Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  Was the ban a blessing in disguise for the communists? “In the hour of dissolution,” wrote the Party’s historians Jack and Ray Simons, “the class struggle had merged with the struggle for national liberation.”31 The act, Brian Bunting claimed forty-five years later, “did more than anything to bring the ANC closer to the communists: it transformed it from a hole-in-corner body to a national organisation.”32 Certainly the communists had to rethink their attitudes to the ANC, which they had previously tended to regard as irrelevant and petit bourgeois. The Youth League, said Rusty Bernstein, endowed the Party with “an understanding of race and nationalism which communists did not have in other countries.… The unique gift the Party brought to the struggle was its multiracialism and internationalism.”33

  In 1950 Mandela, who still had his doubts about Indians and communists, had been elected President of the Youth League in succession to Peter Mda, who had resigned after suffering from heart trouble and gastric ulcers.34 He still maintained in discussions with Sisulu that Africans would resent cooperating with Indian shopkeepers and merchants, whom they saw as their exploiters. When the ANC’s Executive Committee met in June 1951 he argued again for Africans going it alone, against the majority of the committee.

  But privately he was changing his views. In June 1951 he drove down to Natal in a battered Volkswagen with two other Youth Leaguers, Joe Matthews and Diliza Mji. On the way they argued against collaborating with banned communists. To their amazement Mandela tore into what he called their emotional, nationalist attitudes, and told them to look at the real achievements of the South African communists, many of whom had identified with blacks and had sacrificed everything for their cause. “I think that conversation altered the whole outlook within the Youth League towards the South African Communist Party,” said Matthews much later.35

  Mandela had been attracted to the communists more by their personal commitment and practical planning than their ideology. “When I met communists like Ismail Meer and J. N. Singh at university they never talked about ideas, but about political programmes,” he told me later. “You relate to people as they relate to you. I was impressed that a man like Dadoo, a doctor from Edinburgh, was living simply, wearing a khaki shirt, big boots and an army overcoat.”36

  But Mandela was also beginning to think more seriously about political theory. He did not see himself as an intellectual like Tambo, or even Sisulu, but he was reading voraciously, with a concentration which amazed his friends, marking passages, taking notes, making comparisons. For his B.A. degree he had majored in Politics and Native Administration, and he read many Western philosophers, including Harold Laski, Bertrand Russell and Bernard Shaw, as well as South African liberals like Edgar Brookes and Julius Lewin and the publications of the Institute of Race Relations, in Johannesburg, which he found indispensable. He also looked for more practical accounts of liberation struggles, reading the works of black nationalists like Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and George Padmore of Jamaica; and after the Indian passive resistance campaign he had read Gandhi and Nehru.

  Mandela found that Marxist writings gave him a wider perspective. He did not get far with Das Kapital or The Selected Works of Marx and Engels, but he was impressed by The Communist Manifesto and by the biographies of South African Marxists like Sidney Bunting and Bill Andrews. He was struck by the Soviet Union’s support for liberation movements throughout the world, and by the relentless logic of dialectical materialism, which he felt sweeping away the superstitions and inherited beliefs of his childhood, like “a powerful searchlight on a dark night, which enables the traveler to see all round, to detect danger spots and the way forward.” He experienced some pangs at abandoning the Christian beliefs that had fortified his childhood, such as the story of St. Peter three times denying Christ. But, he was later to reflect in jail, the true saints in the fight against cruelty and war were not necessarily those who had mastered the scriptures, or who wore clerical robes.37

  Mandela was certainly no saint himself, and he would never have a strong religious faith. But he was beginning to show himself a more farsighted politician than most of his contemporaries. He had already learned to restrain his cruder nationalist instincts, to be guided more by his head than his heart and to widen his view of the struggle. He accepted that the ANC needed allies, and the Indians and communists were the only allies available. He now seized the opportunity to join them in the first major resistance campaign in the ANC’s history.

  6

  Defiance

  1952

  IN DECEMBER 1951 the ANC held its thirty-fifth annual congress in the black township outside the hot, sleepy Afrikaner stronghold of Bloemfontein. The event would prove to be a historic turning point, but it was hardly noticed by the whites or the world at the time.

  The conference began two hours late, with three hundred delegates trooping into the baking-hot hall. A press table was improvised for the five journalists present, who included Ruth First from the left-wing New Age, two local reporters from the Bloemfontein Friend, and Henry Nxumalo and myself from Drum magazine. Many of the delegates resisted having their photographs taken. On the platform was the courteous, conservative ANC President, Dr. Moroka, and close by him was a small, ascetic figure with a wizened face. This was Manilal Gandhi, the son of the Mahatma, who lived in his father’s old settlement in Natal and saw himself as the keeper of the pure spirit of passive resistance. Both Moroka and Gandhi seemed a world away from the firebrands of the Youth League, including the proud thirty-three-year-old Nelson Mandela.

  The three-day meeting seemed long-winded and inconsequential. Then, on the last day, the General Secretary, Walter Sisulu, produced his report on a joint program of passive resistance, or “civil disobedience,” aimed at deliberately defying the Nationalist government’s racial laws and inviting imprisonment. The plan was partly based on the Indian campaign in Durban in 1946. The ANC would ask the government to repeal “six unjust laws”: those imposing passes and limiting stock, the Group Areas Act, the Voters’ Representation Act, the Suppression of Communism Act and the Bantu Authorities Act. If it refused, they would embark on their Defiance Campaign.1 Dr. Moroka supported the plan with a surprisingly eloquent speech, multiplied by interpreters, affirming that the ANC was prepared to work with Europeans, Indians and Coloureds, provided they were on equal terms.2

  Mandela had now finally committed himself to cooperation with decisive pragmatism. At the conference he had begun by insisting again that the ANC should go it alone, without the Indians, but he soon sensed that the majority was in favor of cooperation, and in his speech as President of the Youth League he turned right around with apparent conviction, as if he had never believed otherwise.3 He called for a non-European front against fascism, which, he explained, was being smuggled into South Africa behind a screen of fear of communism. Africans must be the spearhead of the organized struggle, but with Indians and Coloureds as their determined allies.4

  The Indian influence was evident in the idea of passive resistance, but there was much argument about its nature. Manilal Gandhi protested that Congress leaders did not have “the spirit of true sacrifice,” and insisted that passive resistance was more a process of moral purification than a political weapon.5 His worry was shared by older South African Indians who had been influenced by the Mahatma. The saintly veteran Nana Sita, who had helped to instigate the Durban campaign in 1946, had met Gandhi as a child in Pretoria. Yusuf Cachalia and his brother Maulvi had been attracted to Gandhi’s methods while living in India. But most communist leaders were critical of the Mahatma’s lack of concern for the African cause while he was in South Africa. Gandhi had shown little evidence, wrote Joe Slovo, of having “absorbed the ancient lesson that freedom is indivisible.”6 The communists saw passive resistance purely as a means of mobilizing the masses rather than as a “soul-force.”7 And some Youth Leaguers regarded the campaign as altogether too nonviolent: “The Defiance Campaign was anti-revolutionary,” Peter Mda said late
r, “in the sense that it was ‘passive’ resistance: you couldn’t hit back.”8

  Mandela was more pragmatic. He certainly lacked Gandhi’s asceticism: “Some Indians said he was like Gandhi,” said his friend Fatima Meer. “I told them, ‘Gandhi took off his clothes. Nelson loves his clothes.’ ”9 Mandela admired Gandhi as “one of the pioneers of South Africa’s liberation movement,” and had been deeply shocked when he was assassinated in February 1948; but he did not share his purist view of the struggle: “I saw non-violence on the Gandhian model not as an inviolable principle,” he said later, “but as a tactic to be used as the situation demanded.”10

  His expectations for the Defiance Campaign were certainly high: he believed it would be so effective that it would lead to the ANC being “in a position of either getting the government to capitulate or to get them thrown out by the voters.”11 But he also, like the communists, saw the action as a means of educating the masses, and the beginning of a much harsher confrontation. He did not harbor any illusions, Joe Slovo reckoned, about “converting the ruling class without a tough revolutionary struggle.”12

  The plans went rapidly ahead in January 1952, in a spurt of activity very different from the ANC’s usual leisurely style. Mandela joined a committee of four, with Z. K. Matthews, Ismail Meer and J. N. Singh, which drafted a letter to the Prime Minister, Dr. Malan, demanding the repeal of the six unjust laws.13 Mandela drove down to the Orange Free State with the document for Dr. Moroka to sign. When the Prime Minister’s Secretary received the letter he replied that the differences between the races were “permanent, not man-made,” and that the new laws were not oppressive and degrading, but protective.14 Moroka and Sisulu reiterated their demands, while promising “to conduct the campaign in a peaceful manner.”15

  Mandela was soon looking more like a future leader of his people. On May 31, 1952, the ANC executive met in Port Elizabeth and announced that the campaign would begin on June 26. A banquet was held to say good-bye to Professor Matthews, who was leaving to spend a year in America, and Matthews’s son Joe recalls Mandela saying that he (Mandela) would be the first black President of South Africa.16 He was clearly putting himself in the forefront of the ANC’s organization, offering to take the key position of Volunteer-in-Chief for the campaign, responsible for national recruitment, which would give him high visibility, in a quasimilitary role, across the country.

  On the Day of the Volunteers, four days before the campaign began, Mandela drove down to Durban to be the main speaker to a crowd of 10,000, by far the biggest audience he had ever addressed. It was not a populist speech—he would never develop the emotional rhetoric of some of his contemporaries like Robert Sobukwe or Gaur Radebe—but he found it an exhilarating experience, and received prolonged applause. He told his listeners they were making history; this would be the most powerful action ever undertaken by the oppressed masses, and with the races working together: “We can now say unity between the non-European people in this country has become a living reality.”17

  On June 26, when the Defiance Campaign was launched, Mandela set out for Boksburg, a mining town near Johannesburg, with Yusuf Cachalia and Walter Sisulu, after being delayed by a long conversation with the local white magistrate, whom he knew. The man spoke to him courteously, which Mandela suspected was “not unrelated to the fact that we were acting from a position of strength.”18 In Boksburg fifty-two volunteers gathered outside the big gates of the African township, then walked in without the permits required for entry, led by Nana Sita in his white Gandhi cap and surrounded by hundreds of supporters. They wore the ANC colors on their arms—black for the people, green for the land, yellow for the country’s gold—and held up their thumbs in the Congress salute, singing the hopeful song “Open the Door, Malan, We Are Knocking.” Mandela looked on calmly, aloof but highly visible, with a military dignity. His manner seemed to symbolize his relationship to the struggle: the proud loner who was at the same time totally committed. The police, who had been waiting, arrested the volunteers, bundled them into a troop carrier and drove them to the cells.

  Mandela would soon have his own first taste of jail. On the same evening the ANC held a meeting at the Garment Workers’ Hall in Johannesburg. An 11 p.m. curfew was in force, and when a procession of Africans marched out into the street the police were waiting for them, standing shoulder to shoulder, peering beneath their helmets at the meek-looking blacks and ready to pack them into police trucks. Mandela and Yusuf Cachalia were there as observers, but the police insisted on arresting them, too. So Mandela spent two nights in the jail at Marshall Square, squashed in with his fellow protesters. He was appalled by the conditions, and would never forget how one of the prisoners was pushed down the steps, broke his ankle and spent the night writhing in pain.19 He also soon realized that two of his fellow prisoners were informers planted by the police.

  The first day set the pattern for the Defiance Campaign. Over the next five months 8,000 people all over the country went to jail for one to three weeks for marching into townships, whites-only railway entrances or carriages, or for being out after curfew, always peacefully. The national organization was Mandela’s achievement: before and during the campaign he traveled through the Transvaal, Natal and the Cape, recruiting and explaining, sometimes from house to house, with little publicity from the white-owned newspapers and radio. He learned at first hand about the problems of reconciling hotheaded local activists to centralized discipline: “It is no use to take an action to which the masses are opposed,” he realized, “for it will then be impossible to enforce.”20 Significantly, the campaign’s most striking success was not in the Johannesburg area, where the communists had been strongest, but in the Eastern Cape, which provided half the volunteers: the conditions in factories in Port Elizabeth had generated a surge of discontent.21

  Mandela seemed full of optimism, as he showed in an article for the August 1952 issue of Drum magazine:

  Though it takes us years, we are prepared to continue the Campaign until the six unjust laws we have chosen for the present phase are done away with. Even then we shall not stop. The struggle for the freedom and national independence of the non-European people shall continue as the National Planning Council sees fit.22

  The campaign gave blacks a new sense of confidence in their own strength; and it was also succeeding, as Mandela noted, in removing the stigma from having served a jail sentence. “From the Defiance Campaign onward,” he wrote later, “going to prison became a badge of honor among Africans.” But the government, having been caught off guard, was soon preparing reprisals, with the support of the main white opposition. The United Party, which represented most English-speaking voters, sent two members of Parliament to ask the ANC to abandon the campaign and to support them in the forthcoming elections.23 The ANC asked them to promise to repeal the pass laws if they returned to power, and when they refused to do this the talks broke down.24 Two liberal leaders, Senator William Ballinger and J. D. Rheinallt Jones, warned Mandela and others that the Defiance Campaign would alienate white support; and the liberal Institute of Race Relations also complained. As Mandela recalled, “They came to us and said: ‘Gentlemen, we don’t think this is the best way of expressing your grievances. Please withdraw it.’ And when we refused they attacked us.” But Mandela was pleasantly surprised by the liberal white press: the Rand Daily Mail, he noted, gave the campaign as much publicity as did the left-wing weekly New Age (formerly the Guardian).25

  The Defiance Campaign gave the government an excuse to impose much fiercer laws; and it had fewer inhibitions than the British did when faced by Gandhi’s passive resistance in India. Mandela and his colleagues were taken by surprise. One young black politician, Naboth Mokgatle, warned a meeting of Youth Leaguers, including Mandela, that “Their actions were like throwing things into a machine, then allowing the owner to dismantle it, clean it, sharpen it and put it together again before throwing in another thing. My advice was in vain.”26

  In July the police had
raided the homes and offices of African and Indian leaders, collecting piles of documents. They were still relatively amateurish, and even quite friendly: when they searched the offices of the Transvaal Indian Congress, Amina Cachalia, the wife of Yusuf, brought them tea and sandwiches and led them to unimportant documents while Ahmed Kathrada was removing crucial evidence from other shelves.27 Mandela would reminisce with some warmth about the police chatting with him in Xhosa over tea. But the raids were the prelude to more serious moves. On July 30 Mandela was handed a warrant for his arrest on a charge of violating the Suppression of Communism Act, and another twenty Defiance Campaign leaders were arrested throughout the country.28

  The twenty-one leaders were freed on bail, and went on trial in September in a Johannesburg magistrates’ court, before Judge Frans Rumpff. A loud multiracial crowd converged on the courtroom. But the defendants’ solidarity was spectacularly undermined by Dr. Moroka, who had taken fright at the charges leveled against him and hired a separate attorney to plead his innocence. Mandela had attempted to dissuade him the day before the trial began, but Moroka complained about not having been consulted and about the association with communists—though he had not objected to this in the past. When he came before Judge Rumpff he stated that he did not believe in equality between black and white. He then began pointing out the communists among the other defendants—including Sisulu and Dadoo—until the judge stopped him.29