Читать книгу Mandela: The Authorised Biography - Anthony Sampson - Страница 18

1952

IN DECEMBER 1951 the ANC held its thirty-fifth annual congress in the black township outside the hot, sleepy Afrikaner stronghold of

Bloemfontein. The event would prove to be a historic turning point, but it was hardly noticed by the whites or the world at the time.

The conference began two hours late, with three hundred delegates trooping into the baking-hot hall. A press table was improvised for the five journalists present, who included Ruth First from the left-wing New Age, two local reporters from the Bloemfontein Friend, and Henry Nxumalo and myself from Drum magazine. Many of the delegates resisted having their photographs taken. On the platform was the courteous, conservative ANC President Dr Moroka, and close by him was a small, ascetic figure with a wizened face. This was Manilal Gandhi, the son of the Mahatma, who lived in his father’s old settlement in Natal and saw himself as the keeper of the pure spirit of passive resistance. Both Moroka and Gandhi seemed a world away from the firebrands of the Youth League, including the proud thirty-three-year-old Nelson Mandela.

The three-day meeting seemed long-winded and inconsequential. Then, on the last day, the General Secretary Walter Sisulu produced his report on a joint programme of passive resistance, or ‘civil disobedience’, aimed at deliberately defying the Nationalist government’s racial laws and inviting imprisonment. The plan was partly based on the Indian campaign in Durban in 1946. The ANC would ask the government to repeal ‘six unjust laws’: those imposing passes and limiting stock, the Group Areas Act, the Voters’ Representation Act, the Suppression of Communism Act and the Bantu Authorities Act. If it refused, they would embark on their ‘Defiance Campaign’.¹ Dr Moroka supported the plan with a surprisingly eloquent speech, multiplied by interpreters, affirming that the ANC was prepared to work with Europeans, Indians and Coloureds, provided they were on equal terms.²

Mandela had now finally committed himself to co-operation with decisive pragmatism. At the conference he had begun by insisting again that the ANC should go it alone, without the Indians, but he soon sensed that the majority was in favour of co-operation, and in his speech as President of the Youth League he turned right round with apparent conviction, as if he had never believed otherwise.³ He called for a non-European front against fascism, which, he explained, was being smuggled into South Africa behind a screen of fear of communism. Africans must be the spearhead of the organised struggle, but with Indians and Coloureds as their determined allies.⁴

The Indian influence was evident in the idea of passive resistance, but there was much argument about its nature. Manilal Gandhi protested that Congress leaders did not have ‘the spirit of true sacrifice’, and insisted that passive resistance was more a process of moral purification than a political weapon.⁵ His worry was shared by older South African Indians who had been influenced by the Mahatma. The saintly veteran Nana Sita, who had helped to instigate the Durban campaign in 1946, had met Gandhi as a child in Pretoria. Yusuf Cachalia and his brother Maulvi had been attracted to Gandhi’s methods while living in India. But most communist leaders were critical of the Mahatma’s lack of concern for the African cause while he was in South Africa. Gandhi had shown little evidence, wrote Joe Slovo, of having ‘absorbed the ancient lesson that freedom is indivisible’.⁶ The communists saw passive resistance purely as a means of mobilising the masses rather than as a ‘soul-force’.⁷ And some Youth Leaguers regarded the campaign as altogether too non-violent: ‘The Defiance Campaign was anti-revolutionary,’ Peter Mda said later, ‘in the sense that it was “passive” resistance: you couldn’t hit back.’⁸

Mandela was more pragmatic. He certainly lacked Gandhi’s asceticism: ‘Some Indians said he was like Gandhi,’ said his friend Fatima Meer. ‘I told them, “Gandhi took off his clothes. Nelson loves his clothes.”’⁹ Mandela admired Gandhi as ‘one of the pioneers of South Africa’s liberation movement’, and had been deeply shocked when he was assassinated in February 1948; but he did not share his purist view of the struggle: ‘I saw non-violence on the Gandhian model not as an inviolable principle,’ he said later, ‘but as a tactic to be used as the situation demanded.’¹⁰

His expectations for the Defiance Campaign were certainly high: he believed it would be so effective that it would lead to the ANC being ‘in a position of either getting the government to capitulate or to get them thrown out by the voters’.¹¹ But he also, like the communists, saw the action as a means of educating the masses, and the beginning of a much harsher confrontation. He did not harbour any illusions, Joe Slovo reckoned, about ‘converting the ruling class without a tough revolutionary struggle’.¹²

The plans went rapidly ahead in January 1952, in a spurt of activity very different from the ANC’s usual leisurely style. Mandela joined a committee of four, with Z.K. Matthews, Ismail Meer and J.N. Singh, which drafted a letter to the Prime Minister, Dr Malan, demanding the repeal of the six unjust laws.¹³ Mandela drove down to the Orange Free State with the document for Dr Moroka to sign. When the Prime Minister’s Secretary received the letter he replied that the differences between the races were ‘permanent, not man-made’, and that the new laws were not oppressive and degrading, but protective.¹⁴ Moroka and Sisulu reiterated their demands, while promising ‘to conduct the campaign in a peaceful manner’.¹⁵

Mandela was soon looking more like a future leader of his people. On 31 May 1952 the ANC executive met in Port Elizabeth and announced that the campaign would begin on 26 June. A banquet was held to say goodbye to Professor Matthews, who was leaving to spend a year in America, and Matthews’s son Joe recalls Mandela saying that he (Mandela) would be the first black President of South Africa.¹⁶ He was clearly putting himself in the forefront of the ANC’s organisation, offering to take the key position of Volunteer-in-Chief for the campaign, responsible for national recruitment, which would give him high visibility, in a quasi-military role, across the country.

On the ‘Day of the Volunteers’, four days before the campaign began, Mandela drove down to Durban to be the main speaker to a crowd of 10,000, by far the biggest audience he had ever addressed. It was not a populist speech – he would never develop the emotional rhetoric of some of his contemporaries like Robert Sobukwe or Gaur Radebe – but he found it an exhilarating experience, and received prolonged applause. He told his listeners they were making history; this would be the most powerful action ever undertaken by the oppressed masses, and with the races working together: ‘We can now say unity between the non-European people in this country has become a living reality.’¹⁷

On 26 June, when the Defiance Campaign was launched, Mandela set out for Boksburg, a mining town near Johannesburg, with Yusuf Cachalia and Walter Sisulu, after being delayed by a long conversation with the local white magistrate, whom he knew. The man spoke to him courteously, which Mandela suspected was ‘not unrelated to the fact that we were acting from a position of strength’.¹⁸ In Boksburg fifty-two volunteers gathered outside the big gates of the African township, then walked in without the permits required for entry, led by Nana Sita in his white Gandhi cap and surrounded by hundreds of supporters. They wore the ANC colours on their arms – black for the people, green for the land, yellow for the country’s gold – and held up their thumbs in the Congress salute, singing the hopeful song ‘Open the door, Malan, we are knocking’. Mandela looked on calmly, aloof but highly visible, with a military dignity. His manner seemed to symbolise his relationship to the struggle: the proud loner who was at the same time totally committed. The police, who had been waiting, arrested the volunteers, bundled them into a troop carrier and drove them to the cells.

Mandela would soon have his own first taste of jail. On the same evening the ANC held a meeting at the Garment Workers’ Hall in Johannesburg. An 11 p.m. curfew was in force, and when a procession of Africans marched out into the street the police were waiting for them, standing shoulder to shoulder, peering beneath their helmets at the meek-looking blacks and ready to pack them into police trucks. Mandela and Yusuf Cachalia were there as observers, but the police insisted on arresting them, too. So Mandela spent two nights in the jail at Marshall Square, squashed in with his fellow-protesters. He was appalled by the conditions, and would never forget how one of the prisoners was pushed down the steps, broke his ankle, and spent the night writhing in pain.¹⁹ He also soon realised that two of his fellow-prisoners were informers planted by the police.

The first day set the pattern for the Defiance Campaign. Over the next five months 8,000 people all over the country went to jail for one to three weeks for marching into townships, whites-only railway entrances or carriages, or for being out after curfew, always peacefully. The national organisation was Mandela’s achievement: before and during the campaign he travelled through the Transvaal, Natal and the Cape, recruiting and explaining, sometimes from house to house, with little publicity from the white-owned newspapers and radio. He learnt at first hand about the problems of reconciling hot-headed local activists to centralised discipline: ‘It is no use to take an action to which the masses are opposed,’ he realised, ‘for it will then be impossible to enforce.’²⁰ Significantly, the campaign’s most striking success was not in the Johannesburg area, where the communists had been strongest, but in the Eastern Cape, which provided half the volunteers: the conditions in factories in Port Elizabeth had generated a surge of discontent.²¹

Mandela seemed full of optimism, as he showed in an article for the August 1952 issue of Drum magazine:

Though it takes us years, we are prepared to continue the Campaign until the six unjust laws we have chosen for the present phase are done away with. Even then we shall not stop. The struggle for the freedom and national independence of the non-European people shall continue as the National Planning Council sees fit.²²

The campaign gave blacks a new sense of confidence in their own strength; and it was also succeeding, as Mandela noted, in removing the stigma from having served a jail sentence. ‘From the Defiance Campaign onward,’ he wrote later, ‘going to prison became a badge of honour among Africans.’ But the government, having been caught off guard, was soon preparing reprisals, with the support of the main white opposition. The United Party, which represented most English-speaking voters, sent two Members of Parliament to ask the ANC to abandon the campaign and to support them in the forthcoming elections.²³ The ANC asked them to promise to repeal the pass laws if they returned to power, and when they refused to do this the talks broke down.²⁴ Two liberal leaders, Senator William Ballinger and J.D. Rheinallt Jones, warned Mandela and others that the Defiance Campaign would alienate white support; and the liberal Institute of Race Relations also complained. As Mandela recalled, ‘They came to us and said: “Gentlemen, we don’t think this is the best way of expressing your grievances. Please withdraw it.” And when we refused they attacked us.’ But Mandela was pleasantly surprised by the liberal white press: the Rand Daily Mail, he noted, gave the campaign as much publicity as did the left-wing weekly New Age (formerly the Guardian).²⁵

The Defiance Campaign gave the government an excuse to impose much fiercer laws; and it had fewer inhibitions than the British did when faced by Gandhi’s passive resistance in India. Mandela and his colleagues were taken by surprise. One young black politician, Naboth Mokgatle, warned a meeting of Youth Leaguers, including Mandela, that ‘Their actions were like throwing things into a machine, then allowing the owner to dismantle it, clean it, sharpen it and put it together again before throwing in another thing. My advice was in vain.’²⁶

In July the police had raided the homes and offices of African and Indian leaders, collecting piles of documents. They were still relatively amateurish, and even quite friendly: when they searched the offices of the Transvaal Indian Congress, Amina Cachalia, the wife of Yusuf, brought them tea and sandwiches and led them to unimportant documents while Ahmed Kathrada was removing crucial evidence from other shelves.²⁷ Mandela would reminisce with some warmth about the police chatting with him in Xhosa over tea. But the raids were the prelude to more serious moves. On 30 July Mandela was handed a warrant for his arrest on a charge of violating the Suppression of Communism Act, and another twenty Defiance Campaign leaders were arrested throughout the country.²⁸

The twenty-one leaders were freed on bail, and went on trial in September in a Johannesburg magistrates’ court, before Judge Frans Rumpff. A loud multi-racial crowd converged on the courtroom. But the defendants’ solidarity was spectacularly undermined by Dr Moroka, who had taken fright at the charges levelled against him and hired a separate attorney to plead his innocence. Mandela had attempted to dissuade him the day before the trial began, but Moroka complained about not having been consulted and about the association with communists – though he had not objected to this in the past. When he came before Judge Rumpff he stated that he did not believe in equality between black and white. He then began pointing out the communists among the other defendants – including Sisulu and Dadoo – until the judge stopped him.²⁹

To Mandela, Moroka’s defection was a ‘severe blow’, and was hard to forgive: ‘He had committed the cardinal sin of putting his own interests ahead of those of the organisation and the people.’ But he was also aware of Moroka’s past courage, and that as a rich man he had much more to lose than poorer campaigners, and had many Afrikaner friends. Mandela forgave him later, as he was to forgive so many who betrayed him; he wrote warmly about Moroka in the autobiography written in jail, and later asked him to be godfather of his daughter Zeni’s first child.³⁰ But others were less forgiving.

Judge Rumpff impressed Mandela with his fair-mindedness. Predictably, he found the leaders guilty, but the sentence – nine months’ imprisonment with hard labour, suspended for two years – was relatively lenient. And he stressed that they were guilty of ‘statutory communism’, which, he admitted, had ‘nothing to do with communism as it is commonly known’.³¹

The government’s definition of communism was palpably perverse, but it helped gain support from anti-communists elsewhere, particularly in America, where the Cold War was hotting up. In 1952 Mandela had a glimpse of the ardour of the Cold Warriors when he encountered the black American political figure Dr Max Yergan, who visited South Africa in the midst of the Defiance Campaign. Yergan had earlier spent many years in the Eastern Cape, converting a number of young blacks, including Govan Mbeki, to communism.³² But after returning to America he had become fiercely anti-communist, as he now revealed. In Johannesburg he addressed a meeting at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, attended by black politicians and luminaries including Mandela. Yergan concluded, Mandela later recalled, with ‘a concentrated attack on communism, and drew prolonged ovation from that elitist audience’. But then Barney Ngakane, Mandela’s friend and neighbour in Orlando, counter-attacked, pointing out Yergan’s deafening silence about the Defiance Campaign and about the pernicious influence of American business interests. As Mandela described it: ‘He challenged the guest speaker to speak about the giant American cartels, trusts and multi-national corporations that were causing so much misery and hardship throughout the world, and he foiled Yergan’s attempt to drag us into the Cold War.’³³

By the time of Mandela and the other leaders’ arrests at the end of July, the government was determined to stamp out the Defiance Campaign, which had reached a stage, Mandela thought, ‘where it had to be suppressed by the government or it would impose its own policies on the country’.³⁴ The government’s chief weapon was to ban the campaign’s leaders from holding positions in the ANC or from attending meetings. In May the communist J.B. Marks had been banned as President of the Transvaal ANC, and had recommended Mandela as his successor. Mandela was opposed by a nationalist demagogue named Seperepere Marupeng, a leader of a militant group called Bafabegiya (‘those who die dancing’). Mandela, with his reputation as a ladies’ man, was taken aback when one of the militants, a beautiful young woman, asked: ‘How can I criticise Mandela when he has left his hat in my house?’³⁵ But in October he was overwhelmingly elected to the key position. His triumph was short-lived: in December, along with fifty-one other ANC leaders, he was banned for six months from attending any meeting or from talking to more than one person at a time, and was forbidden to leave Johannesburg without permission. His public position in the ANC hierarchy was now illegal; but his status was reinforced as an individual leader and man of action.

The Defiance Campaign was now petering out. In October it faced another setback when an outbreak of riots in Port Elizabeth and East London (and later in Kimberley) led to the deaths of several innocent people, including a nun. The ANC hastened to offer sympathy to the families, both black and white, who had suffered from ‘this unfortunate, reckless, ill-considered return to jungle law’, and charged the government with deliberately sending out agents provocateurs (which could never be proved). But the riots damaged the protesters’ non-violent image, and gave the government new justification for bannings.³⁶

By December the Public Safety Act and the Criminal Laws Amendment Act provided fiercer penalties against deliberate law-breaking, punishable by up to three years in jail and flogging. Again the ANC was taken by surprise. ‘We had never visualised such drastic penalties,’ Mandela admitted later.³⁷ ‘The tide of defiance was bound to recede,’ as he reported the next year, ‘and we were forced to pause and take stock of the new situation.’³⁸

For a brief time the campaign seemed to be drawing broader support. In early December a young ex-colonial officer, Patrick Duncan, the son of a former Governor-General of South Africa, entered the fray. Duncan was a courageous idealist, with the boyish zeal of a John Buchan hero, passionately anti-communist but also an admirer of Gandhi. Mandela and Yusuf Cachalia persuaded him to join the campaign, to show other whites the way. ‘Pat’s offer came as a gift from heaven,’ Cachalia said. ‘It stopped the campaign becoming racial.’³⁹ Duncan, together with Manilal Gandhi (whom he had persuaded to join him) and a few other whites entered Germiston township near Johannesburg without permits, and were arrested. In the blaze of publicity that followed many blacks were moved by Duncan’s courage, and when he was eventually sent to jail, Mandela, Cachalia and Dadoo came to wish him good luck. But Duncan was not joined by other whites, as they had hoped, and he proved an awkward ally. In the courtroom he pleaded not guilty, then unsuccessfully appealed against his guilty verdict, but never served his full six-week sentence. After his release he became worried about communist influence within the ANC. He later joined the new Liberal Party, and then the Pan Africanist Congress, which became the ANC’s most serious rival.⁴⁰ But Mandela would always remember his bravery with respect.

By the end of 1952 the Defiance Campaign was over. It had been a six-months’ wonder. Politicians and historians continue to argue over its success or failure. Mandela admitted it never spread much beyond the cities and larger towns, except in the Eastern Cape.⁴¹ But he claimed it as an ‘outstanding success’ which had boosted the ANC’s membership – from 4,000 to 16,000 in the Transvaal, while in the Cape it reached 60,000.⁴² The ANC had shown an ability for national organisation which few observers had suspected, and for which Mandela could take much credit. This gave him an important psychological boost, freeing him, as he wrote later, ‘from any lingering doubt or inferiority I might still have felt … I could walk upright like a man, and look everyone in the eye with the dignity that comes from not having succumbed to oppression and fear.’⁴³

The Defiance Campaign also drastically changed the character of the ANC, scaring off the more timid, conservative leaders like Dr Moroka, who was ousted. The young ‘kingmakers’, who included Mandela, looked for a more steadfast President, and found one in Albert Luthuli, a Zulu chief of fifty-three. Luthuli was a large, avuncular figure with slow speech and a generous smile. A former teacher and Methodist preacher based at the mission station of Groutville in Natal, he appeared to be thoroughly conservative. But he had progressed, as he said, ‘along the line of softness to hardness’.⁴⁴ Luthuli became President of the Natal ANC in 1951, and had supported the Defiance Campaign despite pressure from the government, which sacked him from his chieftaincy. He responded with a moving Christian statement called ‘The Road to Freedom is via the Cross’.⁴⁵

Luthuli deeply respected Gandhi, and admired the moderation of the British Labour Party, but he was not afraid to work with communists. ‘Extreme nationalism is a greater danger than communism, and a more real one,’ he told me when he was elected as ANC President in December 1952.⁴⁶ Over the next fifteen years – the longest presidency in the ANC’s history – he was often banned and confined to the area of his home in Natal, and was sometimes seen as a mere figurehead. But Mandela would always regard him as his leader, and a hero of the struggle.

The Defiance Campaign came and went without making much dent on white South African attitudes or on opinion abroad, beyond some left-wing protests. The British diplomats in Pretoria watched events with scepticism, and depicted the Africans as the pawns of Indians and communists. ‘The natives have only a rudimentary political organisation and no effective leaders,’ said one despatch to London in May 1952. The diplomats’ main fear was of ‘civil war between the two white races’, in which the natives might intervene.⁴⁷ The High Commissioner, Sir John Le Rougetel, was upset by the ‘extravagance and scurrility’ of American criticism of the apartheid government, and by a resolution of the Labour Party, then in opposition, which condemned it. He insisted that the British should ‘leave the South Africans to fight their own battles’ – particularly since the more liberal United Party was ‘stiffening up’. Sir John accepted the views of the head of the South African Special Branch, Colonel du Plooy, that the ANC was being financed by the Indian Congress and that ‘its leadership comes entirely from the communist leaders’; he passed on this ‘intelligence’ in a remarkably ill-informed despatch to London in November. The riots in Port Elizabeth he blamed partly on Indian communists who needed a spectacular event to revive the United Nations’ interest in South Africa.⁴⁸

Winston Churchill, who had recently returned to power in Britain as Conservative Prime Minister, had his own confident view, minuted on 16 October: ‘Nothing could be more helpful to Dr Malan in his approaching elections than the Indians and Kaffirs forcing their way into compartments and waiting rooms reserved for whites. The overwhelming mass of the white population of South Africa would be opposed to this intrusion. So what the communists and Indian intriguers are doing is really to help Malan. They must be very stupid not to see this.’⁴⁹

A few Western diplomats were more perceptive. The Canadian High Commissioner, T.W.L. MacDermot, reported to Ottawa in February 1953: ‘The ANC is a great deal more than a political party. Representing as it does the great majority of articulate Africans in the Union, it is almost the parliament of a nation. A nation without a state, perhaps, but it is as a nation that the Africans increasingly think of themselves.’⁵⁰