Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  Just before the treason verdict, Mandela had arrived at the Orlando house with Sisulu, Nokwe and Joe Modise, and told Winnie: “Darling, just pack some of my clothes in a suitcase with my toiletries. I will be going away for a long time.” She packed tearfully, asked the gods of Africa to take care of him and appealed to him to sometimes spare some minutes for his family: “He scolded me for reminding him of his duties.”22

  Mandela’s colleagues had decided that he should remain in hiding, to organize the protest planned for May 31. But he still had to avoid arrest, while he simultaneously needed to publicize the strike as widely as possible. It was, paradoxically, from underground that he became chief spokesman for his people. He was to become more famous in the shadows than he had ever been in broad daylight.

  Mandela still needed to persuade white liberals and well-wishers to support the ANC, and to counter the PAC’s propaganda. For two months he kept popping up from hiding to talk to white editors, attempting to allay their worries, particularly about communist influence in the ANC. In Johannesburg he argued with Laurence Gandar, the sympathetic and self-effacing editor of the Rand Daily Mail. In Port Elizabeth he visited John Sutherland, the quiet, liberal editor of the Evening Post—who was concerned for Mandela’s safety, since the paper’s offices were opposite the police station. Mandela thanked Sutherland warmly for his past support before quickly rejoining Govan Mbeki, who was waiting outside; he was delighted when the Post splashed the stay-at-home campaign. In Cape Town he talked for two hours with Victor Norton, the experienced editor of the Cape Times. Norton, who had met many world leaders, afterward told his political editor, Tony Delius, that he’d never met a more impressive man than Mandela.23 He also told the British High Commission about his remarkable visitor: few white South Africans, he said to the British diplomat Peter Foster, “had any idea of the caliber of the Africans with whom they would have to deal.” Norton virtually despaired of the whites’ keeping the initiative in their hands for much longer, but nothing about Mandela or his planned strike appeared in the Cape Times.24

  In Johannesburg Mandela saw his old ally from the Defiance Campaign Patrick Duncan, now editor of the fortnightly magazine Contact, who was fiercely criticizing the banned ANC leaders for their communist influence and projected stay-at-homes. Finally Mandela said, “Do you think I’m so stupid that I can’t run an organisation without being influenced by people we’ve associated with?”25 But at a second meeting in Cape Town, according to Randolph Vigne, who was present, the two men talked like old friends who never had any rows. This time Duncan admitted that the Treason Trial had clearly shown that the ANC was not communist, and promised to correct his past reports and to support the National Convention—which he did with a bold turnabout in the next issue of Contact.26 He later told Peter Foster that he was impressed by Mandela’s intelligence and confidence—though he “made little secret of his left-wing sympathies.”27

  The communist influence was still perplexing foreign diplomats. “I must confess that we have very little idea of what the South African communists are up to,” Foster wrote to London in January 1961, adding that the government “do not pass on much detailed information to us (if they possess it).”28 Later he blamed the government for banning moderates like Luthuli, thus putting a premium on the conspiratorial activities of militant “neo-communists.” He reported that “Mandela, though less certainly a communist than Nokwe, belongs to the group of highly intelligent younger leaders of the ANC who now appear to be in effective control.”29

  The British government was now rethinking its relations with South Africa, which left the Commonwealth in March 1961. After the vote for a republic, Verwoerd had applied to remain within the Commonwealth, and Macmillan had tried hard to persuade the new black members and Canada—whose Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker, was especially hostile to apartheid—to allow South Africa to stay. But Verwoerd still refused to accept a black High Commissioner in Pretoria, which proved the last straw, and in the end he withdrew his application. Macmillan was devastated and depressed. “The wind of change has blown us away, for the time,” he wrote to Sir John Maud, “but peace will come one day, although perhaps after much sorrow and tribulation.”30 But Oliver Tambo in London regarded white South Africa’s exclusion as a victory; and he would later maintain that black South Africans had never left the Commonwealth.31

  Mandela continued to place hope in pressure from the Commonwealth, influenced by its new Asian and African members; and he had been encouraged by the opposition to apartheid, particularly by Diefenbaker. The British Embassy, as it now became, felt somewhat less obliged to placate the apartheid government now that South Africa was outside the family atmosphere of the Commonwealth. By June the Ambassador, Sir John Maud, was proposing that the Embassy should “reinsure” against the possibility of a future black government by making discreet contacts with black politicians—though these contacts did not amount to much.32 The British government also decided to use its intelligence services to make every effort to penetrate the white citadel in Pretoria, which they knew would be difficult and delicate. So it proved: four years later a senior agent of MI6, acting as an embassy official, was “severely interrogated” about his contacts with the white opposition, and was soon afterward “PNG’d”—declared persona non grata. But MI6 decided that making links with black opposition leaders would be too risky, and could get them tortured or killed.33

  Mandela was now concentrating on the three-day stay-at-home strike scheduled to begin on May 31. His Action Committee wrote to Dr. Verwoerd explaining the call for a National Convention. Verwoerd later told Parliament: “A letter has been received, signed by N. R. Mandela, in arrogant terms, to which no reply has been given.”34 Mandela also wrote to Sir de Villiers Graaff, the leader of the United Party, who had voted for the ANC to be banned in 1960. He warned Graaff that South Africans must choose between “talk it out or shoot it out,” and asked him: “But where, sir, does the United Party stand? … If the country’s leading statesmen fail to lead at this moment, then the worst is inevitable.” Graaff evidently took no notice: he made no mention of Mandela in his memoirs, published thirty years later.35

  A month before Republic Day, Mandela went to Durban to discuss the protest with the banned ANC executive and their allies. Some delegates argued strongly that a stay-at-home was now quite inadequate in the face of the people’s anger and the state’s violence, and favored a general strike. The run-up to Republic Day would clearly be a testing time for ANC discipline. Luthuli warned the New York Times that violence could easily be provoked: “The police sometimes act in a manner that gives the impression they want to shoot the people.”36 Mandela, who had been touring the country, was very conscious of the people’s impatience, particularly since they had been provoked by the PAC. He had heard many complaints within the ANC that it was not politically correct to stress nonviolence when the enemy was “relying on naked force.”37 The far left was much more critical: “We thought this was an impossible demand to make on the workers,” said the Marxist historian Baruch Hirson, who was later to be sentenced to nine years in jail for sabotage.38

  But Mandela kept emphasizing the importance of nonviolence in dramatic messages from hiding. Ten days before Republic Day he rang up the Johannesburg Sunday Express from a coin box: “We emphatically deny reports that violence will take place or that the three-day stay-away will be extended.”39 His campaign was gaining him brief support from English-speaking editors who were themselves opposed to an Afrikaner republic.40 On May 12 the Johannesburg Star profiled Mandela for the first time, alongside a bright, smiling photograph: he had “assumed the mantle of official spokesman for the Native people,” though he stressed that “native leadership is a collective leadership.”41 He was also beginning to feature in British papers: as “a large lawyer, untravelled but enormously well read, slow speaking, nattily dressed,” in the Manchester Guardian of May 27; and as a “big handsome bearded man with a deep resonant voice” two days later
.42

  Meanwhile, the government was preparing an alarming show of strength, mustering its defense forces, canceling leave and making mass arrests. On the morning of the strike Saracen armored cars patrolled the townships, helicopters hovered overhead and troops were posted at crossroads. It was, Mandela reckoned, “the greatest peacetime force in South Africa’s history.” The PAC, to the fury of the ANC, was helping the government by calling on everyone to go to work.43 And the English-language press were now more anxious. Two days before the strike the Star reported: “Next Monday promises to be as nearly normal in Johannesburg as any other Monday.”44 Mandela thought the press and radio “played a thoroughly shameful role,” publicizing every warning against the strike beforehand, and playing down its successes on the first day.45 The Rand Daily Mail rushed out a special edition with the headline “MOST GO TO WORK: ALL QUIET.” When Mandela rang his friend on the Mail, Benjamin Pogrund, Pogrund began apologizing for the subediting of the article, until Mandela interrupted: “It’s all right, Benjie. I know it wasn’t your fault.” In fact, as Pogrund looked back on it, “The headline and the report [were] fatally flawed, the result of rushed and sloppy journalism.”46

  Mandela and his secret Action Committee were in hiding and unable to watch the strike for themselves, which made them all the more sensitive to the press headlines they saw. They made the agonizing judgment to call off the strike after the first day. “It was a courageous decision,” wrote Rusty Bernstein, “but left a deep depression in the movement.”47

  In fact the strike, and the boycott of trains and buses, had been more successful than the ANC realized, and state evidence at the Rivonia trial three years later would reveal its effectiveness. The political scientist Tom Lodge reckoned afterward that “there was a surprisingly widespread degree of participation.”48 But at the time Dr. Verwoerd could convincingly proclaim the calling-off of the strike as a victory, which made Mandela deeply aware of the power of the media. It was a lesson he would never forget.

  Some liberal whites welcomed the defeat of the strike as providing an opportunity for conciliation. “The best use which opposition forces can make of this breathing space,” wrote Allister Sparks in the Rand Daily Mail, “is to start organising a multi-racial National Convention without delay.”49 But most whites now felt able to ignore the black threat.

  Mandela was now convinced that peaceful protest policies had reached a dead end, and recognized that he must move into a new stage of his struggle. On the day of the strike Ruth First had arranged for a British reporter, Brian Widlake of Independent Television News, to interview Mandela on television for the first time—and, as it turned out, the last time for nearly thirty years. Widlake was taken to the house near Zoo Lake of Professor Julius Lewin of Witwatersrand University. Mandela was filmed—with a brick wall behind him, which was thought an appropriate symbol—for twenty minutes, of which three were transmitted.50 The atmosphere was tense, and Mandela’s television debut was not inspiring—“He appeared glum, weary and patently depressed,” Rusty Bernstein reckoned.51 It did not cause much of a stir in Britain, but what Mandela said was to be crucial to South Africa’s future. “If the government reaction is to crush by naked force our nonviolent demonstrations,” he declared, “we will have to seriously reconsider our tactics. In my mind, we are closing a chapter on this question of non-violent policy.”52 The ANC executive later criticized Mandela for defying their policy on nonviolence, but he believed that “sometimes one must go public with an idea to push a reluctant organisation in the direction you want to go.”53

  Over the next few days Mandela kept popping up from hiding to act as the ANC’s chief spokesman. But journalists were not excited by his stiff style. Ruth First—his usual go-between—took Stanley Uys of the Johannesburg Sunday Times to see Mandela in Hillbrow for a half-hour interview. Uys found him very tense, and when they met again thirty years later Mandela reminded him: “You weren’t impressed.”54 Ruth First also took Patrick O’Donovan from the Observer and Robert Oakeshott from the Financial Times, together with Mary Benson, to a flat in the white suburb of Yeoville, where they found Mandela wearing a striped sports shirt and grey trousers. Benson was struck by his relaxed air and his laughter, but Oakeshott thought his formal rhetoric fell short of the occasion. Mandela claimed that the strike had been a tremendous success, and that nonviolence was the only realistic policy against a highly industrialized state, while denying that it was a policy of moderation: “Our feeling against imperialism is intense. I detest it!” But as they left he again said that he thought “we are closing a chapter on this question of a non-violent policy.”55 O’Donovan wrote in the Observer on June 4 that the ANC’s recent tactics had “served only to hand the government a well-publicized triumph.”56 It was only at this time—on June 7—that the Foreign Office in London at last opened a file on Mandela.57

  In fact, Mandela had been discussing abandoning nonviolence with his colleagues since early 1960, when the government had ruthlessly suppressed the pass-burning campaigns. So long as the Treason Trial was continuing all the accused had to insist publicly that they supported nonviolence as a principle, but many of them, including Mandela, had begun to see it as a tactic which might have to be abandoned.58 Mandela was always more impatient of nonviolence than Sisulu or Tambo, as he had shown in Sophiatown in 1953. But now ordinary people were overtaking him with an impatience that, as a politician responding to public opinion, he could not ignore.

  Across much of the political spectrum there was a clamor for violent action, often wild and desperate, like the attacks of anarchists and assassins in Russia in the late nineteenth century. In Pondoland, Tambo’s home area in the Eastern Cape, a peasant movement called Intaba (“the mountain”) had taken over whole areas through guerrilla tactics before they were crushed by the government; Govan Mbeki, who met their leaders in the forests, now insisted that ANC must have a strategy “that would mobilise both city and country dwellers.”59 The PAC was soon to produce a terrorist offshoot in the Cape called Poqo (“alone”), which assassinated whites in reprisal for brutal oppression. A few liberals and leftists organized the African Resistance Movement (ARM), which aimed to blow up buildings. The Communist Party was forming its own semimilitary units to cut power lines. Even members of the Unity Movement in the Cape were preparing their own sabotage movement, called the Yu Chin Chan Club after Mao’s term for guerrilla warfare. As one of them, Neville Alexander, later wrote: “All of us, regardless of political organisations or tendency, we were all pushed, willy-nilly, across this great divide, toward the armed struggle, from a non-violent background, totally unprepared.”60

  Mandela and the ANC would often be criticized for the rashness and amateurishness of their armed struggle, but they felt compelled to move quickly, both to catch up with the mood of the people and to forestall the alternative of uncontrollable atrocities. “Violence would begin whether we initiated it or not,” Mandela wrote afterward. “If we did not take the lead now, we would soon be latecomers and followers in a movement we did not control.”61

  The ANC and the Communist Party were already talking about violence, as Rusty Bernstein recalls, in an unstructured way, without formal meetings.62 “At the moment when you’re considering a new road,” said Joe Slovo, “it doesn’t come in one flash with everyone simultaneously realizing it. It’s a process—with Mandela playing a very important part in the process.”63 The communists were more ready to advocate violence than the ANC, which under its President, Albert Luthuli, had been committed to nonviolence; and the government liked to equate violence with communism. But the arguments crossed party lines, and many of the communist leaders were concerned to restrain black militancy.64

  A month after Republic Day, Mandela put forward to the ANC working committee his historic proposal: that the ANC must abandon nonviolence and form its own military wing. He argued persuasively, quoting the African proverb, “The attacks of the wild beast cannot be averted with only bare hands.” To his surprise
he was opposed by Moses Kotane, the veteran black communist who was close to Luthuli. Kotane still saw scope for nonviolent methods, and warned that violence would provoke massacres. Sisulu privately agreed with Mandela that there was no alternative to violence, but kept quiet, and later arranged for Mandela to talk privately with Kotane, whom he persuaded to accept the armed struggle.

  The crucial argument was then taken up in Stanger, in Natal, at two dramatic meetings presided over by Luthuli, who immediately made clear his Christian concerns about the move to violence. He nevertheless reluctantly agreed that there should be a military campaign with its own autonomous leadership, which would be separate from the ANC, though ultimately responsible to it. The second meeting, at which the ANC met with its Indian, white and Coloured allies, went on through the night. Mandela’s plan for a military wing was opposed by many Indians, several of whom were still influenced by Gandhi. J. N. Singh, one of Mandela’s oldest friends, restated his belief that it was not nonviolence that had failed them, but “we have failed nonviolence.”65 Other friends, including Monty Naicker and Yusuf Cachalia, prophetically warned that violent tactics would undermine the more pressing task of political organization. Mandela would admit later that the ANC did make precisely that mistake: they drained the political organizations of enthusiastic and experienced men, concentrated their attention on the new organization, and neglected the “normal but vital task of pure political organisation.”66

  Many younger Indians had rejected passive resistance, and Mandela and Sisulu were also supported by white communists, including Slovo and Bernstein. “They had a sober approach,” Sisulu said later. “You could reason everything, and they did not have a mechanical Party approach: they relied on people.”67 The Party certainly played a major role in creating the military force, but the idea did not come from Moscow. “It was presented as a fact,” said the Russian expert on Africa Apollon Davidson. “Moscow was sometimes more moderate than the groups it supported, in Palestine, Algeria or South Africa.”68 And the ANC had growing control over the military wing. After 1963, according to Slovo, it was almost exclusively directed by ANC exiles, while “the Party involvement was negligible.”