Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  He believed that the South African government was moving toward fascism, which could be expressed in the Xhosa phrase “indlovu ayipatwa”—“an elephant that cannot be touched.” The ANC could expect to come up against more ruthless responses: “The government will not hesitate to massacre hundreds of Africans.” But Mandela still seemed optimistic—even after Sharpeville—that “The nationalist government is much weaker than when we began.” He was hopeful that the government would be brought to realize that its policies were futile, by internal and external pressures: “Countries which used to support the racial policies of South Africa have turned against them.”41

  Helen Joseph, who had already nervously testified, was inspired by Mandela’s calm confidence. He was only rarely moved to anger, she noticed, for example when Judge Rumpff suggested that giving votes to uneducated people was like giving them to children: “Isn’t it on much the same basis,” asked Rumpff, “if you have children who know nothing and people who know nothing?” Mandela was quietly furious, all the more so since his own father was illiterate, and two elderly men among the accused had never been to school.42 He also faced problems when confronted with some documents and speeches by more militant colleagues. What about Robert Resha’s statement to volunteers that if they were asked to murder, they should murder, murder? That was an “unhappy example,” said Mandela: “He was merely dealing purely with the question of discipline.” What about his fellow accused Thembile Ndimba, who had said: “If instructions are given to volunteers to kill, they must kill”? It was, Mandela admitted, “an unfortunate way of illustrating discipline,” but was not ANC policy. When shown a reference to the “seizure of power” from 1951, he responded: “I don’t read any force or violence in this phrase.” Asked about lectures prepared by Rusty Bernstein which had a clear Marxist message, he said: “Unfortunately the manner in which they were handled may have given the impression that they carried some authority from the ANC.”

  But Mandela was able to show that neither he nor the other ANC leaders had advocated violence at any time in the previous decade, and that while he refused to criticize the communists, he was not committed to the Party.

  KENTRIDGE: Did you become a communist?

  MANDELA: Well, I don’t know if I did become a communist. If by communist you mean a member of the Communist Party and a person who believes in the theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin and who adheres strictly to the discipline of the Party, I did not become a communist.43

  When Kentridge privately asked him why he didn’t attack Stalin after he was denounced by Khrushchev in 1956, he replied: “It was not our political function. What Stalin did was not against us.” Kentridge reckoned that Mandela saw communists as his enemy’s enemies, and therefore his friends; but after much contact with him, he was certain that he was not a Stalinist or a member of the Communist Party.44

  Some of Mandela’s colleagues would later insist that at this time he was indistinguishable from the communists, or was even a secret member of the Communist Party. “He was very close,” said Ben Turok, who was a member of the Central Committee. “If he wasn’t in the Party, that was tactical.”45 Rusty Bernstein said simply, “By the sixties I found it hard to tell who was in the Party and who was not.”46 The government would continue to charge that Mandela was a Party member, which anticommunists abroad would eagerly take up. Even in 1966, after four years on Robben Island, he would be informed by the Department of Justice that he was being listed as a member of the Party. He wrote back to “emphatically deny that I was a member of the CPSA since 1960 or at any other time,” and asked to see affidavits and details of any communist conferences that he had attended. Four months later the department informed him that they had decided not to put him on the list “at this stage.”47 In fact, as his communist friend Ismail Meer said later, “Nelson was never, never, in the closest scrutiny of a well-organized security system, found to be a member of the Communist Party.”48

  The peculiar South African obsession with communism in any case distorted the question. Many South African communists and their sympathizers, like Mandela, were pragmatic in their support: Mandela would later suggest that he was using the communists more than they used him.49 Subsequent events would show how little he was committed to their basic dogma. But in the early sixties, the more ruthless the apartheid government became, the more courageous and admirable the communists appeared—like the French communists in the wartime resistance against the Nazis.

  Certainly the banning of the ANC pressed it closer toward the Communist Party, forcing them together underground. After the state of emergency was lifted in August and most of the prisoners were released, the ANC leaders were able to meet secretly to work out how to operate as a banned organization. Mandela realized that the ban necessitated a drastic reorganization of the ANC to trim down the whole structure, dissolving the Youth League and the Women’s League and concentrating on a small inner group. “Politics for any active member became highly dangerous,” he wrote from jail, “and a form of activity reserved only for the hard core.”50 Operating in a climate of illegality, he recognized the need for a quite new psychological approach.51 When the Communist Party had been banned in 1950, he had warned that the government was aiming at the ANC as much as the communists: now the enemy was using exactly the same weapon against both.52

  For all the earlier warnings and Mandela’s proposals for the M-Plan, the ban took the ANC, like the PAC, by surprise. “Mere survival in the face of the police onslaughts,” wrote the historians Tom Karis and Gwen Carter, “had become as much as either Congress could hope for.” Immediately after the state of emergency was lifted the ANC set up an Emergency Committee, which would continue to operate until the organization was legal again, and it published a statement refusing to submit to the ban.53 But with 2,000 people detained, the ANC was severely restricted.

  The Communist Party, having already been banned for ten years, was more accustomed to underground work, and some key activists, including Mandela’s friends Moses Kotane and Michael Harmel, were now in hiding. In the midst of the emergency Kotane and a few others had let it be known that the Party was back in business; and they were still able to issue some propaganda through their clandestine journal, the African Communist, which was first published in October 1959. This “emergence” of the Party was criticized by many members who had not been consulted, but in fact (according to Bernstein) it simplified relations with the ANC, and dispelled fears of hidden agendas.54 The ANC was still poorly organized for underground existence, with only fragments of the M-Plan able to provide street-level organization. They needed the communists to help them to work undercover.

  The ANC executive had taken one precaution which proved crucial: in June 1959 they had decided that in the event of a crisis Oliver Tambo should immediately leave the country through Bechuanaland, and set up an office in Ghana. Six days after Sharpeville, on March 27, 1960, Tambo left a Johannesburg suburb, seen off by friends including Ahmed Kathrada, to be driven across the border by Ronald Segal, editor of Africa South. He eventually made his way via Dar-es-Salaam to London.55 Over the next thirty years Tambo’s statesmanship, and the mutual trust between him and Mandela in jail, was to be the basis of the ANC’s survival. At the time Mandela did not realize how vital the external wing of the organization would become.56

  Mandela was now much more on his own, separated from the partner whose judgment had always been so valuable to him. He was left with the bleak task of winding up the law practice of Mandela & Tambo. He continued to practice on his own, working from Kathrada’s flat, 13 Kholvad House, where clients kept arriving until the long-suffering Kathrada, confined to the kitchen, began to protest.57 Soon afterward Mandela went underground, and had to abandon his law practice forever.

  Nineteen-sixty continued to be a year of crisis. In October the government held the all-white referendum Verwoerd had promised on the question of whether South Africa should become a republic. It was agreed by a surprisingly n
arrow majority—850,000 votes to 775,000—but it needed only a simple majority. Mandela did not feel strongly about the country becoming a republic. He thought it would not add “even a fraction of an ounce” to South Africa’s sovereignty, and saw it as merely an emotional question for Afrikaner nationalists, who looked back nostalgically to their old “semifeudal” republics in the nineteenth century, before the British undermined them. And he hoped that a republic, by removing their grievance, would “loosen the rivets” which held Afrikaner intellectuals together. But he could not accept a referendum in which only whites could vote.

  Despite the government’s show of strength after Sharpeville, Mandela was determined to go ahead with yet another peaceful protest, a strike or stay-at-home. He still, like most of the ANC leaders, retained a surprising optimism. He may have talked about South Africa moving toward fascism and becoming a police state, but he and his colleagues were almost totally unprepared for it when it came.58 “It is difficult to appreciate,” wrote Karis and Carter, “the extent to which African leaders and other radical opponents of the government felt that the trend of events was in their favor.”59

  12

  Violence

  1961

  BY THE end of 1960 Mandela’s wide-ranging life in Johannesburg was rapidly narrowing. His law practice had collapsed, many friends were in exile and the social network of Orlando had virtually dissolved. His family, he reckoned, was financially ruined.1 His home life with Winnie was constantly interrupted by political tasks; when she gave birth to their second daughter, Zindzi, at the end of the year, he arrived home too late to be with her. “I rarely sat down with him as a husband,” Winnie claims now. “The honest truth of God is that I didn’t know him at all.”2

  Mandela’s political life was already moving half underground, and he was presenting a more subterranean image: no longer the youthful, clean-shaven face and the hair parted in the middle, but a rough mustache and a short black beard, so that his narrow eyes seemed to be peering out of the undergrowth.

  He was nevertheless making another attempt at peaceful organization with other parties. In December 1960 a group of thirty-six African leaders met at a Consultative Conference in Orlando and committed themselves to hold an All-In African Conference, which would in turn call for a National Convention of all races. It seemed oddly unrealistic in the light of the government’s ruthless response at Sharpeville. It showed, argued the political scientist Tom Lodge later, “just how intellectually unprepared the leadership of the Congress alliance was in 1961 to embark on a revolutionary struggle.”3 But the Marxist Michael Harmel argued that it was “essentially a demand for revolution.”4

  The police raided the meeting in Orlando and confiscated all the papers, but the plans went ahead through a committee with Mandela as Secretary. Mandela and Sisulu, in between the last stages of the Treason Trial, traveled around the country secretly to make preparations for the conference, even nipping over to Basutoland, where several ANC activists, including Joe Matthews, had gone into exile. At first they worked together with some Liberals, and also with the PAC, encouraged by the formation of a United Front of the ANC and PAC abroad. But the collaboration soon broke up: the Liberals accused the ANC and communists of taking control, while the PAC decided they should crush the conference, partly because they suspected that “plans were afoot to build up Mandela as a hero in opposition to Sobukwe.”5 So Mandela and the ANC went ahead with support only from the communists. Their collaboration was becoming stronger, in a close-knit group who could trust each other.

  The government was watching closely, and five days before the conference the police arrested ten of the organizers and served a warrant on Duma Nokwe. But the committee still managed to distribute leaflets with a “Call to the African People of South Africa” to prepare for the All-In African Conference, to be held near Pietermaritzburg in Natal, on March 22.

  Mandela needed funds to arrange transport to the conference, and boldly asked to see Harry Oppenheimer, the Chairman of the Anglo-American Corporation. Oppenheimer was the first and only businessman Mandela would meet before he was jailed. Mandela had been influenced by labor movements, he explained later, “at a time of utmost hostility to businessmen.” Oppenheimer received him very politely, as he received nearly everyone: “When we came to his office,” Mandela recalled, “he got up as if we were the president or the prime minister of a country.” Mandela asked for a particular sum: “In terms of today it was peanuts.” Oppenheimer said it was a lot of money, and asked how it would benefit him. He asked questions about the ANC, and appeared to underestimate its strength. “How do I know,” he asked Mandela, “that after giving you assistance you will not be eliminated by the PAC?”6 “Mandela addressed me boldly like a meeting, with formal phrases,” Oppenheimer recalled later. “I was ignorant about the ANC, but impressed by his sense of power.”7 Mandela did not get his money.

  On March 22 the Maritzburg Conference, as it was called, mustered a remarkable show of support for the ANC a year after it had been banned. There were 1,400 delegates from 145 different groups from all over South Africa, including the Southern Transvaal Football Association and the Apostolic Church in Zion. But the ANC clearly dominated, with their slogans, speakers and songs, including “Spread the Gospel of Chief Luthuli.” The New York Times called the event “the biggest political meeting of Africans ever held in South Africa,” and the Rand Daily Mail gave it a big headline: “AFRICANS INSIST ON A NATIONAL PARLEY.”8

  By an apparent coincidence, Mandela’s ban had expired just before the meeting—which the police seemed not to have noticed—and the Treason Trial had adjourned for a week. So Mandela was able to pop up like a jack-in-a-box, in his beard and a three-piece suit, to provide a dramatic climax to the conference and to make his first public speech since 1952.9 The audience was thrilled, their fists punching the air like pistons as they shouted the new slogan “Amandla! Ngawethu!” (“Power to the People”)—which was taking over from the less militant song “Mayibuye” (“Come Back Africa”).10 Mandela appealed again for African unity: “Africans must feel, act and speak in one voice.… We should emerge from this conference with fullest preparations for a fully represented multiracial national convention.”11

  The journalists present gave widely varying assessments of Mandela’s impact. New Age wrote that “every sentence was either cheered or greeted with cries of ‘shame.’ ” Andrew Wilson of the Observer reported “tumultuous applause.”12 “I was aware,” Wilson recalled later, “that he was the chap on whom everyone was focusing their hopes for the future.”13 Benjamin Pogrund in Contact described Mandela, “bearded in the new nationalist fashion,” as “the star of the show.”14 He nevertheless thought that the communists had exaggerated the impact of the speech, and that Mandela spoke dully, with poor delivery.15 But the panache of his emergence from hiding gave his image a new magic. It was at Maritzburg, reckoned his communist friend Dennis Goldberg, that “the sheer romanticism of the underground activity, appearing at a conference, made him a leader.”16

  Mandela himself was reassured by the fortitude of ordinary country people: he proudly watched one elderly man in an old jacket, khaki shirt and riding breeches speaking about his campaign against the Bantu Authorities and saying, “I will go away from here refreshed and full of confidence.” And Mandela was sure that the delegates were prepared for “a stubborn and prolonged struggle, involving masses of the people from town and country.”17

  The conference called on the government to summon a National Convention: if they refused, the ANC would organize multiracial stay-at-home protests beginning on May 31—the day on which South Africa was due to become a republic—for which Mandela would be the chief organizer (while strikes at the workplace were illegal, stay-at-homes were not). Mandela disappeared from the hall, which was riddled with security police, as suddenly as he had appeared. He was not to appear on a public platform in South Africa again for twenty-nine years.

  Mandela returned to Pretoria
for the Treason Trial, which still had several weeks to go before the final judgment was delivered. But on March 29 Judge Rumpff interrupted the trial and announced that the three judges had reached a unanimous verdict of not guilty: “It is impossible for this court to come to the conclusion that the ANC had acquired or adopted a policy to overthrow the state by violence.” The judges agreed that the prosecution had failed to prove that either the ANC or the Freedom Charter was communist, and they singled out Mandela’s June 1956 article for Liberation, which foresaw “a non-European bourgeois advance under the Freedom Charter.”18

  The thirty accused celebrated the verdict with a show of rapture. A cine-camera smuggled into the courtroom snatched blurred scenes of the accused lifting their defense lawyers onto their shoulders, and of a smiling Mandela in a smart checked suit edging his way through the crowd. Mandela was impressed, he said afterward, that the judges had risen above their prejudices to produce a fair decision, and he was again struck that surprising people could reveal a streak of goodness. But it was a surreal rejoicing, in the midst of bans and oppression. Mandela knew that the government would not recognize the ANC’s legitimate grievances, and would soon become much more ruthless, devising new laws that would bypass the courts.19

  He had already decided that he must disappear underground. Winnie had noticed that he had been meditating silently for some weeks, not listening to her.20 Walter Sisulu had been convinced that the ANC must have a single leader underground who could be much more active than Luthuli, now banned in Natal; and that it must be Mandela. Sisulu clearly foresaw the need for a martyr: “When we decided that he should go underground I knew that he was now stepping into a position of leadership.… We had got the leadership outside but we must have a leader in jail.”21