Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  Mandela and Winnie had been to dinner at Williams’ flat—traveling up twenty-one floors in the service lift for the use of natives—at which Mandela had left a vivid impression of greatness on Williams’ then partner, John Calderwood: “A few times in my life I have met someone and thought immediately or within half an hour you are someone very special. That was my reaction to Nelson Mandela. I thought, you are somebody.” He had the same thought later, when he met the British politician Chris Patten.

  The Anstey’s Building was then one of the landmarks of the city. AnnMarie Wolpe remembered that there used to be tearooms on the first floor, where it was all “cream puffs and teapots.”

  Calderwood said Williams could not tolerate intolerance in any form and though he gave the impression of being a strong person with a tremendous driving force, behind the scenes there were tears and frustrations as he sometimes struggled to cope with the complexities of life.

  His wealthy guardian angel, Mrs. Sharp, had bought Williams his elegant Austin Westminster car, a black six-cylinder automatic with a sumptuous brown-leather interior. It looked the part, as Calderwood said. But Williams had never given Calderwood any indication of what he was about to do when he set off in the car in late July 1962 to collect Mandela from Lobatse. Indeed, the couple never, ever spoke about it, before or afterwards. Williams was really remarkably secretive.

  Once he had reached Mandela, they drove back through the middle of the night, with Williams at the wheel, and went straight to Liliesleaf, rolling into the farm at around dawn. Mandela recalled that he was still wearing his beat-up khakis and drank in the South African air after they had crossed the border.

  It seems likely they arrived on the morning of Monday, July 30, six days before his arrest. (The journalist Anthony Sampson believes the date to be Tuesday, July 24, but that seems too early for the sequence of Mandela’s remaining days of freedom and, anyway, Mandela says he arrived at Liliesleaf on a Monday). That evening, Mandela was reunited with colleagues at a Working Committee meeting, comprising Sisulu, Duma Nokwe, Govan Mbeki, J. B. Marks and Dan Tloome. He briefed them on his trip and emphasized the need to reshape the Congress Alliance, making the ANC the clear leader.

  He had written a report on his trip and the impact of the PAC, which he probably presented to this meeting. Describing the PAFMECSA allies, he said it was clear there were “great reservations about our policy and there is a widespread feeling that the ANC is a communist dominated organization.” He wrote that it was tactics, not policy, that were the problem and that the ANC must regard itself as the vanguard of the movement.

  He itemized the funds he had obtained during his trip: £10,000 from Nigeria, £5,000 from Tunisia, £3,000 from Morocco (with a further £7,000 to come), £2,000 from Liberia to be repeated annually and £5,000 from Ethiopia. Perhaps thinking of the days he had spent reading in hotel rooms or waiting aimlessly for meetings, Mandela noted that “money collection is a job which requires a lot of time. You must be prepared to wait.” He said the position of their people was pretty grim, possibly a reference to the financial hardship faced by many colleagues, including, it appears, Tambo himself.

  There was an oblique reference in the report to information not being shared with Tambo in London, followed by the statement that the “impression [is] being given that ANC is a cover organization, leaders [are] repeatedly ignored.” There was Luthuli’s claim that he had not been consulted about the armed struggle; there was Tambo out of touch in London; and no doubt there had been complaints fed back to the Alliance in South Africa by Dr. Dadoo in London that policy was being changed without discussion.

  Mandela’s notes on the PAC must have made depressing reading for his ANC colleagues. He stated that the PAC had started off with tremendous advantages ideologically and had skillfully exploited their opposition to whites and partnerships. Sharpeville had “boosted them up and the stand of their leaders during the trial, imprisonment of Sobukwe fostered the impression that they were more militant than the ANC.” In the PAFMECSA area, the Nobel Peace award to Chief Luthuli had created the impression that Luthuli had been bought by the West. In addition, Luthuli’s book (his memoir) and some of his statements had been extremely unfortunate in creating the impression of a man who was the stooge of whites. Finally, the Congress Alliance itself did not allay that impression; on the contrary it perpetuated it. The mere allegation of being a stooge, wrote Mandela, “is of itself so damaging that it must automatically discredit the ANC.”

  “These things have made it appear that the PAC is the only hope for the African people. There were many who would say that the PAC might be naive but they were the only organization in South Africa that was in step with the rest of Africa.”

  Personal spats and squabbles, as well as the recent inactivity within the ANC, had not helped, he observed, and the ANC had a lot of work to do before it could say it had nailed the PAC. But, he added in a handwritten attachment to the typed notes, “no cause for pessimism, my morale is high.”

  Kathrada recalled how critical Mandela had been of the PAC when they met after his return, blaming them for fomenting the idea that he’d become an Africanist and joined them. But the PAC would have been delighted if they had read Mandela’s notes about them, which disclosed just how far they had been propelled into the forefront by the tragedy at Sharpeville, while exposing the extent to which the ANC was unloved by the rest of Africa, with a white stooge at its head, and communists dictating events behind the scenes.

  According to Anthony Sampson and evidence presented at the Rivonia Trial, at the meeting, Sisulu had urged his comrades to bear in mind the sensitivity of other minority groups, while Nokwe had been more militant, saying they were the prisoners of their own sins, having allowed themselves to drift and carrying co-operation too far.

  Mandela said, “What we lack is initiative. We should change our attitudes and exert ourselves. Our friends must understand that it is the ANC that is to pilot the struggle.”

  Kathrada relates that Mandela was impatient to return to Natal to talk to Luthuli and to the Indian Congress leaders in Durban. The committee that had looked after Mandela’s security before he left for his tour of Africa now met again. Kathrada recalled they might have met and talked while driving around Johannesburg. He could not remember exactly who—Joe Modise probably; maybe Jack Hodgson—had suggested a covert meeting in a moving car. Kathrada wanted to make special arrangements for Mandela’s journey. After all, the police knew Mandela was back, which made him very vulnerable, but he was anxious to get under way without delay.

  Wolfie Kodesh likely was not part of the driving committee meeting, as he recalled that Hodgson had said to him, “Somebody wants to see you up in Cyrildene [one of the Johannesburg suburbs].” When he got there it was Mandela, back from Africa, wearing a lovely, thick jersey that he had bought in Europe. He grabbed Wolfie in a huge, smothering bear-hug, then proceeded to tell him about the problems with the PAC and how black Africans needed to come to the fore of the Alliance. Wolfie remembered, too, how keen Mandela was to talk to Chief Luthuli.

  News of Mandela’s alleged return had been in the newspapers a month before he actually arrived at Liliesleaf. “The Return of the Black Pimpernel” had been reported in June 1962.

  Winnie told a reporter on June 24 that the police had been making visits to number 8115 every night for the past three weeks. Whenever she and the children were about to go to sleep, Security Branch officers would arrive, asking her where her husband was and sometimes conducting searches of the house. “Sometimes they joke and at other times they are aggressive which frightens the children.” Winnie maintained that, despite the rumors, she hadn’t seen Mandela.

  Meer described how the police had arrived at Winnie’s home at ten o’clock one night and become vicious when finding Winnie was not there. Her sister had tried to bar their way, demanding a warrant, but they had pushed her aside and barged into the small property. Neighbors had gathered outside, angry with the police,
and some youths had set light to a police motorbike, which exploded just as Winnie returned, prompting the police to rush outside with guns drawn. The crowd instantly vanished. When the police tried to find out from Winnie who had torched the bike, she told them, “Don’t ask me to do your dirty work.”

  Winnie said later that, in addition to turning up at her home, the police had also followed her, arrested her in the street and carted her off to police headquarters.

  When she was at last told that Mandela was back in the country, it had been Wolfie Kodesh who took her to Liliesleaf for the reunion. She took the usual circuitous route to rendezvous with Wolfie and avoid leading the police to her husband. When he left number 8115 at the end of March 1961, he had never actually told her he was going on a trip around Africa but while he was away she had received some messages from him, through the offices of the newspaper New Age. When she arrived at the farm and saw him again, after a gap of sixteen months, he promptly told her they did not have long together as he had a meeting to attend and would be going away again soon.

  Mandela had briefed Winnie on the politics of his trip, putting it in perhaps plainer terms than he had used in conversation with his comrades. He told Winnie that the ANC had lost their dignity and that the leaders in Africa despised them because they couldn’t understand why the black people of South Africa had not risen up in revolt against such a small minority of whites. Why had it taken them so long to realize they could never defeat the state by peaceful means? Mandela told Winnie how difficult it had been to communicate the ANC’s message to Nkrumah and many other African leaders who just could not understand how a majority could continue to be oppressed by such a minority.

  Winnie had detected something different in her husband—as others too had noticed: he seemed more militant and determined after his training. There was a look about him that she could not define, linked with an ominous feeling that they would never again have a normal life.

  It had been the most emotional meeting Winnie could remember between them. Mandela had been desperate to see his children and she could not recall ever having seen him as demonstrative as he had been that day.

  Winnie must also have seen the effect on him of her changed appearance. He later described the meeting in a letter to Zindzi and Zenani, telling them that he had been terribly shaken when he saw their mother again at Liliesleaf in July 1962. “I had left her in good health with a lot of flesh and color but she suddenly lost weight and was now a shadow of her former self. I realized at once the strain my absence had caused her.” He had looked forward, he said, to a time when he would be able to tell her about his journey, the countries he had visited and the people he had met, but his arrest had put an end to that dream.

  Mandela told Fatima Meer that Winnie’s eyes brimmed with tears at their parting and that was how he remembered them.

  Perhaps, too, Mandela might have noticed the loss of innocence in Winnie. The country girl, aged just twenty-four, who had broken a sandal strap on the veld was already becoming hardened by the harassment that would increasingly twist her life out of shape in the years ahead. Without Mandela to guide her, she was making bad judgments, becoming too close to a local married man, Brian Somana, who had helped take her to and from Liliesleaf. He was eventually suspected of being a police informer. When Somana’s wife sued him for divorce, she would name Winnie as the co-respondent. That particular allegation was never proven, but it offered an early warning of the greater troubles ahead.

  In 1962, Mandela had a reunion with his son Thembi, then a lusty lad of seventeen. He had worn a pair of Mandela’s trousers to the meeting, a shade too big and too long, which Mandela had taken to be significant and was deeply touched by. “For days thereafter my mind & feelings were agitated to realize the psychological strains and stresses my absence from home had imposed on my children.”

  At the time Thembi had been on his way back to boarding school. They had discussed Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Mandela had been reminded that he was talking to a child but “to one who was beginning to have a settled attitude in life.” Mandela was sad when they parted, unable to accompany his son to a bus stop or see him off at a station, “for an outlaw, such as I was at the time, must be ready to give up important parental duties.” So he had left his son—no! his friend—to step out alone and fend for himself in the world.

  “I knew you had brought him clothing and given him some cash,” Mandela wrote to Winnie, “but nevertheless I emptied my pockets and transferred to him all the copper and silver that a wretched fugitive could afford.”

  Knowing the financial friction between Winnie and the first-family children, it is hard to resist the notion that Thembi may have been making a different point altogether when he wore his father’s ill-fitting trousers to their meeting. Mandela must have thought he was doing it to connect to his father, but Thembi may have been wearing them to show he could afford nothing better.

  From the confines of Robben Island, Mandela seems to have begun to romanticize his “wretched fugitive” or “outlaw” existence, whereas, in reality, it had ended in prison, and caused his wife and his children untold harm.

  The Goldreichs were still living at Liliesleaf in July 1962. Hazel remembered being afraid for Mandela as he set off for Natal with Cecil Williams. “You shouldn’t be going,” she told him but he said the arrangements had been made. He was always single-minded, said Hazel.

  Mandela had either overruled, or simply ignored, the request of Kathrada and Co. that he wait until a more secure trip could be planned. He had won over the working committee, all except Govan Mbeki, who had been strongly opposed to him traveling with Cecil Williams. If the police had been alerted to his trip from Bechuanaland with Williams, they would know exactly what to look for in Williams’ flashy, conspicuous Austin Westminster car. In fact, Mbeki had not wanted Mandela to come back to South Africa at all and thought he ought to have stayed outside the border in Lobatse. But Mandela was in a hurry. It was almost as if he was courting arrest.

  The drive down to Natal was uneventful. Mandela went first to a meeting with his Indian colleagues the Meers and Monty Naicker and his wife. “I want to tell the chief that I have briefed you and I want to know your reaction,” he told them. While they were clearly not happy, opposing anything that would affect the Alliance, Mandela said the ANC must move to the forefront. Fatima Meer recalled him telling her how one African head of state said he had torn a copy of the Freedom Charter from his wall when he found out it had been written by whites.

  Mandela sat with Fatima Meer in her kitchen and recounted stories of his trip that she would later use as the raw material of her biography of Mandela. They had gone out driving in her Volkswagen. She said he was very aware that he was a sacrificial lamb and bound to end up in jail. He was just trying to live day by day.

  It was the ANC praise-singer activist, M. B. Yengwa, who drove Mandela out to meet Luthuli. He would have gone to Groutville but Luthuli warned him that the police might be looking for him there, so Mandela went to Tongaat instead and met Luthuli at the safe house of a trusted Indian woman, Mrs. Singh, a teacher, where Mandela stayed that night.

  The chief did not like the idea of outsiders—other African states—telling the ANC what to do. But Mandela said, no, you’re wrong, they’re not telling us, but these are the views they hold. They believe the leadership of South Africa is with the ANC, but the PAC represents aspirations they understand, while the ANC is speaking for an amorphous group, failing to concentrate on African aspirations and grievances. For Mandela, that was precisely what they needed to focus on. He told the chief, “I am recommending that we should take their views into account because we have to operate from these neighboring territories and if they decided to give their support to the PAC, the PAC being a small organization can suddenly become big.” The chief eventually said he understood, but Mandela could tell that he had doubts about the approach.

  His other task in Natal was to revive the spirits of the MK re
gional command who were so disheartened by the conditions in which they were operating, especially the lack of funds, that they had more or less given up on acts of sabotage.

  MK’s commander-in-chief had gone AWOL in Africa, but now he was back and newly militarized. He wore his khakis for the meeting with the regional command, which was held at the home of an Indian in Reservoir Hills. Salaam! Mandela greeted his comrades when he entered the room in which they were gathered.

  The meeting would form a controversial part of the Rivonia Trial, as one person who was present would betray MK and become the prosecution’s star witness, known as Witness X. This was Bruno Mtolo, a long-standing member of the Communist Party and a trade union activist who had been in the ANC since 1957.

  In the months before his own arrest in August 1963, a year after that of Mandela, Mtolo would be sent on MK business to Johannesburg, staying at Liliesleaf. Hazel Goldreich, who gave him a lift to the bus station when he was going back to Durban, passed on her suspicions at the way he kept asking her questions. His persuasive evidence at the trial certainly helped to put Mandela in line for a death sentence. He told the court that Mandela had warned the Natal regional command to keep their communist views to themselves when they went abroad for training because the African states were not prepared to help communists. Mandela denied the deception in court, but it certainly sounded at least a plausible paraphrasing of his position.

  Alongside Mtolo at the meeting were Billy Nair, who was then the head of the regional command, Ronnie Kasrils and Sonny Singh. Singh recalled that there had been about ten people in the room and that tea was served with Indian snacks. He remembered it as being a Saturday afternoon, August 4, the day before Mandela’s arrest. The meeting had been inspired as Mandela told them of his meetings with African leaders and his experiences in London. There was joy and excitement, said Singh, and they were like children in his presence, hugging and embracing him as if he was Father Christmas.