Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  Kantor was discharged and acquitted on all charges at half-time in the trial, after the prosecution had concluded its case. Kantor went back to his old life, but it was not the same life he had known.

  There was now an adjournment of five weeks during which the accused and their lawyers finalized plans for the defense case. There were many hundreds of documents to read, and a clear position on so many points to be established. The defendants were keen to go into the witness box and declare themselves for the world to hear. All of them, including Mandela, wanted to be questioned and cross-examined. That strategy, their lawyers knew, could be dangerous, leading them to make damaging admissions at Yutar’s hands. He would keep relentlessly to the facts, surely, and not try to argue politics with them.

  Joffe believed that Yutar had established only a weak case against Kathrada, Mhlaba and, notably, Bernstein. There was the real possibility of three acquittals so they needed to proceed with caution in terms of how much they decided to reveal in their testimony.

  Bizos was a lone voice of dissent, feeling certain that Yutar’s vanity would get the better of him and that he would try to meet the accused on their home ground. He turned out to be right. Yutar made some extraordinary blunders during his questioning of Sisulu and his fellow accused, neglecting to press them on their association with Operation Mayibuye and other crucial matters. Furthermore he tried too hard to catch them off guard and expended a lot of effort smearing others, such as Chief Luthuli, who were not even in the trial. Too often, Yutar was too busy sneering about the “so-called grievances” of the ANC. “Never bet against a Greek,” said Bizos.

  According to him it had been decided at an early stage that Mandela would not give evidence and part of the reason was that he would be forced to answer questions on all the documents that he had left lying around at Liliesleaf. Mandela was also reluctant to participate in the rituals of the trial and make it seem as if he had given in since his trial the previous November, when he had complained of feeling like a black man in a white man’s court and argued that he could not be fairly tried by the state that did not give him the vote.

  Now Mandela was torn. Although he wanted to be cross-examined, he did not want to relinquish any of his moral authority. He was the same everywhere, in court as in prison, arousing, as Joffe noted, not so much deference as respect in almost all, though not quite all, who encountered him. Even those who did not respect him would be cowed by his commanding manner. He had got into an argument with an officer during his brief stay on Robben Island, in which the officer had advanced towards him, raising his arm as if to strike him. Although scared, Mandela held his ground. “If you so much as lay a hand on me, I will take you to the highest court in the land. And when I finish with you, you will be as poor as a church mouse.” Mandela saw the man was shaking and stood firm. Eventually the officer backed down.

  During the trial the accused got into a dispute one day in the Pretoria prison yard. They were complaining about something, perhaps about being handcuffed on the journey to court, with Mandela leading the protests. The warder said to him, “When your time comes you will do the same to us.” When, not if, Rusty Bernstein thought, as he observed the white warders going to Mandela for help writing their applications for promotion.

  Joel Joffe also noted that Mandela’s personality and stature impressed themselves on everyone around him, not just the accused but on the prison and the prison staff. It seemed to Joffe when he first met Mandela that he was an attractive and interesting character. By the end of the trial he had come to regard him as a “really great man.”

  One day the lawyers went to consult with their clients at the prison, only to find strange new arrangements in place around a raised table dotted with bar stools. Mandela was behind the bar, lined up with the others. He stood up and smiled as the lawyers entered. “What will it be today, gentlemen, chocolate or ice-cream soda?”

  They all finally agreed that Mandela would read a statement, rather than give evidence, speaking, in a sense, not just for himself but for all the accused and, indeed, for the entire liberation movement. He would take the chance of this platform, with the whole world listening, to make a thorough statement of their aims and their beliefs. There is an original typed copy of the speech, from Joel Joffe’s own trial papers, in the archive at Wits in Johannesburg—forty-four pages of foolscap, with some longhand markings and Mandela’s own signature at the end. If it is not the greatest political speech of the last 100 years, it is certainly among the most significant and is surely the best speech of Mandela’s political career.

  The state had intended the Rivonia Trial to be a show trial, exposing Mandela and his co-defendants to all who were watching as mere rabble-rousers and communists, intent, as Percy Yutar put it, on “savage slaughter.” The apartheid state had wanted everyone to know it was firm and right in its values, and would not be bowed by a few agitators.

  But in five hours, on April 20, 1964, Mandela stole all that from them, ensuring that Rivonia would be remembered above all for the dignity and courage of Mandela and his fellow accused, and for the eloquent phrasing with which he articulated his readiness to be a martyr for his cause. The court was packed. A cliché, but true. Mandela’s mother, who had never been to school, was there alongside her daughter-in-law, Winnie. As the correspondent Mary Benson noted, Nosekeni Fanny was strong and dignified, proud of her son. Winnie, who had initially been refused permission to attend her husband’s trial, made a special appeal to the prime minister. He had conceded with a warning that permission would be revoked if “at any time your presence or action at the court, by the manner in which you dress or in any other respect, leads to an incident or incidents caused by you or others present.” Winnie was demure in Western dress. Rusty Bernstein’s daughter Toni attended much of the trial and recalled it as desperately boring. “But Winnie always caused a sensation, she was so beautiful.”

  Mandela’s speech had been the big secret of the defense. Yutar had expected Mandela to go into the witness box to give evidence and had prepared for a cross-examination. He was thrown when Bram Fischer announced that Mandela would be making a statement from the dock instead. Yutar jumped up.

  “My Lord!” Yutar squeaked. “My Lord, I think you should warn the accused that what he says from the dock has far less weight than if he submitted himself to cross-examination.”

  In a normal jury trial, this might have been a tactic to alert the jury to the suggestion that Mandela was trying to avoid giving evidence. But this was South Africa, 1964, and there was no jury. Mandela was not being tried by his peers but by Judge Quartus De Wet. Neither he nor Mandela and his lawyers needed reminding, by Yutar, of the implications of Mandela’s decision.

  “I think, Mr. Yutar, that counsel for the defense have sufficient experience to be able to advise their clients without your assistance.” In his response, Fischer said he appreciated his learned friend’s advice. Mandela stood up and began reading, slowly.

  “My Lord, I am the first accused. I hold a bachelor’s degree in arts and practiced as an attorney in Johannesburg for a number of years in partnership with Oliver Tambo. I am a convicted prisoner… ”

  Like all the best speeches it had a narrative, shaped around the story of Mandela’s political life up to that moment. Mandela admitted his role in MK but, truthfully, denied many of the acts of sabotage attributed to it. He talked of the early history of the ANC and the events that had led to the armed struggle. He described his trip round Africa and the people he had met, adding that he had undergone military training himself and stating his reason for doing so: “If there was to be guerrilla warfare, I wanted to be able to stand and fight with my people and to share the hazards of war with them.”

  MK had remained a “small organization,” he said, recruiting its members from different races and organizations, and trying to achieve its own particular object. Mandela was keen to stress the separation of the ANC from MK. He said the overlap in membership that sometimes occurred
between the two organizations did not change the nature of the ANC or give it a policy of violence.

  He denied that the ANC was communist-led or -inspired. “The ideological creed of the ANC is, and always has been, the creed of African nationalism. It is not the concept of African nationalism expressed in the cry, ‘Drive the white man into the sea.’ The African nationalism for which the ANC stands is the concept of freedom and fulfillment for the African people in their own land. The most important political document ever adopted by the ANC is the Freedom Charter. It is by no means a blueprint for a socialist state.”

  He stressed the differences between the ANC and the communists, the latter seeking to emphasize class distinctions while the ANC tried to harmonize them. It was true there had been close co-operation between them but that was only because of the common ground they shared—“in this case the removal of white supremacy.”

  It might be difficult for white South Africans, he said, with their ingrained prejudice against communism to understand why experienced African politicians so readily accepted communists as their friends. “But to us the reason is obvious. Theoretical differences amongst those fighting against oppression is a luxury we cannot afford at this stage.”

  For decades, communists had been the only people prepared to treat Africans as human beings, as equals. The only people “who were prepared to eat with us, talk with us, live with us and work with us.”

  Mandela described himself as an African patriot. “After all, I was born in Umtata forty-six years ago…”

  He invoked the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights. He spoke of the poverty and inadequate education faced by black South Africans, the lack of dignity they felt, and their hatred of the pass system for the way it criminalized them all and kept husband and wife apart, causing the breakdown of family life. People wanted jobs and fair wages; they wanted their families with them, and the freedom to come and go without fear of pass restrictions or a curfew.

  Above all, they wanted equal political rights. He knew this sounded revolutionary to whites and that whites feared democracy because it must lead to black majority rule. “But this fear cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the only solution which will guarantee racial harmony and freedom for all.”

  It was not true, he said in the last moments of his speech—perhaps unconvincingly—that votes for all would lead to racial domination. Political domination based on color was artificial and when that disappeared so would the domination of one color group by another.

  The ANC had been fighting racism for fifty years and would not stop when it came to power. “It is a struggle for the right to live,” he said.

  It was said that Mandela paused at this moment, and his voice had dropped and began to waver as he continued.

  “During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the idea of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

  Mandela sat back down in the dock. The silence, said Joffe, was profound, like the silence in a theater before the applause thunders out. Only here there could be no applause.

  Sighs were audible as people stopped holding their breath. Some women in the public gallery were in tears.

  Goldberg, sitting near Mandela in the dock, remembered the strain and the hoarseness that inflected Mandela’s voice, and how he had seemed very conscious of what he was saying, which, so far as Goldberg remembered, was “Hang me, hang Sisulu, hang Kathrada, hang Goldberg…” and so on. Personally, Goldberg felt a sense of elation at sharing that moment: at being associated with the intense meaning of Mandela’s words. If you took on the state, you expected the worst; you expected to die. Mandela had shown his comrades and lawyers the speech in draft and there had been grave misgivings among the lawyers about the last lines. It was an invitation to a death sentence.

  Mandela later recalled hearing that Bram Fischer had shown the draft to another lawyer, Harold Hanson, who had handed it back. “Is this what they are going to read? Is this what they are going to say in court?”

  “Yes,” Bram had said.

  “Then take them straight out and hang them.”

  Bram had not told the accused about that at the time but returned to them depressed and had tried to polish the speech, improving what Mandela modestly referred to as his original, “rather crude” remarks. According to George Bizos, the ending of the speech was initially much plainer, merely saying that Mandela was ready to die. It was he, Bizos, who had suggested inserting the words “if needs be,” to soften the point.

  In fact there is a draft of the paragraph in Mandela’s hand, which shows he planned to say, “It is an ideal for which I have lived, it is an ideal for which I still hope to live and see realized. But if it should be so I am prepared to die for it.” Then these words have been crossed out: “should” and “so I am prepared to die for it” and others added, so that it would now read, in second draft, “but if it needs be it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die,” which is almost (minus the first “it”) the finished version.

  This might be imagined as the climax to the case—it was certainly the high point—but in fact the trial still had two months to run. After Mandela came the questioning and cross-examining of his fellow accused, all except Elias Motsoaledi and Andrew Mlangeni, who had not been senior members of the leadership and might do themselves more harm than good if they testified. Like Mandela, they too read statements, which, unlike Mandela’s, were brief.

  It seemed at times as if the courtroom was a bubble, apart from the outside world, but the outside world was watching and clearly forming a view. Mandela was surprised at the support from the old colonizer, Britain, and would have been even more surprised had he known of some of the Foreign Office traffic of sympathetic dispatches and approving noises being made by officials about Mandela, with equal weight for the disapproval of the state’s conduct of its trial.

  Bizos had been briefing British diplomats on the case, at their request. Later on, after a few whiskies, the British consul general, Leslie Minford, clapped his arm around George Bizos’ shoulders and said, George, there won’t be a death sentence. Bizos could not ask him how he knew, and could hardly rely on it, so never told anyone else.

  The United Nations had voted for the release of the accused, the World Peace Council had awarded them a medal and, in a shade of things to come, Mandela had been elected president of the Students’ Union at London University. The support was heartening but did little to ameliorate the accused’s fears of the death sentence. Raymond Mhlaba alone seemed untroubled by it. “What does it matter?” he told Mbeki one day during the trial. “You go there, they put a rope around your neck, pull a lever, and it’s all over. What is there to be frightened or bothered about?”

  People like to think of lawyers as being cool and dispassionate but that was far from the case in the Fischer household. Bram’s wife, Molly, told Joel Joffe that he was crying out in his sleep, “We must save them!” Joffe too admitted to Mary Benson that he had dreamed of the accused stepping onto the scaffold, and would wake in a cold sweat.

  Fischer advised the defendants that they had to be sure they had proved that MK had never intended to kill. “I must be frank,” he said, “that even if we succeed, the judge may yet impose the death sentence.”

  A warder asked Mandela what sentence he was anticipating. “Well, I am sure they are going to hang us,” said Mandela, expecting a comforting reassurance. The warder said he thought so too. Harold Hanson, who would handle the mitigation, went to see the judge and asked him whether he was going to impose the death sentence. The judge said, no. But no one could be sure what would happen and they all continued to fear the worst.

  The accused resolved that, if they were convicted and sentenced to dea
th, they would not appeal.

  As Mandela said, many years later in conversation with Ahmed Kathrada, they wanted to leave a good impression, to their people, that these were heroes and that even when they were facing death they stood by their principles.

  If that was so, their courage must have reached deep into the hearts and minds of their lawyers. No wonder Joffe and Fischer were personally affected, though in the case of Fischer it is tempting to think that his crying out in his sleep was not merely a reflection of the strain he was under or the responsibility he felt towards his clients, but also, at some subconscious level of magical thinking—we must save her—prefigured the personal tragedy that would soon befall him.

  The day after the end of the trial he would set off on the long drive to Cape Town with his wife, Molly, and a friend, Liz Lewin. The Fischers were on their way to join their daughter Ilse who was studying in Cape Town, for her twenty-first birthday, three days later.

  Bram was at the wheel of his Mercedes, which he habitually drove too fast. As they reached Koolspruit, south of Ventersburg, and were crossing a bridge over the river, a motorbike came past them in the opposite direction, startling a cow lingering on the bridge. Bram braked and turned the wheel. The car came off the road, it slipped down a gentle gradient into the river. Bram and Liz got out but Bram could not free Molly. She was trapped in the back seat of the Mercedes and drowned.

  Some days afterwards he traveled to Robben Island to meet his clients. He never mentioned the death of his wife but when Mandela asked after Molly, he hid his face and walked away without answering. After the visit a warder told Mandela what had happened and he quickly wrote a letter of condolence, which the prison never posted.

  Fischer was finally arrested in 1965 and was still in prison when he was diagnosed with cancer in 1975. He was granted compassionate release shortly before his death that same year.