Читать книгу Mandela: The Authorised Biography - Anthony Sampson - Страница 14

1946–1949

THE HOPES OF MANDELA and his friends for a more benign post-war world were soon dashed: not by an apartheid regime, but by the United Party government of Jan Smuts, who had been Churchill’s loyal ally in the war, and who was supported by South Africa’s English-speaking businessmen. In 1946, only months after the final Allied victory over Japan, Smuts made two ruthless moves which pushed both Africans and Indians into greater militancy, and into working together.

The first was against a strike by the newly-formed African Mineworkers’ Union, whose prime mover and first President was Mandela’s friend Gaur Radebe. Radebe had been succeeded in 1942 by J.B. Marks, a robust African communist who had studied in Moscow and who led the strike of 70,000 black miners in August 1946, demanding more pay and better food and conditions. The mining companies, supported by the government, forced the workers back down the mines with bayonets, killing nine and wounding hundreds. Ten days later, fifty of the leaders were charged with fomenting a strike. Several were found guilty, and were fined or imprisoned.¹

Most whites saw the crackdown as a necessary response to the communist menace, which was now re-emerging after the wartime truce. Smuts flew off to London, ‘not unduly concerned’, while the Rand Daily Mail attacked the ‘wild speeches and absurd demands’ of the union leaders, including ‘J.B. Marx’.² The conservatives within the ANC, including Dr Xuma, blamed the communists for provoking a premature test of strength, but the Youth Leaguers criticised Xuma for not calling a general strike in sympathy.³ The brutal suppression seemed to vindicate Lembede’s warning that blacks could expect no mercy from the whites. Mandela was moved by the bravery and solidarity of the strikers – some of whom he knew – and he visited them with J.B. Marks. He discussed communism with Marks, and was struck by his humour and humility. Marks saw Mandela as a rabid nationalist, but thought he would outgrow that phase.⁴

The crushing of the mine strike made fools of the patient delegations of the ANC ‘Old Guard’, who had put their faith in Smuts. While the black miners were being bayoneted, the Natives’ Representative Council was quietly debating black grievances with the government in Pretoria. Its members adjourned in protest, but did not actually boycott the Council. Smuts, however, realised that he had alienated ‘moderate intellectuals of the Prof. Matthews type’, and the next year he tried to placate a delegation of Council members headed by Matthews.⁵ Smuts spoke in his usual paternal mode: ‘This young child, South Africa, is growing up, and the old clothes do not fit the growing boy.’ He deplored their ‘sulking’ attitude, and offered them ‘a bone to chew’ in the form of a bigger Council, all black and all elected, and legalised black unions, though not in the mines. Matthews was sceptical, and explained that the black people had lost confidence in the Council. Afterwards he told the press that the mountain had given birth to a mouse, and that the hungry masses needed more than a bone to chew.⁶ But the Natives’ Representative Council remained passive and ineffective (it would be abolished by the first Nationalist government).

Nelson Mandela was more lastingly influenced by Smuts’s second harsh move, against the Indians in South Africa. The 300,000 Indians who had arrived in Natal since the 1860s, first as contract labourers, then as traders, had their own history of discrimination and protest. They had first learnt about peaceful protest in 1911 from Mohandas Gandhi, who devised his kind of passive resistance while he was working as a lawyer in South Africa, and had led thousands of Indians illegally from Natal into the Transvaal. Africans and Coloureds tried similar protests in 1919 and 1939, but without success. The Indians, some of whom had become prosperous merchants, kept themselves aloof from blacks, and hoped for better treatment after the war. But in 1946 the Smuts government introduced the Asiatic Land Tenure Bill, the ‘Indian Ghetto Act’, which banned the sale of any more land to Indians, while offering them the sop of white representatives in Parliament and an advisory board. It shook the Indians out of their complacency. For two years they sustained a passive-resistance campaign echoing Gandhi’s of thirty-five years before, occupying land reserved for whites: two thousand protesters went to jail, including the campaign’s two leaders, Dr ‘Monty’ Naicker and Dr Yusuf Dadoo.⁷

Mandela was coming closer to the Indians. He was impressed by their progress from speech-making and resolutions to mass action, in contrast to the inertia of the ANC. He was struck by the solidarity and sacrifice of the protesters, who included both militant and conservative Indians, and he admired both Naicker and Dadoo.⁸ In Johannesburg he was now meeting many Indians, and found himself personally at ease with them. A flat in downtown Johannesburg, 13 Kholvad House, in Market Street, had become a crucial meeting-place between the races. There Mandela would meet Ismail Meer, Ruth First, Yusuf Cachalia and many other Indian and white communists in a relaxed atmosphere. He also spent much time at the home of Amina Pahad (whose two sons Aziz and Essop were later to join the Mandela government), where they would all eat curry and rice with their fingers. It reminded him of his childhood at Jongintaba’s Great Place.⁹ And after some early arguments he worked closely with Ahmed Kathrada, a young Indian communist who was to spend twenty-five years with him in prison.

Through his Indian friends Mandela became more interested in India itself, which was then on the verge of independence, and in the achievements of Gandhi and his disciple Jawaharlal Nehru. ‘When we were starting the struggle we really had very little to go by from the leadership in our country,’ he recalled, ‘because their experiences were not reduced to writing, whereas people like Gandhi and Nehru had recorded their experiences. So we had to look up to them, and their influence was tremendous.’ He was more influenced by Nehru, who was not a pacifist, than by Gandhi: ‘When a Maharajah tried to stop him he would push him aside. He was that type of man, and we liked him because his conduct indicated how we should treat our own oppressors. Whereas Gandhi had a spirit of steel, but nevertheless it was shown in a very gentle and smooth way, and he would rather suffer in humility than retaliate.’¹⁰

The Indian passive resisters in South Africa in 1946 and 1947 taught Mandela and other African politicians an important lesson. Only a few non-Indians joined them (including the radical British monk Michael Scott), but they soon attracted support from the ANC. In 1947 the ANC president Dr Xuma joined with Naicker and Dadoo in the so-called ‘Doctors’ Pact’, which promised co-operation between the ANC and the two Indian Congresses. Xuma reinforced the alliance by appearing at the first session of the United Nations in New York in company with an Indian representative, H.A. Naidoo, to protest against the ‘Ghetto Act’, thus initiating the UN’s campaigns against racism. Mandela would come to see this pact as the origin of all the later collaborations between the races, and many young Indians were inspired by the prospect of racial co-operation.¹¹ ‘It was this pact which gave me and my generation a sense of what it is to be South African,’ said Kader Asmal, later Minister of Water Affairs in Mandela’s government.¹²

But at the time, Mandela opposed closer political co-operation with Indians. He was convinced that only separate Congresses could effectively mobilise their masses, and was worried that the Indians or the Communist Party would take over or dominate the ANC for their own purposes, watering down the concept of African nationalism.¹³ He still had a burning sense of the Africans’ special suffering and identity, and he felt defensive, both personally and politically, in face of the more qualified and sophisticated Indians.

The two showdowns of 1946 both ended in defeat. The African Mineworkers’ Union was effectively destroyed, not to be resurrected until the 1980s, and the Indians were increasingly restricted to their ghettos.¹⁴ The setbacks left a deep mark on Mandela and other young black politicians. The Old Guard of delegations and petitions, epitomised by the Native Representative Council, was now discredited, and there were signs of a more courageous leadership emerging among the Indians and the communists.

The independence of India in August 1947 provided a powerful precedent for the struggle in South Africa, as in the rest of the continent, by showing how an established ruling power could be defeated by a unified and organised mass-movement. India’s first Prime Minister, Nehru, had been urging Indians to co-operate with Africans in South Africa ever since 1927, and he would soon show himself a determined ally of both Congresses, making India the first country to impose sanctions against South Africa.¹⁵ Mandela would always be grateful to Nehru for this. The influence of Indian communists would become an obsession for both the South African and the British governments, but Nehru, without being a communist, could provide a broader message for Mandela and others, to see beyond racial and local nationalism. ‘Nationalism is good in its place,’ Mandela would quote Nehru, ‘but it is an unreliable friend and an unsafe historian. It blinds us to many happenings and sometimes distorts the truth, especially when it concerns us and our country.’¹⁶

The ANC Youth League in the meantime was moderating some of its nationalism. In July 1947 its firebrand founder Anton Lembede suddenly died, aged thirty-three, only a few hours after Mandela had been talking to him.¹⁷ Mandela was appalled; but Lembede’s successor Peter Mda proved a clearer political thinker and a greater influence (though Mandela would later find him too cautious).¹⁸ Mda was a spellbinding talker, with a rich vocabulary, a small head and a huge laugh. The son of a Xhosa shoemaker, he had been educated by Catholics, and as a former teacher and lawyer he had both practical and intellectual training.¹⁹

Mandela himself became Secretary of the Youth League, responsible for political organisation and setting up branches.²⁰ With Mda he recruited more members beyond the Transvaal, in Natal and the Cape. He tried to infiltrate African schools, visiting St Peter’s in Johannesburg, where Oliver Tambo had taught, in an attempt to address the students. But the headmaster, D.H. Darling (as he told Tambo afterwards) felt he could not allow the school to be used as a platform.²¹ Mda had more success at Fort Hare, where he persuaded a young lecturer in anthropology, Godfrey Pitje, to start a branch of the Youth League, to ‘soak them in our nationalistic outlook’ and to work hand-in-hand with the executive in Johannesburg, ‘of which the general secretary is N.R.D. Mandela Esq, BA, a law student’.²² Pitje’s professor, Z.K. Matthews, was sceptical of the ‘armchair intellectualism’ of the Youth League but did not prevent it from operating in Fort Hare. The university became the Youth League’s most valuable seedbed, attracting a militant new generation of students that included Robert Sobukwe, Joe Matthews and T.T. Letlaka, into the ANC.²³

Mda insisted that he was not against white men as such, only against white domination: but he warned that Africans could not expect whites to side with them ‘at the time when the horizontal colour bar gave them a privileged way of life’.²⁴ He wrote a new manifesto for the Youth League, less rhetorical and more analytical than Lembede’s, which Mandela approved. It defined African nationalism as ‘the militant outlook of an oppressed people seeking a solid basis for waging a long, bitter and unrelenting struggle for its national freedom’. It warned Africans not to ‘look up to Europeans either for inspiration or for help in their political struggle’. But it was more conciliatory about Indians, recognising that they were an oppressed group who ‘had not come to South Africa as conquerors and exploiters, but as the exploited’.²⁵

Mandela, in spite of his Indian friendships, was still worried that Indians would dominate the ANC in the Transvaal.²⁶ The tension came to a head after a ‘Votes for All’ campaign was launched in May 1948 at a ‘People’s Assembly’ in Johannesburg, opened by Michael Scott, demanding universal suffrage. The Transvaal branch of the ANC was divided: Mandela complained that the People’s Assembly had bypassed existing organisations, while Walter Sisulu insisted that Africans must find allies where they could.²⁷ Mandela and Tambo went to a meeting of the Indian Congress with Sisulu, and were so angry when he supported the Indians’ arguments that they did not talk to him after the meeting, and departed in different directions.²⁸ But they were gradually becoming less suspicious of communist friends like J.B. Marks and Moses Kotane. ‘If Moses represents the Party,’ said Tambo, ‘I don’t think I will quarrel with it.’²⁹

Mandela joined the Transvaal National Executive of the ANC in 1947, and became fiercely loyal to it. He was befriended by its President Constantine Ramohanoe, who taught him how to keep in touch with the grassroots.³⁰ But Ramohanoe wanted to cooperate with Indians and communists, a move which was opposed by the majority, including Mandela. When he defied them by making his own statement Mandela, seconded by Oliver Tambo, moved to depose him, which led to a stormy meeting and Ramohanoe’s departure. ‘Loyalty to an organisation,’ Mandela would always maintain, ‘takes precedence over loyalty to an individual.’³¹ He maintained that stern rule over the next fifty years, as dissidents would learn to their cost. Having subjugated his own will to the movement, he was determined that others should do so too.

Mandela encountered many intellectuals who were fiercely critical of the ANC; particularly in Cape Town, where Trotskyists had formed the ‘Unity Movement’, which included many leading African and Coloured academics who insisted on total non-collaboration. In 1948 he visited Cape Town for the first time, staying for three months. He went up Table Mountain by the cable car, and gazed across at Robben Island.³² He was invited to visit A.C. Jordan, a university lecturer prominent in the Unity Movement, who had written a book much admired by his Tembu friends, Ingqumbo yemiNyanya (The Wrath of the Ancestral Spirits), and was impressed by his intellect. With Jordan was Isaac Tabata, a founder and propagandist for the Unity Movement who talked brilliantly about South African history, but criticised Mandela with venom for joining the ANC: ‘I am sure you did so simply because your father was a member.’³³ (In fact Mandela’s father was only part of his tribe’s collective membership.) Mandela was in some awe of Tabata: ‘It was difficult for me to cope with his arguments … I didn’t want to continue arguing with the fellow because he was demolishing me just like that.’³⁴ He was shocked that Tabata seemed more hostile to the ANC than to the government.³⁵ Afterwards Tabata wrote him a very long letter, warning him against the ‘collaborators’ of the ANC and pressing him to base his actions on principles, to ‘swim against the stream’.³⁶ But Mandela thought the Trotskyists’ insistence on non-collaboration was merely ‘their pet excuse for doing nothing’. Cape Town left him more than ever convinced that only the ANC could mobilise his people to provide effective mass action.³⁷

However disillusioned he was by the Smuts government, Mandela – like many of his friends – still placed some hope in the liberalism of the post-war transatlantic alliance, of the UN and of the Labour government in Britain. In April 1947 King George VI, with his Queen and the two young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, made a spectacular two-month state visit to South Africa which was intended to bolster the links between the two countries. But the British High Commissioner in South Africa, Sir Evelyn Baring, correctly warned London that Afrikaner nationalists would attack the visit as a symbol of the ‘Empire bond which they had pledged themselves to break’.³⁸ The royal party spent thirty-five days touring the whole country in a special white train. Smuts – more of a hero to the British than to the South Africans – made the most of it, declaring a public holiday to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of Princess Elizabeth, later Queen, who would always look back on the tour warmly as her first experience of the Commonwealth. The celebrations were officially boycotted by the ANC, including the Youth League, which met at Mandela’s house to discuss it.³⁹

The King’s contacts with Africans during the tour were strictly limited by the Smuts government. He was not allowed to shake black hands at official ceremonies, but crowds of black spectators cheered the royal visitors, and Dr Xuma, the President of the ANC, could not resist travelling to Zululand to see the King.⁴⁰ The left-wing Guardian in Cape Town was exasperated by the Africans’ celebrations: ‘If the pitch and tone of the people’s struggles for freedom can be lowered by these spectacular feudal devices,’ complained an editorial, ‘it will be extremely difficult to recover the ground that has been lost.’⁴¹ Mandela himself, with his own chiefly background, thought the British monarchy should be respected as a long-lasting institution, and noted the veneration which the Xhosa chiefs showed for George VI. One Xhosa poet described how the then Paramount Chief Velile Sandile ‘pierced the ground’ in front of the King. ‘He was grovelling really,’ Mandela recalled, ‘but I can’t blame him. I might have done the same.’⁴²

Smuts was already losing much of his popularity with white South Africans, particularly Afrikaners, before the general election of May 1948. He had been careful not to alarm the white electorate by making concessions to blacks, but the Afrikaner National Party under Dr Daniel Malan, with its doctrine of apartheid and its warnings against the ‘black peril’ and the ‘red menace’, was gaining support as Africans became more visible in the cities. The ANC saw the white election as a choice between two evils, while Dr Xuma claimed that apartheid was nothing new, merely ‘a natural and logical growth of the Union Native policy’.⁴³ Educated black Africans in Orlando despised the raw Afrikaners who made up most of Malan’s supporters. ‘We only knew Afrikaners as tram-drivers, ticket-collectors, policemen,’ said Mandela’s friend Esme Matshikiza. ‘We thought they couldn’t run the country. We didn’t know that their leaders had studied in Nazi Germany.’⁴⁴

In the election Dr Malan’s National Party gained victory, in alliance with the smaller Afrikaner Party. Its majority was only eight, but this was enough for the country to be ruled for the first time by Afrikaner nationalists without more moderate English-speaking support. Smuts was humiliated, and when he died two years later he was venerated in the outside world as a statesman and war leader, but blamed in his own country for ignoring both Afrikaners and Africans – a warning to his successors that a statesman must not forget to remain a politician.

Malan’s new government soon changed the whole character and perspective of the South African state. The Afrikaners, descendants of Calvinist Dutch settlers in the seventeenth century, had retained a very separate culture from the English-speakers, little influenced by subsequent European liberalism. Their oppression by British imperialists, culminating in the Boer War at the turn of the century, had forged a powerful nationalism, with its own religion and epics, and they nursed their grievances against the British. When the Union of South Africa was created in 1910 the British had hoped to retain an English-speaking majority, gradually softening the Afrikaners’ resentment. But the numbers of Afrikaners had multiplied, while their relative poverty and continuing experience as underdogs fuelled their nationalism. The Afrikaners (as British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan would tell them in 1960) were really the first of the African nationalists, with their own need to prove themselves and defend their culture; and they would inevitably come into conflict with black African nationalists who threatened their jobs and their supremacy.⁴⁵ As Mandela later looked back on forty years of rivalry: ‘Perhaps history ordained that the people of our country should pay this high price because it bequeathed to us two nationalisms that dominate the history of twentieth-century South Africa … Because both nationalisms laid claim to the same piece of earth – our common home, South Africa – the contest between the two was bound to be brutal.’⁴⁶

The new Afrikaner government did not conceal its intention to further separate the races and to build an Afrikaner state. ‘For the first time since Union,’ said Dr Malan, ‘South Africa is our own.’ Sir Evelyn Baring had few illusions: his despatches to London would compare Afrikaner nationalism to Nazism, and he came to dislike the Afrikaner ministers so much (his wife complained) that he could hardly keep the venom out of his voice.⁴⁷ But at first most British politicians and commentators were not seriously worried by the change in government. ‘Dr Malan’s majority is far too small,’ wrote the Economist, ‘to enable him to do anything drastic.’⁴⁸ The Labour government in London, beset by economic crises, needed South African uranium and was anxious not to offend the Malan government lest it take over the three British protectorates – Swaziland, Basutoland and Bechuanaland – on its borders.

Many Africans, including Oliver Tambo, actually welcomed the victory of Malan’s party, an unambiguous enemy that would unite the blacks against it; but Mandela was ‘stunned and dismayed’.⁴⁹ Twelve years later he would still explain the possibility that growing black pressure would gradually compel white governments to extend the vote, leading eventually to universal suffrage.⁵⁰ But now that prospect seemed much less likely. And, like nearly all black politicians, he seriously underestimated the Afrikaner determination to impose total segregation and to suppress black resistance, against the trend elsewhere in Africa and in America. Hardly anyone foresaw that over the next forty years successive National Party governments would pass laws which would ban the black leadership, imprison them or force them into exile.

In the face of this new threat, the Africans proved slow to unite. In December 1948 the ANC held a joint meeting with its rival body the All-African Convention, which was dominated by Trotskyists, including Mandela’s opponent Isaac Tabata. Dr Xuma called for blacks to ‘speak with one voice’. J.B. Marks warned that ‘the people are being crushed while we complacently quibble about technical difficulties’. Peter Mda insisted that the basis of unity must be African nationalism. But Tabata called for unity among all non-Europeans on the basis of total non-collaboration, which ANC delegates could not accept.⁵¹ The meeting was inconclusive, and the arguments continued at another assembly four months later.

The need for unity emerged much more sharply with riots in Durban in January 1949, when enraged Zulus set on Indians and the police and military intervened, leaving 142 dead. Mandela heard from his Indian friends that whites had encouraged the riots by transporting Zulus to the scene.⁵² The bloodshed, Mandela thought, put the ‘Doctors’ Pact’ to the test, and he was impressed to see Dr Naicker playing a critical role in quickly restoring peace and promoting goodwill. ‘The year 1949,’ he wrote thirty years later, ‘was an unforgettable experience for those who have given their lives to the promotion of inter-racial harmony.’⁵³ Dr Xuma blamed the riots on the government’s divisive policies, and warned against ‘the law of the jungle’. The black fury spread to the Johannesburg area, where some Indian and African leaders hoped the Congresses would jointly appeal for calm. Ahmed Kathrada went with a journalist, Henry Nxumalo, to Mandela’s house in Orlando to try to persuade him to support a joint statement, but Mandela, still wary of the ANC being influenced by Indians, insisted that the ANC should act on its own.⁵⁴

By mid-1949 Dr Malan’s government was preparing to enforce apartheid with drastic laws: each person would be classified by race; the races would live in separate parts of the cities; and mixed marriages would be forbidden. The firebrands of the Youth League, including Mandela, felt challenged to respond. Their President Peter Mda advocated a ‘Programme of Action’ based on organising mass protests against the government. The Youth League was gaining more support in the ANC as a whole, and was losing patience with Xuma’s caution. In November 1949, a few weeks before the ANC’s annual conference, Mda went with Sisulu, Mandela and Tambo to see Xuma in Sophiatown. They argued that the ANC must adopt mass action and passive resistance like Gandhi’s in India, or the Indians’ in South Africa three years before. Xuma retorted that it was too early, that action would only provoke the government to crush the ANC. The Youth Leaguers warned him that if he did not support them they would vote against his presidency at the conference. Xuma replied angrily that they were young and arrogant, and showed them the door.⁵⁵

Looking round for an alternative President, they first asked Professor Matthews, who thought they were naïve and immature, with their emotive rhetoric, and turned them down.⁵⁶ Then they made a rash choice, turning to Dr James Moroka, a dignified and relatively wealthy African doctor who had inherited a small estate in the Orange Free State, where a century before his great-grandfather Chief Moroka had welcomed the Afrikaner Voortrekkers – who then betrayed him. Moroka, a courteous gentleman, had, like Dr Xuma, many white friends and patients. He had been courageous in opposing the ‘Hertzog Bills’ in 1936, but he had since been attracted by the Trotskyists, and had become President of the ANC’s rival the All-African Convention. Now, surprisingly, he told the Youth Leaguers that he supported their radical Programme of Action, and agreed to stand against Xuma even though he was not even a member of the ANC – which he kept calling the ‘African National Council’.⁵⁷

The ANC Youth League opened its own conference on 15 December 1949, just before the main ANC conference at Bloemfontein, with a humble prayer:

Thou, Heavenly Father, art continuing to lift us up from the sinks of impurity and cesspools of ignorance. Thou art removing the veil of darkness from this race of the so-called ‘Dark Africa’.⁵⁸

The inner group of Youth Leaguers – headed by Mda, Sisulu, Mandela and Tambo – clearly emerged at the conference as ‘the kingmakers’, though Mandela could not attend. They had some differences: Mda remained a firm African nationalist, with Mandela closest to him. Sisulu was much more open to other racial groups, while Tambo remained diplomatic.⁵⁹ But they all demanded mass action.

The main ANC conference was eclipsed in the South African press by a much more melodramatic event: the opening by Prime Minister Malan of the vast Voortrekker Monument outside Pretoria, commemorating the sufferings of the Great Trek, before a crowd of 100,000 Afrikaners. ‘The hour has come,’ said Malan. ‘A sunbeam from the heavens is striking down on the sarcophagus.’

Dr Xuma did his best to challenge this ceremony, with a speech in the market square of the Bloemfontein township in which he warned prophetically that the Voortrekker Monument would remind future generations of the racial strife between Europeans and Africans. The white press took little notice.

In his presidential address to the ANC conference Xuma tried to rally support, and emphasised that Africans were united against apartheid.⁶⁰ But he firmly rejected the Youth League’s policy of boycotting apartheid institutions. His speech received meagre applause, and Diliza Mji, an outspoken young medical student in the Youth League, then moved a vote of non-confidence. ‘A shock-wave went through the hall,’ as Mji described it. ‘Never in the history of the ANC had the President been criticised.’⁶¹ The kingmakers then turned to Moroka, who had already pledged his support, and the conference elected him as President. Xuma remained on the executive until he resigned on 13 March 1950, complaining that the Youth League had betrayed him. But Sisulu, Mandela and Tambo wrote a forceful rebuttal in the Bantu World: ‘We are as a nation entitled at any time to call upon any one of us to lead the struggle.’⁶²

The ANC also elected a much more radical National Executive, including the Youth Leaguers Peter Mda, Oliver Tambo and Godfrey Pitje, the young activist from Fort Hare. Mandela himself was co-opted onto the National Executive two months later, to fill the place left by Xuma. More importantly, the Congress chose a new Secretary-General. The veteran clergyman James Calata stood down, finding the Programme of Action too radical, and in his place Walter Sisulu was elected by one vote.⁶³ Sisulu was the right man at the right time. Unlike Moroka, he was totally dedicated to the ANC and its new policy. As he recalled: ‘Once they had decided to elect me my approach was: “I have nothing to live for except politics. So I cannot draw up a programme of action which I am not able to follow myself.” That required me to be confident of the future, otherwise I would weaken somewhere. That confidence kept me in.’

Mandela had a narrower view than Sisulu. ‘When I became Secretary-General my duty was to unite people,’ Sisulu said later, ‘whereas Nelson and Mda were still thinking in terms of projecting the Youth League.’⁶⁴ But Mandela thought the Programme of Action would transform the attitudes and methods of the Congress. ‘The ANC was now going to rely not on a mere change of heart on the part of the authorities,’ he explained later. ‘It was going to exert pressure in order to compel the authorities to grant its demands.’⁶⁵ He was now at the heart of a new movement towards confrontation with the Afrikaner nationalists. As Frieda Matthews, the wife of the staid professor at Fort Hare, described it: ‘People were excited, men and women, young and old. At last there was to be ACTION!’⁶⁶