Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  The leader of a new type emerged in South Africa—the leader who would neither surrender tamely to Verwoerd terrorism, nor submit to arrest nor flee the country, but chose instead the life of an outlaw, living in the struggle, hunted, underground and yet in the midst of his people. Mandela’s rise to prominence in South Africa has been by way of united struggle of the people—unity of all Africans, unity of all national groups, unity of communists and non-communists in the fight for freedom. His life has been lived in that atmosphere.75

  Joe Slovo and other colleagues devised two different plans to get Mandela out of the Fort: the first involved escaping through the courtroom with a copied key, disguised in a wig and false beard; the second meant bribing the colonel in command of the prison, who had offered to allow him to escape in return for £6,000. But just before Mandela was due to appear in court the trial was shifted to Pretoria, rendering the plans useless.76 In the Pretoria jail Mandela briefly met up again with Sisulu, who had been sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for incitement to strike. With Mandela’s support he applied for bail while waiting for his appeal, then jumped bail to continue to plot sabotage. Mandela himself did not ask for bail: his policy was to personify defiance.

  He was now playing a more flamboyant role, using the magistrates’ court as his theater. At the opening of his trial on October 22, 1962, he began with supreme defiance, explaining that he would conduct his own defense and asking for the magistrate’s recusal because of the impossibility of a fair trial: he was “facing a white magistrate, confined by a white prosecutor, escorted by white orderlies.”77 He did not try to dispute the evidence of the hundred or so witnesses who testified to his incitement and his departure from the country without a passport.

  Lord Dunrossil, observing the trial for the British Embassy, noted that Mandela was “clearly out of practice as a lawyer,” and sometimes had to be helped by the prosecutor in his cross-examination.78 But when Verwoerd’s secretary, Mr. Barnard, testified about Mandela’s letter to the Prime Minister eighteen months earlier demanding a national convention, Mandela cross-examined him vigorously, claiming that it was improper of Verwoerd not to reply to a letter which raised such crucial issues. Barnard argued that Mandela’s letter was aggressive and discourteous, and not calculated to obtain Verwoerd’s friendly cooperation. Mandela dismissed this, but fourteen years later in jail he wrote that “there might be some merit in his claim.”

  When Mandela had finished his argument, the prosecutor, Mr. Bosch, approached him privately and told him: “For the first time in my career, I despise what I am doing. It hurts me that I should be asking the court to send you to prison.” Mandela shook hands, and assured him that he would always remember his words. But he had his own surprise waiting. He had told the magistrate that he would call the same number of witnesses as the prosecution, but in fact he had prepared none, knowing he was guilty of the charge. Instead he had prepared an eloquent “plea in mitigation,” which was really an hourlong political speech.

  That morning the courtroom was surrounded by police, and packed with Africans, including Winnie in Pondo tribal dress. Mandela walked in, raising his fist and shouting “Amandla!,” which received a loud response of “Ngawethu!” His speech was a personal justification for defying the law, beginning with his own political development. He began by describing the democratic, peaceful life of the tribal society about which he had been told as a child, with “no classes, no rich or poor and no exploitation of man by man.” He conceded that “there was much in such a society that was primitive and insecure,” but said it “contained the seeds of revolutionary democracy in which none will be held in slavery or servitude.” The first draft of the speech had continued: “My colleagues and I fight for such a society in our country,” but he amended this to the more cautious: “This is the history which, even today, inspires me and my colleagues in our political struggle.” He then discussed the conflict between conscience and the law, quoting the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who was sentenced to jail for protesting against nuclear weapons, and recalling how peaceful demonstrations in South Africa had been met by the government’s violence. He concluded uncompromisingly: “Posterity will pronounce that I was innocent and that the criminals that should have been brought before this court are the members of the government.”79 It was a defiant political manifesto, and has since often been quoted by historians; but at the time it was carefully censored by the South African press. The Minister of Justice, John Vorster, had warned that speeches by banned people in court should not allow them “to create a forum,” and the Johannesburg Star consequently omitted Mandela’s boldest statements.

  On November 7, 1962, the magistrate delivered his sentence: three years’ imprisonment for incitement, plus two years for leaving the country without a passport. The total of five years was the heaviest penalty yet given in South Africa, Mandela noted, for a political offense. But it was not unprecedented in Africa: eight years earlier the Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta had been sentenced to seven years (by a judge who had been bribed by the Governor, Sir Evelyn Baring); he was now set to become the first Prime Minister of independent Kenya.80 Mandela took some consolation from noting that he was sentenced on the anniversary of the birth of the first socialist state in Russia, which had supported liberation movements across the world, and that his trial had coincided with the crisis over Cuba, where Castro had confronted Kennedy with Soviet missiles. Above all he was encouraged that the General Assembly of the United Nations, just before his sentence, had voted for the first time to impose sanctions against South Africa.81

  But Western governments remained deeply ambivalent in their attitudes to Mandela and the black opposition, and the archives in London and Washington provide a case history of the limitations of diplomats in the face of a dangerous but valuable foreign government. Since South Africa had left the Commonwealth, the British had been concerned that they might be backing the wrong horse—white rather than black. In June 1962, while Mandela was on the run, Ambassador Sir John Maud had visited London for talks with Foreign Office officials. He himself found Verwoerd “amiably repulsive,” but he believed that Verwoerd saw Britain as South Africa’s only firm friend, and advocated a “double game”: being “forthcoming and amiable” to Pretoria in order to protect British interests, while recognizing that the continuing power of the Nationalist government was not in Britain’s interest. Maud’s policy of “reinsurance” (discreet contacts with black politicians) had had little effect: in London the officials noted that no nonwhites had been invited to the Embassy’s Queen’s Birthday party the year before. Maud explained implausibly that “there were not many suitable non-Europeans in the Cape Town area,” promised “a more multi-racial flavour” at the next party and made a tentative start by entertaining a mixed group of Girl Guides.82 The South African government was watching closely: when Maud did give a multiracial party in June 1963 he was berated for half an hour by Dr. Verwoerd in his farewell interview.83

  Maud claimed that American diplomats were more cautious than the British about developing black contacts, but in fact they had been more adventurous for some time, as they were in other parts of the world.84 Back in January 1959 the American First Secretary in Cape Town, Paul Eckel, had told the British that he entertained many blacks in his home, and that the U.S. Information Office in Johannesburg had a unique multiracial reading room (he did not mention its connection, through its copying machine, with the PAC). The American administration under Kennedy was becoming more concerned about the dangers of apartheid, and was seriously considering sanctions, to the dismay of the British; and the State Department was urging more contacts with Africans in case a black revolution was coming.85 By 1963 the U.S. Embassy was announcing with a fanfare a multiracial Independence Day party for July 4—the British Embassy in Washington said this had been arranged with “half an eye on their own domestic racial problems.”86

  The U.S. Ambassador, Joseph Satterthwaite—previously in charge of African po
licy in Washington—had been closely watching Mandela’s relationship with the communists. In December 1962 he told the State Department about Mandela’s visit to Durban immediately before his arrest, during which he had distanced the ANC from its white and Indian allies. “The rank and file of the ANC,” Satterthwaite reported, without giving any evidence for his claim, “did not know that this new tactic had been directed by the SACP and thought instead that Mandela was moving away from the white communist domination of the Congress Alliance.”87 In fact, his Embassy had no direct contact with Mandela.

  The British were always more nervous of offending Pretoria, but in November 1962, after Mandela had been sentenced, they took a “calculated risk”—as the Embassy reported to London—by allowing an enterprising junior diplomat, Marcus Edwards (now a judge), to meet political young blacks. He went drinking with some PAC journalists, including David Sibeko, a future leader who was to be murdered. They assured him that they were not “a bunch of black Nats,” and said the PAC would soon spring into action. A week later Edwards reported meeting more PAC members, who were rowdy, joking and shouting, but revealed their “seriousness and extremism.” All of them, he reported, wanted “one man, one vote, one party.”88

  Another, unnamed, British diplomat made discreet contact with the ANC through Joe Matthews in Basutoland. Matthews explained that Mandela’s commitment to violence had added to his prestige outside South Africa, and that (pointing to his own Mandela buttonhole) his arrest provided the ANC with a martyr. He and his ANC colleagues, he said, felt no sympathy for pan-Africanism, and despised the strident, ill-educated ministers in black Africa. As for the S.A. Communist Party, Matthews (although he was a leading member) said it had failed to become a mass movement because blacks found it alien, and could not swallow it emotionally. It was hard to believe, the diplomat concluded, that Matthews was a “dyed-in-the-wool Moscow man.”89

  The Foreign Office in London, relishing these titbits, pressed for more information about the black opposition.90 But the embassy resisted taking any more “calculated risks,” which it felt would encourage “indiscreet blacks to boast about their contacts with the British.” “The South African government can be expected to object violently,” wrote the diplomat Hilary Young, “if it finds that members of the Ambassador’s staff are in touch with proscribed organisations such as the PAC and the ANC whose acknowledged aim is to overthrow the present government.” Young concluded: “There is an essential conflict between our short-term objective of maintaining friendly relations with the present government and our long-term objective of developing friendly relations with those people who may succeed them.”91 In fact, the long term was largely forgotten, and the British government made no contact with the major black leaders before they went to jail. “I can’t remember going to the British or American Embassy,” Mandela told me after he became President. “I don’t think they knew I existed.”92

  Mandela’s brief career as guerrilla leader and African statesman had ended as quickly as it began, without his receiving any very visible military reinforcements or diplomatic support from the West. He would often be criticized later for his amateurism, his playacting and his inability to organize a serious military force; and he would accept some of the criticism. But the only way to present a serious threat to white South Africa would have been through a campaign of urban terrorism, as in Algeria, which would have caused horrendous reprisals and loss of life, which he and MK could not contemplate. He never imagined that the armed struggle would in itself, without sanctions or other pressures, have compelled white South Africa to change its policies. But his projection of himself as the militant and now martyred leader had a clear political message: it established him as the lost leader who had defied the system, “hunted, underground and yet in the midst of his people.”

  14

  Crime and Punishment

  1963–1964

  MANDELA DISAPPEARED from public sight into jail leaving vivid images behind him: the Black Pimpernel who had evaded the police; the military commander who championed the people’s struggle; the tribal leader in full regalia proclaiming his African identity. He did not need television—which the government would not allow into South Africa until 1976—to capture people’s imagination. From prison he could become, as Nehru described Gandhi, “a symbolic expression of the confused desires of the people.”1 His leadership depended on personal example rather than organization. He had no official position in the ANC, the armed struggle which he commanded was still in its infancy and he was now cut off from everyone. But he expected to reemerge in five years at the most. He had no idea that he would be in jail for more than a quarter of a century.

  Mandela began his sentence in Pretoria prison, which he already knew well, but his conditions were now harsher. He was no longer permitted to read books, and was allowed very few visitors. His sense of dignity was outraged by having to wear short trousers, and when he complained he was given the alternative of solitary confinement. He suffered it for a few weeks, tormented by lonely recriminations, until he decided he preferred companionship to trousers, and was allowed to join other political prisoners during the day.2

  Among them was his old PAC rival Robert Sobukwe, who had been in jail since Sharpeville, and who had found himself eclipsed by Mandela’s heroic image. They sometimes sat next to each other, sewing filthy mailbags infested with vermin. They got on well, calling each other by their clan names, Madiba and Hlathi, and arguing about everything, including whether Shaw was a better playwright than Shakespeare.3 Mandela criticized Sobukwe for having called for “Freedom in 1963,” which could not possibly have been achieved, and for underestimating the Afrikaners. When some warplanes roared overhead he reminded Sobukwe of their military might. He urged him to read Deneys Reitz’s Boer War classic Commando in order to understand their capacity for endurance. He was impressed by Sobukwe’s reasoning powers, but found him often irritable, and surprisingly subservient to the warders. Sobukwe at first refused to join Mandela in protesting against their conditions, which he argued would amount to acknowledging the state’s right to imprison them, but eventually he agreed to make a joint complaint. Sobukwe at that time was regarded as more dangerous than Mandela: when his sentence expired in 1963 he was immediately detained under a special law, known as the “Sobukwe clause,” and kept on Robben Island for a further six years, completely isolated from other prisoners—an ordeal which helped to unhinge him.4 *

  After six months in Pretoria Mandela was abruptly told to pack, because he was being transferred to Robben Island. He was handcuffed to three other political prisoners, herded into a windowless van containing only a bucket and driven through the night to Cape Town. They were escorted, still handcuffed, to an old boat where they had to stand in the hold, below a porthole through which the warders urinated on them. In a few hours they arrived on the legendary prison island, South Africa’s equivalent to Alcatraz.

  Robben Island lies only eight miles from the mainland, separated from it by a cold, rough sea which prevents escape. It is two miles long, with some beautiful coastline and sandy beaches, full of wild birds, including small penguins. There are some pretty buildings on its village street, including a church and a schoolhouse. Today the island is a popular tourist attraction. But it had few charms for the political prisoners in their separate enclave, surrounded by maximum security.

  Mandela, with his knowledge of Transkei history, was aware that the island had been a prison for Xhosa generals captured by the British in the nineteenth century. The continuity was powerful, and he would frequently refer to such predecessors as Makanna the Left-Handed, who had died on the island after nearly defeating the British at Grahamstown in 1819. Since then it had been a leper colony and a lunatic asylum before becoming a military reserve in 1936. After Sharpeville it had been reestablished as a prison, to hold the waves of political prisoners from different movements, as well as common criminals.5 From 1962 it had come under a more brutal regime designed to humiliate
and demoralize the prisoners; and two sadistic warders, the Kleynhans brothers, had earned a particular reputation for assault. In the two years from 1962 to 1964, according to a report by the academic Neville Alexander, who was imprisoned on Robben Island in 1962, there were weekly, often daily, brutal assaults on political prisoners.6

  This time Mandela would stay only a few weeks on the island, but long enough to make his mark, and to establish the principle he was to follow throughout his prison years: that the behavior of the warders was determined by a prisoner’s attitude to them. He would often recall his first encounter with one of the Kleynhans brothers, who shouted, “Here I am your boss!” and told him and the other three prisoners to jog to the cells, as if they were cattle. Mandela insisted on walking in front, deliberately slowing the pace, while Kleynhans yelled, “We will kill you!”

  When they reached their cell, which was flooded with water, two more officers appeared, one of whom shouted at the humblest prisoner that his hair was too long. Mandela intervened, saying: “Look here, the length of our hair is determined by the regulations.” When the officer approached as if to strike him, Mandela was scared, but managed to say with characteristic bravado: “If you so much as lay a hand on me, I will take you to the highest court in the land. And when I finish with you, you will be as poor as a church mouse.” The officer continued to threaten him, but Mandela became bolder when he saw that he was shaking.7 The senior of the two officers—who turned out to be the head of the prison—quietly left the cell, after which his junior soon followed.