When women in customary marriages were denied inheritance rights, when widows were punished because they refused to stay indoors for a year after the death of their spouse, when a woman in KwaZulu-Natal was killed for wearing trousers -- and when both women and men accepted physical assault and rape as the appropriate response of a husband to a wife he felt was disobedient -- these loosely intertwined strands of South African life came unraveled. Often, disputes rooted in these national contradictions ended up in courtrooms, and the trickiest cases to resolve involved the role of women.

By Christmas Day, this tension was starkly evident in Mvezo, even in the nkosi's private life. Clashes over culture and power were bound to punctuate the second decade of democracy. It got Chief Mandela's back up, though, when people he knew from his old life decided that traditional ways were, at their core, oppressive of women. He launched, at great length, into a retelling of the history of the Thembu people, who had once been led by a queen. "I've always said that men and women exist as parallel parties, like tracks on a railway line," Mandela said. "No one is higher than the other, each are dependent on the other. You will never have things working right if the man and woman are not assisting one another. Once one becomes dominant, you find an oppressive system emerging."

Thando Mandela, as it turned out, would soon decide not to return to Mvezo. When she filed for divorce the following year, she accused her husband of having threatened and beaten her. The severity of the setbacks in the chief's personal life wasn't something Mandela addressed directly. He acknowledged, in a more general way, that the obstacles he had encountered in his new role left him a little downcast. As we talked into the afternoon, it seemed as though Mandela was struggling to reconcile the manifold sides of his identity -- Soweto youngster, Rhodes University scholar, and global businessman -- with this new role, as a traditional leader.

It occurred to him, as we were talking, that you could succeed in the larger world, but in the process lose a special, fragile rootedness to your ancestral place. Mandela's description of this quandary reminded me of his younger brother, the one who didn't consider himself part of the Xhosa culture. The twist was that the chief himself increasingly felt called on to play a larger role on the national stage. In 2009, the fourth election since 1994, he was placed on the ANC party list and ended up a Member of Parliament. In office, he made news mostly with sexist remarks and criticism of protections against discrimination afforded lesbians and gay men under South African law.

Chief Mandela increasingly looked toward trade with China as an element in underwriting the costs of development needed to lift more South Africans out of poverty. He certainly looked to China for business opportunities for himself. In order to deliver on promises he had made to the people of Mvezo at his investiture, the nkosi resembled his grandfather in only one respect. Bit by bit, he migrated back to the centers of national power, in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and to the places outside South Africa where big decisions were being made that would shape the future of the world. In the end, Chief Mandela had decided that he must leave the village in order to save it.

Excerpted from Douglas Foster'sAfter Mandela: The Struggle for Freedom in Post-Apartheid South Africa(Liveright).