Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  Meanwhile, Special Branch had begun monitoring the activities of their political opponents. Their records, contained in the National Archives of South Africa, give some insight into the growing power of Mandela’s oratory as he sought to stir the spirit of protest in his audience. On May 25, just before the trip to Port Elizabeth, he addressed a crowd of ANC activists in Johannesburg. Clearly, the idea of black majority rule (perhaps with himself as ruler) was already taking shape.

  We know that when the Nationalist Party is destroyed by the forces of the people we African people will rise and rule the country. I say this fully aware of the consequences. I am sure that when we are in power our government will name Swarts, Strydom, Malan and Donges as the enemies of liberty… In spite of our unity and support of the world, Dr. Malan has made laws. It is time you must raise your hands and say this will happen over our dead bodies. See the assault of innocent men and women by the police at the city hall steps yesterday. They are only rehearsing and preparing for the coming forces.

  Sisulu was by now a full-time official of the ANC but was much impressed by Mandela’s commitment, as he traveled around addressing meetings yet still seemed to be in the ANC office every day, while simultaneously supposed to be working nine to five as an attorney (Mandela had joined an all-white firm in 1952 after finishing his studies). They both escaped the first round of banning orders, as the government tried to clamp down on the leadership in advance of the main protest.

  The Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign officially began on June 26, 1952, a date later enshrined as Freedom Day in the history of the ANC. In an age before mass communications it was very nearly a masterpiece of planning, with coordinated acts of defiance beginning in the early hours in Port Elizabeth, where a group led by Raymond Mhlaba were arrested for going through a whites-only entrance at a train station.

  Across the country, crowds gathered around the volunteers chosen to show defiance and the African anthem rang out, alongside cries of Mayibuye, iAfrika! Come back, Africa. Mandela worked closely with Yusuf Cachalia, both starting their day at the ANC office in Johannesburg. They were becoming good friends, though often in opposition too. Mary Benson, a future Mandela biographer, recalled seeing him for the first time in the offices of the Indian Congress, in the middle of a furious argument with Cachalia. “Quite embarrassed, they broke off to answer my questions about the Defiance Campaign. Neither he nor Yusuf remembered the incident and he had long ago learned to control his hot temper.”

  Mandela did indeed have a hot temper, which he could not always contain. Yusuf Cachalia was doing well to have forgotten about it. For others the experience of being a witness to, or a recipient of, Mandela’s fury—albeit rare—was not something to be easily shrugged off. If such anger was a sign of stress, then Mandela was surely a man in the thick of it, in June 1952, with a young family at home, his career to be nursed and his role at the center of a national protest campaign that would inevitably result in his going to prison.

  On the eve of the Defiance Campaign he had been the main speaker at a “Day of the Volunteers” rally in Durban. Volunteers were asked to take a pledge. Mandela’s influence can be detected in the last line of the oath, when the volunteers acknowledge, “It shall be my duty to keep myself physically, mentally and morally fit.” Mandela was nothing if not holistic.

  He had found himself in front of 10,000 people. As he said in his memoir, “I had never addressed such a large crowd before and it was an exhilarating experience. One cannot speak to a mass audience of people as one addresses an audience of two dozen.” That day in Durban he told the crowd, which must have been a very mixed group, “We can now say unity between the non-European people in this country has become a living reality.”

  No doubt, Mandela was profoundly committed to the liberation movement, making his way to its center by the sheer force of his personality and political acumen. But perhaps too, as some members of his own family have articulated, it was not all entirely selfless and there was an element of personal ambition too, which found its footing at this moment, around June 1952, when he took center stage for the first time and tasted the potency of leadership.

  At the very least it must have fueled his self-confidence and self-belief. Though he is rarely described as arrogant, it was acknowledged by many that Mandela’s vanity went deeper than his double-breasted suits and he was clearly seldom troubled by issues of low self-esteem.

  As he directed events from the ANC offices, he was obliged to call on Walter Sisulu to be arrested much earlier than planned, as a replacement for a church minister who had a last-minute change of heart about going to jail. Mandela was keen to ensure that the campaign involved senior figures so that everyone could see they were prepared to lead from the front. Sisulu agreed to stand in and changed out of his suit at Mandela’s concern that such smart clothes were “impractical dress for prison.” Then Sisulu and an Indian activist, Nana Sita, led a group of fifty volunteers in their act of defiance, attempting to enter a township in Boskburg, a few miles east of Johannesburg, without permission.

  Mandela and Cachalia also traveled to Boksburg, to hand a letter to the magistrate, notifying him of the act of defiance. As they had hoped, a group of journalists and photographers were watching as they presented the letter. They then went to the township to watch the protest unfold. The police had locked the township gates and for an hour both sides seemed to stand, frozen. No one knew what the police were up to, or what tactics they had been told to adopt. Would they stand aside or start shooting? It could go either way. Then the gates opened and as the volunteers stepped forward with Sisulu and Nana Sita at their head, a police whistle blew and they were all arrested.

  Mandela and Cachalia went back to Johannesburg where another group planned to invite arrest by remaining on the streets after the eleven o’clock night curfew. Mandela left a council-of-war meeting at midnight and unintentionally walked straight into the curfew defiance. “No, Mandela, you can’t escape,” a policeman called out. No sooner had he been arrested than Cachalia was as well, and they were on their way to the Marshall Square police station along with many others, all singing the ANC anthem.

  Years later, Mandela recalled the incident in a letter to Amina Cachalia, who remembered taking food to them the next day, at Marshall Square. Mandela had shared a cell with Yusuf, which made the differing treatment they received all the more ridiculous. Then and later, prisoners received, for example, the best food if they were white, middling provisions if they were Indian, and food that was barely fit for human consumption if they were black: “In the morning an orderly brought him [Yusuf] eggs, buttered bread, chips and coffee. He offered me porridge and I protested vehemently. ‘Eat your food, man, you are not a white man!’ he said. I retorted, ‘Is he white?’ at the same time pointing to your man [Yusuf]. The orderly surveyed him closely and apparently being unable to classify him snapped at me, ‘Shut up. You talk too much. That’s why you are here,’ and off he went.”

  Though the prisons and police jails were to become the settings for many acts of cruelty, violence and torture by the forces of the state, Mandela himself never suffered much physical abuse. But on his first night at Marshall Square he took a kick on the shins.

  As we were jostled into the drill yard one of us was pushed so violently by a young European constable that he fell down some steps and broke his ankle. I protested whereupon the young warrior kicked me on the leg in true cowboy style. We were all indignant and I started a demonstration. We drew their attention to the injured man and demanded medical attention. We were curtly told that we could repeat the request next day. And so it was that this man, Samuel Makae, spent a frightful night in the cell, reeling and groaning with pain. Only next day was he taken to hospital.

  The campaign had caught the popular imagination and hundreds were being arrested across the country. There was a much repeated protest song, “Hey, Malan! Open the jail doors, we want to enter,” and it was no surprise when the police acted to quell the
ongoing campaign by arresting many of its leaders, including Mandela, who were charged under the Suppression of Communism Act.

  There were twenty accused altogether and for the preliminary hearing at Johannesburg magistrates’ court, a crowd said to be in the thousands gathered outside to support the defendants. It was the first time such a mass protest had been made at court and this too marked a new development in the struggle as freedom songs rang out, such as one that began, Thina sizwe, thina sizwe esinsundu— “We Africans! We Africans! We cry for our land. They took it. They took it. Europeans. They must let our country go… ”

  They were so many and so noisy with their songs and their slogans and the ululations of the women that the magistrate had to ask the ANC president, Dr. Moroka, to make them disperse, which he duly did. The crowd had comprised not just ANC and Indian Congress activists but Indian schoolchildren and white students from Wits.

  Alas, the accused themselves could not stand so united. Dr. Moroka hired his own attorney to run a separate defense and when Mandela tried to talk him out of it he said the campaign had been organized without him and he was not going to stand alongside communists. During his testimony in court he actually started pointing out the communists he knew among the accused before the judge stopped him. All of the defendants were convicted of furthering the objects of communism but received suspended sentences, as the trial judge Franz Rumpff noted that they had consistently called on protesters to follow a “peaceful course of action and to avoid violence in any shape or form.”

  The prosecution had incidentally sought to prove that the new freedom songs, the cries of the ululating women, were themselves calls to violence. A white musicologist had to be called to explain that the vibrato sound was a “typical African expression of joy or sorrow.”

  As the Defiance Campaign continued, its popularity was reflected by a huge surge in ANC membership, from around 20,000 to over 100,000. The membership fee at the time was 2s 6d, which ought to have made the ANC rich but, of course, most people could not afford the subscription and regular collection was haphazard.

  The numbers of those who actually paid were far smaller.

  Still, 10,000 defiers had been called for at the start of the Defiance Campaign, and 8,577 had responded by the time the campaign began to falter in October when riots broke out in the eastern Cape. Mass rallies had been banned but when special permission was granted for an ANC “prayer-meeting” in East London, the military moved in and eight Africans were killed, with dozens injured. In the aftermath, enraged protesters went looking for revenge. Two white people were attacked and killed, one of them a nun whose body was mutilated. The rioting spread, nearby at first, to Port Elizabeth, but later northwards to Kimberley, and eventually reaching Johannesburg, with ever more lurid press coverage, which focused on the six white deaths among a total of forty, with hundreds injured.

  Mandela and other leaders tried to prevent further trouble, speaking directly to those involved. Mandela gave a speech at the Denver Hostel in Johannesburg where the residents had rioted four days earlier, saying that they had made a mistake in attacking the police and that their actions had resulted in three more killings. “If everybody stood together and remained united there would come a time when we would repay for the blood of those killed.”

  The leaders had never once called for or incited violence, and there was plenty of evidence of provocation by the authorities, but such serious incidents inevitably undermined the peaceful intent of the campaign, opening the way to negative publicity.

  “For a while primitive Africa ruled,” said the Die Burger paper in Cape Town, “stripped of the varnish of civilization and free from the taming authority of the white man.” Others attempted to link the protesters with the ongoing Mau Mau insurgency, a violent uprising by Kenyans against British colonial rule.

  The government passed strict new laws under which defiers could face flogging and much longer prison sentences. Mandela and his fellows organizers realized they could not ask people to face such harsh punishments. By now, the campaign was beginning to run out of steam and in January 1953 it was called off. There was no doubt, however, that the campaign had been a triumph, in the way that it had redefined the ANC and ushered in a new age of protest to challenge the authorities. It had created a new leader, too, though by no means all the influential Youth Leaguers had gone with Mandela on this journey across the racial and political divide. A. P. Mda wrote that Indians and white communists were taking over the ANC, while Jordan Ngubane turned on his former ANCYL colleagues Mandela and Sisulu, saying they were becoming “mere puppets” of Dr. Dadoo, the Indian leader.

  Indeed, there was significant opposition from members of the Youth League, both to the Defiance Campaign—articulated by a group calling itself the “Bureau of African Nationalism”—and to Mandela himself, who was challenged for the presidency of Transvaal ANC by the leader of a faction that called itself Bafabegiya—those who die dancing—after an elite group of nineteenth-century Zulu warriors. The Bafabegiya complained of financial irregularities within the Transvaal ANC and were unhappy with the cozy relationship between the ANC, Indians and communists. The Bafabegiya themselves were mainly ex-communists who had hardened into an Africanist clique. Their candidate was defeated in the election against Mandela in late 1952 and they gradually faded from significance. Still, it must have been apparent to all concerned that many Africans would never be won over by the idea of a multiracial alliance.

  But among the defiance organizers there had been disappointment at the lack of participation by white people. After discussion, the campaign leaders decided to call a public meeting for sympathetic Europeans at Darragh Hall in Johannesburg. Around 200 people heard Sisulu and Tambo tell them that if they did not stand up to be counted, Africans would think they all supported apartheid.

  The meeting led the following year to the creation of the Congress of Democrats, formed by white anti-racists, most of whom were communists and had been involved in the Springbok Legion, which had been formed during and after World War II by left-thinking Jewish soldiers to promote troops’ welfare and a wider range of socialist values. Others later formed themselves into the beginnings of the Liberal Party. The divisions between the radicals and the more woolly-minded whites had been apparent at the Darragh Hall meeting. One liberal had suggested lobbying for better facilities for black people in the white suburbs, such as open spaces where domestics could go to relax. The suggestion was shot down by the communist Rusty Bernstein: “We have been challenged to take a principled stand against apartheid and the status quo,” he said, adding, “a park for nannies is a dismal and insulting response.”

  Within the ANC there was general despondency at the dismal and insulting performance of their president, Dr. Moroka, who compounded his sins at the annual conference by using his presidential address to express his loyalty to the king of England, the institution of the monarchy and the Commonwealth. By contrast, the head of the Natal ANC, Chief Luthuli, had become universally popular after sacrificing his title to the cause. He had been called to the Native Affairs department and ordered to resign from the ANC or lose his chieftaincy. He had been dismissed as chief of Stanger on November 12, 1952, and issued a famous riposte: “Who will deny that thirty years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately and modestly at a closed and barred door?” He was not a militant figure, supporting the new political alliances with both Indians and whites, but his statement openly expressed the “new spirit… that revolts openly and boldly against injustice.” In a stand-off against a rival candidate at the December conference, he was elected to replace Moroka as president-general and Mandela became one of four newly created deputy president-generals.

  That same month, Mandela achieved his first mention in the London Times, which reported in a two-paragraph article, headlined “Attorney Prohibited” and datelined “Johannesburg Dec. 11”; that “Nelson Rolihlahla Dalibunga Mandela, an attorney, president of the Transvaal branch o
f the African National Congress and national ‘volunteer in chief’ of the defiance campaign, has been prohibited by the Minister of Justice from attending any gathering in the Johannesburg magisterial district for six months. He is also prohibited for six months from living in any area of the Union except the Johannesburg magisterial district.” The article explained that the notice had been issued under the Suppression of Communism Act and the Riotous Assemblies Act, which could be deployed against the “promotion of feelings of hostility between Europeans and non-Europeans.”

  The ban did not just prohibit political gatherings, but all gatherings. Mandela could easily break the law in his own home, with his own family. All social events and business meetings could be included. It was not easy to practice as a lawyer when you were banned. Indeed, following his earlier conviction, the Transvaal Law Society tried to get him struck off its roll altogether, complaining that his leadership of the Defiance Campaign “did not conform to the standards of conduct expected from members of an honorable profession.”

  He had been defended at a hearing of the Supreme Court by the chairman of the Johannesburg Bar, Walter Pollak. The court accepted that there was nothing dishonorable in an attorney identifying himself with his people in their struggle for political rights, even if his activities infringed the law. Mandela won the case and the Law Society was ordered to pay his costs.