Mandela
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The prisoners soon found compensations for their detention. Like most of the others, Mandela had long been banned from meetings and travel, and now he had a rare opportunity to exchange views with friends from other cities. The prisoners soon organized lectures about the current crisis and the history of the ANC. In themselves they comprised a living history of Congress, with veterans like Calata and Matthews alongside young activists from Sophiatown such as Robert Resha and Peter Ntithe, and members of old ANC families like Tennyson Makiwane.5
After two weeks in the Fort, the prisoners were taken to the temporary courtroom which had been prepared for the trial. The old Drill Hall in the center of Johannesburg was a forbidding military relic, with a corrugated-iron roof half lined with hessian and a quaint gabled façade overlooking a parade ground. Mandela and the other prisoners were driven there in police vans escorted by troop carriers; crowds of sympathizers were waiting for them outside the hall, and others inside watched them emerge into the improvised courtroom. Can Themba described the scene: “The accused came up in batches of twenty, some of them cheerful, some sullen, some frightened, some bewildered, some consumed in high wrath.… When Nelson Mandela, attorney, came up he hunched his shoulders and seemed to glower with suppressed anger.”6
The magistrate was F. C. A. Wessel, an elegant, silver-haired Afrikaner from Bloemfontein. He began speaking, but it soon became clear that his words were inaudible without loudspeakers; the hearings were adjourned until the next day. When the prisoners returned they were put inside a huge wire cage built in the courtroom; the defense lawyers immediately objected, and the cage was eventually dismantled.
At last the chief prosecutor began reading the 18,000-word indictment. The charge of high treason was based on speeches and statements made by the accused over the previous four years, beginning in October 1952, when the Defiance Campaign was at its peak, and continuing through the Sophiatown protests, the Congress of the People and the Freedom Charter, which formed the main basis of the charge. The prosecution argued that the accused conspired to overthrow the government by violence and to replace it with a communist state; but they had to prove the violent intentions.
Mandela reflected how often treason had recurred throughout South Africa’s short history. In both world wars some Afrikaners had rebelled against war with Germany, taking up arms on the enemy’s side, and had been tried for treason. The Afrikaners in office had been reluctant to execute their own people, and when Dr. Malan’s government came to power it had released all those convicted of treason during the Second World War, most notably the notorious Nazi Robey Liebbrandt. But Mandela knew that the Nationalists would be much harsher toward their black enemies. He did not think the government genuinely believed that the accused were guilty of treason; the Freedom Charter, after all, enunciated principles which were accepted throughout the civilized world. He thought the whole trial was a frame-up, and that the government merely intended to put the Congress leaders out of action for several years.7
He soon realized that the trial would be much more prolonged than he had expected. On the fourth day the 156 prisoners were released on bail of £25 for blacks, £250 for whites (“Even treason was not colourblind,” Mandela commented), the money being guaranteed by supporters.8 The court adjourned until January 1957, and the accused were allowed to return to their homes. But it was clear that their lives would be disrupted for a long time to come.
The preliminary hearings, which began in January 1957, were intended only to establish whether there was a sufficient case to go for trial before the Supreme Court: but this process was to stretch over nine months and three million words, before any of the accused had even been examined or cross-examined. After the initial high drama of the arrests, the hearings soon settled down to an eerie combination of tedium, humor and menace. Day after day through the sweltering summer the ritual continued under the tin roof. Each morning Wessel, the courteous magistrate, would enter, lightly touching the corner of his desk as he passed, and the tousle-haired prosecutor, Van Niekerk—Joe Slovo called him “Li’l Abner”—would resume his indictment in a monotone.9 Most of the accused managed to maintain their sense of humor. When Kathrada passed a strip cartoon about Andy Capp—the cloth-capped male chauvinist in the London Daily Mirror—to one of the comrades he replied that he couldn’t see its relevance to Marxism-Leninism; Kathrada suggested it might help people to understand the lumpenproletariat.10
The trial soon dropped out of the headlines, and white Johannesburgers forgot about the supposed threat to their survival which was being examined in their midst. Watching it day after day, I had to keep reminding myself of the trial’s real significance as a succession of Afrikaner and black policemen revealed their incompetence and ignorance. The chief defense lawyer, Vernon Berrangé, a former racing driver and fighter pilot, was a sharp and theatrical questioner who shot down much of the evidence presented by barely literate detectives and spies. Writing from prison, Mandela recalled that he had been nicknamed “Isangoma” (diviner) by the accused.11 Berrangé achieved his greatest coup when he cross-examined the state’s “expert witness” on communism, Professor Murray, and quoted a passage which Murray condemned as “communism straight from the shoulder.” It turned out to have been written by Murray himself.
The farcical nature of much of the evidence concealed the trial’s real danger: “These proceedings are not as funny as they may seem,” the magistrate warned the giggling suspects at one point.12 Mandela was worried by the frivolity of some of the young accused: when Lionel Morrison and others put up an umbrella to protect themselves from the leaking roof, he reproved them sternly.13 He was well aware of the high stakes, and knew that the humiliations of the police would only harden the government’s determination to put the ANC out of action.
Mandela took heart from a bus boycott in Alexandra, which began a week after the treason arrests—fourteen years after the boycott which had so impressed him when he had lived in Alexandra in 1943. Once again, black commuters walked twelve miles a day rather than pay an extra penny on the buses. The ANC, as Luthuli admitted, had no part in organizing the boycott; it could only claim that it “helped create a climate of resistance in which such action could take place.”14 But the boycott threw up new local organizers outside the courtroom, including two ANC activists, Thomas Nkobi and Alfred Nzo, who later became prominent leaders. Eventually the government had to give way to the boycotters by passing a special bill requiring employers to subsidize the bus fare. It was the first act of Parliament in the forty-seven years of the Union to have been passed as a result of African pressure, and it reminded Mandela that boycott could be a powerful instrument, but as a tactic, not a fixed strategy: “The boycott is in no way a matter of principle,” he wrote in Liberation the next year, “but a tactical weapon.”15
Mandela kept a lower profile in the courtroom than Luthuli, Matthews or Sisulu: he never featured in the coverage of the left-wing paper New Age, the main chronicler of the trial.* His tall figure, immaculately dressed, carrying a briefcase and talking with slow deliberation, always seemed aloof from the rest. He still had some of the style of a proud chief who had been caught up with a slightly louche urban crowd. Mandela’s later biographer Mary Benson, who worked with him on the Treason Trial Defence Fund, saw him then as a rather slick young man, and “did not take him very seriously.”16 But the defense lawyers noticed that he had a quiet authority over his fellows, who often sought out his legal advice; and his own testimony would reveal how deeply he had considered his commitment to the cause.17
Z. K. Matthews, with his rigorous legal mind, listened to the trial with growing contempt: “These chaps seem to think that I am the mastermind of the ANC campaign, with everyone else doing what I want,” he wrote to his wife, Frieda. “How wrong they are!” He watched the semiliterate police presenting their incoherent evidence in muddled English and producing supposedly incriminating documents like a 1956 calendar or a notice saying “Soup with Meat.” He saw how t
he Afrikaner hatred of blacks was linked to their resentment of English disdain: “It is amazing how deeply the Afrikaners resent the superior attitude of the English. They are making us suffer too because they think we have sold our souls to the English.” But he worried that in ten years’ time “the hatred of the African for the European will be worse than the hatred of the white man for the black.”18
The long Treason Trial brought the various racial groups inside the courtroom much closer together. “I doubt whether we could have devised so effective a method of ensuring cohesion in resistance and of enlarging its embrace,” said Luthuli.19 “We didn’t realize we had so much in common,” said Paul Joseph, an Indian ex–factory worker from a humble background who became a friend of Mandela. “The trial created a cohesion which didn’t exist before.”20 The Africans found themselves pressed together with whites, Indians and Coloureds in roughly the same proportion as the population of the country. It was just the kind of multiracial partnership many of them had been advocating. Whatever propaganda motives had led the government to bring the accused to trial, they could now spread their own counterpropaganda that this was a united, genuinely nonracial movement.
During the daily lunch hour the accused shared their sandwiches and devised recreations, including the Drill Hall Choir, and discussed their arguments and problems. When they went home in the evenings they were made to feel like heroes rather than traitors, with free drinks in shebeens and parties given by white and Indian well-wishers, which extended their contacts and friendships among the other races. Bram Fischer and his wife gave dinners for black leaders, including Luthuli and Mandela, where they met his lawyer friends; Joe Slovo and Ruth First held parties at which Africans, Indians and whites drank, jived and embraced, apparently oblivious of color. They joked about being hanged for treason, and seemed unconcerned about spies, even welcoming the local CIA agent Millard Shirley, an engaging and gregarious American who was ostensibly writing a book (“My Mother Was a Missionary”) but was always turning up at ANC functions.21 But the courage of the “traitors” was real enough. Some of the accused may have been careless or histrionic—“peacocking,” as Africans called it—but the courage and the danger were real enough. In jail later, Mandela remembered one of the defendants’ white liberal benefactors, Ellen Hellman, the Chairman of the Institute of Race Relations, arriving in the courtroom to discuss fund-raising. He began to compliment her on her elegant outfit, but she cut him short: “Mr. Mandela, just tell me in simple terms, what do you want, what do you want?”22
There was also some interest from liberal South African businessmen. Luthuli and a few others, not including Mandela, were invited to meet Harry Oppenheimer of the Anglo-American Corporation. He politely told them that their demands for universal suffrage were too extreme, and that boycotts put off white support. They replied that they could not conceal their real demands, however unpleasant they might seem to whites.23 Oppenheimer discreetly gave £40,000 to the Treason Trial Defence Fund.24
Practical help from abroad was received from British and other well-wishers through the Defense Fund, which was launched by Canon Collins in London and Bishop Reeves in Johannesburg to cover legal and other costs. It was administered first by Hilary Flegg, then by Mary Benson, then by Freda Levson, with all of whom Mandela became friends.25 Mandela was also heartened by the appearance as observers of many Western jurists, including Gerald Gardiner, the British barrister who later became Lord Chancellor, and by American solidarity, including a visit from George Hauser of the American Committee for Africa, and gifts from Sammy Davis Jr.26
But British and American diplomats in Pretoria continued to avoid meetings with the black opposition, lest they offend the Afrikaner government. Ambassador Byroade invited only whites to the U.S. Embassy’s Independence Day party in July 1957, in contrast to the Soviet Consul General’s open hospitality.27 Successive British Ambassadors invited no blacks to their Queen’s Birthday parties, and made no direct contact with any ANC leaders; their diplomats relied on quoting journalists in their dispatches, which made no reference to Mandela.28 In London, South Africa had been under the Dominions Office, which had a cozy family relationship with the white Commonwealth who had been allies in the Second World War, and was more concerned with keeping lines open to Afrikaner nationalists than with African troublemakers; while the Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was not yet grappling with the problems of Africa.29
All through the Treason Trial Mandela had been existing in a strange limbo, between normality and danger; but his life had been further disrupted by a thrilling romance. When the trial began he had been leading a bachelor existence. His marriage with Evelyn had fallen apart, with recriminations on both sides. Evelyn would recall with some bitterness how Mandela would spend nights away without explanation, and claimed that he once nearly throttled her—a charge which Mandela emphatically denies.30 She was more alienated as her husband became more political. After he was first arrested for treason, he returned home from prison on bail to find Evelyn departed and the house emptied, even of its curtains. Mandela had to try to reassure his two children, Makgatho and Makaziwe (Maki), who were deeply upset.31
Mandela’s friends speculated whether he would remarry, and he was often seen with eligible women. One of his female companions was Ruth Mompati, the resourceful secretary in his law office. Another was Lilian Ngoyi, the vivacious and forceful leader of the ANC Women’s League, who was one of his fellow accused in the Treason Trial. Helen Joseph, who was close to both of them, thought how effective they would be as man and wife.32
But it was not an experienced politician who was to capture Mandela, nor any of the other women he and Evelyn had quarreled over, but a newcomer, a beautiful young social worker of twenty-two, sixteen years younger than Mandela.33 Winnie Nomzamo Madikizela came from Bizana in Pondoland, part of the Transkei, where her father, Columbus Madikizela, was a headmaster. (It was also the home area of her hero, Tambo: “I was actually made by Oliver Tambo,” she says now.34) Winnie’s clan, the Ngutyana, was one of the most powerful in Pondoland. Her great-grandfather Madikizela had been a fierce chieftain in Natal until he fled from Shaka’s Zulu army to settle near Bizana. Her grandfather Chief Mazingi, a prosperous trader with twenty-nine wives, was converted to Methodism. Her mother, who was thought to have white blood, was passionately religious, and had nine children before she died when Winnie was aged nine, after which her father raised her strictly as a Methodist. He remained awesomely aloof, leaving Winnie’s two strong grandmothers to influence her most. Her father’s mother, Makhulu, taught her the ways of her ancestors, while her mother’s mother, “Granny,” was a staunch Methodist who made her own Western-style dresses. “She derived from Makhulu her imperious authority,” said Winnie’s lifelong friend Fatima Meer, “and from Granny her love for smart clothes and an obsession with cleanliness.”35
Winnie as a child had been strong-willed, rebellious and sometimes violent. Once she made a knuckle-duster with a tin and a nail with which she hit her sister in the mouth; the wound had to be sewn up by the doctor. Winnie never forgot the thrashing her mother gave her for it. “It was survival of the fittest,” she explained later. “I had to fight my brothers and sisters; I never had clothes of my own. There used to be a lot of physical fights. Looking back, I got quite ashamed when I was older.”36 She excelled at school, and kept clear of politics: when her school friends rebelled in sympathy with the Defiance Campaign, she stuck to her studies.37
In 1953 Winnie came up to Johannesburg to become a social worker, living at the Helping Hand hostel in Jeppe Street and studying at the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work, above the Bantu Men’s Social Centre. She went around with two other attractive young students, Marcia Pumla Finca and Harriet Khongisa, together with Ellen Kuzwayo, an older student who later became a writer, who tried to protect them from predatory men.38 Winnie was a bright student, and two years later she became the first black social worker at Baragwanath Hospital. She was socia
ble, spirited, fascinated by clothes and by shoes (which she did not wear until she went to secondary school). “I had to become a smart city girl, acquire glamour,” she explained much later, “before I could begin to be processed into a personality.”39
In Johannesburg Winnie went to a few meetings of the Trotskyist Unity Movement, to which her brother belonged, but stayed aloof from politics. One day when she visited a law court with a friend she saw the towering figure of Mandela coming in to conduct a case, as the crowd whispered his name. Soon afterward she was introduced to him at a delicatessen by Adelaide Tsukudu, a nurse at Baragwanath Hospital who was soon to marry Oliver Tambo. “I didn’t play Cupid,” Adelaide insists, “and Winnie didn’t break up the marriage; it was already crumbling.”40 Mandela was obviously fascinated by Winnie, and kept looking at her. The next day he invited her to lunch, on the pretext of asking her to help raise money for the Treason Trial Defense Fund. His friend Joe Matthews picked her up, and they lunched at Azad’s Indian restaurant.41