Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  In the middle of the Defiance Campaign he had opened his own law practice with an Indian secretary. Technically speaking, the Urban Areas Act prevented Africans renting offices in the city without the express permission of the authorities. Sisulu had battled long and hard with the help of white lawyers to obtain premises for his estate agency.

  Mandela found rooms at Chancellor House through the amenable Indian owner, but never got further than a temporary permit, which soon expired. He described what happened in his speech of mitigation at his trial in November 1962, in which he outlined the impact of racism on his life and career.

  I discovered for example that unlike a white attorney I could not occupy business premises in the city unless I first obtained ministerial consent in terms of the Urban Areas Act. I applied for that consent but it was never granted. Although I subsequently obtained a permit, for a limited period in terms of the Group Areas Act that soon expired and the authorities refused to renew it.

  They insisted that my partner Oliver Tambo and I should leave the city and practice in an African location at the back of beyond, miles away from where clients could reach us during normal working hours. This was tantamount to asking us to abandon our legal practice, to give up the legal service of our people for which we had spent many years training. No attorney worth his salt would agree easily to do so. For some years thereafter we continued to occupy premises in the city, illegally. The threat of prosecution and ejection hung menacingly over us throughout that period.

  Since leaving Witkin’s, on becoming an articled clerk, Mandela had worked at a succession of white law firms. There were no African legal partnerships at all, then. He had spent a year at Terblanche & Briggish and then gone to a more liberal firm, Helman and Michel, where he studied for the exams that would qualify him to practice as an attorney. He liked Helman’s because they did not charge higher rates to African clients, as many firms did. After passing his exams, he went to H. M. Basner as a newly qualified attorney, apparently already planning to branch out alone. Hymie Basner, a former communist, still enjoyed a radical reputation for supporting cases arising from the struggle and was tolerant of Mandela’s own political activities.

  Mandela had needed a testimonial from his first employers, Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman, before he could join the Transvaal Law Society and begin to practice as an attorney. Lazar Sidelsky, who had once cautioned Mandela against mixing with troublemakers and rabble-rousers, evidently now regarded Mandela as one of them and was tempted to refuse him the testimonial, warning him to keep his nose out of politics.

  “You’ll end up in jail, sooner or later,” Lazar told him.

  “For the benefit of my people I must carry on,” said Mandela.

  “You’ll do more for your people if you set an example to them. Let your people become educated. Don’t worry about politics.”

  Some years later, Sidelsky was on his uppers after a business failure had brought him to the brink of ruin. As he stood waiting for a bus one bleak night, a vast car glided to a halt beside him and there was the handsome attorney, Mandela, offering him a lift home. During the journey Mandela mentioned some money he believed he owed Sidelsky but his former mentor dismissed the matter as long forgotten. A check for £75 arrived in the post for Sidelsky soon after.

  An Afrikaans secretary left when Mandela joined Basner’s, as she refused to take his dictation. She was replaced by the Indian Zubeida Patel, who went with Mandela when he began practicing on his own. He had by then formed a close bond with Oliver Tambo, who had qualified as an attorney not long before Mandela and was working for another downtown white law firm, Kowalsky and Tuch.

  Mandela would visit him there during the lunch hour, where a white secretary observed how he would deliberately seat himself in a whites-only chair in the waiting room. Africans were expected to stand, humbly waiting to be spoken to, but that did not work with Mandela. He would call out, “Mr. Tambo, please!” with the emphasis on the Mr., as it was normal for black people to be addressed by their surname only, if that.

  Tambo had already completed his Bachelor of Science degree at Fort Hare when he was sent down (expelled) in 1942 after playing a central role in that year’s strike, which, bizarrely, centered on the students’ rights to use facilities on Sundays. It was a matter of principle, apparently not one that clashed with Tambo’s religious values. Many people who shared Tambo’s strict faith would not have been advocates for entertainment on the traditional day for churchgoing. He had been a Christian since childhood and maintained a regular routine of prayer and church. He was also a keen and talented choral singer, as well as a skilled practitioner of the traditional Xhosa art of stick-fighting.

  Struggling to find work with his record as a troublemaking strike-leader, he was eventually accepted as a teacher at the mission school St. Peter’s in Johannesburg where, some years earlier, he had been a pupil and head prefect. He had been a popular figure at the school, respected and admired by staff as well as pupils, as a man with firm beliefs and a strong sense of fairness. At the age of thirty-one, in 1948, and with the help and encouragement of Walter Sisulu, Tambo had begun his Articles with a sympathetic white law firm.

  He was considered a studious, reflective character, very thorough and serious in all he undertook, perhaps sometimes a little too thorough and serious, and not as easy to get to know as his more open comrades, Sisulu and Mandela. He was a painstaking lawyer and sometimes a frustrating legal partner who took too long with cases. Tambo suffered from childhood with asthma, an affliction that he bore with quiet stoicism when it occasionally and inconveniently took him to the point of collapse.

  Tambo accepted Mandela’s invitation to go into partnership and within a few months, in early 1953, they had taken offices without a permit on the first floor of a building opposite the magistrates’ court on Fox Street. Their joint names were etched on the glass in gold-leaf lettering, which Tambo described as standing out like a challenge. According to Tambo’s biographer, Luli Callinicos, the two young African attorneys shared a vision of a black law firm where black clients would not feel intimidated or inhibited by barriers of culture and language.

  By 2008 the names in the glass had long gone and the building was in a very poor state of repair, scarcely a monument to the towering figures of South African history who had once worked there. Outside, a line of washing, predominantly socks and smalls, was strung between the pillar of the building and the nearest lamp-post while, inside, a number of otherwise invisible families were squatting. The building appeared to have been damaged by fire and there was no evidence of its former use almost half a century ago. It could be said that it had been squatted then by two lawyers without a permit.

  For much of the 1950s it had been the only black African law partnership in South Africa, a place of hope and refuge for black people who would travel there from all over the country to get legal advice and representation. Everyone who ever worked with Mandela or visited him at Chancellor House agreed that the place was never less than overrun with clients. When the office opened in the morning there would already be a queue of clients on the stairs. Winnie recalled that, when she visited, she would sit reading quietly in the lobby area, shoulder to shoulder with clients, as she waited on Mandela to go for lunch or finish his day’s work.

  To be a black African at the height of apartheid was to negotiate an impossible minefield of petty offenses that might land you in jail. Chief among the obstacles, of course, were the pass laws. It was a common sight in the city to see groups of African men standing handcuffed together on a street corner, or sitting in a line on the curb, or being marched through the commuter crowds to jail, having been arrested for pass offenses.

  The figures rose exponentially throughout the decade. By 1958, for example, there were 396,836 convictions under the pass laws. But 1959 saw the greatest number of prosecutions in history, a total of 1.8 million, not just for pass offenses, but also for possessing or making “Bantu liquor,” as home-brewed alcohol
was called (Africans were banned from buying alcohol themselves), and for trespassing, that is, being some place they were unauthorized to enter. No doubt there were thousands more arrests that never reached court. The black population of South Africa was, broadly, around 10 million, out of a total of around 15 million, of which just 2 million, the ruling minority, were white. The rest comprised Indian and “colored” people.

  Mandela originally agreed with Tambo that he would focus on the political work while Tambo took care of the legal firm, but those boundaries soon became blurred. Mandela was banned and could not leave the area of Johannesburg, leaving Tambo to make the court appearances around the country, representing clients. Sometimes the clients had traveled hundreds of miles to Chancellor House, preferring that journey to a shorter one to the nearest white lawyer.

  In later years, before the fall of the apartheid regime, Tambo described how

  to reach our desks each morning Nelson and I ran the gauntlet of patient queues of people overflowing from the chairs in the waiting-room into the corridors.

  South Africa has the dubious reputation of boasting one of the highest prison populations in the world. Jails are jam-packed with Africans imprisoned for series offences—and crimes of violence are ever on the increase in apartheid society—but also for petty infringements of statutory law that no really civilized society would punish with imprisonment.

  To be unemployed is a crime because no African can for long evade arrest if his passbook does not carry the stamp of authorized and approved employment. To be landless can be a crime, and weekly we interviewed the delegations of grizzled, weather-worn peasants from the countryside who came to tell us how many generations their families had worked a little piece of land from which they were now being ejected. To brew African beer, to drink it or to use the proceeds to supplement the meager family income is a crime, and women who do so face heavy fines and jail terms.

  To cheek a white man can be a crime. To live in the “wrong” area—an area declared white or Indian or Colored—can be a crime for Africans. South African apartheid laws turn innumerable innocent people into “criminals.”

  Apartheid stirs hatred and frustration among people. Young people who should be in school or learning a trade roam the streets, join gangs and wreak their revenge on the society that confronts them with only the dead-end alley of crime or poverty.

  Our buff office files carried thousands of these stories and if, when we started our law partnership, we had not been rebels against apartheid, our experiences in our offices would have remedied the deficiency.

  We had risen to professional status in our community, but every court case, every visit to the prisons to interview clients, reminded us of the humiliation and suffering burning in our people.

  Ruth Mompati joined the firm later in 1953. At the time she had been married a year and was then known by her married name, Ruth Matsoane. (Mompati was the first name of her first-born son, which she began using as a surname after going underground in the 1960s.)

  She had arrived in the city just after the Defiance Campaign of June 1952, from her home in the Cape-province, west of Johannesburg. By 2008 the district in which she had been raised had been renamed in her honor and she was the mayor of the town of Vryburg. She had just turned eighty-three but was still “dignified and reserved” as others remembered her from all those years earlier. She had a warm personality and fine features, evidence of the beautiful young woman she once was.

  In the summer of 1952, Ruth was already a member of the ANC but a prisoner of her profession, she said, having been a teacher, salaried by the government, and prevented from being politically active.

  She remembered, though, how the lowly white shop assistants would call all African men “boy”—“Yes, boy?”—or “John,” while African women, Ruth included, used to be “Annie.” “Yes, Annie, what do you want?” She used to get incensed by this and had once joined a group of young women teachers to teach the shop assistant a lesson.

  “Yes, Annie, what do you want?”

  “Yes, Sarah,” they had replied, “I want a loaf of bread.”

  The white assistant was enraged. “Sarah? Who’s your Sarah? Who’s your Sarah?”

  “Well, I can ask you the same question, who’s your Annie?”

  The year that saw the founding of Mandela & Tambo, 1953, also saw the introduction of the Bantu Education Act, which ended the mission schools where generations had studied, while introducing new basic Bantu education, which was hopelessly under-resourced. Any pretext of “goodwill” was gone by now; only naked racist intent remained.

  The new prime minister, Dr. Verwoerd, explained the system to parliament in September 1953. “I just want to remind honorable members that if the native in South Africa today, in any kind of school in existence, is being taught to expect that he will live his adult life under a policy of equal rights, he is making a big mistake.” He made it even clearer later, in a statement to the senate: “There is no place for him in the European community above the level of certain forms of labor… for that reason it is of no avail for him to receive a training which has as its aims absorption in the European community… Until now he has been subject to a school system which drew him away from his own country and misled him by showing him the green pastures of European society in which he is not allowed to graze.”

  Bantu education was an adjunct to the Bantustan homelands. Verwoerd wanted the natives to “stand with both feet in the reserves,” enjoying an education that should have its roots “in the spirit and being of Bantu society.”

  Ruth was one of many teachers who left the profession at the introduction of Bantu schooling. Some tried to work in the informal, illegal ANC schools that began to be set up as alternatives. Ruth went to a private secretarial college to retrain as a shorthand-typist.

  Freed from her professional obligations, she had begun attending ANC branch meetings with her husband, near their home in Orlando. Mandela would be at the meetings too, in spite of the banning order that was supposed to prevent his attendance. He and Ruth first met at the home of friends and later she saw him at branch meetings.

  She had a friend working at Mandela & Tambo who planned to return to her medical studies. Her friend had told her it was a very busy firm where you worked from the moment you took your seat and the phones started ringing. The clients who came in needed a lot of help because they did not always understand much. It was the type of job you could only succeed in if you loved and cared for your people and for their liberation. As Ruth said, it was not the type of job you took for money.

  Ruth went for an interview with Mandela and got the job. She soon found out how right her friend had been. “When you got in the doorway the phone was always already ringing so you literally had to run to the switchboard and sit down.” When she climbed the stairs to open up the office in the morning, she would often have to thread her way through a throng of potential customers.

  “Mandela & Tambo, good morning!” she would chirrup, answering the phone.

  “Mandela & Tambo, good morning!”

  Her friends used to tease her for that.

  At this point, Ruth’s husband moved to Durban to work as a health inspector, but came home now and again. This has led to some speculation. “Mandela was my boss, my leader, my friend,” Ruth said, adding, perhaps just a little disingenuously, “I never know what people want me to say.”

  A journalist had asked her once if they’d had a relationship. “He said that Nelson Mandela was a ladies’ man and he wanted me to say I was one of the ladies.” Ruth thought the journalist was rude and took exception to his questions. Being dignified, reserved and in her early eighties did not make her very open, or easy to approach with inquiries on personal matters, but I persevered. She wagged a finger at my tape recorder and asked me to turn it off.

  The Defiance Campaign was not just the defining moment in the development of the ANC as a mass movement; it was also the point at which women began to take a more
prominent role. There was some history of protest by women against earlier pass restrictions and since 1943 there had been an ANC Women’s League but it had never held a national conference and struggled to make its mark. This all changed in the Defiance Campaign, when there were designated “women’s days” and thousands of women volunteered to take part.

  Sisulu’s wife, Albertina, was disappointed to find that, when she turned up to volunteer at the ANC offices in Johannesburg, she was turned away because her husband, at that stage, was already in jail. Many married women, such as Albertina and Mandela’s wife, Evelyn, were the mainstays of their families, and it was not so easy for them to make the same sacrifices as their husbands, even when extended family networks were there to help. For many years they were cast in a supporting role. The Women’s League was best known for catering and fund-raising.

  However, the 1952 campaign, and the greater emphasis on the multiracial alliance, led to the founding of FEDSAW, the Federation of South African Women. Many joined from the Women’s League and it was designed, from the start, to take a more radical and active stance, especially against the pass laws and against Bantu education. Many women tried to set up informal schools. Albertina Sisulu organized one at her home as the ANC tried to encourage a boycott of the state’s “Bantu” schools.

  One of the founders of FEDSAW was Lilian Ngoyi who had been inspired to go into politics by the Defiance Campaign, which prompted her to join the ANC Women’s League. Ngoyi had no education but was a vibrant, animated, effervescent character who quickly discovered a natural gift for rousing oratory.

  “When she spoke from a platform she could do as she wished with her audience; they laughed with her, wept with her,” said the white activist Helen Joseph. They became close friends and now share the same burial plot.

  Ngoyi spoke for many when she said, “My womb is shaken when they speak of Bantu Education.” She was then already in her forties, living in Orlando as a widow with two children while also working as a seamstress in a clothing factory.