Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  Mandela became suspect among many white lawyers after receiving his suspended sentence for helping to organize the Defiance Campaign, and in 1954 the Law Society demanded his removal from the roll of attorneys. In a historic case he was defended by two respected white lawyers, Walter Pollak, Q.C., and Blen Franklin, who argued that Mandela had a right to fight for his political beliefs under the rule of law. The presiding Judge Ramsbottom upheld their argument and ordered the Law Society to pay costs. Mandela was heartened by the number of barristers, including Afrikaner nationalists, who came to his support: “Even in racist South Africa professional solidarity can sometimes transcend colour.”18 Forty years later, when he addressed the Law Society, he reminded them: “Here I am with my name still on the roll.”19 But his professional scope was soon restricted by the bans placed on him as a political activist. When he applied for permission to appear in a case in Pretoria in 1955, the Police Commissioner informed the Minister of Justice: “Mandela cannot be trusted, and visits by him to Pretoria and Vereeniging must be treated with suspicion.”20

  As Mandela became more prominent politically, he attracted still more resentment. In November 1955 he was defending a black client before a testy Afrikaner magistrate named Willem Dormehl, who immediately asked Mandela to produce his attorney’s certificate; he could not, and Dormehl adjourned the case. When Mandela later brought the certificate and began his defense, Dormehl kept interrupting his “irrelevant questions” with shouts of “Hey, you,” finally saying “Hey, you, sit down.” Mandela insisted that all the magistrate’s remarks be recorded, and finally stated that he could not defend his client under these circumstances. The case was remanded. A furious Mandela went to see George Bizos, who advised him to petition the Supreme Court. The case came in front of Judge Quartus de Wet—later to sentence Mandela to life imprisonment—who was outraged by Dormehl’s behavior, saying: “Everyone knows that Mandela is an attorney.” De Wet ordered the magistrate to remove himself from the case, and complained: “This is the sort of thing that brings the administration of justice into disrepute in our country.”21

  “The law was used in South Africa,” Mandela would explain as President forty years later, “not as an instrument to afford the citizen protection, but rather as the chief means of his subjection. As a young law student, it was one of my ambitions to try to use my professional training to help tilt the balance just a wee bit in favour of the citizen.”22 He could occasionally be surprised by the fairness of judges, but at the same time he was aware of the limitations of the courts as the guardians of civil liberties. As he later wrote in jail: “In our country where there are racial laws, and where all the judges and magistrates are white and reeking of the stale odour of racial prejudice, the operation of such principles is very limited.” He saw the government packing the courts with its own supporters, but he recognized that South Africa was still producing great judges, who might also be Afrikaner nationalists, but who could take a brave stand against the government. In jail he would recall with pleasure how the respected Judge Blackwell told the Chief of Security Police in the Rand: “This country is not a police state yet!”23

  Mandela would remain divided between his respect for the rule of law and his determination to overthrow a racist regime. Increasingly he was finding himself on the receiving end of the legal machinery, marked down as a dangerous politician and compelled to operate from the shadows. For most of the ten years from 1952 until he was jailed he was banned from holding any elected office and forbidden to make public speeches. He had no formal position with the ANC. He had to rely on his personality and his image; but it was an image which was beginning to shine brightly.

  Mandela had a brief period of freedom when his six-month ban from attending meetings or leaving Johannesburg expired in June 1953, and he reveled in a journey through the Orange Free State to appear as a lawyer in court in the small dorp of Villiers. The open landscape gave him a sense of liberty: he even felt some affinity with the Afrikaner Boer War hero General de Wet, who had fought the British across that countryside.24 But it was a false dawn: in Villiers he was served with a new ban, restricting him to Johannesburg again and requiring him to resign from all organizations, including the ANC, for two years. It was the beginning of his hunted life, as he recalled nine years later: “I found myself restricted and isolated from my fellowmen, from people who think like me and believe like me. I found myself trailed by officers of the security branch of the police force wherever I went. In short, I found myself treated as a criminal, an unconvicted criminal.”25

  Mandela knew that the bans could soon debilitate the ANC by restricting the leaders’ contacts and activities, and encouraging “the crippling evils of factionalism and regionalism.”26 Anticipating the ANC being banned altogether, he worked out a plan by which the leaders could communicate secretly and quickly with each other and subordinates by means of an underground network of cells.27 This was called the M-Plan—rather than the Mandela Plan, which would have revealed that he was illegally participating in the ANC. The plan’s main object was to inform, mobilize and recruit members, but it could also be used to build up labor unions without public meetings.28 As Mandela urged the Transvaal Congress in September 1953: “If you are not allowed to have your meetings publicly, then you must hold them over your machines in the factories, on the trams and buses as you travel home. You must have them in your villages and shanty towns. You must make every home, every shack and every mud structure where our people live, a branch of the trade union movement, and you must never surrender.”29

  The M-Plan was implemented in the Eastern Cape, where the mood of defiance was strongest. This gratified Mandela, since it was largely organized by Africans, with little help from Indians or whites.30 But there were many problems in other regions. Strong local leaders resented central control, lacked paid organizers to run the plan and often did not believe the ANC would actually be banned. In December 1955 the National Executive reported that they had “not yet succeeded in moving out of the domain of mass meetings and this type of agitation.”31 It was not until 1961, after the ANC had been banned, that a modified version of the plan was implemented.32

  Mandela’s next open political challenge came in 1953, in the multiracial township of Sophiatown, close to the white center of Johannesburg. It was a “black spot” which the government was determined to move out to the edge of Soweto. Sophiatown was an overcrowded slum district, with filthy backyards reeking of stale beer; but it was one of South Africa’s most cosmopolitan areas, with an overwhelming vitality and its own harsh beauty, commemorated by poets, photographers and the black painter Gerard Sekoto. More importantly politically, it was the only part of Johannesburg where blacks could own freehold property—which the government could not tolerate. When black residents were forced to leave their homes in return for wretched compensation, Mandela denounced the compulsory removals as “a calculated and cold-blooded swindle.”33 The ANC had some strong supporters in Sophiatown, led by two firebrands, Robert Resha and Peter Nthite, and including part-time tsotsis, or gangsters, and the National Executive felt impelled to resist the removals, while maintaining their policy of nonviolence. It was a difficult challenge.

  Soon after Mandela’s ban expired in June 1953, he presided over a meeting in the Odin Cinema in Sophiatown, alongside the Indian leader Yusuf Cachalia—whom the police arrested on the platform. Mandela succeeded in calming the audience with the help of ANC songs, but he was becoming impatient with nonviolent methods. Addressing an angry crowd in Freedom Square soon afterward, he was carried away by his own oratory, and told them to prepare before long to use violence. Pointing to the police who surrounded them, he sang an ANC song which included the words “There are our enemies!” He was given a stern reprimand by the ANC’s National Executive, which he accepted; but he felt in his heart that “non-violence was not the answer.”34

  The Sophiatown protests nevertheless continued peacefully, with hundreds of speeches by local leaders carefu
lly avoiding violent rhetoric: “The throwing of one small stone at the police,” an ANC report concluded afterward, “would have made Sophiatown a bloodbath.”35 They were supported by a prominent and imposing English monk, Father Trevor Huddleston, who presided over the church of Christ the King, which dominated Sophiatown, and the nearby mission school of St. Peter’s at Rosettenville. Huddleston was already the friend and mentor of Oliver Tambo, and had been moved by the Defiance Campaign to identify himself closely with the ANC’s struggle. “It has been the teaching of the Church through the centuries,” he had told a spellbound black audience at the Trades Hall in February 1953, “that when government degenerates into tyranny … laws cease to be binding on its subjects.” Huddleston was not worried by working alongside communists. “I’m convinced that communism is not a serious danger in South Africa,” he told me.36 He saw it as his Christian duty to protect his parish in Sophiatown, with all its humanity, which he loved.37

  Mandela realized that Huddleston, like his white communist friends, completely identified with the people, and he was to become his lifelong friend and supporter. Huddleston found no difficulty, he said later, in discussing religion with Mandela, whom he saw as an agnostic, not an atheist: “He accepts that God is a mystery, and accepts those whose life is structured in the belief in God.… He believes in the gift of free will, the freedom to choose—which goes deeper than a political belief.”38

  The ANC continued to agitate against the destruction of Sophiatown with slogans like “We Won’t Move” and “Over Our Dead Bodies.” Mandela soon realized that this was a serious mistake. “A slogan is like a bullet,” he wrote later in jail: its effectiveness “depends on matching the bore of the gun.”39 But these bullets could not penetrate. The world’s press had converged on the slum township with high expectations of a bloodbath, even a revolution. “It was coming for sure, so we all believed,” wrote Don Mattera, a gang leader and poet who lived in Sophiatown.40 Mandela and Tambo came to the township every day to coordinate the leadership and to represent the dispossessed owners. But Mandela could offer no peaceful means to prevent the removals. “At no time during the course of this campaign did we think we could beat the government,” he wrote later.41

  The mood was still expectant when I visited Sophiatown on February 9, 1954, the day on which the removals were to take place. At dawn the township was echoing with the sound of the tsotsis hitting the telegraph poles—the battle cry of Sophiatown. But the government had imposed a total ban on meetings, and 2,000 police were patrolling the streets in cars and heavy trucks; the trucks soon began loading up furniture and those tenants who were glad to leave. The ANC leaders looked on disconsolately; the crowds just stared. By the evening the police were looking bored and confident.42

  Mandela had learned a grim lesson—not to raise premature hopes of revolt: “Sophiatown died not to the sound of gunfire but to the sound of rumbling trucks and sledgehammers.” He was convinced that in the future “we had no alternative to armed and violent resistance,” and he sometimes seemed to be impatient for a confrontation in which he could prove himself.43 He was restrained by Sisulu, who was more exposed to the militant youth: “They were coming to our meetings with only one idea,” he recalled. “For me to utter revolution.”

  Sisulu did not utter it, and he was further advised against violence from an unexpected quarter. In 1953 he was invited with the young ANC activist Duma Nokwe to a communist youth festival in Bucharest, Romania, on the initiative of Ahmed Kathrada. They bribed their way onto an Israeli El Al plane, and made their first contacts with European communists. Mandela had persuaded Sisulu that he ought to secretly visit China, in order to discuss whether it might supply the ANC with arms. Sisulu’s Chinese hosts surprised him by warning against an armed struggle: “Look, this is a dangerous route,” they told him. “Don’t come to this solution till you are ready for it. Once you are beaten you have no chance.”44 Sisulu returned convinced by the advice, which Mandela accepted; but his unauthorized visit to China shocked conservative ANC leaders like Luthuli and Matthews, who demanded an apology. Mandela was still convinced that “an armed struggle would be absolutely necessary,” but he was to realize later that he had been precipitate, thinking like “a hotheaded revolutionary.”45

  Mandela was still something of a maverick, a loose cannon within the ANC, and his speeches had inflammatory touches which were to bring trouble from the government. In 1953 he wrote his first major speech as President of the Transvaal ANC. It was read out for him at the annual conference in September, since he was banned from attending. The speech proclaimed: “Today the people speak the language of action; there is a mighty awakening among the men and women of our country.” He looked back on the glories of the Defiance Campaign, when “the entire country was transformed into battle zones where the forces of liberation were locked up in immortal conflict against those of reaction and evil … our flag flew in every battlefield.” (He later had to explain to judges that he was writing metaphorically.)46

  The speech went on to link the South African struggle to others in Africa, where anti-imperialists were gathering momentum: “The entire continent is seething with discontent and already there are powerful revolutionary eruptions in the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Tunisia, Kenya, the Rhodesias and South Africa.” He described how “the massacre of the Kenyan people by Britain has aroused worldwide protest. Children are being burnt alive, women are raped, tortured, whipped and boiling water poured on their breasts to force confessions from them.” He ended with a quotation lifted from Nehru, which gave the speech its title, “No Easy Walk to Freedom”: “You can see that there is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintops of our desires.”47

  Mandela was more influenced by Nehru than he liked to admit: “I used a lot of the writings of Nehru without acknowledging it, which was a silly thing to do,” he said forty-four years later. “But when there is a paucity of views in you, you are inclined to do that.”48 He was also becoming more attached to the rhetoric of Marxist anticolonialism. A few months later, when his ban was again briefly lifted, he addressed the left-wing Peace Council with a bloodcurdling attack on imperialist greed. “In their mad lust for markets and profits these imperial powers will not hesitate to cut one another’s throats, to break the peace, to drench millions of innocent people in blood and to bring misery and untold suffering to humanity.” He did not share, he explained, the bourgeois belief in continuous development: he foresaw a break in continuity, a “leap from one stage to another.”

  On December 13, 1953, Mandela spoke for an hour and a half at a big meeting in Soweto. His speech was recorded (luckily inaccurately) by a policeman, Detective Sergeant Helberg, and was later used as evidence of treason. Mandela warned the huge crowd: “We have to employ new methods in our struggle. It is no longer sufficient to speak from platforms. More work must be done behind the scenes, even underground.” He went on to tell them: “You will not shed blood in vain. We will erect a monument for you next to Shaka.”49

  His speeches were undoubtedly becoming more warlike, and Mandela the revolutionary was now openly competing with Mandela the lawyer. But behind his showmanship, in the courts and on the platforms, there were still doubts about his seriousness as a leader. Like other combative politicians out of office, such as Theodore Roosevelt in the 1890s and Winston Churchill in the 1930s, he often seemed to be spoiling for a fight, without a real organization or plan behind him.

  8

  The Meaning of Freedom

  1953–1956

  DESPITE MANDELA’S political evolution, he still retained his basic African nationalism: his pride in his people and their history, and his determination to regain their rights. But he sought allies wherever he could find them: from among white liberals, Indian Gandhi-ists and Christian priests. And his most effective and committed friends were the communists, who in 1953 had re-formed themselves as t
he South African Communist Party—a name which stressed their homegrown, patriotic basis. Uniquely multiracial, the SACP remained very different from other white parties, and from communist parties elsewhere, and it included some very unrevolutionary members. But because of Pretoria’s special definition of “statutory communism,” devised against the background of the escalating Cold War, they could all be branded as dangerous revolutionaries who were taking over the ANC, thus scaring other potential supporters away.

  The communist bogey would be portrayed more menacingly in the next stage of the ANC’s crusade, the preparation of what would be called the Freedom Charter. South African liberals and many Western sympathizers would depict the Charter as a typical communist ploy aimed at discreetly achieving influence through a popular front with carefully orchestrated demonstrations, using ANC leaders as gullible pawns to endorse their propaganda. But that view was distorted by the magnifying glasses of the Cold War. The Charter’s message was directed not against capitalists or Western democrats, but against narrow nationalists, both Afrikaner and African. For Mandela and most of his colleagues the Charter was a historic breakthrough. It committed the ANC to discarding racialism and to widening the basis of the struggle, and was to become its key manifesto for the next forty years.

  The originator of the Freedom Charter was neither a communist nor a militant, but the conservative elder statesman of the ANC, Z. K. Matthews, Mandela’s mentor at Fort Hare. Matthews had been forced to return to South Africa after a year in the United States in May 1953, when his government had refused to extend his passport. He came back in a more radical mood. He was now less admiring of the traditional black American hero Booker T. Washington than of his radical opponent Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).1 When Matthews arrived at the airport the Special Branch took away books by authors including Arnold Toynbee, and also a photograph of Z.K.’s friend the singer, actor and communist Paul Robeson.2