
We still enjoyed the privileges of being white.
Nevertheless, our fears existed within a system that overwhelmingly worked in our favour.
And our silence helped that system survive.
The comfortable compromise
It is tempting to imagine that English-speaking white South Africans were all secretly liberal, quietly horrified by apartheid and merely waiting for the opportunity to express themselves.
That would be a very convenient rewriting of history.
Some opposed apartheid openly, and at considerable personal cost.
Others disapproved privately while continuing to enjoy its benefits.
And many were perfectly content with the arrangement.
We could be liberal when it suited us.
At the same time, sympathy did not have to mean involvement.
For example, concern could be expressed over a drink before we returned home to the maid who would serve dinner and wash the dishes.
It was easy street in many ways.
In practice, our decency was frequently a performance, sustained by the comforting belief that treating somebody politely was somehow equivalent to treating them equally.
It wasn’t.
We were beneficiaries of a system that depended upon inequality.
And too often, we accepted the bargain.
We called them Africans. What did that make us?
There was another peculiar irony in the language of my childhood.
We referred to black people as Africans.
As though we ourselves were something else.
It was a strange distinction, when you think about it.
After all, we were born on the same continent, lived beneath the same African sky and called the same country home.
Yet in the language of our segregated world, Africans were other people.
We were simply there.
Not quite British.
Not quite African.
Sometimes, it seemed, not even entirely South African.
Just there, enjoying the benefits of a country in which we behaved as though we were permanent guests with exclusive privileges.
It took me years to appreciate the absurdity.
The history we were taught
At school, we learned about the Boers and the Voortrekkers.
We learned about the conflicts between settlers and African kingdoms, often through a distinctly colonial interpretation.
Likewise, stories of Dingane and the Zulus reinforced the divisions we were already being taught to accept.
The history of black resistance, the lives of African political leaders and the humanity of those opposing apartheid were not presented to me in anything resembling a balanced fashion.
Our enemies had been identified.
And children, particularly young children, seldom question the entire moral framework of the world into which they are born.
Usually, that questioning comes later.
Through rebellious teenage years.
Or through exposure to other people and other ideas.
And through travel, reading, conversation and the uncomfortable discovery that the things you once accepted without question may have been profoundly wrong.
It is not always a pleasant process.
But it is a necessary one.
The man I never knew
Nelson Mandela spent more than 27 years in prison.
On 11 February 1990, he walked free.
Four years later, South Africa held its first democratic national elections under universal adult suffrage, and Mandela became the country’s first democratically elected president.
For those of us who had grown up in the old South Africa, the transformation was extraordinary.
I do not suggest that Mandela alone brought about that change. Countless people suffered, resisted, organised, sacrificed and worked to dismantle apartheid.
Equally, I do not suggest that the new South Africa suddenly became a place without prejudice, inequality or injustice.
It didn’t.
But Mandela’s commitment to reconciliation helped make possible a future that many had feared would never arrive peacefully.
And for me, personally, that mattered enormously.
Because I had grown up in a country where I barely knew his name.
A country where I had been conditioned to fear people I did not understand.
A country where the colour of my skin determined privileges I had done nothing to earn.
And I had lived long enough to witness a different South Africa emerge.
I am an African
To be a white child growing up in apartheid South Africa was, in my experience, to be mute, deaf and ignorant of far too much that mattered.
I cannot change the childhood I had.
Nor can I pretend that the prejudices around me did not exist.
And I will not dress up the past to make it more comfortable for myself or for anybody reading this.
Instead, what I can do is acknowledge it.
I can recognise the privilege, the ignorance, the conditioning and the people whose humanity we so casually overlooked.
And I can be grateful that I lived to see the country change.
That I can write these words freely from South Africa is something I do not take lightly.
Now, I can call myself a South African with a sense of belonging that my childhood understanding of the country never truly allowed.
I am an African.
After all, Africa is where I was born.
The colour of my skin does not determine whether I belong to this continent.
Nor does it erase the history of what happened here.
Ultimately, both truths can exist together.
And the man whose name meant nothing to me as a child helped teach me that.
Thank you, Madiba.
A note from Rob
This is a personal recollection of growing up as a white, English-speaking child in apartheid South Africa. It reflects the attitudes, experiences and contradictions of the world I knew, not the experiences of every white South African, and certainly not those of the black South Africans who bore the greatest burden of apartheid.
Some memories are uncomfortable. They should be.
I have left them that way deliberately.
Your memories matter too
Did you grow up in apartheid South Africa, or in another society where childhood taught you to accept things you later questioned?
I’d particularly like to hear what changed your understanding of the world around you. Sometimes the most important conversations begin with the things we once took for granted.
Share your memories in the comments ↓
Historical context: Nelson Mandela Foundation biography · Television in South Africa, 1976
Continue reading: Why Do We Travel?
One Response
What an amazing piece of writing. It says exactly what we have probably never vocalized as white South Africans. Your writing captures the essence of my childhood exatly!