Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  If “petty apartheid,” as it was known, was the segregation of facilities such as restaurants, public toilets, buses, trains and all other municipal services, as under the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953, then “grand apartheid” was the political separation envisaged by the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951, which ordered the creation of the Bantustans, the territories where it was hoped all black South Africans would reside. Black South Africans were no longer legal residents of their own country, only citizens of their homeland, or Bantustan. Mandela’s home, of course, was the Transkei, now the “Republic of the Transkei,” with its capital and administrative headquarters in Umtata. Kaiser Matanzima was soon to become the first and long-serving president of the puppet state, with Columbus Madikizela, the father of Winnie, as his minister of agriculture. For many Africans, accepting these roles was a sell-out.

  By 1960 more than twenty major Acts of parliament had been passed in the pursuit of the permanent suppression of black, Indian and colored people. No aspect of life—home, education, employment, leisure—remained untouched, or free. “South Africa belongs to us once more,” Malan had said in his 1948 victory speech. The Nats were determined not to give it up ever again. They imagined apartheid as lasting for all time.

  For the nationalist Africanists of the ANC Youth League, then and later, there were awkward comparisons between the two brands of nationalism, African and Afrikaaner. Of course, the Africans did not exactly want to oppress and exploit others on the basis of their race, but they did share with the whites a kind of chauvinism and desire to be at the top of the heap. The Youth League was initially unmoved that the ANC itself, under Dr. Xuma, was forging ever closer links with other groups. The so-called doctors pact of 1947 had Dr. Xuma and his Indian counterparts, Dr. Yusuf Dadoo and Dr. G. M. Naicker, agreeing to work together to campaign for votes and an end to discrimination.

  But as the National Party came to power, Mandela and the Youth League held some joint discussions of their own with Indian Congress activists. Though there was to be no direct co-operation between them for a while longer, the Africans were learning something from their Indian colleagues and were newly radicalized by the prospect of the apartheid state.

  A year later the Youth League drew up a Programme of Action. The document was to redefine the ANC, asserting the ANCYL’s commitment to African nationalism while acting as a blueprint for resistance and protest, which, for the first time, would take the ANC activists outside the law and oblige them to court arrest. This was the moment for the ANC to stop being a pressure group and lead the way to mass action.

  Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo went to Sophiatown to present the program to Dr. Xuma for his approval, determined that it should be accepted by the ANC. All were ready to blackmail the president that they would support his re-election at the annual conference only if he supported the program. “We told him that gone were the days when the choice of leader depended on his status as a doctor or lawyer. It now depended on whether he could muster the support of the masses of the people,” Mandela said in an interview with Elinor Sisulu.

  When they told Xuma how Gandhi and Nehru had built organizations of mass protest by going to jail and wanted him to do the same, Xuma obviously felt he was being addressed by upstarts. “What do you know about Gandhi and Nehru? You come to lecture me here?” When they presented him with their ultimatum—endorse the program or be deposed—he became even angrier, accusing them of blackmailing him and of being young, arrogant and disrespectful.

  Mandela could see that Xuma was not about to throw away his comfortable existence as a doctor by going to prison. He refused to back the program and sent them away, out into the late-night curfew with no means of getting home. They had to find beds nearby at the house of a friend of Sisulu’s.

  That was the end of Xuma. At the Bloemfontein conference, his presidential speech was received with “hollow clapping.” A vote of no confidence was proposed and seconded by members of the Youth League. “A shock wave went through the hall. Never before had a president been criticized,” a Youth Leaguer, Diliza Mji, told Fatima Meer. The ANCYL had won the vote but lacked experience themselves to put forward a suitable candidate to be president, so had to find a stand-in (a regent, you might say) and chose Dr. James Moroka with Sisulu elected as national secretary.

  The Programme of Action was adopted and a national strike was called for June 26, 1950, in protest against apartheid. The ANCYL soon discovered the caliber of their new president. He hosted a meeting with the Indian Congress and the Communist Party, only to agree to support a rival national protest, a stay at home, two months before the ANC’s own strike, on May 1, 1950.

  The Youth Leaguers were furious.

  Political friction between Indian and African mirrored the social unrest that had broken out in January 1949, when long-standing tensions turned to violence after an incident in Durban in which an Indian retailer was alleged to have beaten an African youth caught shoplifting. In the hierarchy of the oppressed, Africans always felt themselves at the bottom of the pile, and many resented the merchant class of Indians who, they believed, exploited them. Of course, the vast majority of the Indian community were working class too, with their own struggles. There were social divisions among the Indians who came to South Africa. The so-called passenger Indians, who had come freely to work and prosper, might see themselves as superior to the indentured laborers; plus, of course, they had brought with them the status of their caste.

  Africans often went to the Indian locations to shop and sometimes ill feelings arose. As a result of the incident in Durban, many Indian shops and homes were burned, with a death toll of 137—fifty Indian and eighty-seven African.

  Sisulu and Ismail Meer were among those who went there to try to quell the riots. Some Youth Leaguers were slowly being persuaded of the need for unity, and now, in calling a rival “stay away” protest, the Indians and the communists were trying to thwart them. Mandela, and once or twice even Sisulu, tried breaking up communist meetings. On one occasion, which they would joke about later, Mandela hustled Yusuf Cachalia from a platform where he was speaking.

  Years later, the Pan-Africanist Congress would rise from the ashes of the Youth League, looking back to the Programme of Action as the true statement of African resistance (rather than the 1955 Freedom Charter). The PAC leader, Robert Sobukwe, himself a former Youth Leaguer, would hark back to 1950 and refer to the May 1 strike as a communist stunt.

  Already, the African nationalists of the Youth League feared that the Programme of Action was being undermined by ANC support for the May strike. Mandela’s attempts at disruption were just one measure of the open hostilities.

  Paul Joseph, then a young Indian communist, remembered being thrown out of a Youth League meeting at the time—“Sorry, this meeting is only for Africans”—but saw Mandela there and noted that even though he was not yet prominent there was something about him. “He had charisma, he was articulate, very dapper. A good statesman and highly regarded by the Indian community.”

  Ahmed Kathrada became incensed by the Youth League’s opposition to the May strike and confronted Mandela when they met in the street. They exchanged initial pleasantries and then Kathrada challenged Mandela to defend his position on a joint platform, saying, “I’ll stand with you and I’ll beat you.” They parted angrily, but Kathrada was glad to have defended the position of his Indian colleagues and anticipated that he would have their support when Mandela stood to complain about him at a later meeting. As Kathrada later recalled, “I am there as a driver, standing at the door, and Madiba gets up and complains about the disrespect this youngster showed towards him. I’m expecting my mentors Ismail Meer and J. N. Singh to be friendly to me. Meer got up and said, this was Kathrada’s fault, he’s an impetuous, hotheaded youngster.” Indeed, Kathrada had neglected to consider the importance of age and seniority. Mandela was eleven years older.

  Like Paul Joseph and Kathrada, Mosie Moolla had been active in bring
ing out support for the May 1 strike and he too saw the tension between the two communities, African and Indian. They were forgetting who the real enemy was—white domination and white oppression; they were all in the ghetto; none of them could vote; none of them could choose where to send their children to school. They were all second-class citizens.

  In spite of all the ANCYL’s efforts to prevent it, the May 1 strike went ahead. Mandela and Sisulu were on the street, watching a spontaneous gathering in Johannesburg, when the police opened fire and they had to seek shelter. Altogether eighteen people were killed, all of them African. Paul Joseph remembered the recrimination afterwards when a Youth Leaguer attacked an Indian activist and assaulted him, saying, “You Indians killed my people.”

  The Youth League decided to turn its own June 26 strike call into a day of mourning but the response was not quite as widespread as they had hoped. Sisulu (naturally enough, being a communist himself) believed there should be greater co-operation between the ANC and communists. He proposed a campaign of national civil disobedience against the many new laws being enacted.

  Mandela agreed with the idea of a campaign but was still thinking on separate lines and argued that it should be African-only. He was outvoted. After its December 1951 annual conference, the ANC issued an ultimatum to the government to repeal the new laws, by the end of February 1952, otherwise a major campaign of defiance would begin.

  It was around this time that Mandela’s friendships across the racial and political divide finally began to wear down his resistance to co-operation with the communists. He had high regard for ANC communists such as Dan Tloome and J. B. Marks (even though Mandela’s Transvaal branch had once tried to expel Marks because of his communist beliefs) and would spend long night hours arguing with Moses Kotane, who would challenge him to accept that they were all fighting the same enemy and that the communists had no desire to take over the ANC.

  When the government passed the Suppression of Communism Act in 1950, the Communist Party of South Africa disbanded and later re-formed as the South African Communist Party—an underground movement with a structure of secret cells. The Act was widely regarded as a blow against all opposition, as the law’s definition of communism was so broad that it encompassed virtually any protest.

  There had been a joint conference to consider how to protest against the Act (not long after the contentious May 1 protest in 1950) at which Mandela had agreed with Yusuf Dadoo’s call for a united front and Tambo had said, “Today it is our Communist Party, tomorrow it will be our trade unions, our Indian Congress… our African National Congress.” They had issued a joint statement. The conference was later recalled by prominent white communist Rusty Bernstein as the meeting where the foundation stone was laid for the ANC coalition that would dominate the decades to come. It was the meeting where hatchets were buried.

  Feeling ill informed about Marxist philosophy, Mandela acquired some books and began studying the likes of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. His memoir contains a brief but considered reflection on dialectical materialism and his recognition that a classless society is not so far removed from the communal life of a rural African community. The call to revolution, he said, was music to the ears of a freedom fighter, and there was no conflict between communism and the struggle against racism. So he “amended his view” of communists and opted from now on to embrace them in the liberation movement.

  This was not a position shared by the more determined nationalists of the Youth League who remained suspicious of any communist influence that might dilute African ideals. They even went so far as to form an underground “watchdog committee” to monitor communist leanings and push the nationalist cause.

  The divergence of opinion among the Youth Leaguers was a sign of the greater divisions to come within the ANC.

  Six

  DESPITE BEING FORCED to abandon his ambition of becoming an advocate, Mandela was beginning to attract attention, both for his growing role as a political activist with potential for leadership, as well as for his appealing personality and well-groomed appearance. His regal bearing, allied with his fondness for tailored suits, gave him the appearance of affluence. Perhaps starting work meant he had more money to spend. The Bantu Welfare Trust loan was still sitting there, unpaid.

  Joe Matthews, the Professor’s son, recalled Mandela at the previous December’s annual conference presenting the plan for the Defiance Campaign. Mandela was dressed in his favorite double-breasted suit, according to Matthews. “You know the two best-dressed chaps in the movement were Madiba and [Yusuf] Cachalia on the Indian side. You would look at a suit that Madiba was wearing and you would go all over and say, ‘I want a suit like that one.’ The tailors would tell you, ‘There’s no such suit.’ He was really a great dresser.”

  In December 1951, at the ANC’s annual conference, Mandela presented the plan for the Defiance Campaign, a series of protests that would be unleashed if the organizations demands were not meant. Although they had been inspired by the passive resistance of the Indian activists, Mandela and the majority of the Youth Leaguers had no wish to emulate their spiritual devotion to passivity. For them, non-violence was a tactic, not a way of life as it had been in the days of satyagraha under Gandhi. The son of the Indian leader was there as an observer at the ANC conference and listened to their plans for the campaign. He asked for permission to speak but annoyed many with his comments that Africans were not ready for defiance as they did not understand the principles of satyagraha, such as non-violence and discipline.

  The conference agreed to send a letter to the prime minister, warning him that their campaign would begin if he had not repealed the apartheid laws by the end of February. In an echo of the phrase that would soon become the rallying slogan of the ANC, “Freedom in our lifetime,” the letter spoke of the ANC’s aims for “democracy, liberty and harmony in South Africa” and said they were “fully resolved to achieve them in our lifetime.”

  Back home after the conference, Mandela and Sisulu drafted the letter, which then needed to be authorized and signed by their president, Moroka. Although suspicious of communists, Moroka liked and trusted Mandela, who was deputed to take the letter to Moroka in Bloemfontein, a journey of several hours from Johannesburg.

  In Mandela’s version of events, he was asked to take the letter because he was the only one who could drive, having just passed his test a few weeks earlier. Not many Africans took the driving test and even fewer could afford a car, though at this stage Mandela was driving only a borrowed vehicle. During the journey, Mandela accidentally knocked a white boy off his bike and although the boy was not badly hurt the police were called. The Afrikaner sergeant told him, Kaffer, jy sal kak vandag— kaffir, you will shit today—and Mandela retorted in English that he would shit when he pleased and not when ordered to by a policeman. They searched his car and found a copy of the newspaper New Age: Wragtig ons het ‘n Kommunis gevang— “My word, we’ve caught a communist.” He was eventually released, only to run out of petrol and so had to humble himself on the doorsteps of white farmers—“My baas has run out of petrol”—to obtain some fuel. He eventually reached Moroka and got the letter approved.

  Evidently, Prime Minister Malan was much offended at the “impertinent” tone of the letter, which sought to put the ANC on equal footing with the government. He did not reply personally but got his private secretary to sign a lengthy and patronizing riposte, representing the government’s apartheid policies as a “programme of goodwill” to the hapless Bantu.

  “The laws are largely of a protective nature. Even those laws which are regarded as particularly irksome by the Bantu people have not been made in order to persecute them, but for the purpose of training them in the performance of those duties which must be fully observed by all those who wish to claim rights.”

  The letters were publicized, which helped to feed anticipation as the Defiance Campaign approached. No one knew what was going to happen, whether or not the people would turn out in
large numbers to support the protests and how the government would respond if they did.

  Mandela was now president of the Youth League and a growing influence on the ANC executive—and his trademark confidence was coming increasingly to the fore. He had a leading role in the first round of protests, which took place all around the country on April 6, 1952—on the very day that Afrikaners were celebrating the 300th anniversary of the arrival in the Cape of their founder, Jan van Riebeeck. There were mass rallies at numerous locations that attracted crowds of thousands, with over 30,000 attending the largest protest in Port Elizabeth. It looked as if the ANC and their colleagues had caught the mood of the moment.

  The ANC and the “Joint Planning Council” met in Port Elizabeth in May where a National Action Council was formed. Mandela earned a prominent position, being appointed volunteer-in-chief to orchestrate and oversee the acts of defiance. That evening, after the council meeting, there was a farewell dinner for Professor Z. K. Matthews who was going off to New York for a year to take up a post as a visiting academic at Columbia University. Mandela spoke at the dinner and surprised the old guard of the ANC when he said he looked forward to becoming the first black president of South Africa. Joe Matthews recalled there was quite a lot of criticism of the speech afterwards. “How could the leader of the Youth League, in the presence of his elders, make such a statement? He was a very cheeky fellow, you see, Madiba.”

  Professor Matthews was an influential ANC figure and his departure on the eve of a historic campaign was not great timing, raising suspicions that he was avoiding the risk of arrest. However, his presence in New York helped the ANC to present its case to the United Nations (which would soon be setting up a commission to examine the “racial situation” in South Africa), as well as forge links with emerging community leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King and older activists such as the singer Paul Robeson, who was much loved by Mandela and his colleagues. Just as there was international support for the ANC’s campaign, so the policy of defiance would influence activists elsewhere in Africa, in India and in the Caribbean, and would help to shape the non-violent civil rights movement in the United States.