Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  Mandela spent as much time as possible with Winnie, between the Drill Hall and his law office: “I was both courting her and politicizing her,” he remembered.42 He was able to wrest her away from a rival, who turned out to be none other than his opponent and nephew Kaiser Matanzima, and he introduced her to his political friends, including Indians and whites. In the midst of the treason ordeals, they were not sure what to make of this innocent-looking twenty-two-year-old, with her lively talk, her fascination with clothes and her big, soulful eyes, who seemed to belong to a quite different world. “She was very glamorous but terribly shy,” said Paul Joseph’s wife, Adelaide. “She was very innocent and naïve,” remembered Yusuf Cachalia’s wife, Amina. Mandela took Winnie to Rusty Bernstein’s house on Sundays, where she would sit in the Bernsteins’ daughter’s bedroom reading fashion magazines. “She was right outside the political circle,” said Bernstein, “but Nelson didn’t worry about that.”43 Winnie embraced Mandela’s political friends as her own: she stayed with Ismail and Fatima Meer in Durban, idolized Lilian Ngoyi, regarded Helen Joseph as a mother and saw Tambo as a father figure.44 She was awed by Mandela’s air of authority as a hereditary chief “who would not listen to a woman.… The way he walks, the way he carries himself he is in fact paramount chief.”

  Mandela never formally proposed, but Winnie found herself swept into matrimony. Her family worried about the risks. “My father was totally against the marriage,” she says now. “My sisters literally cried, and they begged me not to marry such an older man.” They warned her that Mandela would end up in prison, and that she would be “just an instrument” to keep the house going and to visit him.45

  But they were in love. Mandela had now divorced Evelyn, and in June 1958 he and Winnie were married, a year after they had met. Mandela was allowed a six-day relief from his bans to travel down to the Transkei for the wedding celebrations, first at the ancestral home of the Madikizelas, then at Bizana town hall, accompanied by friends including Ruth Mompati and the white communist Michael Harmel. In his speech Winnie’s father warned her that Mandela was already married to the struggle, and that if she wanted to be happy with her in-laws she must do what they did: “If your man is a wizard, you must become a witch.”46 Mandela would lovingly call her a witch in his letters.

  Mandela returned to the constraints of the Treason Trial, and his beautiful young wife provided an exotic contrast to the somber tedium and commitment of the courtroom. His dramatic appearances with Winnie, both with wide smiles, seemed to belong to showbiz rather than to politics, and his image acquired a new dimension: not just the lawyer and revolutionary, but the lover with the adoring partner. They were visibly fascinated with each other, with a sense of drama which was heightened, as in a wartime romance, by the obstacles and dangers they faced. Through his long years in jail Mandela would relish the times they could snatch together, and would recall their former life: “Do you remember the wonderful dish you used to prepare for supper? The spaghetti and simple mince from some humble township butchery! As I entered the house from the gym in the evening that flavour would hit me full flush in the tongue.”47

  But his marriage to a passionate girl, with her own demands, and with all the complications of three alienated stepchildren, did not provide the kind of stable home base which many of his political friends took for granted. Walter Sisulu still had Albertina as his “backbone,” subsidizing his own meager pay and sharing all his political commitment: “I could rely on her, and there was no complaining … she had mastered the situation in an amazing way, and that gave me wonderful courage.”48 Mandela’s life with Winnie was more exciting, but more distracting, less predictable; while she was soon aware of how much politics dominated his life: “He did not even pretend that I would have some special claim to his time,” she remembered. “There never was any kind of life I can recall as family life, a young bride’s life where you sit with your husband. You just couldn’t tear Nelson from the people: the struggle, the nation came first.”49

  Winnie very soon developed her own political ambition and instinct. “I discovered only too soon how quickly I would lose my identity because of his overpowering personality—you just fizzled into being his appendage, with no name and no individuality except Mandela’s.… I vowed that none of this should apply to me.”50 Her older friend Ellen Kuzwayo observed that she was drifting away from routine social work.51 She began to attend meetings where her white friends Helen Joseph and Hilda Bernstein taught black women about public speaking; but she soon burst out: “I don’t think we need to be taught how to speak. From our suffering we can just tell people how we feel.” She began to find her own voice, with an expressiveness and empathy which amazed her teachers. And she began campaigning with a powerful populist instinct, bypassing the more conventional speeches of the ANC leaders. “She wasn’t bothered about being in the limelight,” said her Indian friend Adelaide Joseph. “She wanted to be there with ordinary people.”52

  Winnie was soon drawn into the women’s struggle, which had been gathering momentum in the wake of the Defiance Campaign. It showed its strength when the government determined to make women carry the hated pass-books which controlled Africans’ movements, which until then had applied only to men. The ANC formed the Federation of South African Women, affiliated to its Women’s League, which by August 1956 organized a march of 20,000 women to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to deliver a petition to the Prime Minister, Hans Strijdom. The marchers arrived singing their militant anthem: “Strijdom you have tampered with women. You have struck a rock.”53 Winnie joined the Orlando branch of the Women’s League, and was soon making her mark.

  “I’ve married trouble!” Mandela told his lawyer friend George Bizos one day. Winnie, it turned out, had been charged with inciting other women against carrying passes. When asked to show her own, she had shouted that she would never carry one, and when a policeman came to her house with a summons she had assaulted him. “Have you married a wife or a fellow agitator?” Bizos asked Mandela. Winnie later explained that the policeman had entered her bedroom, where she was dressing to be taken to prison. She had ordered him out, he had grabbed her and she pushed her elbow into his chin so that he fell on the floor. He then charged her with assault. Bizos took on the case, and she gave her evidence with a confidence and clarity which amazed the Afrikaner magistrate, who let her off.54

  Four months after their marriage, in October 1958, already pregnant, Winnie shocked Mandela by announcing that she would join a mass protest in Johannesburg, and ignored his efforts to dissuade her. She was arrested and jailed together with a thousand other women, keeping up their spirits in prison and making friends with two Afrikaner wardresses. Mandela arranged bail for her, along with others. Winnie had embarked on her own passionate political crusade. Later, Mandela would reprove himself for having been too preoccupied with his own problems to give her support and advice in the face of all her frustrations. As he wrote to her: “I then led a life where I’d hardly had enough time even to think.”55

  Some of Mandela’s old friends could never understand why he had chosen Winnie: they thought his leadership was being distracted by this aggressive “new woman,” who came from outside any ANC tradition, and that he had married too much trouble.56 Yet there was clearly political as much as sexual electricity between the couple, as between the Peróns in Argentina or, later, the Clintons in America. Winnie’s impetuous assertiveness and crowd-pleasing oratory complemented Mandela’s more reserved campaigning, like a wilder descant to his steady bass. At social occasions, with their charisma and their sharp clothes, they were a model public couple of the late fifties, bringing an aura of American glamour to their politics as they entered a dance hall, with the spotlight shining on them. Winnie was soon developing her own sense of theater, and would soon appear as an Amazon of the revolution.

  *When I was writing a book about the trial, The Treason Cage, I included profiles of Luthuli, Sisulu and Tambo, but not Mandela; I thought he was too d
etached to be a future leader, and would be less forthcoming.

  10

  Dazzling Contender

  1957–1959

  WHILE THE Treason Trial droned on, Mandela was caught up in the biggest political crisis in the forty-five years of the ANC’s existence. It was ultimately to split the organization apart, and to threaten Mandela’s own position even more seriously than he realized at the time. Ever since the Congress of the People the ANC had been under attack from the exclusive African nationalists, or Africanists, who opposed the Freedom Charter, with its assumption that the land belonged to everyone, and who called for Africans to take militant action and to stop cooperating with communists or other races. The Treason Trial had given luster and nationwide recognition to the ANC leaders, but it had also focused attention on their collaboration with Indians and whites, which further antagonized the Africanists.

  Mandela was well placed to understand the impatience and resentments of the Africanists, for they had something in common with his Youth Leaguers a decade earlier, and included some of his old allies. In different circumstances he could have been their leader, but now that he was committed to a broader multiracial nationalism in alliance with the communists he regarded the rebels as a clear threat to the ANC’s unity, which he saw as crucial to the struggle. He was the more exasperated because they were taking advantage of the Treason Trial to gain support from the grass roots. The two sides were depicted in straightforward ideological colors: nationalists versus communists, exclusive versus inclusive. There were in fact many overlaps and blurs, but behind the confrontation lay long-standing personal resentments and cross-currents which became clearer in retrospect, and which eventually made reconciliation impossible.

  • • •

  THE TREASON TRIAL continued to embroil Mandela and his fellow accused in endless legal argument. Although the government showed no signs of giving up its case, in December 1957, after almost a year of preliminary hearings, the prosecutor dropped the charges against sixty-one of the accused—including, surprisingly, Luthuli and Tambo. Mandela, with his record of militant speeches, was among the remaining ninety-five. The defense applied for the whole case to be discharged, but instead a new prosecutor was appointed: the former Minister of Justice Oswald Pirow, a militant anticommunist who had been an avowed Nazi supporter during the war, and who now claimed that new evidence had emerged of a dangerous conspiracy which meant that the country was living on the edge of a volcano.

  When the magistrate, Mr. Wessel, concluded that there was enough evidence of treason for the case to go to the Transvaal Supreme Court in Pretoria, Mandela realized that he had become too confident that the whole trial would collapse, and that he and his fellow defendants might yet be sent to jail.1 Behind all the absurdities of the trial—the long-winded prosecutor, the incompetent detectives and the ridiculous definitions of communism—there still lay the government’s original purpose: to put the accused out of action, and to convict them through existing legislation.

  The ANC leaders’ preoccupation with the day-to-day proceedings in the courtroom played havoc with their organization, giving more opportunities to their opponents, who were not on trial. The leaders tried to rally supporters with a We Stand by Our Leaders campaign, but they had no opportunity for speech making or canvassing. The Africanists, who were closer to the ground, accused the leaders of being high-handed and undemocratic, treating the membership like “voting cattle.”2

  The Africanists’ strongest base was in Mandela’s home territory of Soweto, where they were led by an impetuous populist, Potlako Kitchener Leballo. Mandela, who was his attorney, thought of Leballo as a wild card, undeniably brave, but immature, like many of his followers.3 He had worked for the United States Information Service office in Johannesburg under the American David Dubois, where he was allowed to duplicate his leaflets.4 Joe Slovo claimed that the Pan Africanist Congress, which emerged in 1959 as the party of the Africanists, was founded at a meeting in the USIS offices.5 Leballo’s American links encouraged allegations that the CIA was backing the Africanists, which were never substantiated.

  From Leballo’s house in Soweto came the journal the Africanist, burning with diatribes and vituperation against the ANC’s leftist leadership. The Africanists, like nationalists everywhere, had more scope for emotive language than the multiracialists; their invective against “aliens,” “Eastern functionaries” and “vendors of the foreign method” was much livelier than the clichés of anticolonialism and Marxism which Mandela and his colleagues favored, and made better copy for the white journalists who did much to publicize them. And their spokesmen were also more colorful and picturesque. Josias Madzunya, the Africanist ANC Chairman in Alexandra, was a former peddler who wore a long overcoat in the hottest weather and who could be relied on for firebrand speeches. Peter Raboroko, their spokesman on education, was a brilliant talker who became a witty polemical journalist. Zeph Mothopeng, a dedicated teacher before he was fired for opposing Bantu education, was an intellectual who at first sounded aridly theoretical, but who proved to be a fearless campaigner and was to be imprisoned on Robben Island.

  The Africanists, including some of the old Youth Leaguers, attacked Mandela and his allies for moving closer to the whites and the communists, and away from their own people. And Mandela was certainly now moving in different circles. “He was not shy to admit that he had shifted ground,” said his law clerk Godfrey Pitje. “ ‘Look, chaps, you can’t blame me for this,’ Mandela would say in the office. ‘I’m beginning to look at things differently.’ ”6

  The Africanists saw Mandela’s group being seduced by the charms of white communists like the Slovos in their comfortable suburbs, while they were men of the people who drank at the shebeens in the townships. Peter Raboroko, who had been at school with Tambo, described later how Mandela and his friends were “catapulted from the atmosphere of African society into this.… To be on a first-name basis with white women, and this type of thing, it just became so very glittering for them.” When Mandela denounced Raboroko as a “shebeen intellectual,” he took it as a compliment: “My political reputation is going to be in rags and tatters,” he retorted, “when people learn I was seen walking with you.” When Raboroko talked about the masses, Mandela said, “You mean the shebeens?” “Oh yes,” replied Raboroko. “By the way, I’m not as fortunate as you—you have your drinks in posh houses in Lower Houghton and Parktown. I have to be content to be drinking with the people in shebeens!”7 In fact Mandela spent most of his evenings working, and still avoided liquor. “Now and again I went to a shebeen out of curiosity,” he said later, “but even now I don’t know what happens in a nightclub.”8

  The Africanists were simmering with resentment against the ANC leadership in Mandela’s own neighborhood of Orlando, and the tension came to a head at a special conference of the Transvaal ANC in Orlando in February 1958. Leballo led the attack against the provincial executive, which was weakened by the absence of banned leaders like Mandela and Sisulu. The meeting broke up in disorder, and the ANC National Executive had to use emergency powers to take over the Transvaal branch. Two months later the national ANC faced humiliation when it tried to mount a stay-at-home protest against the whites-only general election in April 1958. The move, opposed by the Africanists, was a fiasco: Duma Nokwe, the Assistant Secretary of the ANC, called it “bitterly disappointing, humiliating and exceedingly depressing.”9 The ANC leaders could not tolerate the Africanists’ open defiance, and at a secret meeting they expelled Leballo from the organization.

  The final break came in November 1958, when the Transvaal ANC summoned a crisis conference. It was opened by Luthuli, who again warned against reacting to the Afrikaners with “a dangerously narrow African nationalism.” The Africanists regarded Mandela and Tambo as among their prime enemies. Tambo, still Secretary of the ANC, tried to calm the rival factions as they wrangled over credentials and delegates, with Africanist thugs confronting loyalist thugs. To avoid defeat in a vote the Afri
canists retreated from the hall, sending a letter to the leadership proclaiming that they had broken away to become “the custodians of the ANC policy as it was formulated in 1912.”10

  Could the split have been avoided? A potential mediator had been Nthato Motlana, Mandela’s family doctor, an impish, fast-talking man who had worked with him in the Youth League and the Defiance Campaign. Motlana was a rare phenomenon in Orlando: an entrepreneur who believed in capitalism. “A sharp businessman,” Mandela recalled. “Right from the beginning he was very shrewd.”11 Motlana was suspicious of white communists, and was friendly with the Africanist Robert Sobukwe, who was his patient and who held meetings in his surgery; but he was against a split, and thought breakaways were setting back liberation struggles all over Africa: “I told them not to run away from the whites—to stay in the ANC and fight them from there.”12

  Motlana warned Mandela that the Youth Leaguers were complaining about communist influences, and threatening to leave the ANC, but Mandela reassured him: “Don’t worry, Nthato. The ANC is going to rule the country.”13 Looking back later, Mandela felt the ANC had been too quick to reject the Africanists: “There were cases where I think we could have exercised more tolerance and patience.… We expelled too many people.” But he saw the split as probably inevitable in the wake of the Freedom Charter: “I don’t think we could have avoided it.”14

  Mandela now parted ways with some of his oldest political friends, including his early mentor Gaur Radebe, now fiercely anticommunist. Peter Mda, his inspiration in the Youth League, remained an Africanist, and was convinced that Mandela was a secret Communist Party member, but still felt for him “a friendship of the heart if not of the head.”15 Mandela was less warm in remembering Mda: “I never had any meaningful contact with him whatsoever as a public figure,” he wrote from jail. “I have formed the picture of a man who has stuffed his bones with a lot of marrow, a thinker with a tongue that can both bite and soothe.” He saw Mda as being as different from himself as war from peace: “Mda was a young man concentrating on the former and I drawing attention respectfully to the latter.”16