Winnie remained the chief outlet for his emotions, bringing out a romanticism he kept hidden from others. “I have been fairly successful in putting on a mask behind which I have pined for the family, alone, never rushing for the post when it comes until somebody calls my name,” he wrote to her after a visit in 1976. “I also never linger after visits although sometimes the urge to do so becomes quite terrible. I am struggling to suppress my emotions as I write this letter.” After she had visited him in August 1975, he told her: “I said to myself: ‘There goes Msuthu like a bird in hand returning to the bush, to the wild jungle and the wide world.’ ” “I’ve plans, wishes and hopes. I dream and build castles,” he wrote the next month. “But one has to be realistic. We’re mere individuals in a society run by powerful institutions with its conventions, norms, morals, ideals and attitudes.”
Mandela felt deprived when Winnie did not write for over a month: “You witch! You’ve numerous ways of keeping me hitched to you. But this is a new one.” He celebrated her birthday in September 1975 with “a magnificent brew fit for a monarch” consisting of four teaspoons of powdered milk, three teaspoons of Milo and two teaspoons of brown sugar, all mixed in hot water. He dusted her photograph in his cell every morning. “I even touch your nose with mine to recapture the electric current that used to flush through my blood whenever I did so.” And he pictured in his mind “the shape of your forehead, shoulders, limbs, the loving remarks which come daily and the blind eye you’ve always turned against those numerous shortcomings that would have frustrated another woman.” “My appetite is good and I sleep well,” he assured her next month. “Above all, strength and supreme optimism runs through my blood because I know you love me and that I enjoy the good wishes of countless family members.” “I light up immediately your letter comes,” he wrote to her in July, “and I feel like flying where eagles cannot reach.”55
Other friends and relations helped to keep up his spirits. They made him realize (he told Winnie’s sister Nobantu) “that there are far more people wishing me well, and success in everything I do, than otherwise.”56 “Hope is the horse on which you travel to your destination to reach the winning post,” he wrote to Barbara Lamb, the daughter of his old friend Michael Harmel. “My only fortune in life is to have friends who have taught me these things among whom was your darling pa.”57
But Winnie was his main source of strength, and of political information. She would bring him news in coded language, and he would reply with hints of his real views. “The year 1975 started off badly and was disastrous from beginning to end,” he told her in 1976, “and many fault-lines that had withstood the furious onslaught of the merciless forces of fate, caved in.”58 Winnie was also the crucial messenger of political news for other prisoners: “She was the best source,” said Kathrada. “All other prisoners waited for her visits.”59 After each visit they would wait anxiously for Mandela to reveal what he had learned—which he would sometimes delay, with maddening self-control.
“Without Winnie, Nelson wouldn’t have been what he is,” said Peter Magubane, who would remain a friend of both. “When newspapers could not write about him, she could have his problems publicized. Without her, the ANC would have been forgotten. She was the only person who stood by the ANC and said, ‘I dare you to stop me.’ She was prepared to die for it.”60
Winnie, with all her faults, was becoming a major actor on the political scene in her own right, who could keep the name Mandela alive inside and outside South Africa. And in 1976, when the black opposition suddenly erupted in a new form, she would pop up in the thick of it.
18
The Shadowy Presence
1964–1976
THE PRISONERS craved more news from outside. When Mandela was caught with a newspaper he had picked up from a bench he was sentenced to three days’ solitary confinement with a diet of rice water. Newspapers were the most precious contraband, the raw material of the struggle, said Mandela afterward. The prisoners would go to extreme lengths to get a newspaper: bribing warders, stealing them from visiting priests, or retrieving the newsprint wrapping from the warders’ sandwiches. Maharaj even cajoled a warder, by getting his fingerprints on a cigarette packet, to smuggle in a newspaper every day, which he then summarized in his tiny writing to circulate among the other prisoners.1 He managed to receive the Economist magazine in spite of the censors, on the grounds that he was studying economics; but it was often heavily censored, and was withdrawn for a time in 1967.2 As Mandela wrote later: “Our knowledge of current events was always sketchy.”3
What news they received was not encouraging. Since the Rivonia trial the police had almost obliterated any effective black opposition. “There is scarcely an African political leader of note who is not in jail, in exile or under a restrictive order,” wrote Stanley Uys in the Observer just after Mandela had been sentenced. “The security police have become extremely efficient, apparently with the aid of an extensive informer network, and no underground group seems able to get organised.”4 Statements given after interrogation by ANC activists like Bartholomew Hlopane and Michael Dingake (later sent to Robben Island) show how deeply the police had penetrated the organization. “The present strength of the ANC is very weak indeed,” said Hlopane in an affidavit in October 1964. “In my opinion there are no more than fifty members at present in Soweto.”5 Mandela soon learned about the desolation from the captured saboteurs and guerrilla fighters who came to the island.
The hopelessness of resisting apartheid seemed personified by Mandela’s friend Bram Fischer. Soon after visiting Mandela on the island in 1964 he had been arrested and charged with furthering communism. He was allowed bail, and disappeared underground: he owed it to the political prisoners, he later told the court, “not to remain a spectator, but to act.”6 After less than a year he was caught, and was sentenced in 1966 to life imprisonment. Had it really been worth giving up his family and career? George Bizos asked him. He replied sharply: “Did you ask Nelson?” But Fischer paid a terrible price. In his all-white jail he was denied his human dignity, as Mandela said, “by every means his jailers could imagine.” After Fischer contracted cancer in 1974 Mandela petitioned the Minister of Justice, Jimmy Kruger, to be allowed to see him, in vain. Fischer died the next year, and Mandela always deeply regretted that he had never conveyed his real feelings to him.7
The prisoners were always worried that they would disappear from the world’s consciousness. “Right from the outset, the prison department tried to bury us alive by cutting us completely off from the outside world,” Mandela wrote later.8 “At Rivonia we were told that no one will know the name Mandela in five years’ time,” said Kathrada. “There was collective amnesia: the world wasn’t allowed to know anything about us, and vice versa.”9 “We earnestly hope that they do not become forgotten men,” George Bizos wrote to me after the Rivonia trial.10 But the prisoners were indeed soon almost forgotten by the media in Britain and America. In 1964 the London Times had fifty-eight references to Mandela, in 1965 two, in 1966 none, in 1967 four, in 1968 none, in 1969 two. The New York Times had twenty-four references in 1964, none in 1965 or 1966, one in 1967—but to Winnie, not Nelson—and none in 1968. Without Winnie, Mandela would have been still more forgotten.
Within South Africa the name of Mandela was even more completely obliterated, through laws which forbade any mention of the ANC or its leaders. The activists seemed to have disappeared, and the poet Oswald Mtshali adapted the hippie song:
Where have all the angry young men gone?
Gone to the Island of Lament for Sharpeville …
It was all the more frustrating in contrast with the apparent liberation of the rest of Africa. “1964, a year that was the best of times for much of newly independent East and West Africa,” wrote the historians Karis and Gerhart, “was the worst of times in the southern areas of the continent where the tides of empire had not yet receded.”11
“Verwoerd is dead!” whispered one of the ordinary criminals at the quarry
in September 1966. The news gave the political prisoners a sudden ray of hope. Mandela was ambivalent when he learned that Verwoerd had been killed by a deranged white messenger in Parliament, for assassination was not the ANC’s policy. But he held some hopes for Verwoerd’s successor, Balthazar John Vorster; he had some fellow feeling for Vorster, he wrote from jail, as a man who had been imprisoned for treason during the war: “a man of strong beliefs prepared to fight for them.” He thought of him as “deserving of the highest honours in so far as white conservative politics are concerned.”12
But Vorster’s first acts gave little reason for optimism. He pushed through the new Terrorism Act of 1967, which gave the police still more draconian powers, and in 1969 established a ruthless new secret service, the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) under his old wartime colleague General Hendrik van den Bergh. His Minister of Defence, P. W. Botha, further extended the hold of the military. The news for the prisoners was nearly all bleak. “The first few years on the island were difficult times both for the organisation outside and those of us in prison,” said Mandela afterward.13 “The worst time was the sixties,” said Sisulu. “But I didn’t lose hope; I’m an optimist.”14
Mandela followed the news from the mainland with growing frustration, knowing that he was powerless to influence events. The prisoners had agreed from the start that they would not seek to interfere with the decisions of the ANC in exile, but Mandela did have fitful contacts with his former partner, Oliver Tambo, by means of smuggled coded messages which have since come to light.15 Through all the strains of separation he maintained his trust in Tambo, which would be a key to the ANC’s unity and eventual success.
Mandela’s first concern was with the progress of the armed struggle. Hopes rose in October 1967, when the prisoners learned from the Economist that black South African soldiers were fighting along the Rhodesia-Zambia border. “Although the terrorism has been contained easily enough,” it reported, “the government seems unusually worried about it.”16 ANC fighters in the “Luthuli detachment”—the spearhead of MK—had, it turned out, crossed the Zambezi from Zambia to Rhodesia, personally supervised by Tambo, and joined by Zambian guerrillas. They had bravely fought the white Rhodesian army in the Wankie game reserve: Tambo announced optimistically on August 19 that they were “fighting their way to strike at the Boers themselves in South Africa.” But the rebel force soon faced reinforcements from the South African army, and were eventually killed or captured after retreating to Botswana. Mandela did not learn the details until one of their commanders, Justice Mpanza, arrived on Robben Island.17
Tambo faced fierce criticism over the failed campaign when the ANC held a crucial conference at Morogoro, their headquarters in Tanzania, in 1969. The ANC reorganized the high command, and agreed to admit non-Africans for the first time—including Joe Slovo, who became commander of MK. The Robben Islanders were encouraged by this development. “It had a tremendous impact on the whole question of Southern Africa and revolution,” said Sisulu.18 But the new structure of the ANC would cause problems for Tambo by reviving suspicions that white communists were taking over the organization.
Tambo remained a reluctant leader. He had been appointed Acting President of the ANC after Luthuli’s death in 1967, but resisted becoming President. He insisted that the world assumed Mandela was really the President, but realized that Mandela could not be held responsible for conducting the armed struggle when he could not make crucial decisions, while if he were recognized officially as President he would be less likely to be released. The National Executive elected Tambo President in his absence, which Tambo then challenged, but was overruled unanimously. He was worried that “I am the first and only President of the ANC to be elected by the NEC without a mandate from the available membership.”19 He still called himself Acting President, and often referred to Mandela as “Commander in Chief.”20 It was not till 1977 that the decision was referred to the leaders on Robben Island, who confirmed Tambo as President; but he still avoided the title.21 In his own mind Tambo had no doubt that Mandela was President in waiting, to whom he would defer.
Tambo’s campaign against apartheid was made harder in the mid-sixties, when South Africa was enjoying a spectacular economic boom. The flight of foreign capital after Sharpeville in 1960 had been reversed, and by 1965 more investment was coming in than before the massacre. During the sixties South Africa’s rate of growth averaged 6 percent a year, outstripping nearly all Western nations’, with an average return on capital of 15 percent, much higher than in Europe. The biggest automobile manufacturers and other multinational corporations increased their presence, while West Germany became a major new investor.22 The financial opportunities for overseas companies were extended by a huge increase in defense spending. The boom inevitably brought more blacks into the factories and cities, thus challenging the principle of apartheid. Vorster was all the more determined to press ahead with Verwoerd’s plans for “grand apartheid,” which would give nominal independence to the new Bantustans while treating urban blacks as foreigners without rights.
Tambo’s hopes of help from black South Africa were rapidly fading. The economic and military clout of Vorster’s government enabled it to bully or seduce the much poorer new black nations to the north, which depended on it for trade, transport or migrant jobs. Tambo had expected increasing support from friendly neighbors as they emerged from being colonies to independence: more so when the three ex–British protectorates—Basutoland, Swaziland and Bechuanaland—achieved independence in 1966 and 1967. The United Nations swelled with new African members; the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which emerged in 1963, made promises of boycotts and aid; and Zambia and Tanzania became the champions of black liberation. But by the end of the decade the harsh facts of economic dependence were asserting themselves. When fourteen heads of African states met in Zambia in May 1969 they proclaimed a “Lusaka Manifesto,” drafted without consulting the ANC, which stressed the need for compromise with South Africa and played down the armed struggle. At the ANC’s Morogoro conference a week later Tambo warned about “a sinister and vigorous counter-offensive” against the newly independent states and liberation movements.23
Western governments could not resist the allure of the South African boom. South African businessmen, led by their biggest company, Anglo-American, liked to explain that South Africa was passing into a new stage of economic “takeoff,” like Britain in the 1850s, in which prosperity would automatically compel reforms. This argument was taken up by the Economist in June 1968 in a long and influential study of South Africa by Norman Macrae. The whites, said Macrae, would become more liberal as they felt safer: “richer and securer generally means lefter.” He described how the military seemed to have a complete grip on any black unrest: “A few brave lunatics are sometimes infiltrated across the border with intentions of sabotage; they are then promptly picked up by the South African police which has informers in every one of those freedom-fighting camps.”24
Viewed from Robben Island, the outlook certainly seemed grim. “It was the worst time,” said Maharaj, “made worse by the numbers of fighters being caught, or failing to get in.”25 By 1970 the South African prospects looked still grimmer, when the all-white general election showed no sign of the promised liberalization. The United Party, led by de Villiers Graaff, was routed by Vorster’s National Party and by the new right-wing Afrikaner party the Herstigte Nasionale Party (HNP). George Bizos, who visited the island periodically, was always struck by how morale fluctuated according to the black activity outside: now he found Mandela at his lowest ebb, worrying about the lack of opposition.26 Resistance inside South Africa seemed almost to have disappeared. ANC and PAC were forbidden initials. Anyone seen with a Congress document could be detained indefinitely. No word by Mandela or Tambo could be published.
Western governments and observers had virtually written off the ANC. “Occasional attempts to infiltrate South Africa have been unsuccessful,” said a secret American intelligence
report in October 1969. “Political organization within the Republic is weak and infiltrated by government agents.”27 “By the end of the 1960s,” wrote the American historian Thomas Karis, “the ANC seemed to be little more than a shadowy presence.”28 When the Washington Post correspondent Jim Hoagland came to South Africa in 1970 he found that “Luthuli, Mandela and Sisulu were perceived dimly, as if they belonged to another time, long past and long lost.”29
Mandela in jail admitted: “During the harsh days of the early 1970s, when the ANC seemed to sink into the shadows, we had to force ourselves not to give in to despair.”30 A draft ANC document in November 1970 conceded that their organization inside the country was “almost dead.”31 When I visited black friends in Soweto in that year I found them far more reticent than six years before. “You know I don’t dare tell my own brother what I’m thinking,” said the son of the journalist Henry Nxumalo. Informers were everywhere, and young tsotsis (gangsters) were paid to give news of saboteurs or guerrillas. “So you’ve come to pick up the old threads?” asked Mandela’s old Indian friend Yusuf Cachalia. “Well, they’re broken.”32
Tambo now believed an eventual bloodbath was almost unavoidable. On March 25, 1970, he wrote to his friend Ronald Segal, who ten years earlier had helped him to escape from South Africa, that he could see how Vorster and white South Africans were driven to killings and torture by their fear of the unknown: “I can understand the inevitability of a savage spilling of blood in South Africa which the developments of the last ten years have sealed irretrievably. The decade of the seventies will be soaked in blood—the blood of the innocent no less than of the guilty, unfortunately.” Tambo speculated on how different his own story might have been if Segal had not driven him across the border in March 1960: “History builds on events that are in themselves totally insignificant.… Perhaps the record would today stand as follows: Ronald Segal—serving a life sentence in Pretoria jail. Oliver Tambo—hanged in Pretoria, 1968, following a conviction under the Terrorism act. John Vorster—assassinated. Nelson Mandela—commander of a vast guerrilla army operating in different parts of South Africa.”33
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