Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  If Mandela could have seen him, he would surely have been pleased to note that Luthuli wore a traditional, leopard-skin Zulu cap and a necklace of lion’s teeth as he presented his speech, which he completed by singing the African anthem. Luthuli arrived home the following Friday, just before the bombs went off.

  If only it were possible to outline the role that Mandela, as commander-in-chief, had assigned for himself on the night the armed struggle began. But that story has never been told and now, it seems, it never will. Two or three people were requested to ask him during the research for this book and he claims he can no longer remember. It would appear he has never spoken about it. That could mean there is something to hide—or equally that there is nothing to tell.

  Those who are still alive and were out that night, on active service in their cell units, do not recall him being there with them. No one else recalls him planting a bomb himself. They could all be protecting his secret. Or perhaps he really did keep away from the action, as the general on the hill, watching over operations, back at Liliesleaf beside the radio, maybe, waiting for news of the explosions to be reported.

  MK was very clearly Mandela’s creation, structured along the lines of the old M-Plan, in typical guerrilla pattern, as a series of cells, groups of four cells in a platoon, the platoon answering to a regional command, which answered to a national high command, presided over by Mandela himself. He was in charge but, after his participation in the test run at the brickworks, seems to have been removed from the action. Not, then, leading from the front.

  Wolfie Kodesh was in the thick of things, of course, going back and forth from Jack Hodgson’s flat in the weeks leading up to the opening night. Jack’s wife, Rica, and their son Spencer were in on it all, and there were African comrades turning up “from all over the show”—as Wolfie put it—which was easy because they could just pretend to be workers coming to the apartment. Wolfie was busy with his own cell as they chose and prepared their targets. His unit eventually selected three government buildings, all in the Indian location of Fordsburg: a post office, a magistrates’ court and a pass office.

  They were soft targets, all of them, office premises that were closed by night when the bombs would go off, to minimize the risk of injury. No one was supposed to get hurt. Wolfie led a cell comprising three Indian comrades: Paul Joseph, Reggie Vandayar, and Laloo Chiba, a young married man with a couple of small children who combined being in MK with his day job at a dairy. Chiba, who had become politically active in the late 1950s, first formed a cell for the Communist Party in mid-1961, but was then told to disband that cell and merge with MK. He was a quiet, unassuming character who—almost unnoticed—possessed great reserves of courage.

  Other than Joseph’s instruction from Wolfie on how to throw a Molotov cocktail against a wall, there was no physical training or preparation. Joseph tried to do some reading and, as he had been told to do, would look out for recruits and potential targets for bombs while also trying to stockpile weapons. Chiba recalled they kept a stash of Molotov cocktails and dynamite at a doctor’s storeroom. The doctor even came out with them one night, later, on a sabotage run.

  Wolfie’s own planning was meticulous. For the post office they needed to get onto the roof of some adjacent phone booths, so he and Chiba practiced running and jumping, using their comrade’s cupped hands to gain the necessary elevation. They got so expert, he said, that they could have thrown each other over their shoulders.

  The magistrates’ court was straightforward but the pass office required entry through a window that needed to be broken, so here too they practiced, in Chiba’s backyard, taping windows and then tapping them so they fell out of the frame without shattering.

  The date of December 16 was not idly chosen for the start of the armed struggle. The Afrikaners celebrated it as the Day of the Covenant in commemoration of the Voortrekker commandos’ victory over the Zulu impi of King Dingane at the Battle of Blood River in 1838. Fearing defeat, supposedly, the Boers had made a pact with God—a covenant—before the battle. It was sometimes known as Dingaan’s Day, after a variation on the name of the Zulu king, and was mourned by Africans as a tragic massacre. No doubt, when he chose that date, Mandela considered that his MK warriors were avenging the memory of the 3,000 Zulus who were said to have died.

  That night Wolfie’s unit waited for the two large cinemas in Fordsburg to empty, following their Saturday-night shows, before they set off, being driven by Chiba in his white Volkswagen Beetle. They did not collect the bombs from the Hodgson “factory” in Hillbrow but were handed them at a rendezvous. As they went on, they passed Mosie Moolla, who also appeared to be carrying a bomb. Wolfie guessed he was part of another unit.

  They placed bombs on top of the two phone booths at the post office, both the whites-only and the Africans-only booths. They handled the bombs gingerly as they seemed fragile and unstable. The timer was a plastic capsule being eaten away by sulphuric acid. When the acid reached the nitroglycerine it would trigger the explosion.

  Jack Hodgson had been in a car once with his son Spencer when a bomb in the boot started smoking and they had rushed to a relative’s home to hose it down and wash out the car. According to Wolfie, Hodgson had set out with a white comrade, Ben Turok, on the night before the 16th, to set a bomb with a long fuse at the main library in the city. That bomb too had started smoking. They had to stop and dismantle the bomb, then reassemble it before it could be planted at the library. Turok left fingerprints that would be found later and would lead to his conviction.

  Wolfie’s unit had a problem that night with the bomb at the law courts, which they had to move again after first putting it into position. The task fell to Paul Joseph who found the bomb lying on its side oozing explosive. He set it upright and went back to the car, only afterwards thinking that he had danced with death.

  When they reached the pass office, a place that Wolfie had checked night after night and found it always deserted, they came across an African guard sitting at a brazier by the gate. They improvised, pretending the car had broken down, one gunning the engine, another looking under the bonnet, while the other two used the cover of the car to knock the window out, as they had practiced, and place the bomb.

  As they headed back to Joseph’s home to clean out the car they heard the two bangs of the post office bombs, detonating a little earlier than planned but satisfyingly loud. They turned down a nearby street to see the impact and saw crowds gathering and police everywhere, which was just the effect they had hoped for.

  Paul Joseph went home and got into bed. His wife, Adelaide, was already asleep, oblivious to his MK debut. He lay awake listening and suddenly there was a rush of sirens, which seemed to stop right outside. They had come for him already! He leaped out of bed. Adelaide woke up. Where are you going? Only for a glass of water, he lied. He looked out and saw that, happily, the car had only stopped to turn the corner of their street. He was safe for the time being.

  Jack Hodgson had been present when Ahmed Kathrada’s cell was selecting its target and considered the Portuguese Labour Office, where migrant African workers from Mozambique were being taken on at exploitatively low wages to toil in the mines. It was a legitimate target, but it was just next door to Kathrada’s apartment at Kholvad House and he knew that children often played there by the building until late at night. When he raised an objection, Hodgson responded that this was a war and in war children got hurt, people died. The MK oath made it clear that deaths were to be avoided at all costs and Kathrada did not much like Hodgson’s attitude.

  The problem, for Kathrada, was that Hodgson had fought in a war and the belief within MK was that people with experience of real fighting were the ones best suited for guerrilla campaigns. In Kathrada’s opinion, that was not necessarily the case. Kathrada said he let his feelings be known to Hodgson in reply to his crass remark but he was a disciplined young cadre and knew he had to be careful with his seniors, so he made sure they remained friends and there was never an
y tension between them. “I treated Hodgson with the respect he deserved, although I had made up my mind that his abilities in certain respects had been exaggerated.”

  On the night, Kathrada and his fellow cadres kept careful watch, going back and forth from the flat until the street was clear of all adults and children. They used a weak incendiary bomb, which they dropped through the building’s letter box where it created a modest fire. Kathrada was glad when it was over. He did not feel he was cut out to be an urban guerrilla.

  There were numerous minor mishaps, no doubt due to the amateurishness of both the equipment and the operatives. AnnMarie Wolpe remembered standing on the balcony of an apartment in Hillbrow where there was a party raging, as her husband, Harold, quietly told her he had planted a bomb but it had failed to go off.

  Joe Slovo, the MK chief of staff, Mandela’s number two, had wanted to play his part and had a bomb constructed from a tin tennis-ball tube, which he took in a carrier bag to the Drill Hall, an army building that the government had used in the early hearings of the Treason Trial. Slovo had been thorough in his preparation and knew there was a wooden floor, which he hoped to set alight, along with dozens of wooden chairs stored in the room. When he arrived the hall was being cleaned and there was an army of domestics at work, so he set off to find an office in the building instead. He had primed the timer, by turning the acid capsule upside down, and was just about to place the carrier bag and its contents in a cupboard when he was interrupted—“Can I help you, sir?”—by an army officer.

  He had a story ready—that he was hoping to get a temporary military exemption for his brother, who had received call-up papers. The officer helpfully led him through the building, still holding the carrier bag, to find someone who could deal with his inquiry. Slovo was sweating, not knowing quite how long the acid would take to eat through its cover. Luckily, the person he was being taken to speak to had already left, and the officer advised him to come back the following morning. Slovo quickly went out and, as soon as he could, snatched the bottle from the tin tube. He described it as the longest four minutes of his life.

  Later that evening, Slovo, Bernstein, and Hodgson embarked on another mission. They went out to sever the telephone cables that intersected on the main road between Johannesburg and Pretoria. They pulled up by a manhole and used a pretend breakdown of the car, Bernstein standing by a raised bonnet, to shield Hodgson and Slovo as they lifted the manhole and clambered down to tape the dynamite to the cables. They lit the fuse and drove off in a hurry, waiting for the subterranean boom. Slovo thought he heard a distant rumble, but Bernstein never did. He was proved right later, during the Rivonia Trial, where every act of sabotage was listed and there was their manhole, where a routine inspection had found an unexploded cache of dynamite taped to the cables.

  Bernstein believed that the leafleting campaign that accompanied the first explosions was a failure too. As usual, he had been involved in the drafting of the document, which came to be known as the MK manifesto. His was just a small contribution, he would say. Bernstein disputed Mandela’s claims in Long Walk to Freedom that he had actually been recruited into MK and had helped Mandela and Slovo to write the MK constitution. Bernstein sees the constitution and the manifesto as separate documents, but they may be one and the same. Certainly, it would seem that only the manifesto has survived and most of it is Mandela’s own work:

  “The time comes in the life of any nation where there remain only two choices: submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means within our power in defense of our people, our future and our freedom.”

  MK—Umkhonto we Sizwe, Spear of the Nation—announced itself as a new, independent body formed by Africans but including in its ranks South Africans of all races. It was independent but its members were placing themselves “under the overall political guidance of that movement.” It was striking out along a new road for the liberation of the people.

  “The government policy of force, repression and violence will no longer be met with non-violent resistance only!”

  The flyers were pasted up on walls and telegraph poles across Johannesburg and throughout the country. There were fifty-seven explosions that night—in Port Elizabeth, Durban and Johannesburg—but there were many hundreds of leaflets distributed and, in the absence of any other claim of responsibility or press statement, the leaflet was the only way in which the acts of terrorism could be identified.

  Bernstein believes the police went around tearing them all down so that there was confusion as to exactly who had been behind the bombs and, from the start, some bewilderment about who or what MK was. Perhaps, to a degree, the uncertainty and anonymity created among white South Africans a greater sense of menace from an unknown enemy.

  The great tragedy of the night was the death of one cadre and the serious injury of another when their bomb apparently detonated while they were placing it, in Johannesburg. Ben Ramotse lost an arm and Petrus Molefe was killed. Ruth Mompati remembered attending his funeral, expecting the police to arrive and arrest the priest at any moment. Mandela told Ahmed Kathrada, in 1990, that the MK leaders had felt some responsibility for the loss of Molefe as he was their soldier. The incident was additionally disturbing as it suggested a lack of training. But, he said, they took it in their stride. Casualties could not be avoided when starting a “new method of political activity.”

  The young woman who had typed for him at Wolfie’s flat, Amy Reitstein, was driving with a friend on the road to Johannesburg from Cape Town when news of the explosions came on the radio. She remembered how excited they were and how she expected the government to fall within the week. “We were very naive,” she said.

  The next morning, Paul Joseph went out and walked among the crowds, examining the debris of the previous night’s actions. He saw the damaged symbols of apartheid—the nie blankes sign dangling—and saw how the spectacle excited the crowd. It was then that he realized the power of those actions and what could be achieved by them.

  There was another round of explosions over the New Year and they continued sporadically through 1962. A number of recruits were being sent for training, initially in China, then in Moscow and in some independent African states.

  The recruits invariably came from the ranks of political activists. There were growing concerns that the tail was wagging the dog, that MK was dictating events to the ANC and the Congress Alliance. Sisulu was forced to defend the independence of MK at a review meeting where, according to his biographer, Elinor Sisulu, Chief Luthuli was unhappy with the timing, so soon after his peace award, and troubled at the reckless action that had led to casualties. Another leader—not named—was said to have severely criticized Sisulu as a wild character, not up to the responsibilities of his leading role.

  When Mandela set off at the beginning of 1962, in search of support throughout independent Africa, he left behind a flimsy, barely competent structure that now faced an increasingly efficient Special Branch with developing powers of detention without trial. Arrests were just beginning to lead to prolonged episodes of interrogation and torture. By 1963 it would be no holds barred.

  Kodesh came to Chiba and told him that they were breaking up their cell unit and that each of them would form their own new unit, multiplying the number of people involved. Paul Joseph recalls that Reggie Vandayar was suspended after the police raided his home and found an old gun hidden there, in spite of the instruction they had been given to clear their homes of arms. Vandayar was reinstated and allowed to form a cell.

  Chiba became a platoon leader and now discovered for the first time that Jack Hodgson was above him in the chain of command. Chiba occasionally visited the bomb-making flat at Hillbrow but never shared any of Kathrada’s concerns about poor security.

  After Mandela’s arrest in August 1962, Hodgson ordered him to carry out a special one-off act of sabotage to remind the authorities that MK would fight on. Chiba said there was no uni
t ready to act at short notice but Hodgson insisted it must be done. So Chiba formed a special unit, which he led himself, and Elias Motsoaledi prepared a twenty-pound dynamite bomb, which they took to an electricity substation at Vrederdorp not far from the city center.

  They used an electric timing device set for two hours, which was then supposed to ignite a spark and trigger a ten-second fuse. When it didn’t go off they couldn’t decide what to do but eventually went back and retrieved the timer. Chiba lit the fuse from a burning cigarette. He had seen all the films where people get blown up disconnecting bombs and was shit scared, he said, as he fiddled with the fuse to get it alight. When it started fizzing he had ten seconds and reached the car just before the “massive bloody explosion.”

  Hodgson was as pleased as punch that the mission had succeeded but, as Chiba put it, reprimanded him severely for the risk he had taken. Chiba was arrested for the first time a few months later, immediately after one of his units was captured in mid-mission by a railway line. The unit was led by Reggie Vandayar, and one of the cell members was a police informer—later assassinated, probably by MK in revenge. Another member, Indres Naidoo, was shot and wounded by police during the arrest.

  The captured members of MK were kept together in a room at the headquarters of the railway police and then taken out one at a time to be questioned. Chiba was the last to be called. He was first assaulted for about thirty minutes, his eardrum was perforated, and then a wet hessian sack was placed over him. He was straitjacketed and electric wires were tied to his fingers and toes. They wanted the name of his contact and when he refused they sent electric currents through him. “All I could do was to scream out in pain. I could only scream and scream and plead ignorance.” He felt good, he told the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) years later, that he had not given away a name but would always be haunted by the deep sense of shame he felt for pleading with the enemy to stop torturing him. “I don’t think that a revolutionary should actually give the enemy the pleasure of listening to one’s screams.”