Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  A quiet, studious young academic from Fort Hare named Robert Sobukwe had also started to influence the Orlando Youth Leaguers. Although not flamboyant or commanding in the style of Mandela, he was thoughtful, eloquent and inspiring. He had begun lecturing at Wits, traveling daily to the city from the township on the train, where he would often be mocked—ironically, for an Africanist—by other young men, gangsters known as tsotsis mainly, for being a “black white man” (an echo of Mandela “the black Englishman”) because of his tweed jacket, gray trousers and briefcase.

  Sobukwe was just one of the hardcore Africanists who were still pushing the 1949 Programme of Action that had stimulated the revival of the ANC five years earlier and been trumpeted, by Mandela among others, as a nationalist doctrine. But Mandela had moved on; the struggle had moved with him and the clock could not be turned back. That was essentially what concerned the Africanists and many others within the ANC: the all too eager willingness to forge interracial alliances. The conservative forces of the apartheid government feared a communist takeover—as did the Africanists.

  There was by now an alliance of congresses (not yet formally a Congress Alliance) in which the ANC and the Indian Congress were joined by SACTU—the South African Congress of Trade Unions, the newly formed SACPO—the South African Colored People’s Organisation, and the Congress of Democrats, where many of Mandela’s friends and comrades—the Bernsteins, the Slovos, the Fischers, the Wolpes, the Hodgsons and so on—among the white communist community could find a legitimate political home.

  Mandela addressed the Congress of Democrats’ meeting in Johannesburg in late 1953, defying his ban to tell the whites that for Africans to submit to baasskap (the policy of absolute domination of the native peoples by white settlers in South Africa) would be not only to surrender their honor but also to betray the trust and confidence placed upon them by the ANC. “Our first concern is to strengthen the congresses and to make them in theory and in fact the fighting organization of the people. If we carry out this task earnestly and diligently the clique of small and frightened men that rule South Africa today will never be permitted to work their wicked ways upon us. If we make action the cornerstone of our political activities the people of South Africa will ultimately achieve victory and finally defeat the racial policies of the government.”

  This alliance of congresses might have been a step too far for the Youth Leaguers of Orlando, but it was not broad enough for others. To those who complained of Sisulu’s trip to the Eastern bloc, Mandela had pointed out that no one objected when Professor Matthews had gone off to America, to teach and to absorb himself in the history of the civil rights struggle.

  Matthews, or the Prof, as he was widely known, had returned brimming with energy for campaigns that would reach out across the country and “capture the imagination” of the people. During a meeting at his home near Fort Hare in Alice in the eastern Cape, the idea had emerged of a nationwide appeal for a vision of a future South Africa. A series of public meetings would culminate in a national convention to approve a manifesto for the way forward. That was the origins of the Congress of the People (COP) and the Freedom Charter. Even white Afrikaner racists would be asked to contribute.

  Professor Matthews brought the idea to the organizers of the regional ANC conference in August 1953 and later drafted a memo to define more clearly his ambition for a “dream” of freedom for all, a blueprint for a democratic, non-racial South Africa. Oddly, he then took little or no further part in the exercise, never even laying eyes on the draft charter that was drawn up and failing to attend the conference. He claims in his memoir that he was too busy with other matters, taking over as acting principal at Fort Hare around this time, but others have suggested he felt sidelined and excluded from the process that he had set in motion.

  The campaign fell into the hands of a National Action Council, which immediately offended the Africanists by being neither exclusively African nor giving sufficient prominence to the ANC. Indeed, their fears that the whites would take over, given half a chance, seems borne out by the way in which the charter was eventually drafted by Rusty Bernstein: the draft constitution for black rule in South Africa was authored by a white communist.

  But first the raw material of the charter had to be collected. Here, too, Bernstein played a key role, writing the leaflet that became the nationwide call to participate, and in the process coining the phrase, “Let Us Speak of Freedom!” This was a grass-roots action, as the leaflet circulated and “Freedom Volunteers” went out among the people at meetings and rallies, on street corners and from door to door, to collect their grievances, demands and wishes so that they could be fed into the creation of the charter. It was reported how they came “flooding into COP headquarters on sheets torn from exercise books, on little dog-eared scraps of paper, on slips torn from COP leaflets.” Bernstein remembers that the fragments were all stuffed into an old cabin trunk while the council set about organizing the congress.

  Alongside these council meetings, Mandela was also involved in the campaign against Bantu education, setting up informal schools and promoting a boycott against the new apartheid schools. Then too he was among those trying to defend Sophiatown against the government’s plan to bulldoze its streets and turn it into a white suburb.

  Sophiatown had risen to prominence as one of those overpopulated anomalous urban locations, a “freehold township” where black people could actually own properties. Perversely, it had been built at the turn of the century as a white suburb, by a developer named Herman Tobiansky who had christened the network of streets after his own family (his wife’s name was Sophia).

  Not long after whites had begun buying the first stands (plots), the town council decided to site the sewage works next door, so Tobiansky started selling stands to anyone who would buy them. All sorts of properties made of all sorts of materials, predominantly brick and corrugated iron, went up there, and for a while Sophiatown was truly multiracial with white families living among black, Indian and colored families. The whites soon started complaining of the social and moral dangers their children faced from the intermixing. While those claims were obviously false, the township genuinely posed health concerns: water wells were quickly contaminated by the sewage, and disease followed on the heels of overcrowding as stand owners sought to maximize their income by building “barracks” on their plots. One infamous stand—little bigger than an ordinary housing plot—had sixty families living on it.

  There was limited employment and not much money, so people cast around for alternative methods of making an income. Women took in washing or brewed beer; men turned to crime and formed gangs of pickpockets, robbers, black marketeers and protection racketeers. Every street in Sophiatown had at least one gang and some, such as the Americans and the Berliners, became notorious far beyond the boundaries of Sophiatown. The gangsters lurked in the numerous shebeens, such as the 39 Steps, the Man in the Moon or the House of Truth, where they mingled with activists, musicians, writers and singers. Sometimes the gangsters helped themselves to the singers, literally, as they attempted to kidnap or carry off the likes of Miriam Makeba.

  Abigail Kubeka, who sang with Makeba in the Skylarks, remembered that they often performed for free at fund-raisers for the ANC, perhaps at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, or even at the Odin Cinema in Sophiatown itself. Afterwards they would go on to the 39 Steps where the gangsters would buy them drinks and maybe ask them to sing, over and over again, the same song. They would do whatever the gangsters wanted, until they left at 5 a.m. and went to sleep nearby at the home of the Skylark who lived in Sophiatown.

  Makeba also sang with the jazz vocal group, the Manhattan Brothers, before she stepped out on her own. The Brothers’ Joe Mogotsi relates that they had once saved her from being taken by a gangster by saying they needed her up early for a rehearsal. Mogotsi claimed the gangsters’ style and even their name had originated with the Brothers who invented their own American-influenced dress with tight, sharply creased
trousers that were known as tso, as in “sharp,” and so the trousers and the wearers came to be called tsotsis.

  The jazz culture looked to America for its style but was distinctively African too, with songs performed in Xhosa, and lyrics that were often about love and lost romance but might also lament the laws of apartheid or mock its practitioners. One popular song, written by Vuyisile Mini who was later hanged for his role in MK, taunted PM Verwoerd, Verwoerd Pasopa naants’ indod’ emnyama, “look out, Verwoerd, here come the black people.”

  People called Sophiatown by its affectionate name, Koffi, and it was widely romanticized as a place of excitement and adventure, a melting pot for many cultures and an inspiration to writers and musicians. The shebeen was a place where you could drink away your dreams, as some did, such as the gifted Drum writer Bloke Modisane, while beyond the shebeen doors lay a grim, unlovely existence, hedged in by apartheid, poverty and the ever present threat of violence. At the Church of Christ the King—one of the few original buildings that still survives in Sophiatown—the much loved white priest, Trevor Huddleston, initiated a junior jazz band and gave a talented young boy, Hugh Masekela, the chance to play the trumpet that had been donated to him by Louis Armstrong.

  Despite its vibrancy, Sophiatown was a slum and the political pressure to clear it was unrelenting. Even many of the 11,000 people who lived there wanted to live elsewhere but, for many years, the authorities had nowhere to relocate them to. It was the Group Areas Act of 1950 that marked the beginning of the end of Sophiatown. Residents would be removed to the southwestern townships, in particular Meadowlands, out beyond Orlando. By now, the destruction of Sophiatown had some appeal. It was a seat of trouble and resistance as well as an urban eyesore, a “black spot” on the landscape. The removals were set to begin in February 1955; the bulldozers would move in and the properties would be destroyed, with only the most basic compensation for the owners. A new white suburb would rise up, called Triomf.

  The ANC was determined to stop the removals and Mandela was one of several leaders appointed to galvanize resistance. A “Let the People Speak Committee” was formed and there were weekly rallies in Freedom Square in Sophiatown. In March 1954, a full year before the eventual clearance, Mandela addressing a meeting:

  When the people rise and demand their freedom, heavens will reciprocate. The time is bound to come for action. What concerns the people of Sophiatown most is their removal from here… I will tell you that [Prime Minister] Malan has decided to remove you without consulting any of your leaders. He will throw you in the open veld… We cannot avoid a major crisis… I know that when we are forced to the clash between the forces of liberation and fascists the forces of liberation will triumph. On that day all of us will be in Sophiatown… We know that there are many people and even educated Africans who are telling people that you are backwards and that the police and the army will crush you if you rise against them… there is nothing superior about the white man. He can be fought as he has been fought before… if we can stand together we can sweep everything before us.

  This is the question you must ask yourself in Sophiatown. You must rally everybody and protect your families and property. I can speak on behalf of the leaders in this province, that on that day we will all be here. If you in Sophiatown can stand together against the government you cannot be removed. You have the support of the South African Indian Congress. The writing is on the wall when we will crush the forces of reaction and defend our houses and prevail over the forces of reaction.

  Forty years later Mandela was giving a round of additional interviews to gather fresh material for his memoir. The interviewer was Ahmed Kathrada and Mandela told him about the failures of the Sophiatown campaign.

  We held a series of meetings in Sophiatown every Sunday in which we tried to mobilize the community against removals and several of us, you see, appeared in those meetings—you appeared, I appeared, people like Trevor Huddleston, the chairman was Robert Resha, people like Walter, and we mobilized the people against these removals.

  But of course we were against terrible odds because the government was saying, especially to the tenants and they fell for it, you are being exploited here by the owners and. property owners, we are moving you to a place where you will not live in such filthy conditions, where you are going to have your own house, your own garden.

  And eventually this particular tactic beat us and because tenants were really being exploited and they were living under very overcrowded conditions of filth and squalor and eventually that beat us. But the issue here was one of not accepting the principle that blacks should have freehold rights. Especially in the urban areas that was the issue. And that is what we were really defending. Not the exploitation of people by the landlords, we were against that, but we were defending the principle.

  As the date for the start of the removals approached, the campaign became more desperate for success. The ANC was committed to resisting the removals and now realized it faced a significant, humbling defeat.

  The rhetoric became increasingly inflammatory and the slogan “over our dead bodies” gained currency. It did not take much to stir the angry young men of Sophiatown and the prospect of a bloodbath began to seem all too likely.

  Mandela’s own speechifying got the better of him one day—he was lucky Special Branch missed it—when he told the Freedom Square crowd to be prepared to use violence before long. He then pointed at a line of police and began singing an ANC song with the refrain, “There are our enemies.” He was reprimanded by the ANC executive but he was not the only one anticipating or inciting violence.

  It was the speech of another firebrand, Robert Resha, after the removals had begun that caused no end of trouble later. A bugging team in a room adjacent to ANC headquarters recorded Resha in May 1956 as he addressed a meeting, explaining to them what a volunteer was:

  Volunteers are those people who do and die. Volunteers are those people who… when they are given leaflets to do they go out and distribute those leaflets… A volunteer is a person who is disciplined… When you are disciplined and you are told by the organization not to be violent, you must not be violent.

  If you are a true volunteer and you are called up to be violent you must be absolutely violent. You must murder. Murder! That is all.

  Forced to defend the speech, Resha claimed his words were born in the rubble of Sophiatown, which was at the time in ruins, “like a bombed city.” The ANC had succeeded in taking Sophiatown to the brink, but had no intention of tipping it over the edge, nor, really, any plan of what to do or where to go.

  Sisulu remembered a meeting of senior figures from the various congresses at which the white communists Jack Hodgson and Cecil Williams had wanted to meet force with force, while others proposed putting up barricades. These ideas were dismissed as unrealistic and tempers became frayed with “personal insults of cowardice” being thrown around. The best the ANC could agree on was to offer alternative homes with ANC families to those who did not want to accept the government’s flimsy new builds in Meadowlands.

  “It was coming for sure, we all believed it,” said the Sophiatown poet-gangster Don Mattera. The residents were waiting for the call to revolution from the ANC, but it never came. Instead, they were stood down by Joe Modise who confronted the crowd and told them that they were in no position to take on the army and the police.

  As Anthony Sampson said, that did not deter the world’s press from descending on Sophiatown at the beginning of February, hoping for some action. Sampson at first thought they might get their wish when he arrived at dawn to the sound of tsotsis hitting telegraph poles, the “battle cry of Sophiatown.” But there were many hundreds of police on the streets and an emergency banning order had been issued by the minister of justice the day before. The minister said the police had reliable information that “the Natives in Sophiatown have in their possession a number of machine guns, revolvers, pistols, hand grenades, home-made rifles and home-made dynamite bombs.”

/>   If, indeed, they had assembled that sizeable an artillery, the people of Sophiatown never used it. The first 150 families went off without a fuss; the removals began and continued without any significant resistance. Eventually all the houses were emptied and the bulldozers moved in. Dr. Xuma’s home and the Huddleston church were among the handful of sites left intact. Like a white flower, Triomf sprang up through the rubble. Fifty years later, Triomf is Sophiatown once again, in name if not yet in spirit, but any resident digging in his garden on a Sunday afternoon might chance across some bulldozed fragment from the ruins of the old township, that “black spot” that had been eradicated from the city.

  The ANC’s education boycott was no more of a success than the Sophiatown campaign, so hopes rested on the Congress of the People, which was set for two days in late June 1955. Each of the white political parties was invited to take part, the Nationalists included, but none accepted. The Liberals withdrew, apparently because they did not like the communist company they were keeping, though within the ANC there was the suspicion that, in fact, the Liberals’ real problem was their reluctance to be led by black people.

  The organizing council struggled to find a venue where all races could gather freely—no easy matter under apartheid—and finally had to accept the offer of a bumpy, makeshift soccer field with oil drums for goalposts on the outskirts of Orlando, in Kliptown. The site was cleared and a fence erected, enclosed with hessian sacking. Delegates had been appointed from all corners of the country and many hundreds arrived for the start of the two-day congress on June 25, 1955.

  The trunk containing the people’s messages had been opened just days before, as Rusty Bernstein was handed the task of hurriedly shaping the raw material into a draft charter for approval by the congress. Bernstein later described how volunteers helped him sift through and organize the thousands of messages, dividing them into individual piles based on themes such as labor, land, civil rights, votes, education, living standards… Some of those were then further divided into subgroups.