Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  Some leaders seemed to think Mandela was little more than a stooge of the white communists. Mandela had returned from his tour, dressed in fatigues, with a gun and 200 rounds of ammunition on his belt, determined to present a more exclusive, nationalist image to black Africa.

  So on October 15, 1962, Mandela marched into the Pretoria court for the first day of the trial, once again in full tribal regalia. The crowd in the courtroom rose at his entrance—a privilege normally reserved for the judge or magistrate, and not normally accorded to the accused. The people had waited more than an hour for the proceedings to start. There were over 200 Africans in the main area of the court, many of them also in traditional dress, while the whites were upstairs in the gallery.

  Mandela complained at the sudden switch from Johannesburg and said there was a high-level conspiracy to make it difficult for him to defend his trial. “One of the rights of a black man is to have counsel of his own choosing, and he has the right to approach a court of law to maintain these rights.”

  An observer from the British embassy later reported that Mandela seemed tense and out of practice as a lawyer, also showing a tendency to stray off into politics, when he would be interrupted by the magistrate.

  Mandela asked for a two-week adjournment and was grudgingly granted a week, which, as Viscount Dunrossil of the Foreign Office pointed out, was round one to Mandela and a minor tactical defeat for the government.

  As the hearing ended, Mandela turned to the crowd and raised his fist. Amandla! They shouted back at him. He again clenched his fist. And again, ignoring calls for silence from court officials, the spectators cried, Amandla!

  As they walked from the court, they began singing the ANC anthem while the police, using a megaphone, gave the crowd of singers five minutes to disperse.

  Outside they were still gathered together and began singing a new praise-song:

  Shosholoza, Mandela!

  Advance, Mandela!

  It seems likely that the authorities had moved the trial to Pretoria precisely to avoid the public displays of support and affection for Mandela that they had seen on a smaller scale in Johannesburg. They clearly regarded the tribal costume as inflammatory. A nervous young warder was dispatched by the Pretoria prison commander, Colonel Jacobs, to take it from him.

  When Mandela refused to hand it over, the warder began trembling and was practically begging, saying he would be sacked if he returned without it. The prisoner was sympathetic and told him to tell his commander that this was Mandela speaking, not the warder.

  Then the colonel himself appeared and ordered Mandela to hand over his “blanket.” Mandela once more refused, telling the colonel he had no jurisdiction over how Mandela dressed in court and adding that he would fight the case to the Supreme Court if they took the kaross. The colonel relented, but only with the understanding that Mandela would not wear the animal skin while traveling to and from the court, to prevent its inciting the other prisoners.

  So when the trial finally restarted, a week later on October 22, 1962, Mandela again entered the dock as a proud African, fist clenched, turning to the African spectators, who returned the gesture with their own raised fists and their cries of Amandla.

  Mandela had one more master stroke to play before the hearing proper began. He had drafted an application for the magistrate, Mr. W. A. van Helsdingen, to recuse himself—to withdraw from the case—on the grounds that Mandela could not get a fair trial and was under no legal or moral obligation to obey laws made by a parliament in which he was not represented. Apartheid did not extend the right to vote to black people.

  Mr. van Helsdingen and Mandela were old colleagues—the latter having appeared as an attorney before the former a number of times in the past (and Mandela was equally well known to the state prosecutor, Bosch). Ever courteous, Mandela prefaced his speech by observing that he meant no criticism of the magistrate nor of the prosecutor personally. He did not doubt the magistrate’s sense of fairness and justice.

  “I might also mention that in the course of this application I am frequently going to refer to the white man and to white people. I want at once to make it clear that I am not a racialist and do not support racialism of any kind, because to me racialism is a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man.”

  The magistrate replied that there was only one court here today, the white man’s. “Which court do you want to be tried in?”

  Mandela’s response was he had been very aware of injustices all his life and there was no equality before the law as far as black people were concerned.

  Why is it that in this courtroom I face a white magistrate, [am] confronted by a white prosecutor and [am] escorted into the dock by a white orderly? Can anybody honestly and seriously suggest that in this type of atmosphere the scales of justice are evenly balanced?

  Why is it that no African in the history of this country has ever had the honor of being tried by his own kith and kin, by his own flesh and blood?

  I will tell your worship why!

  Mandela said that the purpose of the rigid color bar was to enforce the policy of the country. He felt oppressed by the atmosphere of white domination in the courtroom.

  Somehow this atmosphere recalls to mind the inhuman injustice caused to my people outside the courtroom by this same white domination. It reminds me that I am voteless because there is a parliament in this country that is white controlled. I am without land because the white minority has taken a lion’s share of my country and forced me to occupy poverty-stricken reserves… We are ravaged by starvation and disease because our country’s wealth is not shared by all sections of the population.

  It may be a tribute to Mandela’s natural authority and decency, even from the dock, that the magistrate did not stop his speech but allowed him to continue even as he made the most overt criticisms of the very system the magistrate was there to represent and uphold.

  “I hate racial discrimination most intensely and in all its manifestations. I have fought it all along my life. I fight it now, and will do so until the end of my days. Even although I now happen to be tried by one whose opinion I hold in high esteem, I detest most violently the set-up that surrounds me here.

  “It makes me feel that I am a black man in a white man’s court.”

  The magistrate paused only briefly before rejecting Mandela’s application so that the case could begin. It did not last more than a few days. The state called numerous witnesses—a sledgehammer to crack a nut, as Mandela was blatantly guilty of the two charges, had no real defense and no intention anyway of mounting a defense. Not that he told the court that, allowing them instead to think he was planning a lengthy rebuttal with an equal number of witnesses.

  Mr. Louis Blom-Cooper, then a young lawyer for Amnesty International, had traveled from the UK to attend the trial as an observer. Late on the second day he told Bob Hepple he had seen the magistrate going off for lunch with two Special Branch detectives, one of whom was a state witness, while the other had been assisting with the prosecution. Hepple told Mandela, now you’ve really got grounds for asking the magistrate to recuse himself. Mandela was oddly reluctant to use the information, saying he was not basing his case on personal corruption but on politics. He finally decided to make the application but did not want to ambush the magistrate, so he asked Hepple to go and warn him privately beforehand what was about to happen. The magistrate went red in the face and spluttered at Hepple that he had not discussed the case with the officers and they were merely escorting him for his protection. The magistrate again refused to step down and the case continued.

  The prosecution concluded the following day, after which the court clearly expected a full defense from Mandela. Instead, he said, my lord, I submit I am guilty of no crime. He would not be calling any witnesses. To his side he heard the prosecutor exclaim, Lord! Mandela planned to make another long speech instead.

  Mandela described how his youthful imagination had been fired by tales of tribal warriors
who lived “in the good old days before the arrival of the white man” and said he would devote his life to the emancipation of his people. “When my sentence is completed I will still be moved, as men are always moved, by their conscience. I will still be moved by my dislike of the race discrimination against my people when I come out from serving my sentence, to take up again, as best I can, the struggle for the removal of those injustices until they are finally abolished once and for all.”

  There was a crowd of 150 Africans in the court. When the magistrate adjourned to consider sentence, Mandela as he went down shouted Amandla! three times and each time the crowd responded, Ngawethu! “Power shall be ours!”

  According to Hepple, Mandela was always calm and never lost his authority or dignity. He always expected to receive the maximum sentence of three years for inciting the strike and two years for leaving the country illegally. Five years in total was exactly what he got. The magistrate claimed he had no doubt that Mandela was the leader and mastermind of the stay at home campaign and that he had acted in a way calculated to bring about tyranny and destruction. It was clear, he said, that Mandela’s main object was to overthrow the government by unlawful and undemocratic means.

  The Times of London, in its report of the final day, described Mandela as “a tall man wearing a jackal skin cloak” and said he repeatedly gave the clenched-fist salute of the banned African National Congress.

  “There was a demonstration at the conclusion of the hearing, but no violence, as the crowd from inside singing “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” (God Bless Africa) joined those outside. Women danced in the street and chanted. The police linked arms across the street, urging the crowd along, and the demonstration eventually petered out.”

  Mandela still had the incriminating writings at Rivonia on his mind. Hepple has a vivid memory of being asked by him to pass along a message: “Please tell them to destroy all my papers at Rivonia.” Hepple certainly gave the message, he thinks to Joe Slovo. “But obviously it was never carried out.”

  Early in the morning of the day that Mandela was due to make his closing speech, Hepple had been sitting with Mandela in his cell, updating him on events outside: in New York, where the UN had voted for sanctions against South Africa for the first time, and in Durban and Port Elizabeth, where there had been explosions—acts of sabotage in support of Mandela’s case and the UN decision.

  As they talked, there was a knock on the cell door. It was Prosecutor Bosch asking for a private word with Mandela, whom he knew.

  “Don’t be crazy,” said Hepple. “You can’t speak to him alone.”

  Mandela said, “Oh no, it’s OK, if he wants to see me you just wait outside.”

  So Hepple stepped out, leaving the defendant and his prosecutor alone—a rare event in any court. When the prosecutor emerged after a few minutes, Hepple could immediately see that he had been crying. It was plain how emotional he was feeling.

  Hepple went back into the cell and asked Mandela, “What the hell’s going on?”

  “You won’t believe this but he’s just asked me to forgive him.”

  “Well, I hope you told him to bugger off.”

  “No, no, I told him I knew he was just doing his job.”

  In fact, as Mandela later described it, the prosecutor had said that he had not wanted to come to court that day and for the first time in his career he despised what he was doing. It hurt him that he should be asking the court to send Mandela to prison.

  The prosecutor had reached out, shaken Mandela’s hand and, bizarrely, hoped everything would turn out well for him.

  Two

  THE DEFINING MOMENT of Nelson Mandela’s childhood came not long after he was born, when his father was, as Mandela describes it in his memoir, “deposed” from the position of chief by the local white magistrate, depriving the elder Mandela of his income, wealth and status. The family’s resulting “straitened circumstances,” forced Mandela’s mother to move to another village many miles away, where Mandela lived until his father’s death sometime later.

  In Mandela’s memoir, and in all the biographies written about him both before and since, the story is told of how his father stood up to the white authorities, refusing to obey the summons to appear before the magistrate to answer a petty complaint lodged against him by one of his own “subjects,” involving a stray ox. Instead, his father sent the magistrate a message: Andizi ndisaqula— “I will not come, I am girding for battle.” Mandela emphasizes that such an act of defiance was regarded back then as the height of insolence, but it reflected his father’s belief that the magistrate had no legitimate right of authority over him. It was an act of principle, not a fit of pique. He was steeped in the Thembu tradition and customs in which power and patronage were solely in the gift of the Thembu king, traditionally known as the paramount chief.

  His father’s defiant message prompted the magistrate to charge him with insubordination. “There was no inquiry or investigation; that was reserved for white civil servants. The magistrate simply deposed my father, thus ending the Mandela family chieftainship.”

  The impression is of a prestigious lineage summarily and unjustly terminated; a chief—Mandela’s own father—humiliated; and a family condemned to hardship.

  But the message that Mandela takes from the sequence of events—the myth-building, you could call it—is the way in which they helped to shape Mandela’s own character, disclosing traits that he believes he inherited, namely his father’s “proud rebelliousness” and his “stubborn sense of fairness.”

  There are no published sources for this version of Mandela’s early history and it appears that Mandela, who acknowledges that he was too young to be aware of this episode at the time, must have heard about it. It would have been passed on to him as part of the oral tradition that he repeatedly refers to in accounts of his formative experiences—stories told around a fire by elders, a history not written down but handed down, verbally, from one generation to the next.

  As Mandela himself points out, both his father and mother were illiterate, had no formal schooling and never learned to read or write. Though, of course, this did not mean they were ignorant or lacking wisdom; they were simply living out the last days of a rural way of life going back many hundreds of years.

  Despite his family’s hardships, Mandela went to school. He was the first in his family to do so, and they supported and encouraged his education. For him the conventions of his past were there to maintain or to break. The choice was his—and he was to do both, often, throughout his life, showing respect and disdain for the old values in almost equal measure.

  Mandela the traditionalist; Mandela the modernist: you can take your pick or, better still, see him as a forward-looking leader facing up to the subtle challenge of easing a traditional society into the contemporary world.

  In passing on the oral history of his father’s downfall, he was observing an important custom but also, perhaps inadvertently, exposing its fundamental weakness as a reliable record. Truth and myth can easily become blurred in the memory, either accidentally or purposefully.

  Alongside the oral recording of the past was a parallel archive—the obsessive bureaucracy of the empire and its outposts, a world of white civil servants all busily sending each other notes, memos and letters, and keeping detailed minutes of meetings. Everything was kept and so, by chance, just recently, a treasure trove of documents relating to Mandela’s past was discovered in the archives at Mthatha (formerly Umtata), the main town in the eastern Cape.

  They not only reveal a completely different account of what happened to Mandela’s father but also disclose much about the inner workings of the white authorities and their role in relation to the local communities. There is little evidence in those papers of a rebellion, proud or otherwise, by Mandela’s father and every indication that he was suspected, and indeed was guilty of, corrupt practice and abuse of his local powers as a headman.

  The corruption was modest, maybe, but it continued for some t
ime before he was finally summonsed. Far from defying the magistrate, he actually bowed to his authority and appeared before him at a lengthy hearing, vainly attempting a defense in the face of substantial evidence. He was found guilty and dismissed from his position.

  A careful reading of the original interviews that Mandela gave, for his memoir, also indicates that he was already living with his mother in the new village when his father was dismissed. She was not forced to leave by reason of hardship but was merely living in this far-flung place as one of his father’s mini-empire of wives. Polygamy was an accepted practice then and Mandela’s mother was the third of his father’s four spouses.

  “Well, you see, the Chief would then marry as many wives as he could afford,” Mandela told his ghost-writer, Richard Stengel. “Each wife would have her own separate kraal, and sometimes they would be separated by 20 miles, as my family for example… So they were widely separated and they led different lives, and my father would circulate, you know, from one house to the other.”

  What is clearly and indisputably true, according to the oral and established history, is that Mandela was closely related to the Thembu royal line. The Thembu had been incorporated into the Xhosa nation some 400 years earlier when they migrated south towards the coast from the Drakensburg mountains. The Xhosa, in turn, were part of the Nguni people who had lived as hunter-gatherers across southern Africa for nearly a thousand years. The northern Nguni comprised the Zulu and Swazi people, and in the South they included the Sotho, Mfengu, Pondo and Thembu tribes.

  According to Mandela he, like everyone else among the Xhosa, belonged to a specific clan and his was the Madiba clan. Hence in later years, he has become widely known as Madiba, the name given to him as a mark of respect.

  He traces his lineage from the Thembu king Ngubengcuka, a great leader who died in the early nineteenth century. He had several wives and, according to custom, each represented a royal house of different status. The heir would be chosen from the Great House. Then there was the Right-Hand house and lastly the minor, Ixhiba or Left-Hand house, whose sons were supposed to have influence in settling royal disputes.