Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  Mandela did not move to Liliesleaf immediately after the purchase. He spent a couple of weeks at the home of Arthur and Hazel Goldreich in Parktown. The Goldreichs, with their two young sons, Paul and Nicholas, moved to Liliesleaf not long after Mandela, to become “the front—the seemingly ordinary, wealthy, white family living in the main house—for the secret activities that went on there.”

  The Goldreichs, although related to the Rochmans who had earlier put up Mandela, were far more deeply involved in the movement, and were closely connected to the other prominent white Jewish families, such as Joe Slovo and Ruth First, Rusty and Hilda Bernstein, and Harold and AnnMarie Wolpe.

  More than anyone else, except perhaps the advocate and communist leader Bram Fischer, Arthur Goldreich was leading a double life.

  Indeed, he was leading a double life in more ways than one. He was not just a successful commercial designer on the one hand and an underground activist, at the heart of the struggle, on the other, but also a family man who had other relationships. As his colleague Denis Goldberg put it, quite plainly, “Arthur was a womanizer and Hazel knew and tolerated it. He used to boast about his revolutionary activities to get into young women’s pants.”

  Goldreich was by no means the only person in the struggle leading this particular kind of double life. Mandela himself led a double life for a while. Double, triple and so on… One of his closest Indian colleagues—had a long-standing, parallel second relationship.

  Another prominent activist and MK member, Mosie Moolla, explains that he had a “girlfriend” as well as his wife, both of whom used to visit him in prison. (He also describes his reunion with Mandela after 1990, at which Mandela asked after his wife, then leaned in and whispered, no doubt with a twinkle, “And how is the other one?”)

  Bram Fischer may have been having an affair during, or very soon after, these history-shaping events. The Hodgsons, the Slovos. They all had episodes of “double lives” if that’s an appropriate term.

  Some say Joe Slovo slept with so many of his comrades’ wives that it is more a question of whom he didn’t sleep with than whom he did. Maybe that observation is apocryphal. He certainly tried it on with AnnMarie Wolpe who claims she rejected him. He was not, apparently, rejected by everyone. The Slovos’ daughter Gillian also wrote about her mother’s affairs in her brilliant memoir, Every Secret Thing. Even now, some think that was in bad taste and complain about the invasion of her parents’ privacy, as if the truth should be varnished, icons kept intact.

  That of course would be to deny reality and deny the possibility of considering those involved as rounded human beings, faults, flaws, warts and all. More than anything, perhaps, it is fascinating to reflect on why there was so much extramural sexual activity and what that tells us about the chief characters and the world and the age they were living through.

  It cannot be mere coincidence that this group of people—with moral values and political beliefs so important that they were prepared to risk their lives for them, or to face years in jail, or to endure torture and the breakdown of their mental and physical health—did not always apply the same probity to their personal lives.

  It must have been so exciting to be at the center of these events that even the fear of discovery, arrest, jail, torture, or death must have had its own stimulus. These individuals were not conventional—many of us would have been too afraid, or too uninterested, to participate in the struggle. They were radicals in an ultra-conservative time and place, bucking and challenging the system, which must have been a thrill in itself, bringing the boldest, brightest personalities to the fore.

  There is no easy walk to sainthood, and perhaps it was difficult to be so scrupulous about race and politics while continuing to treat your loved ones with respect as well. They were only human, after all. Then, too, there were so many opportunities as these men and women led uncertain and unstable lives, often forced to be apart from their families or partners, and pressed into close or intimate comradeship with others, often in brief but intense circumstances. Sometimes, in their oral histories or written memoirs, whether reaching us direct or via their offspring, the sexual charge in those memories is still palpable, even decades later.

  Unfortunately, the pain and the disruption that these events, both political and personal, left in their wake has damaged many who were touched by them.

  Arthur Goldreich has lived in Israel for the last forty-five years and was unavailable for interview during the research for this book, as he pleaded ill-health and being too busy, preparing the latest exhibition of his art.

  He had made his way to Israel following a dramatic prison escape in 1963. Hazel had also escaped, too, from South Africa, after two months’ detention without charge, and traveled with her sons to Israel to be reunited with her husband, only to discover him already in a new relationship. She had returned to London and set up home there instead. Her sons also live in the UK. Hazel said they had not seen much of their father over the years.

  Ironically, perhaps, when Hazel first met Arthur in the early 1950s, it was shortly after he had returned from Israel where he had gone as a teenager, leaving South Africa to fight as a Zionist against the British, and helping to create the independent state where he would one day live. He had fought with the Palmuch, the origins of the Israeli army, and had been immersed in kibbutz culture, which may have influenced his move to communism on his return. He had studied design in London and shown talent as an artist, becoming politically committed but never so active that he was arrested or known to the police.

  For the MK revolutionaries, the birth of the Israeli state, plus the fact that Goldreich had been there and played a part, however modest, was inspiring. As Mac Maharaj put it, “Arthur has gone over and joined the Israeli army. It has a romantic allure for MK because they have rubbed the noses of the British into the ground and forced the British to accept the Israeli state. They have created kibbutzes and used them as camps to train an army to defend itself.”

  In South Africa, Goldreich worked as a designer for the department store chain, Greatermans, and also designed and created the settings for the late-1950s theater production of King Kong whose opening night Mandela and Winnie had attended in February 1959.

  Mandela described Goldreich as a flamboyant personality who brought a buoyant atmosphere to Liliesleaf. Arthur’s cousin, Hazel Rochman, knew him as “this big, flashy, gorgeous guy.” AnnMarie Wolpe said he was like Mandela, being blessed with a winning personality, and was the life and soul of the party. He was a showman, she said, who loved the limelight and the approbation, though she was surprised once when she said to one of his sons—she couldn’t remember which—“Oh your father’s so talented, he paints, plays piano, plays the guitar,” and he replied, “He plays one tune on the piano, one tune on the guitar.”

  In 1957, Joe Slovo had visited Goldreich and asked him to become part of the underground movement, which meant Goldreich calling a halt to all his visible political activities. By chance, he had won a prestigious art award that year too and was widely celebrated. He felt his political friends, seeing all the newspaper articles and interviews about it, believed he had sold them out for his own glorification when he appeared to withdraw from politics, not realizing he was now leading a double life.

  In his book Rivonia’s Children, the author Glenn Frankel recounts the story told to him by a woman, Selma Browde, who watched Arthur one night at Franco’s restaurant while he danced, drank champagne, flirted with women and “talked cynically of politics.” Finally, Selma, a liberal, could take no more and challenged him: “How can you go on living like this in a country like South Africa? Why don’t you do something?”

  He laughed. “I enjoy the good life,” he said.

  “I was greatly relieved, I must say, when it all eventually emerged,” Arthur said during a visit to Liliesleaf in 2004, “and they hugged me and welcomed me back to the fold… Everything around me was a façade and was immodest,” he added, in a tone approaching sadnes
s.

  Joe came to him again, in 1961, and asked him to become involved in the armed struggle. Goldreich discussed it with Hazel and they didn’t hesitate. They would move to Liliesleaf. Hazel told the police she never knew that Nelson Mandela was living in her house at Parktown, but of course that was nonsense: she knew all too well that “David” the painter and decorator/houseboy was in fact the commander-in-chief of MK. He was always special, something very special, she said, commanding respect long before he became a leader. He used to stay in the cottage at the back of the garden where Arthur had his studio and kept his printing press.

  They would have meetings there; Mandela and others would come and go. Hazel later heard that a young neighbor had once asked her father, why can’t we have black people visiting us, like the Goldreichs do? Even having black visitors was notable, and problematic, in the white suburbs of the racist city at the heart of the most racist country on earth.

  Builders were brought into Liliesleaf ahead of the Goldreichs to make some refurbishments and amendments to the property. Mandela moved there in October 1961. At first he was often alone there at night, as the builders would leave at sunset, and he sometimes felt uneasy being on his own in such a remote and unfamiliar setting. He once had to go and look around in the darkness after he thought he heard someone moving in the bushes, but found nothing. He remembers weeks passing, before the Goldreichs arrived, but the time period must have been much shorter, as it appears they moved in later the same month as Mandela, in October 1961. Confusingly, Arthur Goldreich has dated the move to December 1961.

  Mandela says he was invited to stay at Liliesleaf by Goldreich and was first taken to Rivonia by Michael Harmel—when he initially acted as cook and servant to the caretaker, Jelliman. The Goldreichs’ domestic, Enith Kgopane, who moved with them, remembered that “David” occupied the room next to the servants’ toilet, at first—a bare-brick, cell-like room—and later moved into the end room of the outbuilding that still had a thatched roof, after it was vacated by Jelliman.

  Mandela not only cooked for Jelliman but also served breakfast and tea to the builders, who were African, from Alexandra. He liked Jelliman, finding him amiable, courteous and appreciative, unlike the Africans who, never troubling to ask his name, would send him on errands, or order him with a summons of “Waiter!” or “Boy!” to sweep the floor and clear their rubbish. He told the specific story of being made to stand and wait once, while serving tea, as one of the builders finished telling an anecdote before helping himself to sugar from the tray Mandela was holding. Mandela felt “mild exasperation,” as he put it, and went to walk away. “Waiter, come back here, I didn’t tell you to go.”

  There was a lot of traffic in and out of the property, not just of builders and routine deliveries but members of MK and communists coming for meetings. It seems remarkable that the police didnn’t cotton on to Liliesleaf sooner. A schoolboy, George Mellis, who lived nearby, soon became fascinated by the constant tide of visitors and must have been suspicious too. He befriended the Goldreich boys, Paul and Nicholas, after their arrival and used to play with them at the main house, often staying for lunch. He noticed white men and Bantu men together in the outbuilding and thought it strange. Sometimes there were a lot of cars parked in the yard. He once asked Nicholas about all the people who were there and Nicholas said he wasn’t allowed to say anything. On one occasion George took down all the registration numbers of the cars at Liliesleaf and handed in the list to the police.

  MK had set up an early channel, out of the country, for a select few to receive military training in China—Walter Sisulu had made contacts during a trip there some years earlier—and one of the first recruits was Raymond Mhlaba from Port Elizabeth in the eastern Cape, who would later become a key figure for MK. Mhlaba, a communist, a regional ANC official and a trade unionist, had been one of the earliest to be arrested during the Defiance Campaign of 1952. While he was at Rivonia, Mhlaba took part in the discussions that helped to shape MK, as a draft constitution was evolved, along with Joe Slovo and Rusty Bernstein, who was often used as a speech or policy writer.

  When Mhlaba left for China, Mandela was joined at Liliesleaf by Michael Harmel who was supposed to be writing a policy document for the Communist Party. They would keep a distance from each other during the day, while Mandela played the houseboy, but often sat and talked in the evenings. Harmel’s grasp of political theory was important to Mandela but his casual attitude to security was not so helpful.

  Mandela came back from a meeting one night to find the front door of the house open, the lights on and the radio turned up loud. Mandela always kept the place in darkness so it was disconcerting to see it lit up like Christmas. Inside, he found Michael Harmel fast asleep and woke him up to complain. “Man, how can you leave the lights on and the radio playing?”

  Harmel, said Mandela, was groggy but angry. “Nel, must you disturb my sleep? Can’t this wait until tomorrow?”

  “No,” said Mandela.“I reprimanded him for his lax conduct.” Lax conduct was the story of Harmel’s life.

  In the absence of any proof that he was ever a member of the Communist Party, and in the face of his consistent denials that he joined, perhaps the greatest evidence that Mandela could have been a communist was found among papers in his handwriting when the police raided Liliesleaf. Those papers should have been destroyed, but instead, and contrary to Mandela’s own instructions, they were kept on the site and poorly hidden.

  Among them were what appeared to be the beginnings of a book, three chapters with the overall title, How to Be a Good Communist, amounting to nearly 100 pages of Mandela’s meticulous, curling longhand. “The life of a communist revolutionary is no bed of roses,” he had written in the opening chapter.

  It consists of serious studies in Marxist literature, of hard work and of constant participation in numerous and endless mass struggles. He has no time for worldly pleasures and his whole life is devoted to one thing and one thing only, the destruction of capitalist society, the removal of all forms of exploitation and the liberation of mankind… The cause of communism is the greatest and most arduous cause in the history of mankind… Under a CP government South Africa will become a land of milk and honey… There will be no unemployment, starvation and disease.

  Chapter Two was a consideration of dialectical materialism; Chapter Three addressed political economy.

  Naturally, Mandela had never written these pages for consumption by the police or to assist in his prosecution. It was amateur night at Liliesleaf when two of his ANC colleagues decided not to destroy them.

  Is Liliesleaf clean? Is it clean? Mandela had repeatedly asked.

  It turned out they were in part a reworking of a pamphlet that Rusty Bernstein had given Mandela, which was in turn a translation of a famous Chinese text, How to Be a Good Communist, first written and presented in lectures in 1939 by the revolutionary theorist Liu Shaoqi. Mandela tried to explain away the document during his famous—and famously long—speech at the Rivonia Trial in Pretoria in April 1964, when he said he had merely been trying to demonstrate to an unnamed “old friend” how you could simplify the seemingly impenetrable language of communist theory.

  Those pages must have been written during these weeks at Liliesleaf, and the “old friend” he referred to in his speech was Moses Kotane.

  Mandela said in his speech that the old friend had been trying for years to get Mandela to join the Communist Party and the two men had many debates about the role the party could play in the struggle. The friend would give him Marxist literature sometimes, which Mandela would not always find the time to read. The friend, he said, was someone who worked closely with him on ANC matters and occupied senior positions both in the ANC and in the Communist Party. They always stuck to their guns in argument. Mandela would tell him, as he said at the Rivonia Trial, that he accepted a role for communists and people of all races in the struggle to end race discrimination and establish democratic rights for black people in South Afr
ica. But he did not share the communist view of Western governments as reactionary and undemocratic. Mandela believed in the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the U.K. parliament, the U.S. Congress; he was a democrat, and a socialist.

  His friend always said that only trained Marxists would be capable of tackling the problems of poverty and inequality, once freedom had been achieved, so a communist state would be needed. Mandela argued that ideology could wait until freedom had been won.

  They saw each other several times at Liliesleaf and on one of the last occasions Kotane was busy writing with books around him. Mandela related in his speech what followed. “When I asked him what he was doing he told me that he was busy writing lectures for use in the Communist Party and suggested that I should read them… I told him that they seemed far too complicated for the ordinary reader in that the language was obtuse and they were full of the usual Communist clichés and jargon… he asked me if I would redraft the lectures in the simplified form suggested by me. I agreed to help him and set to work… but I never finished the task.”

  Quite how the redrafting of lectures explains away Mandela’s reworking of a Chinese revolutionary pamphlet remains as unclear as any dialectic. The document that Mandela had written under the heading How to Be a Good Communist looks more like an attempt to adapt and modernize the original for a South African revolutionary readership—an MK handbook perhaps. Mandela later told Richard Stengel that had indeed been its purpose—to show Kotane how communism could be made suitable to South Africa.

  However, it is an evocative image from that time: of Mandela and his friend—Kotane, probably—arguing into the night at Liliesleaf about the relative merits of revolution and social democracy.