Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  By early morning the Congresses had agreed that Mandela should form a new military organization, which came to be called Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), or “Spear of the Nation.” He could recruit his own staff, and MK would be kept quite distinct from the ANC, to avoid threatening the ANC’s legal status (though within eighteen months the link between MK and the ANC became generally known when the ANC firebrand Robert Resha publicly proclaimed it).69 It was the historic dawn of the new phase of struggle.

  Luthuli remained ambivalent. He was worried about a violent struggle, but he was not a pacifist. Mandela would always remember him saying at Stanger: “If anybody thinks I am a pacifist, let him go and take my chickens; he will know how wrong he is.” Luthuli would later complain that he had not been properly consulted, but he had deliberately kept his distance.70 He never endorsed the decision, while he did not attack it. “Despite his deep Christian commitment to nonviolence,” wrote Slovo afterward, “he never forbade or condemned the new path, blaming it on the regime’s intransigence rather than on those who created MK.”

  But Mandela was now totally committed to the armed struggle as Commander in Chief of MK, and he threw himself into his new military role with enthusiasm. He was becoming a soldier overnight, like the Afrikaner guerrillas in the Boer War such as Jan Smuts or Deneys Reitz, about whom he had read much. It marked a complete break with ANC tradition: “The decision that Mandela should become a fugitive, and henceforth live the life of a professional revolutionary,” as Slovo wrote later, “was a major watershed in our history. It pointed the way to a qualitatively different style of clandestine work and set the scene for the complete break with pacifism or ‘legalism’ which was made soon afterwards.”71

  “We plan to make government impossible,” said Mandela in a press statement issued from hiding on June 26, now proclaimed as Freedom Day. He did not explain how this would be done, but warned that there would be “other forms of mass pressure to force the race maniacs who govern our beloved country to make way for a democratic government of the people, by the people and for the people.” There was a warrant out for his arrest but he would not surrender himself, because in the present conditions “to seek for cheap martyrdom by handing myself to the police is naïve and criminal.” “I have chosen this latter course,” he continued, “which is more difficult and which entails more risk and hardship than sitting in jail. I have had to separate myself from my dear wife and children, from my mother and sisters, to live as an outlaw in my own land. I have had to close my business, to abandon my profession, and live in poverty and misery.”72 As he put it a year later, he had to “say good-bye to the good old days when, at the end of a strenuous day at an office, I could look forward to joining my family at the dinner table, and instead to take up the life of a man hunted continuously by the police.”73

  For the first few weeks he hid in the homes of several Indian families in Johannesburg, emerging for secret meetings with the ANC executive, including Kathrada, Duma Nokwe, Alfred Nzo and Harold Wolpe, most of whom were forbidden to meet with more than two people. A small group was responsible for finding safe houses, among them Kathrada, who found the Indian hosts, and Wolfie Kodesh, an ebullient white journalist on New Age.

  It was a precarious existence. One night Kodesh found a flat near his home in Yeoville which was temporarily vacant. Ten members of the executive converged there, including Mandela, in his favorite disguise as a chauffeur. But when Sisulu arrived Kodesh noticed two old people in the corridor looking closely at him, and overheard one of them say, “Go phone up.” Kodesh quickly warned them all to disperse, but as they did not know where to hide Mandela, Kodesh suggested his own flat at 52 Webb Street. “The police would never have thought that a black man would be in a white area like that,” said Kodesh, “where he’d stick out like a sore thumb.” Mandela stayed there for two months, the tall, athletic commander and the stocky journalist an odd duo. As Kodesh remembers Mandela’s first night: “He insisted on sleeping on the camp bed, against my protests. I was woken up at four-thirty a.m. by the creaking camp bed, to find him getting dressed in long johns and a tracksuit. He explained he was going out for a run, but I refused to give him the key, so he ran on the spot for an hour. He repeated it every morning, and later I joined in, gradually improving until I was running with him for the whole hour.”

  It was dangerous for Mandela to go out, so he began to read voraciously, from books Kodesh had on his shelves or which Kathrada brought him from the public library. Kodesh told him that Clausewitz was to war what Shakespeare was to literature, so Mandela devoured Clausewitz’s classic On War. “I never saw a chap concentrate as he did,” said Kodesh, “underlining, taking notes, as if it was for a legal examination.”74 Mandela read widely, including the Afrikaner poet Ingrid Jonker (whom he was to quote in his inauguration speech forty years later). But his overriding interest was in books about liberation struggles: Mao Tse-tung and Edgar Snow on China, Menachem Begin on Israel, Louis Taruc’s Born of the People, about the guerrilla uprising in the Philippines, and Deneys Reitz’s classic about the Boer War, Commando.75 He read carefully and attentively, as Mac Maharaj, who had found some of the books for him in London, discovered when they were later imprisoned together on Robben Island.

  It was a time when many revolutionaries around the world appeared to be triumphant—Mao in China, Ben Bella in Algeria, Castro in Cuba. Mandela studied the rebellions throughout Africa—in Ethiopia, Kenya, the Cameroons and particularly in Algeria, which the ANC saw as a parallel to their own struggle. But it was the Cuban revolution which most inspired him and many of his colleagues. It was a dangerous model, a freak victory, but they were fired by the story of how Castro and Che Guevara, with only ten other survivors from their ship the Granma, had mustered a guerrilla army of 10,000 in eighteen months, and had marched on Havana in January 1959.76 Mandela was especially interested in the account by Blas Roca, the Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, which described how it was Castro, not the Party, who had realized that the moment of revolution had come. He would never lose his admiration for Castro.

  Mandela found it hard to adjust to his solitary life in Wolfie Kodesh’s flat. “I suddenly found that I had too much privacy,” he recalled from jail, “and really missed the family, company and the gym where I could completely relax. It required a lot of discipline to keep the routine demanded by my new style of life.”77 Particularly he missed Winnie, and Kodesh noticed that when Mandela talked about her and the children he dropped his military style, and had tears in his eyes. Kodesh helped to arrange several visits by Winnie, which were always tricky, as her house in Soweto was under constant watch from a nearby hill. She had to be driven by circuitous routes, changing cars on the way, exactly timed: if the car was late, the visit would be aborted. Sometimes she and Mandela would meet in a safe house elsewhere. They could always find friends of the movement who would take the risk, but they agreed never to cause them anxiety. Once they met at a house in Parktown owned by a sympathetic but nervous white editor. When he came into the room nervously rattling the drink glasses on their tray, Kodesh quickly mentioned another appointment, and took Mandela away.

  Kodesh worried more about Mandela’s safety as the newspapers began publicizing his disappearance, dubbing him the “Black Pimpernel.” “All the police have photos of the Black Pimpernel,” he warned him. “Aren’t you afraid of being caught?” Mandela replied: “I don’t think about it, I concentrate on my work.”78 But two things happened to alarm them. Once Mandela overheard some domestic workers talking about the sour milk which he had left on the windowsill. This was an African delicacy, which they realized meant that there was a black man living in the white building.79 Finally, Kodesh went one day to see the Zulu cleaner living at the top of the building, who had been told that the black stranger was a student who was waiting for a bursary to go overseas. On the man’s bed he spotted a newspaper clipping. It was an “article about the Black Pimpernel, with pictures of Nelson—though without a beard
. I thought, ‘This is bad, he knows who I’m looking after.’ I said to Nelson: ‘Pack up, you’re off, he’s seen all the pictures.’ ” Kodesh took Mandela to a house in the Johannesburg suburb of Norwood owned by a friendly doctor, where he stayed in the servants’ quarters, pretending to be the gardener.80

  Mandela had been recruiting a small group of experts to embark on MK’s campaign of sabotage. The Communist Party already had its own group of specialists for its sabotage plans, but it was clear that the two groups needed each other, and they eventually merged. Mandela would always rightly insist that MK was founded by Africans, but it needed expertise and tactical skills which the ANC alone could not provide.81 He recruited Joe Slovo, whom he trusted and admired, to serve on the High Command. “The word ‘surrender’ was not in his vocabulary,” Mandela said later. “He was daring through and through.”82 Slovo in turn praised Mandela in his own terms: “My affection and admiration for him grew. There was nothing flabby or condescending about Nelson. Ideologically he had taken giant strides since we confronted one another in the corridors of the university during the early 1950s on the role of the Party in the struggle. His keen intelligence taught him to grasp the class basis of national oppression. But the hurt of a life whose every waking moment was dominated by white arrogance left scars.”

  Slovo brought in a small group of communist experts, including Jack Hodgson and Wolfie Kodesh, who knew about explosives from their experience in North Africa during the Second World War, and Arthur Goldreich, who had fought the British in Palestine in the late 1940s. Their expertise, it turned out, was amazingly amateurish. “Among the lot of us we did not have a single pistol,” wrote Slovo afterward. “Our knowledge of the techniques for this early stage of the struggle was extremely rudimentary.”83 They practiced their skills very rashly. One morning, when Kodesh went out to a brickworks outside Johannesburg to experiment with bombs with Jack Hodgson, Mandela insisted on coming along. At the brickworks Kodesh saw a black man who clearly recognized him, and wanted to abort the exercise. But Mandela went to talk to the man, then came back and told them to carry on. The bomb duly exploded, producing a cloud of topsoil, like a miniature atom bomb. As they drove away Mandela was ecstatic, said Kodesh, congratulating them all.84

  It was in October 1961 that Mandela found a new hiding place at Lilliesleaf Farm, an isolated house with some huts in Rivonia, then a semirural suburb of market gardens and bungalows outside the municipal limits of Johannesburg. The farm had been secretly bought by the Communist Party, which disguised its ownership through Arthur Goldreich, who settled there with his family to establish a respectable front with a lifestyle that included horse riding on Saturdays. It appeared in safe hands for Mandela when his friend Michael Harmel drove him out there, and was, he later testified in court, “an ideal place for the man who lived the life of an outlaw. Up to that time I had been compelled to live indoors during the daytime and could only venture out under cover of darkness. But at Lilliesleaf I could live differently, and work far more efficiently.”85 He felt happy at Lilliesleaf, he wrote later from jail, because “the whole place reminded me of the happiest days of my life, my days of childhood.”86 Lilliesleaf served as a safe house for members of the Communist Party as well as for Mandela, although only he and the Goldreich family were actually living there: he took over a small room in the outbuildings, and was known as David Motsamayi. The farm was not, he told the court later, the actual headquarters of either MK or the ANC; but Rusty Bernstein, who often visited, worried that it appeared to be turning into MK’s semi-permanent headquarters.87

  From Lilliesleaf, Mandela frequently left in the evenings in disguise to meet ANC leaders and others. Sometimes he would be in mechanics’ overalls, sometimes as a night watchman in a long gray overcoat and big earrings, once even as a priest leading a fake funeral procession of disguised activists. He enjoyed the sense of theater: in October a group of Indian activists assembled in a house in Fordsburg, and a man in dirty Caltex service station overalls walked in. It was not until he said, “Sit down, comrades,” that they recognized Mandela.88 Ahmed Kathrada was one of a small group deputed to make sure Mandela appeared as a “new man.” They persuaded him to abandon his stylish clothes, but he still had his vanity: they could not get him to shave off his beard, which had become part of his revolutionary style.89

  Many of Mandela’s friends were worried about his lack of precautions. “He was probably the most wanted man in the country at the time, and was taking great risks,” wrote Bernstein. “But that was his style. He was one who led from the front. He never asked anyone to take a risk which he was not prepared to take first for himself.” Bernstein worried that there was an expanding circle of aides, drivers and visitors who knew about Mandela’s hiding place at Lilliesleaf, and that the responsibility for security was dangerously divided between the Communist Party and Mandela himself: “We were slow to realise the dangers in what was happening,” Bernstein recalled.90

  Winnie visited Mandela several times at Lilliesleaf, bringing him vegetables, and would then go on to see their Indian friends Paul and Adelaide Joseph. “I used to see the car was full of mud, clearly from a farming area,” said Paul. “We knew that our house was under constant observation. They were all terribly careless. But it was the early days of the underground movement, with a certain amount of romanticism.” One day the Josephs were surprised when they were driven by Walter Sisulu to a small room in Fordsburg, near central Johannesburg. “We walked in to find Nelson there. He gave us hugs, talked about family matters, and after a while said, ‘I’m glad I’ve seen you.’ That was that.” Years later they learned that Mandela had been upset by a false story that their marriage was breaking up, and wanted to help.91

  Underground life was a strain for many of the conspirators. “I truly believe that people underground come to believe themselves invulnerable,” said Dennis Goldberg, who was working secretly in Cape Town. “Eventually the stress becomes so great that they make mistakes subconsciously to put an end to it.… It’s like coming out of the cold.” Goldberg saw Mandela’s “Pimpernel phase” as inherently unstable: “There’s a downside to being the romantic leader: it makes you take more and more risks, because you must maintain that publicity, and when you’re underground you’re caught between disappearing into a hole in the ground and pulling in the lid, because you’re then safe; and emerging to do more and more daring operations.”92

  While he was in hiding Mandela traveled throughout South Africa, without much concern. Once when he drove down to Durban to stay with the Meers, Fatima was shocked to receive a phone call from a friend who asked: “Has Nelson arrived?” When he stayed for two weeks on a sugar farm at Tongaat, near Luthuli’s house, he pretended to be an agricultural demonstrator, until a farmworker asked him, “What does Luthuli want?”93 But he was determined to keep in touch with ordinary people, and was buoyed up by their support. In mid-November Mary Benson was invited to meet him outside Johannesburg. He was wearing his chauffeur’s white coat, and had just toured Natal and the Cape. “You can’t comprehend,” he told her, “unless you stay right there with the people.” She recalled how he joked about a recent narrow escape, reminisced about old times, then gave her a lift back to her sister’s flat, driving an erratic old car which kept spluttering to a halt.94

  While the MK command was plotting sabotage, white South Africans felt little sense of danger after the suppression of the stay-at-home strike. The ruling National Party had gained support from white voters by promising tougher measures against agitators. In October 1961 there had been a first shock of sabotage, when an electric pylon was cut and a government office burned down; it turned out to be the work of the National Committee of Liberation (NCL), a group of a few liberals and leftists which later developed into the African Resistance Movement (ARM).95 MK publicly dissociated itself from these saboteurs, whom they thought “temperamentally inclined toward deeds of derring-do”; but privately they agreed to coordinate their actions.96 The sabot
age only increased the solidarity of most whites, and in the election soon afterward the Nationalists achieved their biggest victory, with the electorate for the first time giving them a clear majority.97

  December 16 was Dingane’s Day, which commemorated the Afrikaners’ massacre of Zulus in 1838 but which had now become a focus for African protests. And it was then that MK performed its first acts of sabotage, with explosions in Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and Durban. They caused a national furor, though the saboteurs had not been very efficient: one of them, Petrus Molife, was killed, and another had his arm blown off. Joe Slovo tried to blow up the Drill Hall in Johannesburg, but had to retreat after being discovered by an army sergeant.98 But MK saboteurs succeeded in attacking government offices and an electrical transformer.

  On the previous night ANC volunteers had scattered leaflets and stuck up posters proclaiming the founding of MK and explaining the need for new methods alongside the traditional organizations: “The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight.” MK, they said, hoped to bring the government to its senses “before matters reach the desperate stage of civil war.”99 The police tore down most of the posters by morning, so few people got the message. “Contrary to our intentions,” wrote one conspirator afterward, “the sabotage created only a ripple of concern in the government or the country at large.”100 But Mandela and his colleagues were at first buoyant, believing that white South Africans would now realize that they were sitting on top of a volcano, and that the ANC had a “powerful spear that would take the struggle to the heart of white power.”101 “We were elated by our initial successes,” Mandela wrote later from jail, “and even those who had first doubted the wisdom of the new line were also swept away by the tide of excitement.”102