On his way through Africa Macmillan kept revising the speech he would deliver in Cape Town, and it was repeatedly redrafted by his officials, including two rarefied mandarins in his entourage: the polymath David Hunt from the Commonwealth Office, and the dapper High Commissioner, Sir John Maud (“With Maud,” said a South African wit, “you have to take the smooth with the smooth”). Macmillan was so nervous just before he went into Parliament in Cape Town that he had to go to the lavatory to be sick. It was a masterly speech, with a style and historical sweep which at first disarmed the Afrikaner MPs. He praised their nationalism as the first of the African nationalisms, before spelling out that “there are some aspects of your policies which make it impossible” for Britain to support South Africa in the Commonwealth.8 It was not until the British press had underlined the speech’s true meaning that the message struck home. As Die Burger, the leading Afrikaans paper, put it: “Britain could no longer afford to be seen in our company when certain of our affairs are broached.”9
Macmillan had asked to meet the leading black politicians, but his program was tightly controlled by Verwoerd’s government, and the High Commission, as we have seen, knew little about African leaders like Mandela. At the whites-only garden party given by Sir John Maud, Patrick Duncan urged Macmillan to see the black leaders, but found him suddenly deaf.10
Eventually Macmillan decided that his Cape Town speech had made such an impact that he would be forgiven if the meeting with the ANC leadership never came off.11 Albert Luthuli would have told Macmillan, he said afterward, that Africans would be better off if South Africa were outside the Commonwealth: “Britain would have more influence, and the Afrikaners would be more isolated.” But he was pleasantly surprised by Macmillan’s speech: “It gave the African people some inspiration and hope.”12
Mandela too thought it was “a terrific speech.” Despite his distrust of British imperialism, he would never forget Macmillan’s courage in the lions’ den, warning a “stubborn and race-blinded white oligarchy” about the wind of change. Thirty-six years later in Westminster Hall, Mandela would partly model his own speech on Macmillan’s, with the same historical sweep; and he would recall a cartoon in a South African paper showing Macmillan after the speech, with the caption from Julius Caesar:
O! pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers.13
Macmillan’s “wind of change” soon proved an understatement: only six weeks later he had to explain that he had not meant “a howling tempest which would blow away the whole of the new developing civilization. We must, at all costs, avoid that.”14 Even while he was touring Africa the Belgian government was deciding, with minimal preparation, to give independence four months later to the Congo—which would rapidly disintegrate into civil war and chaos, introducing the Cold War into the heart of the continent and spreading fear through white South Africa. The headlong pace of the imperial retreat encouraged the PAC to promise to overthrow white domination in South Africa by 1963. Mandela was exasperated by their assumption that the Afrikaners would give up power as easily as the colonial powers had. “The PAC did not appear to have any plans to prepare the people for that historic moment,” he wrote later from jail. They assumed it would be achieved “merely by going to jail and waiting there for the Nats to fall on their own.”15
The two rival Congresses were now bitterly divided—like so many rival liberation movements in Africa—criticizing each other as much as their common enemy. While the ANC was preparing for its demonstration against pass laws on March 31, 1960, Sobukwe and the PAC were pushing ahead with their own antipass campaign, with much less planning. Sobukwe believed that bold, spontaneous leadership would automatically mobilize the masses, and on March 18 he abruptly announced that in three days’ time—ten days before the ANC’s planned demonstration, “In every city, town and village, the men must leave their passes at home,” and surrender themselves at police stations for arrest, pledging themselves to “No bail, no defense, no fine.” He belatedly invited the ANC to join them, but Nokwe predictably declined, saying that the plan had “no reasonable prospects of success.”16 Mandela was equally skeptical: he thought that the PAC was merely a “leadership in search of followers,” and was preempting the ANC’s own plans with blatant opportunism.17
On March 21 Sobukwe and about 150 others surrendered themselves without passes at Orlando police station—where the PAC’s following was weak, as it was in most of South Africa. But it was much stronger in the black townships of Cape Town and in Sharpeville, outside Vereeniging in the Transvaal, where the ANC had long been poorly organized.18 In Cape Town 1,500 people offered themselves for arrest, while huge crowds gathered in protest until the police dispersed them, killing two. In Sharpeville a crowd of about 10,000 surrounded the police station, unnerving the police, who opened fire and shot sixty-seven people dead.
The Sharpeville massacre, like no previous South African confrontation, immediately reverberated around the world. In Washington, President Eisenhower, facing his own racial problems in election year, said he would not sit in judgment on “a difficult social and political problem six thousand miles away.” But the State Department unprecedentedly criticized Pretoria, and hoped that black South Africans would be able to “obtain redress for legitimate grievances by peaceful means.”19 At the United Nations the Security Council blamed the government for the shootings, with Britain and France abstaining.20 In South Africa the stock market collapsed, and whites queued to buy guns or to apply to emigrate.
The black political scene was transformed overnight. Sobukwe and the PAC had received a huge boost. It was, Mandela thought later, “not so much because of what they were saying, which was quite immature. It was because of the massacre.”21 But the surge of mass anger seemed at first to vindicate Sobukwe’s belief in spontaneous action. The PAC’s nationalist rhetoric caught the black imagination more vividly than the ANC’s more cautious statements: “Sobukwe’s got a bang, man,” as one African journalist put it. “He’s down to earth, down, down, down.” Many blacks were openly singing the PAC anthem:
We the black people
Are crying out for our land
Which was taken by crooks.
They should leave it alone.22
Mandela accepted that the PAC leaders had shown courage, and he quickly realized that the ANC “had to make rapid adjustments.”23 After Sharpeville he spent the whole night secretly discussing how to respond with Sisulu, Nokwe and Slovo. They decided that the ANC leaders, beginning with their President, Albert Luthuli, should publicly burn their pass-books. They would also call for a Day of Mourning, when workers would stay at home in protest against the massacre. They formed a subcommittee working from Slovo’s house to prepare the strike, while Nokwe went to Pretoria to arrange for Luthuli to burn his pass.24 Many communists, including Rusty Bernstein, had serious doubts about pass burning, which they feared could lead to evictions, sackings and banishment; but the ANC had decided, and the communists tried to help.25
For ten days after Sharpeville the iron structure of apartheid seemed to be crumbling. On March 26 Luthuli was photographed holding the charred remains of his pass-book; two days later the great majority of black workers obeyed the ANC’s call for a stay-at-home, while Mandela and Nokwe burned their passes in front of cameras and journalists, and a few hundred others followed their example. “Only a truly mass organization could coordinate such activities,” Mandela reflected.26 Most remarkably, the government appeared paralyzed; on March 25 the Commissioner of Police had announced that he was suspending arrests for not carrying passes.
The ANC now seemed to be calling the shots. When I talked to Mandela in Orlando on March 29 he was dismissive of the PAC’s reliance on spontaneous response: “You’ve got to have the machinery, the organisation.” He was touchy about the PAC’s role in originating the protest, insisting that the ANC’s potato boycott had been a crucial prelude to the pass burning, and sounded confident th
at the ANC initiative would succeed. With him was Duma Nokwe, his short body slumped in a huge armchair, who was jubilant that a thousand pass-books had already been burned: “We never dreamt it would happen so soon. We’ll have them roasted. The country is now in a pre-rev …”—he stopped himself from saying “revolutionary”—“in the state before major changes take place.”27
Was it a revolution? It was certainly one of those brief interims in a nation’s history when it seemed that anything could happen. In the shebeens there was sudden exuberance: “There’s a crack in the white wall”; “The police are so polite, it hurts: one cop even called me meneer [mister]”; “They’ve thickened our skins so much, we can’t feel the pricks any longer.” Even the state-owned broadcasting system played an old revolutionary signature tune, smuggled into the studio by a militant black employee: “Wake up, my people. Be united. The fault is with us. All nations keep us under their feet.”28
By March 30 the initiative was passing back to the PAC in Cape Town, their stronghold. A general strike had paralyzed the city, and the police began brutally attacking the townships to break it. The black workers responded with an apparently spontaneous march of 30,000 people on the city center, led by a twenty-three-year-old student in short trousers, Philip Kgosana, who had modeled himself on Sobukwe. When they reached the city he seemed for an hour to hold the country’s future in his hand: but he was tricked into dispersing the crowd by the promise of a meeting with the Minister of Justice. Instead he was arrested and detained for nine months.29 Historians continue to argue whether the march could have precipitated a revolution; certainly without the deception of the crowd the police might well have caused a far worse massacre than Sharpeville, which would have provoked a much more dangerous black explosion.30
As it was, the government quickly took advantage of the situation, declaring a state of emergency on the same day and detaining over 2,000 people. Mandela had been secretly tipped off beforehand by a friend in the security police, and had alerted colleagues including Ahmed Kathrada, who in turn told Bernstein, who warned his communist friends not to sleep at home.31 It was decided that a few activists—including Harmel, Kotane and Dadoo—should disappear underground, while Mandela and the rest would submit to arrest.32
Mandela was arrested and taken to Newlands jail, near Sophiatown, where he spent the night in appalling conditions, which he described the next day to Helen Joseph, who had been imprisoned separately: “Fifty detainees had been locked up for the rest of the night, after their arrest at one o’clock in the morning, in a yard open to the sky and lit by one electric bulb. It was so small they could only stand and were given neither food nor blankets. In the morning they were taken to a cell, about eighteen feet square, with sanitation only from a drainage hole in the floor, flushed at the whim of the policeman in charge. Food, even drinking water, came only at three o’clock in the afternoon, twelve hours after the men had been brought to the cells.”33
The government was now moving rapidly to prevent further protest. On April 8, with the support of the opposition United Party, it pushed through a new Unlawful Organisations Bill by which, after forty-eight years, the ANC was finally made illegal, together with the PAC. They would remain so for the next thirty years. The black townships were in political confusion, as no one knew who was in prison and who had escaped. The crisis atmosphere was intensified on April 9, when Dr. Verwoerd was shot and wounded by a white farmer named David Pratt at an agricultural show in Johannesburg.
For a few days South Africa remained in a political limbo, with Verwoerd out of action and his cabinet bewildered. One Minister, Paul Sauer, made a speech on April 19 stating that Sharpeville had closed the old book of South African history, and that the country must reconsider its race relations “seriously and honestly.”34 But this conciliatory mood soon passed. Verwoerd recovered rapidly and took charge, more intransigent than ever. The police enforced their powers still more brutally. The heroic bonfire of pass-books petered out as people remembered that without a pass they could not draw a pension or post office savings, or apply for a house. They began queuing up to replace the passes they had burned.
Already by the end of April, a month after Sharpeville, the talk of imminent revolution looked wildly premature. “This isn’t it,” said the journalist Can Themba. “The guys have been talking about the wind of change becoming a hurricane: it never seemed to occur to them that it might be only a breeze.”35 The relaxation of the pass laws had proved purely tactical, intended to prepare for a much more systematic clampdown. Pretoria showed no signs of yielding to pressure from Macmillan or any other Western leader; and the government was soon making plans to train the police, with help from abroad, in much more efficient and ruthless methods of surveillance and torture.
The aftermath of Sharpeville had revealed the lack of realism in both the ANC and the PAC. There were few parallels between South Africa and the rest of the continent, where the colonial governments were reluctant rulers and the liberation movements faced much easier rides to freedom. The struggle of black South Africans against the Afrikaners would clearly be much tougher than victories further north.
In this extraordinary atmosphere the three judges in Pretoria had resumed the Treason Trial, calmly listening to the evidence about events of five years before. Each day, the thirty accused were brought into the courtroom from prison. Mandela was eventually allowed out at weekends to visit the offices of Mandela & Tambo, whose practice had been undermined by the trials. He was escorted by a sympathetic Afrikaner policeman, Sergeant Kruger, who trusted him not to escape. But during the week he had to spend the nights in prison and the days in court, facing the most crucial stage of the Treason Trial.36 The government had now given the trial an added significance, as an alternative to an inquiry into the causes of the Sharpeville massacre, which the opposition was demanding. As Dr. Verwoerd said on May 20: “The trial itself has in part the character of an inquiry into the causes of disturbances.”37
The defense lawyers, headed by Bram Fischer, were indignant about the constraints imposed by the state of emergency, and maintained that justice could not be ensured in such abnormal conditions, with their clients in prison and often unavailable for consulting. They proposed a bold strategy, which Mandela approved: they would withdraw from the case until the emergency was over, leaving the thirty accused to defend themselves. It was a controversial maneuver, but it would give the defendants a chance to demonstrate their intelligence to the judges, and to address them directly. The prisoners’ long legal discussions in jail often surprised their warders: when Mandela visited Helen Joseph to discuss the proceedings he noticed that some of the female warders became fascinated by the arguments, and by the prisoners’ political commitment. The withdrawal of the defense team laid a special responsibility on Mandela and Duma Nokwe, the only two lawyers among the thirty. They now had to help the others prepare their cases, but some of them complained about the lack of proper representation. Mandela assured them that they were making a strong moral argument.38
In August 1960, after five months of restrictions, the state of emergency was lifted and the lawyers returned to the courtroom. It was now Mandela’s turn to give evidence—which he welcomed all the more since he had been banned from speaking anywhere else. The young barrister Sydney Kentridge was assigned to Mandela’s defense, to prepare him for the witness box and conduct his examination. Kentridge’s unassuming style concealed a relentless rationality; it would take him to the top of his profession in both South Africa and Britain, and he would become famous when he extracted the full horrors of Steve Biko’s torture and death from police witnesses at the inquest. In the Treason Trial courtroom, Kentridge was soon full of admiration for Mandela. “It was then that I first realized,” he recalls, “that he was a natural leader of men. He was firm, courteous, always based on thought and reason. His real political intellect emerged from his answers to questions. He had no hidden agenda, which became clear in his evidence, under heavy cross-ex
amination.”39
Certainly Mandela’s testimony revealed a more thoughtful politician than had emerged before. Under all the pressure of his examination and the stormy political crisis, he rose to the challenge with total control. In his own statement he carefully explained his political development and philosophy, while stressing that it was not necessarily the philosophy of the Congress. It was, he thought, the strongest speech he had ever made.40 He described his earlier belief in African nationalism and his conversion to multiracialism. He reasserted his emphasis on nonviolence, and rejected the concept of revolution in the sense of “mighty leaps.” He explained how he had visualized the ANC achieving universal franchise through gradual concessions of qualified voting, leading eventually to a people’s democracy. He himself favored, he said, a classless society, such as he believed existed in Hungary, China or Russia, but he conceded that for a long time Africans would have different classes—workers, peasants, shopkeepers and intellectuals. He was emphatically opposed to imperialism: “Insofar as I have had experiences of imperialism personally, there seems to be very, very little to say for it.… It has gone all over the world, subjugating people and exploiting them, bringing death and destruction to millions of people.” He was also opposed to capitalism, but claimed not to know whether it was linked to imperialism. He insisted that the ANC had taken no view on capitalism, and that the terms of the Freedom Charter, apart from breaking up the mining monopolies, would leave capitalism “absolutely intact.”
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