Mr Nelson Mandela during his student days
It is thought that the photograph may have been taken when he was a student at Healdtown, the Wesleyan College in Fort Beaufort, Eastern Cape. Mandela was a student at the college for two years, between 1937 and 1938, as described in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom.
“The picture shows what are possibly final year students at Healdtown,” says Ms Ruth Muller, archival project officer at the Centre of Memory and Dialogue at the Foundation. “A young-looking, somewhat chubby-faced, Nelson Mandela stands in the back row, fifth from the right, arms folded, the fashionable parting in his hair very visible.”
Head of the Memory Programme, Mr Verne Harris, showed the picture to Mr Mandela in late August. “This is the person I can’t remember,” said Mr Mandela, pointing at himself. “This chap is ugly, I’ve got better looking with age,” he joked. He asked for an enlargement so that he could spend some time remembering his peers from those years.
A young Nelson Mandela is pictured in this photograph, standing in the back row, fifth from the right. See a larger version of the image
Ms Muller describes the photograph in detail: “There are two white people, a man and a woman, in the centre of the picture. The man is clearly a reverend. Perhaps they were teachers? The students surrounding them, the young women in white blouses, the young men in smart jackets and ties, look seriously and with confidence at the photographer.”
This picture was found together with a collection of other photographs. The photographs “may have come from the presidency at the end of [Mr Mandela’s] term of office in 1999. Others were probably sent to him as gifts at different times,” says Ms Muller.
The photo that the Foundation has was made from a copy negative. “This means, someone photographed an old, visibly creased, print, and then made a print from the resulting negative. It has also been laminated,” explains Ms Muller.
“At the moment, we do not know where it came from or who has the original, but we would dearly like some information from anyone who may have knowledge of the history of this evocative picture and the people in it.”
People with any information about the photo can email the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory at nmf@nelsonmandela.org