A novel study of the complex connections between Nelson Mandela and the nationalist leadership in the ANC with their kinsmen inside the Transkei Bantustan state, that reveals the significance of ethnic belonging, so important in African history. At a time of increasing regional fractures within the African National Congress, Mandela's Kinsmen provides a timely study of South Africa's nationalist elite. Whilst mass protests against apartheid were forged in the crucible of township and trade union politics, Gibbs focuses on Mandela's fraught relationships to his kinsmen inside apartheid's foremost "tribal" Bantustan, the Transkei. He uncovers the enduring connections between the nationalist elites and the chieftaincy areas, and argues the enduring institutional legacies of the Bantustans continue to shape post-apartheid South Africa. Timothy Gibbs is a Lecturer in African History, University College London. Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland & Botswana): Jacana

Mandela's Kinsmen is the first study of the fraught relationships between the ANC and their relatives inside apartheid's first 'tribal' Bantustan.

Timothy Gibbs reinterprets the complex connections between nationalist elites and the chieftaincies, and overlapping ideologies of national and ethnic belonging. In South Africa, like the rest of the continent, the chieftaincies had often been well-springs of African leadership in the early 20th century, producing leaders such as Nelson Mandela, who hailed from the 'Native Reserves' of rural Transkei. But then the apartheid government turned South Africa's chieftaincies into self-governing, tribal Bantustans in order to shatter African nationalism, starting with Transkei in 1963.

Drawing on a wealth of first-hand accounts and untapped archives, Mandela's Kinsmen offers a vividly human account of how the Bantustan era ruptured rural society. Nevertheless, Gibbs uncovers the social and political institutions and net- works that connected the nationalist leadership on Robben Island and in exile to their kinsmen inside the Transkei. Even at the climax of the apartheid era - when interlocking nationalist insurgencies spiralled into ethnically based civil wars across South Africa and the southern African region - elite connections still straddled Bantustan divides.

These relationships would shape the apartheid endgame and forge the post-apartheid policy.