Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  Traveling onwards to Tunisia with Resha, Mandela agreed they would present their case openly, in each country, and Mandela said he would not shy away from speaking of the success of the PAC. He started telling a senior Tunisian official of the impact the PAC had made, and about their humble, talented leader Sobukwe, who was now in prison, when the Tunisian stopped him and said, well, if that is the case, what are you doing here, because when that fellow comes out he will smash you, he will finish you.

  This made Resha very uncomfortable as he had not supported the idea of singing the PAC’s praises. Mandela had wanted to be honest and open but he could see Resha thinking, I told you so. Resha told him, “No, man, you are putting the PAC case better than they would put it, you see?” Fortunately, the official agreed to give them an audience with the president and promised them they would receive the £5,000 funds they wanted. Resha relaxed.

  Mandela had by now begun wearing military-style khakis, donning a suit only for meetings with heads of state. Resha wore a suit most of the time. He was looking after the money and needed to appear more businesslike.

  In Morocco, Mandela met leaders of the Algerian revolution and was much inspired by their achievements. There were other guerrilla leaders present, from Mozambique and Angola, but it was the Algerian Dr. Mostefi who moved them, with his description of how a small guerrilla force had risen in numbers and stood up to the far bigger French army. The struggle was hard and long, he warned his guests, but they should never despair.

  Mandela visited a military camp near the Algerian border and had his first real experience with weapons: “After lunch we have a spree with G [German] Mauser and an automatic Mach. I am warmly complimented on accuracy.” He talked with the Algerian leader, Ahmed Ben Bella, and found him a brilliant and pleasant man.

  Back in the Moroccan capital, Rabat, they met an aide to the Moroccan king who gave them a further £5,000, telling them he wanted no record of the gift and also promising facilities for military training, even offering to fly in recruits from Dar es Salaam.

  “Where do you want us to send the weapons?” he asked.

  Dar es Salaam, said Mandela.

  Resha flew to London to deposit the funds, while Mandela went on to Mali where he patiently explained the MK story to a government official who warned him not to tell anyone else as people would think he was mad for trying to challenge the mighty South African state. He still gave Mandela some funds though. Mandela was traveling on limited resources and relying on the hospitality of his hosts. In Mali they initially refused to pay his hotel bill, but after some embarrassment the problem was resolved.

  Unable to see Sekou Toure in Guinea, as he was busy with an American official, Mandela flew on to Sierra Leone where a mix-up caused him to be introduced to the country’s prime minister as Chief Luthuli, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He went from there to Liberia, to take up the invitation from the president who expressed keen support for the ANC’s struggle.

  On April 27, Mandela flew to Accra in Ghana, where he met up with a widowed white woman activist from home, Hilary Flegg, who was there as a sociologist. Her husband, Norman, a communist, had helped finance the Guardian newspaper—the voice of the struggle in South Africa—before his death. Mandela’s diary records that Flegg took him out and about sightseeing and that they had dinner together one night. The following night they went to a nightclub at the Ambassador hotel where a Ghanaian man came up to Mandela and asked him whether he was a white man.

  Mandela said, what do you think?

  The man peered at him and at Flegg and said, “I think you are a white man.”

  “But I look like you,” said Mandela, “and you are not a white man.”

  The Ghanaian said, “You whites spoil everything,” but he bought Mandela a beer, which, as a non–beer drinker, Mandela gave away.

  Mandela had hoped to see Ghana’s leader, Kwame Nkrumah, but the PAC were well established there and Mandela believed they blocked his way. As Mandela told Meer later, he had always been fascinated by Nkrumah’s vision of a united states of Africa but now, as he traveled around the continent for the first time, he began to realize that dream was unlikely ever to be realized. The countries and the people were too diverse.

  Tambo arrived back from Europe to join him but even he could not get to see Nkrumah. So, after some further difficulty over paying for the hotel, they flew via Lagos, Nigeria, back to Guinea, where they were finally able to meet Sekou Toure.

  Toure, who wore a threadbare suit at their meeting, listened carefully to the South African story. When they had finished, he told them that Guinea had their interests at heart and had raised their plight with the United Nations. He went out of the room and they must have hoped he would return with some money but instead he brought them two copies of a book he had written, which he signed for them. “Gee whiz!” Mandela said, recounting the incident years later. They had gone all that way back, for a book. He and Tambo were so annoyed that they couldn’t eat any lunch but at about four o’clock that afternoon a man came carrying a suitcase “bulging with money.” Unfortunately it was the local currency and useless outside Guinea so they had to exchange it at the Czech embassy.

  They flew now to Senegal and arranged an appointment with the country’s scholarly president, Leopold Senghor. As they approached the presidential palace in Dakar, Tambo had an asthma attack, apparently brought on by the heat and humidity of the city. He refused to abandon the meeting but was in such a bad way that Mandela had to carry him on his back up the stairs. The president called a physician but Tambo still needed to spend a few days in bed, looked after by Mandela as best he could in their cheap hotel.

  Mandela’s diary for June 7, 1962: We fly by BOAC to L.

  Tambo was living in London with his wife, Adelaide, Winnie’s former roommate at the Helping Hand hostel. Some people within the movement felt that Adelaide became grand as her husband rose in status, and that she embraced Western ways. It was said she refused to live in Africa and favored London, where for a long time they had an apartment in Fulham. Eyebrows were raised in Johannesburg later, when their daughter was taken to be married in an ostentatious, horse-pulled carriage.

  Mandela always said he went to London to make contact with politicians and the press, as well as to collect some revolutionary literature. According to Mac Maharaj, it was at Tambo’s urging that he went. He and Adelaide were Christian and anti-communist, and Tambo needed Mandela to persuade Adelaide of the need for an armed struggle. Mandela had told Tambo he was beginning to grasp that African support would be piecemeal and that the real help was likely to come from the Eastern bloc. “Nel, you better come and explain that to Adelaide.” Mandela told Kathrada he had been given a hard time by the British immigration officials when he arrived, claiming he was coming to do research for a book.

  He had a wonderful time in London, by his own account, visiting the likes of Denis Healey and Hugh Gaitskell, Labour Party members. If Mandela had not spent so much time with journalists, he said, he could also have met the incumbent prime minister, Harold Macmillan. He stayed with Tambo and enjoyed visiting bookshops. David Astor, the editor of the Observer, was then pro-PAC, which Mandela told him was a mistake; he ought to be promoting unity between the two organizations. Michael Scott was there at that meeting too and said he was surprised Astor had anything good to say about the PAC.

  The journalist Mary Benson, who was by now also living in London, kept her own diary in which she noted, “cooked. 7pm. Tambo” on Thursday, June 14, 1962. There was a knock at the door and when she opened it, there beside Tambo was Mandela. “N. gorgeous,” she wrote in her diary, “talked til 1.30.” She elaborated later on how superb he looked in his immaculate suit as he paced across the floor, giving a thrilling account of slipping across the border into the rest of Africa. Benson arranged meetings for him and took him sightseeing around the Houses of Parliament and Westminster, then along the Thames to dinner with friends in Chelsea. Benson took a famous photograph of M
andela in front of the Houses of Parliament. They saw the statue of Jan Smuts outside Westminster Abbey and Mandela joked that perhaps one day there might be a statue of them there too.

  Todd and Esme Matshikiza had also left Johannesburg to settle in London and were living modestly in a one-bedroom flat in North London. They were in bed when the doorbell rang. It was after midnight, possibly around 1 a.m., but they put on their dressing gowns and Todd went to the door. There were Tambo and Mandela. The two men were ushered into the small room, messy with bundles of bedding. Esme could see that Tambo was edgy, tense, she thought, with the responsibility of looking after Mandela. So much had changed, for all of them, since Todd and Esme had stood chatting with the Mandelas at the opening night of King Kong, just three years earlier. Esme noted how Mandela seemed oblivious to the surroundings as he described his flight from South Africa. He said that if he went back he was likely to be sent to jail. Esme asked him, innocently, “Why, then, would he go back?”

  “Look,” he said—and these were his exact words, Esme would never forget them—“I’m the leader of the people and the leader of the people must be with his people.”

  He was not the same person anymore, not the person she had known back home. Esme had the feeling that he was up there, way above them all somewhere, a visionary, with the aura of someone special. She just sat awestruck and watched and listened as he spoke.

  It seems possible that the tension Esme sensed in Tambo was also connected with the political fallout from the Africa trip, as well as the difficulties that he and Mandela quickly encountered when they tried to explain how the ANC was going to counter the impact of the PAC to Alliance comrades such as Dr. Yusuf Dadoo and Vella Pillay. Dadoo, especially, feared the ANC was having a change of heart over its links with the Congress Alliance and there was evidently conflict between him and Tambo on the matter. Mandela suspected that Dadoo, now based in London, was out of touch with events back home. But here was the first evidence that he would be caught between a rock and a hard place as he tried to maneuver the ANC into a position of credibility with the African states, while retaining the confidence of his Alliance partners.

  Mandela did want to stop using the Alliance as a mouthpiece for the ANC. He also wanted the ANC to be able to speak for itself and to give at least the appearance of separation from the Alliance. Like others back in South Africa, later, Dadoo thought Mandela was abandoning his core belief in non-racial co-operation.

  Mandela described how Dadoo took exception to the ANC’s apparent shift and thought they were turning nationalistic. “He kept asking, ‘What about policy?’ We tried to reassure him that we were not suggesting any changes in policy: we were concerned about the image we projected. We felt at the time that Dadoo was falling short in appreciating the problem from our perspective.”

  Towards the end of June, Mandela left London and returned to Africa for his appointment with the Ethiopian military. He flew first to Khartoum and then on to Addis Ababa where he was driven out to the headquarters of the Ethiopian Riot Battalion. He was immediately set to work—on the first day he had lessons in demolition with explosives, and then the following day some practice. He was expecting to be there for six months, and in the early weeks was often training alongside the elite presidential guard, becoming friendly with his trainers, Lieutenant Befikadu and Colonel Tadesse. They went out to dinner together and to the cinema.

  He fell into a daily routine, training from eight till one, with an hour’s break for lunch, and continuing from two until four, after which there would be lectures in military science at which Mandela would take notes. Incriminating notes that would later be found at Liliesleaf.

  He had demonstrations in mortar fire and spent hours on two shooting ranges. He learned to make small bombs and mines and also how to avoid them. He felt he was being molded into a soldier, a guerrilla leader, and believed he was starting to think like a soldier. He learned to shoot at moving targets while he himself was running. There were fatigue marches on which he would be weighed down with a supply of bullets on an ammunition belt, a gun, a knapsack of provisions and a full water bottle.

  His diary entry for July 13: “Lt Befikadu and I cover 26 kilometers in fatigue marches. We do it in 3 hours.”

  He was physically fit, he told Kathrada years later, as physical training had always been a part of his life, but he valued the weekly fatigue marches.

  When you are going to be a leader of a guerrilla army you must know what guerrilla warfare means, how it is brought about and you must know how to use a gun and you must know the whole military science.

  The idea was to fight a war and change the system by fighting and the death of human beings was unavoidable. It was a question of necessity not a path that we chose. We chose peace and negotiations but we were dealing with a regime that was impervious to any form of negotiations.

  Mandela was taught by Colonel Tadesse that he would be leading a liberation army, not a capitalist army, and that he must lead with authority while always remaining equal even to the most junior of men. “Even when you get your food you must not eat your food in your office, or in a room; go out and chew with the men, for your food, they must see what you get, what you eat. And once they do that they will be happy with you.”

  Mandela recalled an occasion when Tadesse was talking to him in the officers’ mess (not a particularly egalitarian venue to start with), when they were interrupted by a sergeant. “Yes, what do you want?” Tadesse barked, unequally, at the sergeant. The sergeant said he was looking for somebody. “Get away from here. He’s not here. Get away.” Tadesse turned back to Mandela and continued telling him how to treat his soldiers fairly. Mandela felt embarrassed, but still admired Tadesse, even if the colonel did not practice everything he preached.

  In late July, Mandela received a telegram from colleagues in Johannesburg, saying he was needed back home. It was as if he was being summoned to his mission… He had been trained and was ready to answer the call. The ANC needed him at the head of the escalating armed struggle. It also appears that, after the tensions with Dadoo in London, rumors had begun flying around the Congress Alliance that Mandela had become a nationalist once again, reverting to the position he had held in the late 1940s within the Youth League. The PAC, cheekily, were even claiming he had joined them, so it seems highly likely that this was another urgent reason for his return.

  As he said goodbye to Colonel Tadesse, the Ethiopian officer presented Mandela with a handgun and 200 rounds of ammunition. Today, of course, it would be difficult to travel around with such items, but evidently in July 1962 you could get on and off planes and cross borders with ease, while armed to the teeth. The gifts were cumbersome, heavy even for a man who had been trained to peak condition. Mandela put the ammunition on a belt around his waist and kept the gun hidden in a holster. Back in Khartoum he had hoped to stay discreetly at a cheap inn but the airline arranged a first-class hotel on the banks of the Nile. When Mandela went onto the terrace many white people there began staring at him and he imagined they knew he was armed. He returned to his room and stayed there, taking his meals alone, not wanting to leave the gun and bullets, or go out with them. He was also carrying several thousand pounds sterling in cash.

  He flew to Dar es Salaam the next morning and immediately reported what he was carrying to the police chief. Meanwhile he crossed paths with twenty-one recruits, the first batch, on their way out of South Africa and heading for training in Ethiopia. The recruits slaughtered a goat and honored Mandela with a dinner, then left him with a salute, which was the first time he had ever been saluted by his own men as a military leader.

  Julius Nyerere made a plane available to take Mandela into Bechuanaland (now Botswana). He was met by two local white officials. Fearing they had come to arrest him, he told them he was David Motsamayi, but when they said they had come to meet a Mandela it became apparent they were not hostile after all. He was driven into Lobatse where he was reunited with Joe Modise. His colleague warned
him that the South African police knew he was coming and that he should not wait around too long.

  Seventeen

  THE ANC HAD expected Mandela sooner. Kathrada and Sisulu had traveled to Bechuanaland two weeks earlier to prepare the way for his return. They had sent armed MK recruits to provide a safe escort but, when Mandela did not appear as planned, the recruits were called home.

  In the end he was collected, not by armed guards, but by Cecil Williams, the middle-aged, gay, white communist. Like many others, Williams was leading a double life, but his was really a multi-layered existence, living discreetly with his male partner at his elegant high-rise flat in the Anstey’s Building at Hillbrow, sometimes going looking for casual sex in public parks and toilets. He had been beaten up on at least one occasion, working in the theater, being overtly involved in politics with the Congress of Democrats while covertly involved through the Communist Party.

  He kept most of this almost entirely to himself, never speaking of his secret political activities to his partner or anyone else. Only once, in later life, did he talk to an oral historian about what it had meant to be gay in South Africa in the first half of the last century. He did so on the condition of anonymity and on a promise that the tapes of the interview would be destroyed afterwards.

  Thus, the role of one of the more extraordinary figures in the history of the struggle passed unrecognized for many years, until in 1998, two decades after his death, he was made the subject of a drama documentary, The Man Who Drove With Mandela, which some old comrades (such as Kathrada) criticized for being too focused on Williams’ identity as a gay man, and not enough on the other areas of his life.