Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  To Mandela, Moroka’s defection was a “severe blow,” and was hard to forgive: “He had committed the cardinal sin of putting his own interests ahead of those of the organisation and the people.” But he was also aware of Moroka’s past courage, and that as a rich man he had much more to lose than poorer campaigners, and had many Afrikaner friends. Mandela forgave him later, as he was to forgive so many who betrayed him; he wrote warmly about Moroka in the autobiography written in jail, and later asked him to be godfather of his daughter Zeni’s first child.30 But others were less forgiving.

  Judge Rumpff impressed Mandela with his fair-mindedness. Predictably, he found the leaders guilty, but the sentence—nine months’ imprisonment with hard labor, suspended for two years—was relatively lenient. And he stressed that they were guilty of “statutory communism,” which, he admitted, had “nothing to do with communism as it is commonly known.”31

  The government’s definition of communism was palpably perverse, but it helped gain support from anticommunists elsewhere, particularly in America, where the Cold War was hotting up. In 1952 Mandela had a glimpse of the ardor of the Cold Warriors when he encountered the black American political figure Dr. Max Yergan, who visited South Africa in the midst of the Defiance Campaign. Yergan had earlier spent many years in the Eastern Cape, converting a number of young blacks, including Govan Mbeki, to communism.32 But after returning to America he had become fiercely anticommunist, as he now revealed. In Johannesburg he addressed a meeting at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, attended by black politicians and luminaries including Mandela. Yergan concluded, Mandela later recalled, with “a concentrated attack on communism, and drew prolonged ovation from that elitist audience.” But then Barney Ngakane, Mandela’s friend and neighbor in Orlando, counterattacked, pointing out Yergan’s deafening silence about the Defiance Campaign and about the pernicious influence of American business interests. As Mandela described it: “He challenged the guest speaker to speak about the giant American cartels, trusts and multi-national corporations that were causing so much misery and hardship throughout the world, and he foiled Yergan’s attempt to drag us into the Cold War.”33

  By the time of Mandela and the other leaders’ arrests at the end of July, the government was determined to stamp out the Defiance Campaign, which had reached a stage, Mandela thought, “where it had to be suppressed by the government or it would impose its own policies on the country.”34 The government’s chief weapon was to ban the campaign’s leaders from holding positions in the ANC or from attending meetings. In May the communist J. B. Marks had been banned as President of the Transvaal ANC, and had recommended Mandela as his successor. Mandela was opposed by a nationalist demagogue named Seperepere Marupeng, a leader of a militant group called Bafabegiya (“those who die dancing”). Mandela, with his reputation as a ladies’ man, was taken aback when one of the militants, a beautiful young woman, asked: “How can I criticize Mandela when he has left his hat in my house?”35 But in October he was overwhelmingly elected to the key position. His triumph was short-lived: in December, along with fifty-one other ANC leaders, he was banned for six months from attending any meeting or from talking to more than one person at a time, and was forbidden to leave Johannesburg without permission. His public position in the ANC hierarchy was now illegal; but his status was reinforced as an individual leader and man of action.

  The Defiance Campaign was now petering out. In October it faced another setback when an outbreak of riots in Port Elizabeth and East London (and later in Kimberley) led to the deaths of several innocent people, including a nun. The ANC hastened to offer sympathy to the families, both black and white, who had suffered from “this unfortunate, reckless, ill-considered return to jungle law,” and charged the government with deliberately sending out agents provocateurs (which could never be proved). But the riots damaged the protesters’ nonviolent image, and gave the government new justification for bannings.36

  By December the Public Safety Act and the Criminal Laws Amendment Act provided fiercer penalties against deliberate lawbreaking, punishable by up to three years in jail and flogging. Again the ANC was taken by surprise. “We had never visualized such drastic penalties,” Mandela admitted later.37 “The tide of defiance was bound to recede,” as he reported the next year, “and we were forced to pause and take stock of the new situation.”38

  For a brief time the campaign seemed to be drawing broader support. In early December a young ex–colonial officer, Patrick Duncan, the son of a former Governor-General of South Africa, entered the fray. Duncan was a courageous idealist, with the boyish zeal of a John Buchan hero, passionately anticommunist but also an admirer of Gandhi. Mandela and Yusuf Cachalia persuaded him to join the campaign, to show other whites the way. “Pat’s offer came as a gift from heaven,” Cachalia said. “It stopped the campaign becoming racial.”39 Duncan, together with Manilal Gandhi (whom he had persuaded to join him) and a few other whites entered Germiston township near Johannesburg without permits, and were arrested. In the blaze of publicity that followed many blacks were moved by Duncan’s courage, and when he was eventually sent to jail, Mandela, Cachalia and Dadoo came to wish him good luck. But Duncan was not joined by other whites, as they had hoped, and he proved an awkward ally. In the courtroom he pleaded not guilty, then unsuccessfully appealed against his guilty verdict, but never served his full six-week sentence. After his release he became worried about communist influence within the ANC. He later joined the new Liberal Party, and then the Pan Africanist Congress, which became the ANC’s most serious rival.40 But Mandela would always remember his bravery with respect.

  By the end of 1952 the Defiance Campaign was over. It had been a six months’ wonder. Politicians and historians continue to argue over its success or failure. Mandela admitted it never spread much beyond the cities and larger towns, except in the Eastern Cape.41 But he claimed it as an “outstanding success” which had boosted the ANC’s membership—from 4,000 to 16,000 in the Transvaal, while in the Cape it reached 60,000.42 The ANC had shown an ability for national organization which few observers had suspected, and for which Mandela could take much credit. This gave him an important psychological boost, freeing him, as he wrote later, “from any lingering doubt or inferiority I might still have felt.… I could walk upright like a man, and look everyone in the eye with the dignity that comes from not having succumbed to oppression and fear.”43

  The Defiance Campaign also drastically changed the character of the ANC, scaring off the more timid, conservative leaders like Dr. Moroka, who was ousted. The young “kingmakers,” who included Mandela, looked for a more steadfast President, and found one in Albert Luthuli, a Zulu chief of fifty-three. Luthuli was a large, avuncular figure with slow speech and a generous smile. A former teacher and Methodist preacher based at the mission station of Groutville in Natal, he appeared to be thoroughly conservative. But he had progressed, as he said, “along the line of softness to hardness.”44 Luthuli became President of the Natal ANC in 1951, and had supported the Defiance Campaign despite pressure from the government, which sacked him from his chieftaincy. He responded with a moving Christian statement called “The Road to Freedom Is via the Cross.”45

  Luthuli deeply respected Gandhi, and admired the moderation of the British Labour Party, but he was not afraid to work with communists. “Extreme nationalism is a greater danger than communism, and a more real one,” he told me when he was elected as ANC President in December 1952.46 Over the next fifteen years—the longest presidency in the ANC’s history—he was often banned and confined to the area of his home in Natal, and was sometimes seen as a mere figurehead. But Mandela would always regard him as his leader, and a hero of the struggle.

  The Defiance Campaign came and went without making much dent on white South African attitudes or on opinion abroad, beyond some left-wing protests. The British diplomats in Pretoria watched events with skepticism, and depicted the Africans as the pawns of Indians and communists. “The natives have only a ru
dimentary political organization and no effective leaders,” said one dispatch to London in May 1952. The diplomats’ main fear was of “civil war between the two white races,” in which the natives might intervene.47 The High Commissioner, Sir John Le Rougetel, was upset by the “extravagance and scurrility” of American criticism of the apartheid government, and by a resolution of the Labour Party, then in opposition, which condemned it. He insisted that the British should “leave the South Africans to fight their own battles”—particularly since the more liberal United Party was “stiffening up.” Sir John accepted the views of the head of the South African Special Branch, Colonel du Plooy, that the ANC was being financed by the Indian Congress and that “its leadership comes entirely from the communist leaders”; he passed on this “intelligence” in a remarkably ill informed dispatch to London in November. The riots in Port Elizabeth he blamed partly on Indian communists who needed a spectacular event to revive the United Nations’ interest in South Africa.48

  Winston Churchill, who had recently returned to power in Britain as Conservative Prime Minister, had his own confident view, minuted on October 16: “Nothing could be more helpful to Dr. Malan in his approaching elections than the Indians and Kaffirs forcing their way into compartments and waiting rooms reserved for whites. The overwhelming mass of the white population of South Africa would be opposed to this intrusion. So what the communists and Indian intriguers are doing is really to help Malan. They must be very stupid not to see this.”49

  A few Western diplomats were more perceptive. The Canadian High Commissioner, T. W. L. MacDermot, reported to Ottawa in February 1953: “The ANC is a great deal more than a political party. Representing as it does the great majority of articulate Africans in the Union, it is almost the parliament of a nation. A nation without a state, perhaps, but it is as a nation that the Africans increasingly think of themselves.”50

  7

  Lawyer and Revolutionary

  1952–1954

  TO OUTWARD appearances, in his early thirties Nelson Mandela was leading a settled home life in the matchbox house in Orlando. His wife, Evelyn, ran the home with a dedication that impressed many of their friends. “Without Evelyn’s encouragement and assurance that she would always be there to keep the home fires burning,” wrote Phyllis Ntantala later, “he would not have made it.”1 Always in the background, she cooked and cared for the spotless house, maintaining a simple lifestyle: when Mandela’s English supporter Canon John Collins visited it in 1954, Mandela brought him a bowl of water to wash his hands in, and led him to the outside lavatory, a tumbledown shed containing a bucket. Collins was struck that Evelyn did not join them for lunch.2

  But it was not a happy home, and was much less stable than the Sisulus’ or the Tambos’. Evelyn disapproved of Mandela’s political career, and he realized that her religion “would not support political activity.”3 When she had married him, she explained, she had thought he was a student, not a politician. Though she sometimes put on an ANC uniform, she said, “I was just trying to please him.”4 She was becoming more religious as her husband became more political: a dedicated Jehovah’s Witness, she spent much of her time reading the Bible. Their friend the writer Es’kia Mphahlele believed Evelyn’s religion was partly an escape from the political pressure, and felt that the Mandelas were incompatible: “It could never work.”5 Certainly the household was showing strain. Mandela’s younger sister Leabie, who sometimes stayed in the house and saw him almost as a father, was very aware of the tension. Evelyn, she remembered, “didn’t want to hear a thing about politics.” Leabie could not understand why people were always hiding, or going away and coming back in the early morning: “I would feel bitter because there was no happiness.”6

  Outside the home, Mandela was being pulled in different directions, with contradictory careers. On the one hand he was practicing as a lawyer, involved every day with all the ordered legal machinery of the state. On the other he was caught up in revolutionary politics, and was beginning to see violence as the inevitable outcome of the confrontation. His respect for the law proved the key to his survival, but it was severely tested. “Little did he think,” said Mandela’s white barrister friend George Bizos, “that he would spend more time in the courts accused of capital and other crimes than representing others.”7

  Mandela’s legal career had progressed while he was carrying out all his political activities. After leaving Witkin, Sidelsky & Eidelman, he had worked for three white partnerships: first for Terblanche & Briggish, then for Helman & Michel, and then for H. M. Basner, a left-wing former Senator under whom he finally became a fully qualified attorney. In 1952 he established the first African law firm in the country together with Oliver Tambo, the Youth League colleague whom he had known since they were fellow students at Fort Hare.

  It was to prove a historic partnership, more surprising than Mandela’s political relationship with Sisulu. Tambo was also from the rural Transkei, and had tribal markings on his cheeks. Like Mandela he had had a polygamous father, and had been expelled from Fort Hare. In other ways he was Mandela’s opposite: he was quiet, academic and religious, from a peasant family who did not expect others to do things for them. But Tambo had a clarity of mind which impressed both his teachers and his fellow students. He came to Johannesburg to teach mathematics at St. Peter’s School, where he politicized many boys, until Walter Sisulu persuaded him to become a lawyer. Mandela respected Tambo’s maturity and reflective mind, and always listened to his advice.

  The firm of Mandela & Tambo opened in August 1952 in a picturesque old building called Chancellor House, opposite the magistrates’ courts in downtown Johannesburg and only a few blocks from the grand fortress of the Anglo-American Corporation, the center of South African capitalism. MANDELA AND TAMBO was painted in big letters on the windows—which offended conservative white lawyers. The offices were in the same building as the ANC headquarters run by Sisulu, and it was part of a dissidents’ enclave of Indian-owned buildings, including Kapitan’s restaurant and Kholvad House, the radical Indian meeting place. The black occupants of Chancellor House were soon under threat from the Group Areas Act, which designated South Africa’s city centers for whites only; but Mandela & Tambo stayed there illegally until 1961—by which time they were under constant surveillance.8

  The firm became the official attorneys for the ANC, and were much in demand from other black clients with a host of claims and complaints. “We depended on Mandela and Tambo,” recalled Joe Mogotsi, who sang with the Manhattan Brothers, “if we were arrested after giving a concert in town, without our passes.”9 They had many rural clients. “To reach our desks each morning,” Tambo recalled, “Nelson and I ran the gauntlet of patient queues of people overflowing from the chairs in the waiting room into the corridors.… Weekly we interviewed the delegations of grizzled, weather-worn peasants from the countryside who came to tell us how many generations their families had worked a little piece of land from which they were now being ejected.… Every case in court, every visit to the prisons to interview clients, reminded us of the humiliation and suffering burning into our people.”10

  They were soon assisted by Mendi Msimang, a young Zulu activist who had been helping Sisulu, and by Godfrey Pitje, a Youth Leaguer who had been best man at Tambo’s wedding.11 As a humble country boy, Pitje felt himself a commoner beside Mandela: “It wasn’t difficult to defer,” he said later. “It was the natural thing, to the son of a chief.”12 Mandela liked to show himself to be in command, but he could also listen to his staff. When he dictated letters to his efficient secretary, Ruth Mompati—who became a close friend, and later Ambassador to Switzerland—she would sometimes suggest a correction which he would first ignore, but accept soon afterward.13

  The two partners’ talents were complementary. Mandela spent much of his time in court, arguing in flamboyant style, or writing political speeches long into the evening. The quietly reflective Tambo stayed in the office doing much of the paperwork, sucking at a small unlit p
ipe. In the courtroom Tambo behaved calmly and unobtrusively, relying on his knowledge of the law. But Mandela cultivated an assertive, theatrical style with sweeping gestures. He made his presence felt as soon as he entered the court, which made magistrates and prosecutors complain that he was uppity.14 Godfrey Pitje was amazed: “All he needed was to turn around and look up and there was almost a flareup round him.” But Pitje was thrilled to hear Mandela treating racist magistrates with contempt, and to see him defying apartheid restrictions. Once when Mandela walked boldly through the “whites only” entrance to a courtroom he was told by a young white clerk with a dark complexion: “This is for whites.” Mandela replied: “Then what are you doing here?”15

  Mandela often defended clients in the rural Transvaal, where crowds would gather to see this legendary black lawyer, without necessarily understanding the law. When he achieved the acquittal of one client who had been charged with witchcraft, some spectators, he suspected, ascribed the outcome to the power of magic, rather than to the law.16 He often briefed liberal white barristers like George Bizos to plead important cases; they would bewilder the local Judicial Officer by calling black witnesses “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” rather than “Jim” or “Martha.”

  Mandela and Tambo often found themselves fighting a losing battle against the new “tribal authorities,” who were gradually extending the powers of government and imposing prosecutions and fines. But as the rural blacks became more politicized and met more workers in the cities, they were becoming more aware of their legal rights. The government banned meetings of more than ten people, and when the police dispersed or arrested the spectators, they would shout to their relatives: “Phone Mandela and Tambo!”17