Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  One new presence in Johannesburg was Govan Mbeki, who had come to the city from Port Elizabeth on the cape in late 1962 when he was served with a five-year banning order. He had been active in the ANC since the mid-1950s, but had earlier been a storekeeper and a member of the precursor of the Bantustans, the Transkei bunga. Mbeki (the father of Thabo, the country’s future president) was eight years older than Mandela but a baby in politics by comparison. Some doubted, were even suspicious of his credentials (how come he had never been arrested before 1960?) while others did not warm to his abrasive style. It is said he was not much admired by Mandela, and Mac Maharaj thought Mbeki was ruthless and unprincipled.

  By late 1962, Mbeki had run a sabotage cell in Port Elizabeth before going underground to evade his banning order. He was staying at Liliesleaf after being co-opted onto the national high command of MK and showed some impatience to move on from sabotage and begin the armed struggle in earnest. He found support from Joe Slovo, and they, along with Arthur Goldreich, wrote a document called “Operation Mayibuye.” “The time for small thinking is over,” began the document. It was a brief but high-reaching blueprint for a revolution. “It can now be truly said that very little, if any, scope exists for the smashing of white supremacy other than by means of mass revolutionary action.”

  The plan required “hundreds of activists” who would leave the country for training and return equipped to spark the revolt, at the head of several thousand men in four main areas who would join them in the initial onslaught. The plan envisaged an army of 7,000 in total.

  “We are convinced that this plan is capable of fulfillment. But only if the whole apparatus of the movement both here and abroad is mobilized for its implementation and if every member now prepares to make unlimited sacrifice for the achievement of our goal.”

  Arms would have to be manufactured in substantial volume to supply the guerrillas. Fantastic, pie-in-the-sky figures were proposed as “production requirements”: 48,000 landmines, 210,000 hand grenades, 1,500 timer devices for bombs. Medical care required 1 million aspirin. All this was way beyond the scope of the living room of Jack Hodgson’s Hillbrow flat. In any event, Hodgson fled the country a few weeks after Mayibuye was completed and first presented to the high command in April 1963. A pity, or perhaps it was just as well, as the plan would have been right up his street.

  Along came Denis Goldberg, a white Jewish comrade from Cape Town known as “Mr. Technico.” He too was going into exile abroad, but when he arrived in Johannesburg in May 1963 he was asked to stay and take charge of “logistics.” He began sleeping on a camp bed on the floor of the dining room at Liliesleaf, with the wind blowing up through the parquet floor. It was romantic, he thought. The Long March begins with the first step. The Long March of Mao had come to South Africa.

  Slovo attended endless meetings at Liliesleaf during and after the writing of “Operation Mayibuye,” which meant having to leave his Innes Chambers offices downtown as often as three times a day to go to Rivonia. He wanted to present the document to the leadership abroad, he said, and asked for permission to take it out of South Africa (getting in a visit to his homeland in Lithuania at the same time). He spoke of sending back parachutists. Some comrades, such as Kathrada, suspected he really just wanted to leave to put Operation Mayibuye into action.

  The great controversy among them all later was why they began to make plans based on the document before it had ever been approved. Slovo and Mbeki claimed it had been given the green light but the evidence of this was non-existent.

  A new property, Trevallyan, was purchased by Goldberg for use in preparing his arsenal. He started going around iron foundries, concealing his identity with an overcoat, hat and glasses, and using an assumed name, one of several, to get quotes for the manufacture of the parts he wanted. The hand grenade was based on a design Goldreich had brought back from China. He hoped he had disguised that too but one foundryman asked, ”How many of these do you want?” And when Goldberg said that he needed 210,000 in six weeks, the man replied, “Ah, during the war we made 15,000 hand grenades a day.”

  As others have noted, in spite of his false names and his overcoat, Goldberg left an all too obvious trail of his preparations for terror.

  As Trevallyan was a farm location, the plan was to make it look like a smallholding for free-range chickens and storing arms in the sheds that would normally hold the animals. The men who stayed there—Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Wilton Mkwayi and sometimes Sisulu—would pose as chicken laborers.

  Kathrada had nearly left the country, but he had gone underground instead—first at Liliesleaf, and then at a new underground home he rented in the suburb of Mountain View. Before Kathrada could live in his new home, he was transformed, with the help of the theatrical Arthur Goldreich, into Pedro Pereira, a Portuguese man, with dyed hair, a beard, glasses and a false shoe to create a limp. For thirty-four years he’d been an Indian; now suddenly he was not. Kathrada was not very comfortable with his disguise and thought it looked unnatural, but Goldreich had even greater plans to create a plaster cast of Kathrada’s face and make a latex mask that someone else could wear to leave the country. The idea was that if the police thought he had gone, they would stop looking for him.

  The ranks of the underground were swelling. A steady trickle of recruits or comrades passed through Liliesleaf from Cape Town and the eastern Cape, including Bruno Mtolo, who was remembered for wetting the bed while he was there. Security seemed lax and Kathrada was not the only one who was getting nervous.

  Bob Hepple had offices near Slovo in Innes Chambers. Sometimes the Liliesleaf foreman, Thomas Mashifane, would come to his office with messages, blatantly connecting Hepple to the farm. Thomas himself was concerned at the number of cars going in and out of Liliesleaf, declaring that if it carried on they would all be in jail.

  One day, Hepple went out to Rivonia and found Kathrada enraged after finding a gun under a bed. It belonged to Govan Mbeki, who said he was not going back to prison without a fight, and if the police came he would shoot it out with them. He was a hothead, said Kathrada, and a tyrant, to boot, who would not let his comrades eat decent food or drink alcohol as they had to learn to live like revolutionaries. They were not even allowed to kill and cook the roaming fowl. Still, Kathrada and Wilton Mkway, a once-illiterate former shepherd—made sure to obtain the occasional bottle of brandy, revolution or no revolution.

  The revolutionaries would often all sleep there in the thatched cottage after meetings. Although it was cramped and cold, Mbeki would try to deny them a warming fire. Kathrada laughed at the preposterous idea of Operation Mayibuye but in truth, he didn’t mind admitting, he was scared of its consequences and feared ending up on the gallows. He was called a coward, later on Robben Island, by another comrade, Elias Motsoaledi, but he wasn’t stung because it was true. Kathrada discovered, too, that his friend Wilton Mkwayi had sharpened a stick to beat him with, because Mkwayi was impatient for the revolution and Kathrada’s reservations about Operation Mayibuye were getting in the way.

  Bob Hepple remembered being told by Bram Fischer at the end of May 1963 that Joe Slovo and the ANC communist J. B. Marks were going to Dar es Salaam to present Operation Mayibuye to the external leadership. Hepple said that at that stage neither the Communist Party nor the ANC had seen the document, let alone approved it.

  Would Mandela have supported Operation Mayibuye? In many ways it appeared to fit neatly into his own preparations for the greater struggle ahead. He had read the theory, listened to the guerrilla heroes of Africa, such as Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella, and had training himself, while organizing the training of others. Training for what? He never really spelled it out, but some kind of revolutionary war must have been in his thinking. “Much bigger explosions to come,” he had promised PAFMECSA.

  According to Mac Maharaj, the armed struggle was only ever a means to an end for Mandela, and the end was political negotiation. Let’s bomb them to the negotiating table. He might have trained for wa
r but he was thinking like a political leader. That was not the Cuban model.

  According to Mac, Mandela read Operation Mayibuye during the Rivonia Trial and was shocked. What is this, chaps? But they closed ranks and never discussed it until they reached Robben Island, when he began to punch holes in its loose thinking and theory, gaining himself a reputation as an uncompromising debater, showing no mercy to Mbeki or Joe Gqabi, who also tried to take him on. In the end, unable to cope with having his baby torn apart, Mbeki asked for, and was granted, a ban on all talk about Operation Mayibuye. That was the end of it.

  After Mandela’s arrest, there had been political discussions about the best way forward, which Hepple had engaged with. Did you subscribe to the Che Guevara theory that a small group could ignite a revolution or did you accept the long struggle, organizing resistance internally? Hepple preferred the latter and thought Operation Mayibuye was crazy. A plan for the military invasion of South Africa? Absolute lunacy.

  Being junior and carrying little weight himself, he discussed his concerns with Ruth First—as, indeed, did Kathrada—but she was glad something was finally happening and hoped it might be the spark that started the prairie fire. Ruth liked the MK men, whose efficiency and resolve she contrasted with the tiresome meetings of the political committees. Hepple was torn between her infectious urgency and his own unease.

  How much longer could they go on without being caught? Hepple wondered. On one occasion some friends of Goldreich visiting the main house had burst in on them during a meeting at the thatched cottage. The whole set-up seemed insecure. Hepple thought Mbeki must be in a disturbed state of mind if he imagined he could shoot it out with the police.

  There was further alarm in the third week of June when the police made a number of arrests including a couple of comrades, Bartholomew Hlapane and Patrick Mthembu, who knew all about Rivonia. Hlapane would later claim that Mandela really had been a communist. Mthembu had been abroad for training and used to boast he would “make the Boers shit bricks,” but he quickly broke in interrogation and gave evidence for the state at the Rivonia Trial. He was later assassinated in revenge.

  Two days after those arrests, on June 26, 1963—Freedom Day for the ANC—they pulled off a brilliant propaganda coup, broadcasting an address by Walter Sisulu over the airwaves of so-called Radio Freedom. It was Goldberg’s handiwork, using aluminum tubes for the mast, which he spray-painted black to make them invisible in the dark. They had the speech on tape, written and recorded at Liliesleaf, and transmitted it over a home-made radio. Sisulu had wanted forty-five minutes but Goldberg said he would be a sitting duck out there and to keep it to a quarter of an hour instead.

  They did not dare broadcast from Liliesleaf but used the back garden of a friendly family in Parktown. Goldberg had two white comrades standing sentry, with a torch and a walkie-talkie. When it was over he dropped the aerial and rushed to the cinema to buy a ticket and watch the film—he had forgotten the title; it was about the Gestapo—as an alibi. He went back and collected the materials of the broadcast later.

  The transmission reached the media and was reported in The Times of London on June 28. “Freedom radio broadcast in South Africa.” “Message from ANC leader in hiding.” The story said that the broadcast had been made by Mr. Walter Sisulu, who could not be quoted in South Africa because he was a banned person. He had disappeared from his home a month ago while under twenty-four-hour house arrest and on £3,000 bail. Expert opinion said it could have come from anywhere within 250 miles of Johannesburg.

  A week later, on July 6, there was a meeting at Liliesleaf to discuss Operation Mayibuye, which Bob Hepple and Ruth First traveled out together to attend. Rusty Bernstein was there too and made plain his opposition to the plan. He had prepared a paper of his own, which proposed a more gradual move to armed incursion, involving quick attacks on border outposts and hasty retreats back across the frontiers. Bernstein’s belief was that this would set off an international incident that could precipitate a political crisis and the downfall of the state. The alternative, he said, would be a serious mistake, a long, protracted guerrilla war that was unlikely to succeed. Mbeki, unsurprisingly, disagreed. He believed an armed invasion was the only way to win. Bram Fischer, who was also present, said it was not a good time to start a guerrilla war.

  Hepple, listening, felt that the leaders were becoming isolated and divorced from reality. The discussion was heated and tense. It looked as if a major rift was developing between them. Bernstein was under house arrest and had to get home, so the meeting was cut short. They agreed to meet again five days later, on Thursday, July 11. Kathrada asked whether Bernstein could leave his paper behind so he could read it in the meantime. Bernstein refused. Very sensible, thought Kathrada.

  By now they were winding down life at Liliesleaf and the meeting on July 6 was supposed to have been the final one at the farm—but no one could suggest a safe alternative that would not further compromise security. So, in the end, they opted to go there one more time. They were breaking the rules of the underground, said Kathrada. Don’t go back. You should never go back. Kathrada and Bernstein both later claimed it was Hepple’s idea to meet once more at Liliesleaf, but he doesn’t think it was his decision.

  Ruth First, who was not going to that day’s meeting, left messages at Hepple’s home, early on the morning of July 11, for him to pass on to Sisulu and Mbeki. Hepple went to his office and was getting ready to leave around lunchtime when an Indian man he didn’t know appeared, saying he had a message from Natalie for Cedric—meaning from Natal for the Centre/Liliesleaf. Hepple asked him to come back tomorrow as he was about to go out. He wanted to check the contact first with Kathrada. There were suspicions even then, within the movement, of a leak in Natal that could have lead to Mandela’s arrest.

  Kathrada, who had arrived at Liliesleaf the night before, slept in the thatched room after a small glass of brandy. He would always say he had his last drink on July 10, 1963. “How do you know?” he would be asked.

  “Because it was the night before I was arrested.”

  After finishing the beverage, he had a black coffee and went to bed. There was no one else there, just him and the Goldreichs and the staff.

  Hepple was nervous that day and took a roundabout route, not only to thwart anyone who might be following him but also to avoid the usual journey past the Rivonia police station. He got to Liliesleaf about 3 p.m. and parked his Vauxhall at the back of the house beside Bernstein’s car and near Denis Goldberg’s VW Kombi.

  Goldberg had bought the VW to transport comrades and had just that morning collected it from the garage after having it fitted with blue curtains, so that others would not see a white man driving black people. It was such an unusual sight that it would have aroused suspicion.

  Goldberg had earlier driven to town in a little Austin A40, taking with him Wilton Mkwayi who was going into Soweto for the day to organize MK recruits. He was always going into the townships and coming back with reports of hundreds of volunteers. So far, it was mostly hearsay. He was lucky to be out of Liliesleaf on that particular occasion. He had been saved again by muti, he would later claim. Goldberg put the A40 into the garage at Mountain View, took a cab to retrieve the VW and then collected Sisulu, Mbeki and Raymond Mhlaba.

  As they drove into Liliesleaf, they were chatting and someone asked what they were going to call Trevallyan.

  “Shufisa!” cried Goldberg.

  “That sounds African,” said Mbeki, “but it isn’t. What does it mean?”

  “Well,” said Goldberg, “Eisenhower had his Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force Europe, that’s Shaefe, and we’ve got Shufisa, Supreme Headquarters United Front in South Africa.”

  They all roared with laughter but Sisulu cautioned, I’m not sure that’s right, we don’t have a united front yet, you know.

  Goldreich’s cousin, a dentist, arrived to work on Sisulu, as Goldreich had plans to disguise his face by using a mold to reshape his gums. The dentist
seemed twitchy and said he was due to play golf. As he arrived, Hepple passed the dentist leaving and wondered who it was. Kathrada said he was embarrassed as he was sure the dentist had seen through his disguise and recognized him. They were all a little on edge as they gathered in the room to begin the meeting. Hepple was wondering whether he could carry on. If Operation Mayibuye was adopted he didn’t know what he would do. He was not cut out to be a revolutionary soldier.

  Goldberg, who was not part of the meeting, sat in the lounge of the main house reading Robert Jungk’s account of the development of the atomic bomb, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns. Even those who were in the meeting seem unsure what body had been convened. Was it MK high command? Neither Bernstein, Hepple nor Kathrada was on the high command and they were there. Wilton Mkwayi was part of the body and he wasn’t there. Mbeki, Sisulu and Mhlaba were there. Andrew Mlangeni was on the high command and probably would have been there—if he had not already been arrested on June 24. All six of those present were communists. What else was it, if not a meeting of the high command? What authority did it have to approve Operation Mayibuye? No one could say for sure. The underground was well and truly muddled.

  Bernstein had left home with his alternative-to-Mayibuye document under the mat of his car but had got cold feet and turned back, hiding it in his garage before continuing his journey, and stopping on the way to sign in at Marshall Square police headquarters. As the meeting started he had on his lap the copy of “Operation Mayibuye” that Mbeki had brought.

  There was another copy that had been loaned to Dave Kitson, a member of the logistics committee, by Arthur Goldreich, which he had gone to collect so that it could be referred to during the meeting. When he got to the house, Kitson was ill in bed with his family around him, and the document was under his bed. Goldreich wanted it and was in a hurry to get back. Soon, soon, Kitson was saying, not wanting his family to know. Finally the document was handed over. Goldreich hid it inside the hubcap of his Citroën DS and set off for Liliesleaf. His wife, Hazel, was out teaching and the children were at school.