Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  Singh was so exhilarated that he rushed to the ANC offices in Durban on the Monday morning after reading of Mandela’s arrest, and blurted out that he had just met Mandela. Word went round and he was called to Room 316, the office of MK, and interrogated in case it had been he who had given Mandela away. All Singh was guilty of was overenthusiasm.

  Mtolo had extraordinary recall of the meeting, recollecting during the Rivonia Trial that Mandela had asked them to outline their grievances to him and had promised to take them to the national high command in Johannesburg. They were not getting enough money, they told him, and did not trust the comrade who was supposed to be their treasurer. Mandela had asked for the private address of the regional command. Billy Nair had given him the details, which he had written into the notebook he was carrying with him.

  He was still wearing his khakis when he went to a gathering at the home of the Drum photojournalist G. R. Naidoo. In some accounts, this took place in the late afternoon following the MK meeting on Saturday. In others, it was the following lunchtime and Mandela left straight after the event, to be arrested on the road back to Johannesburg. In his memoir, Mandela says the Naidoos’ party was a pleasant evening—not, then, a lunch—and his first relaxation for a long while. Fatima Meer recalled how they hugged and remembered the feel of the thickened cloth in Mandela’s khaki embrace. It was a purely social occasion, like a going-away party—with perhaps the idea of smoothing over the transition that Mandela hoped to make in the way the Alliance operated. There were various prominent local Indians there, and no other Africans that Meer could remember, only Cecil Williams, “a gentle person, somewhat effeminate.”

  In retrospect, perhaps, it was the sort of event that Mandela ought to have avoided. Anthony Sampson describes it as a larger function with many unfamiliar faces, but that was not how it seemed to Fatima Meer. There was no ceremony at Mandela’s departure. He and Williams merely left, leaving Meer with the memory of a towering, broad-shouldered, robust man, who had shriveled by the time she next saw him, in prison. You’ve grown thin, she told him. “He turned round and ungraciously said to me, ‘You’ve grown fat!’ ”

  Once again, Williams was driving, with Mandela next to him in his chauffeur’s coat and cap. Some people, such as Rica Hodgson, thought this a stupid mistake as Williams was supposed to be in the back as the white baas, with Mandela masquerading as his driver, but it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. The police clearly knew he was coming and were waiting for him.

  How and why they knew has never been explained, though many people have been suspected: G. R. Naidoo, Bruno Mtolo, the British security service. Kathrada thinks the British could very easily have picked up Mandela’s trail from the two white officials who met him when his plane landed in Bechuanaland and who may have either followed him back or passed on the information to their South African colleagues. If it was the British, it must have been a very secret operation, as the British embassy in Pretoria reported to the Foreign Office in London that the most widely held theory was that Mandela had been betrayed by the “communist wing” of the ANC as part of their fiendish plan to take over the ANC completely. “In view however of the known co-operation between Mandela and communist sympathizers this theory does not seem altogether likely. On the contrary there seems some reason to believe that the feud between the PAC and the ANC may have more to do with it. If we can find out more in due course about this we shall let you know.” The PAC may well have been keen to get Mandela out of the way, but no evidence of their involvement has ever emerged.

  There have been suggestions over the years that the CIA had forewarned the South African Security Branch. This theory has been given some credence by an Atlanta Constitution article that ran at the time of Mandela’s release, which claimed the CIA’s “Durban office” had warned South African authorities, telling them exactly where Mandela would be the next day. The tip-off had been disclosed at the state department in Washington at the time, it was reported. This Constitution story may in turn have had its origins in a 1986 newspaper report from The Star in South Africa, which claimed that an American diplomat who got drunk at a dinner had blurted out that he was actually a CIA agent and had betrayed Mandela. A later story in the Washington Post named Donald Rickard as the drunken diplomat and described him as a colleague of another CIA diplomat, Millard Shirley, who had moved among members of the liberation movement in Johannesburg. Rickard supposedly had been the consul in Durban with a “high-ranking” Deep Throat, a local Indian.

  Rickard, who retired back to the States, never spoke publicly of these matters but they received some corroboration from a Security Branch officer, Gerhard Ludi. Ludi had penetrated the Communist Party in Johannesburg, having a brief relationship with Rusty Bernstein’s daughter Toni during a trip to the Soviet Union. Ludi gave evidence against Bram Fischer after Mandela’s arrest and claimed to know the CIA had an agent within the Natal ANC.

  In any case, it seems likely there was some kind of betrayal and, equally, that it emanated from Natal, since that was where the arrest took place. But that is informed speculation. Mandela was probably right not to care who had given him away. It didn’t matter and would only have been one more score to settle.

  Howick is just about an hour beyond Durban, on the road that heads north-west to Johannesburg and only a few minutes outside Pietermaritzburg.

  Mandela was captivated by the lush green landscape of the Natal highlands in the afternoon light of that clear, cool day. He noted how the railway line followed the course of the road they were driving along and thought it would be a good spot for some sabotage. He took out his notebook and made a note about it.

  He and Williams were discussing sabotage as they passed through Howick and were just at Cedara when a Ford V-8 full of white men went past them on the right. Mandela turned round and saw behind them two more cars both filled with men. In front of them, the V-8 was slowing and signaling to them to stop.

  They pulled up just before a bend in the road with a steep bank to the side. As he slowed, Williams asked, “Who are these men?” It was a rhetorical question; they both knew what was happening and who the men were. The police had chosen the spot well as there was nowhere for them to go and they could have forced the Austin off the road into the bank if Williams had tried to use his high-performance car to outpace them.

  In his memoir Mandela said he considered jumping out and making a run for it, trying to escape into the woods, but realized it was ridiculous, as he would have been shot in seconds. He told his ghost-writer, Richard Stengel, that he was very fit in those days and could climb virtually any wall. To Ahmed Kathrada, he said he could see the mountains, the Lesotho mountains, but decided it would be a risky thing and opted to remain where he was. He had no fear of being shot once he had decided to stay put.

  A tall, slender man with a stern expression came over to the window on Mandela’s side of the car. He looked as if he had not shaved or slept in a while, leading Mandela to assume they had been waiting for him for several days. He said he was Sergeant Vorster from Pietermaritzburg, and produced an arrest warrant. He asked Mandela who he was.

  Mandela said he was David Motsamayi, but the officer knew better.

  “No, but aren’t you Nelson Mandela?”

  Mandela again insisted he was Motsamayi.

  The officer again said, “Oh, you are Nelson Mandela and this is Cecil Williams. I am arresting you and we will have to turn back to Pietermaritzburg.”

  In his memoir Mandela says the officer asked him a few questions about where he had been and where he was going, seeming irritated when Mandela parried and did not give much away. “Agh, you’re Nelson Mandela and this is Cecil Williams and you are under arrest!”

  “Very well,” said Mandela.

  Vorster said a major would sit in the back with them for the journey. There was no examination of the car or frisking of the arrested men. Mandela turned to distract the major with conversation and, as he did so, he surreptitiously pull
ed out his gun and his notebook. With the loaded gun still in his hand, Mandela had again considered escape. “At one time I thought I could open the door fast and roll down,” he told his ghost-writer, “but I didn’t know how long, you know, this bank was and what was there. I was not familiar with the landscape. No, I thought that would be a gamble and let me just go and think of a chance later.” So he pushed the firearm and notebook into the gap between the front seats. The police, witless to the end, never bothered to search the car and those items were never found. They have never been recovered and no explanation for their disappearance has ever been given. That can only mean that they were one more secret that Cecil Williams took with him to his grave in 1978. He must have retrieved them when the car was returned to him after their arrest.

  Williams was released on bail and escaped the country, making his way to Scotland where he set up home in Glasgow with John Calderwood. Ruth First later stayed with them for three weeks, to write her memoir of her detention and interrogation, 117 Days.

  Williams died a communist, said Calderwood. He never changed his mind. Never gave up his secrets.

  In a 1991 newspaper interview, Mandela claimed he had buried a gun in the grounds of Rivonia, which has provoked the current owner, Nic Wolpe, to invest considerable effort in trying to locate it, so far without success. Have you found my gun? Mandela was supposed to have said on a visit to Liliesleaf in 2003. “I buried it somewhere over there,” he said, pointing across the acres. The buried gun was a puzzling claim for Mandela to make as he only ever referred to one gun, the gift from the colonel in Ethiopia, and it was with him when he was arrested. That, too, is a mystery that cannot be solved.

  At the police station in Pietermaritzburg, Mandela, still pretending to be David Motsamayi, a chauffeur, was led into an office. Among the several officers present was Warrant Officer Truter, who had won Mandela’s respect at the Treason Trial for being an honest witness. They exchanged pleasantries before Truter said, “Why do you keep up this farce, because you know that I know you?”

  “I have given you a name,” said Mandela. “I have given you my name, and that is the end of the matter, I am not going to discuss the matter.” But then they chatted about other things, including the Treason Trial, before Mandela was locked up alone in a cell for the night.

  He described in his memoir how upset and agitated he felt. He must have been living all those months in denial, as he was clearly unprepared for his capture and confinement. He fretted for a while about how he might have been betrayed, then fell into a deep sleep.

  In the morning he appeared before a magistrate and was ordered to be transferred to Johannesburg. News of his arrest had already become known in Durban. Fatima Meer had brought some food to the jail, which he took with him on the journey to Johannesburg. Everything seemed very casual and informal; he was sitting unrestrained on his own in the back of a car with two officers up front. At Standerton they let him get out and stretch his legs, and he offered them some of his food.

  Then, as they neared Johannesburg, other police cars appeared as an escort. The car stopped so that Mandela could be handcuffed and placed in a locked van with reinforced windows. The convoy went by a roundabout route in case of ambush to Marshall Square, where Mandela was put in a cell. He began to think about how he was going to manage appearing in court the next day.

  He heard a cough from the neighboring cell. A familiar sound.

  “Walter?”

  “Nelson, is that you?”

  The mixture of relief, surprise, disappointment and happiness, Mandela said, was indescribable.

  Eighteen

  IS IT CLEAN?

  Mandela’s anxiety about Liliesleaf following his arrest was not misplaced. He had left all his recent papers there when he departed for Natal—his diary, his briefing on the PAC, notes of his successes with fund-raising, his own military training as well as plans for the military training of others, and, of course, his writings on How to Be a Good Communist. Everything, in fact, except the small notebook he had been carrying with him in the car.

  It was a ready-made package of prosecution evidence for his complicity in sabotage and in plans for an armed revolution. So far he was facing five years for leaving the country without a passport. But those writings could get him hanged. No wonder he kept asking his lawyers for reassurance that the papers had been removed and destroyed. They said they had checked and were told he was safe. But as we have seen, the opposite was the case.

  By his own admission, the culprit was Arthur Goldreich, together with Ruth First. Goldreich has never said he was specifically asked to destroy the papers but he does say he found them in Mandela’s room at Liliesleaf after his arrest. He must have told the others about them, as he describes how he had a visit from Ruth First who said, “We have to take care of these papers. What shall we do?”

  “What do you think we should do?” Goldreich answered.

  “We have to hide them somewhere,” said First. “They must be saved.”

  Goldreich initially wanted to send them out of the country but decided that would be too risky. Then he thought of giving them to friends, but feared implicating them. Finally he decided to bury them instead, in the primary coal bunker just outside the kitchen of the main house at Liliesleaf. He did at least go to some trouble to hide the papers, putting them first in a wooden box with reinforced metal edges, then removing the coal from the bunker, digging a hole—he called it a “slick”—in the floor and putting the box into the hole, before replacing the coal to cover it.

  Goldreich even discussed his idea with Rusty Bernstein, the pair of them, Goldreich the designer and Bernstein the architect—a cautious, security-conscious character—agreeing that it was a good plan and bound to work. But, on July 11, 1963, an officer named Dirker looked inside the bunker and saw bits of cardboard protruding from the coal. There is no doubt that the mishandling of Mandela’s incriminating papers epitomizes the general level of amateurish incompetence with which the remaining plotters went about their business after Mandela had been removed from them.

  Perhaps other revolutions have begun with the same careless, haphazard approach, but in South Africa in 1963 the would-be revolutionaries underestimated the enemy, while dramatically overestimating their own capabilities. It is easy to criticize, from the vantage point of history, but the truth is that they incited a fierce clamp-down by the state and set back their cause for a generation.

  The blame is probably not entirely theirs, as the PAC’s armed wing, Poqo, seems also to have been entirely unregulated, committing a number of atrocities in and around the eastern Cape. Poqo distributed leaflets with the slogan, “Freedom comes after bloodshed.” They were blamed for a mob attack on a police station at Paarl in November 1962 and the ensuing rampage through the town when two white people were killed. They were also alleged to be behind one of the most notorious incidents of the period, when five white people, including a woman and two young girls, were attacked and killed while camping at the roadside by the bridge over the Mbashe River in early 1963. A few weeks later Poqo were thwarted in their plans for a mass rural uprising, drawn up in Maseru, the capital of what was then Basutoland.

  Continuing acts of sabotage from MK, albeit disciplined to prevent injury or death, added to the general air of insurrection that provoked the state’s new hardline justice minister, John Vorster, to bring in the General Law Amendment Act of May 1963, which allowed the police to arrest suspects without warrants and detain them without charges for up to ninety days, after which they could immediately rearrest them. The law even denied courts the power to order release. Vorster had told Prime Minister Verwoerd that one could not fight communism by following the Queensberry Rules (for boxing like gentlemen).

  Special banning orders for the house arrest of named activists, such as Rusty Bernstein, were also being granted. At one stage, Jack Hodgson was under twenty-four-hour house arrest.

  Vorster had appointed a new head of Special Branch, Hendrik va
n den Bergh, who used his headquarters in the Gray’s Building to, as he must have seen it, meet terror with terror, in the shape of torture and interrogation with the use of violence, electric shock and techniques for inducing psychological breakdown. As Ruth First later put it, “Men holding key positions in the political movement, who had years of hard political experiences and sacrifice behind them, cracked like eggshells.” First herself would be taken to the edge of reason, making a vain attempt at suicide and becoming embroiled in a game of seduction with her interrogator, J. J. Viktor, during her arrest and rearrest under the ninety-day law, an experience she would describe in 117 Days.

  Ruth could be talking about the frailty of any number of her colleagues, but she formed a close bond with the young advocate Bob Hepple in the weeks before he was caught up in the Rivonia arrests and was subjected to the vicious interrogation that unhinged him. First and Hepple engaged in agonized discussions about the next phase of the armed struggle as they shuttled back and forth between the city and Liliesleaf, deep in the northern suburbs.

  Though still in his twenties, Hepple had been politically active since his teens and was used to living with secrecy, moving around from one illegal meeting to another without a qualm. “Youth!” as he said, from the high hill of his seventies in 2008, “You just thought you were immortal.” After Mandela’s arrest he had been invited to join the Secretariat of the Communist Party by Bram Fischer and Joe Slovo. Rather than making policy on the secretariat, he was involved in organizing and supporting the leaders. He quickly concluded that the whole setup was blurred, that at the top, the party and the ANC—the central committee of the former and the national executive of the latter—were virtually one and the same, indivisible from MK. The activists were not just the nice, white, middle classes sitting in their nice, white, middle-class homes, however. Black comrades were very much involved too, said Hepple.