Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  He was about to leave Witkin’s, he said, where he had been working as an articled clerk at £8 10s a month, and become a full-time student at Wits where he would be studying for his final year of his Bachelor of Laws course—the LLB—to become qualified as an advocate. He needed the money to pay his university fees and buy the necessary textbooks.

  I may well mention sir that I have faced and am still facing considerable financial difficulties. For the last two years my studies at this university have been done under very strenuous and trying circumstances. My only source of income is the salary I receive from this firm. It is out of this salary that for the last two years I have been able to pay for my university fees and to support myself and my family and in view of the high cost of living in this city I have found it almost impossible to make ends meet.

  I have no father and my mother whose financial position is very humble indeed has done her utmost to assist me towards my education and has exhausted all her resources and can do nothing more for me.

  He was not discouraged, he told the Trust, and was determined to continue his studies until he completed the course.

  He got the loan, but was refused when he asked for an additional £150 five months later, in May 1947. He applied yet again that September (“At the risk of seeming unreasonable… ”) only this time asking for just £102, which, for some reason, found favor and was granted.

  Mandela had enrolled at Wits in 1943 to begin his LLB in the hope of becoming an advocate. It was a part-time course and he was then the only black African in the law faculty. There had never been a black barrister in Johannesburg.

  Mandela’s enrollment at Wits marked the beginnings of his political associations and friendships with people from other races. It was through the university that he met Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Bram Fischer, George Bizos, J. N. Singh and Ismail Meer, among many others. Like Mandela, nearly all these people had been raised within narrow racial confines, but were commingled by their interest in the anti-racist politics of the left.

  When Mandela first knew him, Meer, a South African of Indian descent, was in an interracial relationship with Ruth First, a very glamorous, sharp-witted young white woman who was already an active young communist and at the beginnings of a career in radical journalism. People who knew them said they made a striking couple, but Meer’s family disapproved of the relationship and it did not survive.

  If they had married, they would have been criminalized anyway, by the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and the Immorality Act of 1950.

  On the rebound, as some believe, from Meer, Ruth First got together with Joe Slovo and they were married in 1949. She and Meer continued to move in the same circles and it sometimes seemed that they still had feelings for each other. Amina Cachalia remembers them dancing together at a party years later and how it was evident that there was still a connection. Ruth was quivering when she came to Amina. What should she do about her reawakened feelings for Ismail? Amina told her to go out, take some deep breaths, come back in and talk to her husband.

  Ruth and Joe were not always faithful to each other, their volatile marriage—which has been characterized as an open one—punctuated by many flirtations and affairs, sometimes with the husbands and wives of comrades. The Slovos were famous too for their multiracial parties.

  Meanwhile, Ismail Meer was living in a rented apartment at 13 Kholvad House, around the corner from Kort Street where could be found the best Indian restaurants in Johannesburg, such as Kapitan’s and Azad’s. The flat, which became a popular venue for political and social gatherings, was later occupied by another young Indian activist, Ahmed Kathrada. Mandela was a regular visitor, and would sleep over if he stayed late and missed the curfew for Africans. Meer’s future wife, Fatima, recalled the beginnings of their friendship.

  We were just courting at the time. My husband was rather proud of me and wanted to introduce me to Nelson so he brought him to my parents’ home in Pinetown. I was a teenager, about seventeen, at high school, so neither of these two young men were taking me very seriously, they were both treating me like a teenager, which I was resenting. I felt patronized. They were not treating me as an adult, as an equal. They were teasing me. Nelson liked teasing people. He has a wonderful sense of humor.

  Indian communists and radicals from the South African Indian Congress were more highly motivated than the ANC at this time. They looked back to Gandhi’s satyagraha campaigns and mobilized widespread support in 1946 for the first post-war protests of passive resistance against the Asiatic Land Tenure Act, which Indians called the Ghetto Act as it sought to confine them to specific areas.

  Ironically, Mandela’s growing friendship with white and Indian communists and radicals coincided with the rise of his ANC Youth League nationalism. While he was personally close with many white and Indians, he was suspicious that many of them felt themselves to be intellectually superior and would take over if the ANC tried to work with them. And Mandela believed that the struggle was the struggle of black Africans, first and foremost.

  When Ruth First wrote to invite the Youth League to become affiliated with the Progressive Youth Council (essentially young communists), the ANCYL wrote back with a sniffy rejection: “We fear there is a yawning gap between your policy or philosophic outlook and ours. We are devoting our energies to the preparation for the greatest national struggle of all time, the struggle for national liberation.” Co-operation could only “result in chaos, ineffective action and mutual jealousies, rivalry and suspicion.”

  The fiercest and most articulate nationalist was the ANCYL’s leader, Anton Lembede. But he died following a brief illness in 1947, his loss creating “a gaping wound in one’s soul for a lifetime,” as one Youth Leaguer wrote. Mandela and Sisulu had come across Lembede writhing in pain in his office. They called a doctor and he was quickly sent to hospital but died there two days later of “cardiac failure.”

  A. P. Mda took over at the head of the ANCYL and the position was slightly softened. Mda, according to Mandela, was able to separate his resentment of racism or white domination from white people themselves and he was not so rabidly anti-communist. Soon after he was appointed, Mandela became the body’s secretary.

  As the Youth League sought to exert greater influence, both Mandela and Sisulu were elected into positions in the mainstream ANC, which meant their devoting even more time to politics and spending even less at home. Mandela later reflected that he hardly ever went out with his wife. He could count the occasions when he had done so on the fingers of one hand. However, when he was at home he changed nappies and participated in childcare. He had brought his younger sister Leabie from the eastern Cape to their home and she went to school in Orlando. Evelyn had never previously met Mandela’s mother, Nosekeni, when she too came to stay with them in the late 1940s. Mandela himself had not seen her for some years. She was supposed to be unwell and was weak on arrival but Evelyn saw that she recovered rapidly once under their roof. Evelyn told Fatima Meer that she thought her illness was the result of her missing her son.

  It is notable how little Mandela saw of his mother after he left Qunu and went to live with the regent, Jongintaba, at Mqhekezweni all those years earlier. Was he too busy or too poor to see her? Was he too caught up in city life or was he, in some way, embarrassed by this illiterate, pipe-smoking woman with narrow horizons—a reminder of his own humble beginnings? Apparently she once answered the door to one of his Indian comrades and told her son that a white man had called for him. On being corrected that it was in fact an Indian, she asked, “What nationality is an Indian?” There were no Indians in the rondavels of the eastern Cape.

  During her stay, Mandela’s mother was helpful in the home, affording Evelyn some freedom to take an active part in politics. Evelyn would often be characterized later as apolitical and uninterested, having time only for her faith. In the mid-1950s she did become a devout Jehovah’s Witness—probably influenced by the strong faith of her brother, Sam—but in truth Evelyn was f
ar from apolitical.

  Ruth Mompati, an ANC member, remembered Evelyn in the ANC Women’s League and would see her alongside Albertina Sisulu at branch meetings in Orlando West. As Evelyn herself told the reporter Fred Bridgland, she used to dress in ANC colors—black skirt, yellow blouse, and green-and-white scarf—to go to Women’s League meetings across the Witwatersrand at townships like Springs, Evaton and Atteridgeville. “I was shy but I spoke.”

  Furthermore, Evelyn told Fatima Meer that she was “roped into” the Nursing Union by Adelaide Tsukudu, a fellow nurse who would later marry Oliver Tambo. “Adelaide was vivacious and very persuasive,” said Evelyn. “She and Gladys Khala had strong feelings about the rights of nurses and particularly about the discriminatory wages of black nurses. I shared those feelings and I threw my weight in with them. We held meetings at the General Hospital and at Darragh Hall. Nelson was pleased with my involvement and very supportive.”

  Evelyn liked the house to be busy with visitors from home, such as K. D. Matanzima, who always turned up with an entourage. She wanted all her guests to feel the house was their own. It seemed to her that they were a happy, crowded family. Mandela himself was highly organized and “very regular in his habits,” always up at the crack of dawn to go jogging, before a light breakfast. He was glad to do the family shopping and even, according to Evelyn, enjoyed bathing the babies and sometimes “taking over the cooking from us women.”

  Perhaps Evelyn was putting a gloss on their lives together, to emphasize the great hurt she believed was done to her later, or maybe those early years, once their initial housing problems were solved, really were as simple and contented as she implies. You would look in vain through Mandela’s memoir for any suggestion that his wife was ever politically motivated herself or saw politics as anything other than his own “youthful distraction.” He represents the beginnings of the end of their marriage as a struggle between her religion and his cause, but that is not quite the whole story.

  Throughout this period they must, at the very least, have been under continual financial strain. The Bantu Welfare Trust periodically reminded him of the need to repay his loans and he mostly ignored their letters. When they eventually threatened to go to his sureties for the money (these included Sisulu), he quickly replied, with an apologetic promise to begin repayments—a promise he did not keep.

  His financial position cannot have been helped by his inability to complete his LLB at Wits. It must, to some extent, have been a vicious circle, a trap in which his impoverished, overcrowded home life, coupled with the diversions of his burgeoning political activities, conspired to intrude on his studies. The more his studies suffered, the more his financial status was affected as he could not move on. He apparently still hoped to become an advocate. When he wrote to the Dean of the Law Faculty at Wits in December 1949, pleading for one last chance to retake his final examination, he had been studying for the LLB for seven years and had failed the final year three times.

  A retake, technically, was known as a supplementary examination, which Mandela wanted to schedule for the following month, January 1950. He told the Dean that, over his seven years at Wits, he had incurred considerable expenses, totaling £472 17s, by purchasing textbooks and traveling between Orlando and the city with a monthly second-class train ticket.

  “Early in 1945 it became clear that I could not continue with my studies unless I was in possession of sufficient funds and with this end in view I sold my property and for some time I was able to continue with the course.” This is the only reference to any property owned by Mandela. So far as is known, he never owned any.

  The letter continued:

  Soon thereafter these funds were exhausted and I was forced to apply to and received from the Bantu Welfare Trust Johannesburg the loan of £301 [actually it was £352]… part of which I used towards my fees and the balance in the maintenance and support of my family.

  This amount was also exhausted and for the years 1948 and 1949 I had to draw upon my last reserves which had been accumulated with considerable difficulty by means of personal savings. This reserve has now been exhausted leaving me almost destitute and stranded.

  Besides I have a number of pressing accounts which I am unable to meet and in view of the gradual rise in the cost of living in this city, it shall be impossible for me to continue my studies for a further year and it would greatly assist me if I could be permitted to present myself for the supplementary examinations in January next.

  I should also add that during the whole of this period I studied under very difficult and trying conditions. I was a part-time student and resided (as I still do) in Orlando Native Location in a noisy neighbourhood. In the absence of electric light I was compelled to study in the evenings with a paraffin lamp and sometimes with a candle light. I wasted a lot of time travelling between Orlando and city and returned home after 8pm feeling tired and hungry and unfit to concentrate on my studies. Even during the examinations I was compelled to work in order to maintain the only source of livelihood that I had. It is my candid opinion that if I had done my work under more suitable conditions I could have produced better results.

  It is not hard to visualize the contrast between Mandela’s world and that of the majority of students, who must have come from the white middle class and had comfortable homes in the garden suburbs—and black domestic staff to maintain them.

  Mandela’s letter was considered by the Dean and his six colleagues on the faculty board at a special meeting on December 14, 1949, at 5 p.m. at the Chambers of Advocate Pollak. They considered three applications to take supplementary examinations and granted two of them. The board regretted that it could not accede to the request of N. R. D. Mandela as he had failed in three courses in his final year.

  George Bizos had first met Mandela the previous year when he too began studying at Wits. Like Mandela, Bizos had arrived in the city in 1941, as a refugee from Nazi-occupied Greece. He was concerned by the oppression of black people and their unequal treatment on the Wits campus so was at a protest meeting where Mandela spoke on behalf of a student activist facing expulsion.

  Bizos would himself become one of the greatest advocates in South Africa and a prominent defender of the oppressed. In his view, the Dean of the Law Faculty, Professor Hahlo, was a racist at heart and had “drunk deep into the cup of apartheid.”

  Mandela later disclosed to Bizos that the Dean had told him that becoming a barrister was beyond the ability of black people. To be a barrister, the Dean had said to Mandela, you must be part and parcel of the mores and habits of the people—meaning white people—so in his opinion Mandela should really drop his personal ambitions and become an attorney, which did not require an LLB but a diploma in law, for which the Dean would give him credit but which would still require another two years of study. (A South African attorney can only appear in court in minor cases and instructs advocates/barristers in major cases.)

  Mandela never did become an advocate.

  He does not make much of these events in his memoir and was apparently reluctant for the subject to be aired when his letter came to light during research by a Wits historian in the post-apartheid era. But Evelyn, his first wife, would recall, many years afterwards, how significant the incident had been.

  “Nelson had not spoken about politics when he courted me. Now he talked often about the oppression of our black people. He was particularly upset when he found people at Witwatersrand University were blocking him from becoming an attorney [surely she must have meant to say advocate] because of the color of his skin.” Evelyn clearly believed it had been a turning point in Mandela’s commitment to the struggle, a personal motive for his fight against apartheid.

  The first black advocate in Johannesburg was not called to the Bar until 1956. His name was Duma Nokwe, and he used to have to hang his robe in Bizos’ rooms, as the Natives’ Urban Areas Act made it illegal for him to have Chambers of his own in the city and no one else would have him.

  As Mandela strugg
led at Witwatersrand, a new political order was being established across South Africa. By the time of the general election of 1948, there were schisms in white politics between the Afrikaner Nationalists, many of whom had sympathized with and supported the Nazis, and Jan Smuts’ ruling United Party, which had taken the country to war on the side of the British. Though himself an Afrikaner long committed to racist policies, Smuts had reservations about post-war South Africa as a segregated country. By contrast with the blinkered, isolated South Africa of the next forty years, he was an outward-looking prime minister who played a key role in the formation of the League of Nations, a precursor of the United Nations, the very organization that would later impose sanctions on South Africa.

  Smuts’ reaction against segregation may have been practical—he had commissioned a report that suggested it was unsustainable—but it certainly appalled the majority of Afrikaners, who looked to the Nationalists to protect them from the prospect of a united South Africa of equal opportunity. The “Nats” campaigned in 1948 on a nakedly racist platform, introducing the newly coined concept of apartheid, which came from the Afrikaans word for “apartness.” Of course, the policy was not so much one of separation as subjugation. Apartheid appealed to the white electorate.

  In May 1948, as the apartheid era began, Daniel François Malan became prime minister and the United Party merged with the Nationalists as the National Party. The laws that defined apartheid flowed thick and fast through parliament over the next decade. The first was the 1949 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act that outlawed mixed marriages, followed a year later by the Immorality Act that prohibited interracial sex.

  The Population Registration Act of 1950 categorized everyone in the country by racial classification and introduced the pass system for the different racial groups. The Group Areas Act of the same year determined where the different races could live, naturally enough securing the best urban locations for the minority white community.