Читать книгу Mandela: The Authorised Biography - Anthony Sampson - Страница 22

1953–1956

DESPITE MANDELA’S political evolution, he still retained his basic African nationalism: his pride in his people and their history, and his determination to regain their rights. But he sought allies wherever he could find them: from among white liberals, Indian Gandhi-ists and Christian priests. And his most effective and committed friends were the communists, who in 1953 had reformed themselves as the South African Communist Party – a name which stressed their home-grown, patriotic basis. Uniquely multi-racial, the SACP remained very different from other white parties, and from Communist Parties elsewhere, and it included some very unrevolutionary members. But because of Pretoria’s special definition of ‘statutory communism’, devised against the background of the escalating Cold War, they could all be branded as dangerous revolutionaries who were taking over the ANC, thus scaring other potential supporters away.

The communist bogey would be portrayed more menacingly in the next stage of the ANC’s crusade, the preparation of what would be called the ‘Freedom Charter’. South African liberals and many Western sympathisers would depict the Charter as a typical communist ploy aimed at discreetly achieving influence through a popular front with carefully-orchestrated demonstrations, using ANC leaders as gullible pawns to endorse their propaganda. But that view was distorted by the magnifying glasses of the Cold War. The Charter’s message was directed not against capitalists or Western democrats, but against narrow nationalists, both Afrikaner and African. For Mandela and most of his colleagues the Charter was a historic breakthrough. It committed the ANC to discarding racialism and to widening the basis of the struggle, and was to become its key manifesto for the next forty years.

The originator of the Freedom Charter was neither a communist nor a militant, but the conservative elder statesman of the ANC, Z.K. Matthews, Mandela’s mentor at Fort Hare. Matthews had been forced to return to South Africa after a year in the United States in May 1953, when the government had refused to extend his passport. He came back in a more radical mood. He was now less admiring of the traditional black American hero Booker T. Washington than of his radical opponent Dr W.E.B. du Bois, the founder of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).¹ When Matthews arrived at the airport the Special Branch took away books by authors including Arnold Toynbee, and also a photograph of Z.K.’s friend the singer, actor and communist Paul Robeson.²

Matthews found his people’s prospects much deteriorated. The Nationalists’ second election victory the year before was really greater than it appeared, he pointed out, because ‘the opposition parties are but pale reflections of the government party as far as their colour policies are concerned’.³ Over lunch with his sons at home, Matthews first discussed the idea of a gathering of all races to discuss the possibility of a multi-racial constitution.⁴ Other groups took up the idea, and in August 1953 Matthews, as President of the Cape ANC, formally proposed it at their annual conference: ‘I wonder whether the time has not come for the ANC to consider the question of convening a National Convention, A CONGRESS OF THE PEOPLE, representing all the people of this country irrespective of race or colour to draw up a FREEDOM CHARTER for the DEMOCRATIC SOUTH AFRICA OF THE FUTURE.’⁵

‘Little did I realise when I uttered those words,’ he recalled later, ‘that I was laying the foundation of a charge of treason.’⁶ It was ironic, Mandela commented in jail twenty years afterwards, that Matthews, who had been criticised as a fence-sitter, should have conceived the dynamic idea which became ‘the vortex of our aspirations’.⁷ Mandela welcomed the proposed convention as a public display of strength, and compared it to the founding of the ANC in 1912. It was all the more important since he suspected that the ANC might soon be banned altogether.⁸

The idea was endorsed at the next annual conference of the ANC in Queenstown in December 1953. It was much more confident and well-reported than the Bloemfontein conference two years earlier which had initiated the Defiance Campaign. There was clearly tension between Marxist speakers, who saw the struggle in class terms, and the Christian approach of the President, Albert Luthuli, who insisted: ‘The urge and yearning for freedom springs from a sense of DIVINE DISCONTENT and so, having a divine origin, can never be permanently humanly gagged.’⁹ Some of the nationalists wanted to expel Sisulu for collaborating with other races, but the majority of the delegates were convinced of the need to co-operate: Luthuli pointed to the dangerous example of narrow Afrikaner nationalism, and insisted that African nationalism be broader, democratic and progressive. The need for a Freedom Charter was agreed upon, and the conference instructed the executive to make immediate preparations for a Congress of the People, including a corps of national ‘Freedom Volunteers’.

In March 1954 Sisulu and Mandela helped organise a meeting with some of the ANC’s allies at Tongaat, close to Luthuli’s home area, to which he was now restricted.¹⁰ An eight-member National Action Council was set up to prepare for the Congress of the People. Only two of the council members (Luthuli and Sisulu) were from the ANC, which the nationalists were quick to depict as a sign of domination by outsiders. The other six included two from the South Africa Indian Congress, two from the newly-formed South African Coloured People’s Organisation, and two from the new body of white ANC supporters, the Congress of Democrats, which was made up largely of communists, whose involvement brought new controversies and suspicions.

The SACP’s Central Committee, which included Joe Slovo and Rusty Bernstein, threw itself into organising the Congress of the People, holding many secret meetings.¹¹ The more nationalist ANC members, the ‘Africanists’, were alarmed by the communist influence, but Mandela appreciated the hard work and total commitment of friends like Bram Fischer and Michael Harmel, who had been hounded and persecuted as much as the blacks, and who shared his goal of overthrowing white domination.¹² He no longer believed that communists were necessarily against the Church as he noted that many black communists were genuine Christians.¹³ When Canon Collins came to Johannesburg from London in 1954, Mandela assured him that the ANC was not communist, though the government was driving it in that direction: ‘There was little time left for there to be a possibility of real co-operation between black and white.’¹⁴

The ANC invited another newly-formed white organisation as well as the Congress of Democrats to co-sponsor the Congress of the People. The Liberal Party had been formed in the wake of the April 1953 general election – in which the Nationalists had increased their majority – to counter the forces of racism. Its leaders included respected academics and intellectuals including the novelist Alan Paton, and it would be helped by Harry Oppenheimer, the Chairman of the huge Anglo-American Corporation. The Liberals were totally opposed to apartheid, but they stopped well short of calling for universal franchise, and were hostile to the communists. ‘Between communists and liberals,’ wrote Paton later, ‘there is a fundamental incompatibility.’¹⁵

Most Liberals remained aloof from the ANC and its communist friends, but some ANC leaders would make friends with individual members of the new party: President Luthuli was in touch, Mandela noted, with the most liberal Liberals, and welcomed the party as an ally against white supremacy. Mandela too had Liberal friends – notably Patrick Duncan, who had joined the Defiance Campaign – but he was critical of the Liberal Party. He was already foreseeing the need for violence, and thought the Liberals would get in his way. And he was impatient with the Liberals’ refusal to support universal suffrage.

In June 1953 Mandela wrote an article entitled ‘Searchlight on the Liberal Party’. It was published in a new monthly periodical, Liberation, which was edited by Michael Harmel, with Mandela himself on its editorial board. He attacked the Liberals’ insistence on ‘democratic and constitutional means’ and their refusal to support ‘one adult, one vote’. He saw them as part of the European ruling class which, he said, ‘hates and fears the idea of a revolutionary democracy in South Africa just as much as the Malans and the Oppenheimers do’.¹⁶ He predicted a clear parting of the ways between those who committed themselves to the revolutionary programme and those who did not, between the friends and the enemies of Congress. And he asked, as he would often ask again: ‘Which side, gentlemen, are you on?’¹⁷

The Liberals replied through Professor Tom Price, who poured scorn on Mandela’s ‘rosy clichés born of the October Revolution’ – an attack which, as the Liberal Party’s historian Randolph Vigne lamented, ‘served only to draw the battle lines between the Liberals and the new Congressites, black and white’. The Liberals at first welcomed the chance to co-sponsor the Congress of the People; but they soon became convinced that they were being lured into a ‘popular front’ whose decisions were taken in advance by communist elements. They believed, moreover, that the Congress would be ‘a very minor affair’, and decided to withdraw before it was held – to the later regret of many of their members: the historian David Everatt concluded that the decision was ‘one of the most damaging the party ever took’.¹⁸

Preparations continued without the Liberals, but with much input from the white communists in the Congress of Democrats. Groups across the country held hundreds of meetings, submitting their own drafts and proposals which would be incorporated in a grand Freedom Charter to be put forward at the Congress. The response was certainly vigorous, welcoming very different concepts of freedom – including the freedom to have ten wives. As Joe Slovo later described it: ‘Tens of thousands of scraps of paper came flooding in: a mixture of smooth writing-pad paper, torn pages from ink-blotched school exercise books, bits of cardboard, asymmetrical portions of brown and white paper bags, and even the unprinted margins of bits of newspaper.’¹⁹

Some suspected that this democratic outpouring was not quite as spontaneous as it looked. Sydney Kentridge, who was later to be Mandela’s counsel, noticed that many of the demands were in the same handwriting, and suspected that a classic communist technique was secretly at work: to detach the masses from their previous leaders.²⁰ But the eventual Freedom Charter was very far from being a communist manifesto. Long after, Mandela remained convinced that ‘it was a document born of the people. It was not something that was imposed from the top. And that is why it is still relevant even today.’²¹ He was impressed by ‘how far ahead of the politicians the masses were, in several respects’. The people realised that political power was essential, but also that it would be meaningless without economic power. He was struck too by their lack of extreme nationalism, and their acceptance of the principle that South Africa belonged to all its people.²²

Behind the scenes, Mandela worked very closely with Walter Sisulu, who was now being pursued by the police. Z.K. Matthews told the Cape ANC in June that Sisulu was operating behind the ‘iron curtain’ of the Transkei as a Scarlet Pimpernel (before Mandela inherited the title): ‘They sought him here, they sought him there, they sought him everywhere.’²³ The police soon caught up with him in his house in Orlando in July 1954. I happened to be with him. He was talking with his usual analytical detachment about bannings and detentions, when two Afrikaner detectives walked in. They were surprisingly friendly: ‘Ah, we’ve found you at last: two letters from the Minister of Justice for you!’ ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ Sisulu answered. ‘Only two? It won’t make any difference, you know. The struggle will go on!’ The detective smiled: ‘Cheerio then – Afrika!’²⁴

The next day Sisulu was arrested, and was later sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for having attended a gathering of five people. But he remained the moving force behind the African National Congress. In August 1954 he recalled how five years earlier he had promised that, as Secretary of the ANC, ‘I shall be entirely at your disposal.’ He described how crippling bans had already removed most members of the National Executive, including Mandela, but insisted that the movement was growing in strength: ‘The government has already been shaken, the time has passed when they could rule the country as if we, the people, did not exist.’²⁵ In fact Sisulu was still regarded by his colleagues as Secretary of the ANC, with Mandela as his close partner.

The first draft of the Freedom Charter was created by the communist architect Rusty Bernstein, who rather casually added a rhetorical beginning and ending – which he later thought overblown.²⁶ In early June it was passed on to a small planning group, including Mandela, who made a few changes. The Charter’s meaning was to become a battleground for the next thirty-five years while it remained pickled in history, its authors jailed or exiled. It was frequently condemned as a Marxist document, with its bold promise: ‘The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.’ But in fact it was carefully designed to be all things to all men: Mandela saw it as having been welded from the demands of the masses, arising out of their daily lives.²⁷ It proclaimed principles rather than policies, in a declamatory style like a political psalm. Michael Harmel, the Marxist historian of the SACP, claimed with some reason that it ‘stems from the tradition of the proclamation of rights of the French and American revolutions and echoed in the UN Declaration of Human Rights’.²⁸

The Freedom Charter opened with the words:

We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know:

That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.²⁹

The Congress of the People was fixed for 26 June 1955 (now established as the annual ‘Freedom Day’). It was held on a private sports field in Kliptown, near Soweto. Three thousand delegates converged from all over the country on the cheerful scene, which looked more like a Derby Day than a militant demonstration. They included wizened black countrymen and office-workers with bright American ties, smooth Indian lawyers with their wives in saris, and swaying black grandmothers in wide skirts in the ANC colours.³⁰ There was a clear communist influence, with stalls distributing left-wing pamphlets and a fraternal message from Chou En-lai in Beijing. But the meeting itself had the leisurely, casual character of traditional Congress meetings, with Christian elements including Father Huddleston, who was given a special ANC honour.

Mandela, like most of the organisers, was banned from the meeting and could only watch it from afar. He had driven to Kliptown with Sisulu, and moved round the edge of the crowd in a thin disguise, standing for a time next to a bearded man from the Transkei, marvelling at the people’s dedication.³¹ It seemed surprising that the Kliptown meeting was not itself banned; the reason for this soon became clear.

Mandela watched the Congress follow its slow course. On the first day the Freedom Charter was recited in three languages, and was approved with shouts of ‘Afrika!’ from the crowd. On the second day each section of the Charter was acclaimed in turn, until they reached the words ‘there shall be peace and friendship’. At that point the meeting was suddenly disrupted by detectives and policemen armed with sten guns bursting into the crowd. An Afrikaner officer took the microphone and announced that they were investigating high treason, and were searching for subversive documents. The police took down the name of every spectator before they were allowed to leave, trooping away peacefully while a band with a dented tuba and broken drums played African songs. Mandela was tempted to join them, but thought better of it, and drove back to Johannesburg for an emergency meeting of the ANC leadership. It was gratifying that the police had recognised the importance of the Congress, but Mandela knew that the raid ‘signalled a harsh new turn’.³²

The Freedom Charter soon acquired an independent momentum. It had not been completely endorsed at the Congress of the People, so its status was uncertain: as Rusty Bernstein saw it, the Charter had ‘drifted out of the Congresses’ control – and for lack of foresight had taken on a free-floating life of its own’.³³ The white newspapers prominently reported the meeting and the police intervention, while not printing the Charter itself. But the text of the Charter soon reverberated within the ANC, and was challenged by formidable critics.³⁴

In December 1955 the annual conference of the ANC debated the Charter in a stormy atmosphere, while most of its architects were banned from attending. The National Executive complained that many ANC branches ‘showed a complete lack of activity, as if some of them regretted the birth of this great and noble idea’.³⁵ Luthuli himself was uneasy, as he told his Congress colleague Arthur Letele, about ‘certain new trends or cliques in Congress’, but he commended the Charter, and advocated an ‘all-inclusive African nationalism’ which embraced all South Africans. Many nationalists, who now called themselves ‘Africanists’, resisted cooperation with other races. The former ANC President Alfred Xuma wrote a letter complaining about ‘certain tendencies’ within Congress, which he believed had ‘lost its identity as a National Liberation Movement with a policy of its own and distinct African leadership’. Mandela’s former mentor Peter Mda reasserted the original nationalism of the Youth League in an article in his journal the Africanist: ‘From our inception we saw the burning need of ridding the ANC of foreign domination.’ He proclaimed: ‘NO WHITE MAN HAS EVER IMPRESSED US.’³⁶

The annual conference eventually put off endorsing the Freedom Charter until a special conference in Orlando in April 1956. There it provoked a new storm. The Africanists complained that the conference had been packed by the ‘Charterists’, and attacked the idea that the land belonged to everyone, implicit in the phrase ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’, which suggested public ownership. Luthuli and the Natal branch had their own concerns about the economic clauses of the Charter, but they gave way in the cause of unity, not wanting to strengthen the hand of the Africanists.³⁷ Luthuli was resisting pressure to dissociate himself from left-wing allies: that year his eccentric white Californian friend Mary-Louise Hooper, who had been raising funds for the ANC in America, suggested to him that the ANC should change its official lawyers, Mandela & Tambo, because their left-wing reputation was putting off potential donors. Luthuli replied that while he did not like communists, ‘it would not only be unwise but mean to forgo the services of any of our faithful and tried lawyers solely on the grounds of leftist leanings’.³⁸

The Freedom Charter was eventually approved by the conference. It was a remarkable achievement, just when the Afrikaner government was imposing its exclusive racial power, for the ANC to adopt a manifesto which was above all anti-racial.³⁹ ‘For the first time in the history of our country,’ wrote Mandela a year later, ‘the democratic forces irrespective of race, ideological conviction, party affiliation or religious belief have renounced and discarded racialism in all its ramifications.’⁴⁰ But the Charter was approved at the cost of fierce dissension, which would split the ANC apart two years later.

Nelson Mandela gave his own interpretation of the Freedom Charter, which would later become significant, in an important article in Liberation in June 1956, the first anniversary of the Congress of the People. It was not just his view: all the articles in Liberation were carefully edited by the magazine’s whole board, and Mandela had been asked to ‘correct the assumption that the Freedom Charter was the embryo of a socialist state’.⁴¹ The article largely conformed to the Marxist interpretation of the Charter, which Mandela argued was a ‘revolutionary document precisely because the changes it envisages cannot be won without breaking up the economic and political set-up of present South Africa’. And he underlined the need for public ownership: ‘The Charter strikes a fatal blow at the financial and gold-mining monopolies that have for centuries plundered the country and condemned its people to servitude.’⁴²

But in a crucial passage he welcomed the opportunity that would be created for free enterprise to expand: ‘The breaking up and democratisation of these monopolies will open up fresh fields for the development of a prosperous non-European bourgeois class. For the first time in the history of this country the non-European bourgeoisie will have the opportunity to own in their own name and right mills and factories, and trade and private enterprise will boom and flourish as never before.’⁴³

For decades these two sentences would reverberate through subsequent trials and angry debates on Robben Island. They were omitted – as Trotskyists noted with relish – from the Liberation article when it appeared in Mandela’s published speeches and writings, edited by Ruth First in London and several times reprinted.⁴⁴ But Mandela continued to state his belief that under the ANC private enterprise would ‘flourish as never before’ – which would have a very practical significance forty years later.

The arguments about future economic systems were beginning to be overshadowed by the more immediate activities of the Afrikaner government. By the mid-fifties the Nationalists were extending their policy of apartheid much more rapidly and thoroughly than Mandela and his colleagues had first anticipated. In 1954, at the age of eighty, Dr Malan retired, to be succeeded as Prime Minister by Hans Strijdom, a cruder advocate of white domination, with little intellectual subtlety. But a much more ambitious concept of ‘grand apartheid’ was being prepared by Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, the Minister of Native Affairs, who would become Prime Minister in 1958.

Verwoerd, with his innocent face and gentle voice, was a visionary who had no doubts about the moral rightness of his plan to completely separate blacks from whites, a plan which attracted Afrikaner intellectuals and others as the ultimate solution to the problem of race relations. But it could be achieved only by a programme of drastic social engineering and mass removals which was closer to the actions of communist governments in Eastern Europe than to any free-enterprise model in the West. While Afrikaner governments were representing themselves as champions of free enterprise, they were embarking on unprecedented state intervention which constantly impinged on the daily lives of Africans. The new black townships, with their thousands of identical houses unrelieved by shops or businesses, looked like caricatures of socialist housing for the lumpenproletariat.

Mandela spent much time analysing and criticising ‘Verwoerd’s Grim Plot’, as he called it.⁴⁵ He regarded Verwoerd as following the broad ideas of Hitler’s national socialism and racial principles, through which he had planned to rule Germany’s African colonies. ‘Fascism has become a living reality in our country,’ Mandela wrote in June 1957, ‘and its defeat has become the principal task of the entire people of South Africa.’⁴⁶ But Verwoerd had reason to believe that he could gain support from tribal leaders, by encouraging their rivalries and differences. He had a special opportunity to do this in the rural areas, where the chiefs were jealous of their territorial influence and privileges. Only a few chiefs, like Albert Luthuli, were prepared to resign their chieftainship rather than serve an alien power. As in wartime Europe, it required great courage to resist the temptation to collaborate with an all-powerful regime.

Mandela now saw himself as belonging firmly to Johannesburg, which had forged his mature attitudes and politics. But he still kept his links with the countryside, and his royal ancestry and upbringing had given him a deeper sense of involvement with his home territory than most of his colleagues. ‘Fourteen years of crammed life in South Africa’s largest city,’ he wrote later, ‘had not killed the peasant in me.’ In September 1955 his travel ban had again expired, and he decided to revisit the Transkei.

Driving through Natal, he again enjoyed the wild, open landscape and his closeness to nature, with a relish which comes through in his writings. He recalled the land’s historical associations, and reflected on the old battles for territory: first between Zulus and British, then between Afrikaners and British. ‘Was it the same Afrikaner who fought so tenaciously for his own freedom,’ he wondered, ‘who had now become such a tyrant, and was persecuting us?’⁴⁷ In Durban he stayed with his Indian friends Ismail and Fatima Meer, and visited the banned Luthuli in Groutville. Arriving home in the Transkei he saw his mother again, with a mixture of nostalgia and guilt. He had invited her to come and stay with him in Johannesburg, but she had chosen to continue living alone, twenty miles from a doctor, still a simple peasant woman ploughing the fields and surviving in the rugged conditions.⁴⁸ In jail he would always have an uneasy conscience about her: but she had encouraged him to fight for his beliefs, and he reassured himself that his struggle was giving his people a new meaning to life.⁴⁹

His main purpose in visiting the Transkei was political. The government was now determined to extend apartheid by means of the new Bantu Authorities Act, which would promote the chiefs locally while subordinating them to their white rulers in Pretoria. The Transkei was to be the showpiece. The Bunga, the council of Transkei chiefs, had rejected the new Act in 1952, but the government had lured them with greater juridical and financial powers, and in 1955 the Bunga voted to accept it. Mandela was upset, but realistic: with his own chiefly background he clearly understood the temptation to collaborate. In July 1955 he wrote a well-argued article for Fighting Talk called ‘Bluffing the Bunga into Apartheid’. He pointed out how every chief and headman would now be paid by the government, and fired if they defied it, as Chief Luthuli had been fired in 1952. It was ‘part of a deliberate bluff’ to deceive the credulous tribal leaders into believing that they had a voice in their own government. But he recognised the weakness of ANC propaganda in the face of the chiefs’ influence over their people, and urged the ANC to reconsider its decision to boycott the forthcoming Transkei elections: ‘Should these bodies not be used as platforms to expose the policies of the Nationalist government, and to win the people over to the liberation movement?’⁵⁰

Mandela saw the conflict in very personal terms. Kaiser Matanzima, his nephew and one-time hero at Fort Hare, was now an influential chief in the territory of Western Tembuland, and he had helped to persuade the Bunga to accept the new Act. The two men, both born to rule, both confident lawyers, had much in common, and they would always maintain a family intimacy. But they now had very different loyalties, and found themselves on opposite sides in the classic debate between collaborator and resister. Mandela no longer believed in the hereditary principle which had benefited Matanzima, while Matanzima saw Mandela as now being a Johannesburger, ‘far away from his home people’.

During his visit to the Transkei Mandela argued with Matanzima through the night, carefully avoiding theoretical ‘isms’. He warned him that the government aimed to divide and rule the black people, and claimed that resistance would avoid future massacres. Matanzima replied that the chiefs would be strengthened by the apartheid system, and that multi-racial policies would increase racial friction, leading to bloodshed and bitterness. He saw himself as being in the thick of battle. ‘My attitude was one of reconciliation with the Afrikaners,’ Matanzima recalled forty years later. ‘Black and white must meet together in the Transkei.’⁵¹ Mandela was distressed by the deadlock. ‘I would have loved to fight side by side with him,’ he wrote later in jail, ‘and share with him the laurels of victory.’ But by then Matanzima was firmly allied with the ANC’s enemies.

Mandela continued his tour of the country. He drove on to Port Elizabeth, where he first met Govan Mbeki, the Marxist activist who was organising the ANC in the Eastern Cape. Then he visited the campaigning Englishman Christopher Gell, who lived in an iron lung – from which he dictated shrewd advice to the ANC and sharp critiques of apartheid for the newsletter Africa X-Ray Report. Mandela never forgot this unusual ally: when Gell died the ANC organised his funeral, with more blacks than whites among the mourners.

Mandela went on to Cape Town, enchanted by the famous Garden Route, stopping near Clarkson to appreciate both the glorious view and the opportunities for guerrilla fighters to hide in the forests: ‘My head was full of dangerous ideas.’ In Cape Town he did not see the Trotskyists with whom he had argued seven years earlier, but moved between communists and clergy. He visited the offices of New Age to find the police searching them and seizing papers: an omen of trouble to come. He stayed for two weeks in the black township of Langa with Methodist ANC activists, driving round the Cape to organise branches (though resting on Sundays). Before he left the Methodists knelt and prayed for his safe journey home.

Mandela returned to his family in Orlando feeling refreshed and reactivated, and much better informed about rural realities. He warned his colleagues that the ANC was very weak in the Transkei, faced by conservative chiefs and strong security police, and urged a ‘boycott from within’. The argument was urgent, as the government pressed ahead with ‘grand apartheid’. A government commission, headed by Professor F.R. Tomlinson and including no blacks, had outlined an ambitious scheme to invest in separate homelands, or ‘Bantustans’, in which Africans would ‘develop along their own lines’, with their own administration and industries. The government accepted much of it, while rejecting its more liberal proposals, and prepared to cut up South Africa into separate Bantustans: the Transkei would be the first. Mandela warned that the Bantustans would have no real scope for developing their own policies, while providing reserves of cheap labour for white employers.⁵²

Apartheid plans were stretching out everywhere, and the government was also determined to enforce complete segregation in schools. The Bantu Education Act of April 1953 gave Pretoria control over all the mission schools, in order to enforce the principle (in Verwoerd’s famous words) that: ‘There is no place for the Bantu in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour.’ As Verwoerd told Parliament: ‘Racial relations cannot improve if the wrong type of education is given to Natives. They cannot improve if the result of Native education is the creation of frustrated people who, as a result of the education they received, have expectations in life which circumstances in South Africa do not allow to be fulfilled immediately.’⁵³

Mandela was just such a frustrated native. For all his past complaints about the missionaries’ imperialism, he was always appreciative of his teachers – and he would become more grateful to them later. He was saddened when the Methodists agreed to hand over their schools to the government: ‘Verwoerd must have danced.’⁵⁴ Most Anglican schools were likewise handed over, but the Roman Catholics kept their schools going without the help of the state.⁵⁵ Mandela feared that the new tribal education system, on top of the territorial segregation, would further undermine the national unity of the ANC: ‘The African people are being broken up into small tribal units, isolated one from the other, in order to prevent the rise of national consciousness amongst them and to foster a narrow and insulated tribal outlook.’⁵⁶

The Bantu Education Act brought to a head the thorny question of apartheid schools. Mandela was more realistic than most of the National Executive of the ANC, who wanted a permanent boycott. He warned that they would not be able to sustain it, and could not provide an effective alternative: they should not promise what they could not deliver. He was overruled, and the ANC called for children to stay away, and tried to create schools of its own. But the ANC schools were harassed by the police, and parents became desperate for some kind of education. The ANC was compelled to give up the boycott. Historians would judge its mistake harshly: ‘Of all campaigns conducted by the ANC,’ wrote Frank Welsh in 1998, ‘that against Bantu education was the most poorly-planned, the most confused and, for Africans generally, the most confusing.’⁵⁷ Mandela’s warning had been vindicated. ‘It was a heavy responsibility,’ he wrote, ‘to choose between two evils: fighting to the bitter end, even if all the children were turned into the streets, and a compromise which at least would keep them in the classroom.’⁵⁸

Apartheid in schools was soon followed by apartheid in universities, as the government forced higher education into the same mould. The Extension of University Education Act of 1959 would remove the independence of Mandela’s old academies, Fort Hare and Wits, and impose strict segregation. It would kick away the ladder by which he and his friends had reached a wider world, and break black students’ contacts with other races, which threatened the government’s system. ‘The friendship and interracial harmony,’ Mandela wrote in Liberation in 1957, ‘constitute a direct threat to the entire policy of apartheid and baasskap [white domination].’⁵⁹

Mandela watched the avenues of his hopeful youth closing behind him. The schools and universities were being cut off from the wider influences of English liberal culture which had forged his own attitudes. The government was showing the full ruthlessness of its policies, while dividing his people to frustrate their opposition. Mandela still believed the new structures should be resisted from within; but he had to wait twenty years to be proved right, by the schoolchildren of Soweto. In the meantime his old schools had been first cut back, then devastated, by apartheid: when Jack Dugard, the former principal of the teacher-training school at Healdtown, returned there in 1976 he found that all but one of the staff were Afrikaners, obsessed by their own personal safety, while the classrooms had been wrecked by fires. He asked: ‘How could education progress in such an atmosphere?’⁶⁰

Keeping in touch with his rural roots gave Mandela a special perspective. In February 1956 he made another brief trip to the Transkei with Sisulu, to buy a plot of land in Umtata, following his principle that a man should own land near his birthplace.⁶¹ Soon after returning to Johannesburg he was banned for the third time, preventing him from leaving the city for another five years. He judged that ‘The police thought they had given me enough rope to run around.’ But he was now more defiant, and contemptuous of bans. ‘I was determined,’ he wrote in jail, ‘that my involvement in the struggle, and the scope of my political activities, would be determined by nobody else but myself.’⁶² His bans had compelled him to become more self-reliant, more detached from any party machine. But at the same time the government’s oppression was forcing the ANC and its allies closer together.

Mandela was set on a clear collision course with the government, which was watching him carefully. After being served with his bans he wrote to the Minister of Justice on 13 April asking him for his reasons. Three months later he received a long reply (still retained in the Department’s archives) stating that he had vilified the whites and incited blacks to disobey laws and establish a black government, and reminding him of inflammatory speeches he had made over the previous six years. On 22 June 1950 he had said: ‘It is about three hundred years since the Europeans came to this country. Heroes and beauties of Africa died. Our country was taken away and slavery came up.’ ‘This is the organisation,’ he had said of the ANC on 22 March 1952, ‘which will be the future government of this country.’ ‘If everybody stood together and remained together,’ he said on 7 November 1952, ‘there would come a time when we would repay the blood of those killed.’ ‘We are in a better position against the Afrikaner people than they were when they fought the British imperialists,’ he said on 7 March 1954. ‘I know as sure as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow that a major clash will come and all forces of reaction will collapse against the forces of liberation.’⁶³

He was right about the clash, but wrong about the collapse.