Читать книгу Mandela: The Authorised Biography - Anthony Sampson - Страница 26

1957–1959

WHILE THE TREASON TRIAL droned on, Mandela was caught up in the biggest political crisis in the forty-five years of the ANC’s existence. It was ultimately to split the organisation apart, and to threaten Mandela’s own position even more seriously than he realised at the time. Ever since the Congress of the People the ANC had been under attack from the exclusive African nationalists, or ‘Africanists’, who opposed the Freedom Charter, with its assumption that the land belonged to everyone, and who called for Africans to take militant action and to stop cooperating with communists or other races. The Treason Trial had given lustre and nationwide recognition to the ANC leaders, but it had also focused attention on their collaboration with Indians and whites, which further antagonised the Africanists.

Mandela was well-placed to understand the impatience and resentments of the Africanists, for they had something in common with his Youth Leaguers a decade earlier, and included some of his old allies. In different circumstances he could have been their leader, but now that he was committed to a broader multi-racial nationalism in alliance with the communists he regarded the rebels as a clear threat to the ANC’s unity, which he saw as crucial to the struggle. He was the more exasperated because they were taking advantage of the Treason Trial to gain support from the grassroots. The two sides were depicted in straightforward ideological colours: nationalists versus communists, exclusive versus inclusive. There were in fact many overlaps and blurs, but behind the confrontation lay long-standing personal resentments and cross-currents which became clearer in retrospect, and which eventually made reconciliation impossible.

The Treason Trial continued to embroil Mandela and his fellow-accused in endless legal argument. Although the government showed no signs of giving up its case, in December 1957, after almost a year of preliminary hearings, the prosecutor dropped the charges against sixty-one of the accused – including, surprisingly, Luthuli and Tambo. Mandela, with his record of militant speeches, was among the remaining ninety-five. The defence applied for the whole case to be discharged, but instead a new prosecutor was appointed: the former Minister of Justice Oswald Pirow, a militant anti-communist who had been an avowed Nazi supporter during the war, and who now claimed that new evidence had emerged of a dangerous conspiracy which meant that the country was living on the edge of a volcano.

When the magistrate, Mr Wessel, concluded that there was enough evidence of treason for the case to go to the Transvaal Supreme Court in Pretoria, Mandela realised that he had become too confident that the whole trial would collapse, and that he and his fellow-defendants might yet be sent to jail.¹ Behind all the absurdities of the trial – the long-winded prosecutor, the incompetent detectives and the ridiculous definitions of communism – there still lay the government’s original purpose: to put the accused out of action, and to convict them through existing legislation.

The ANC leaders’ preoccupation with the day-to-day proceedings in the courtroom played havoc with their organisation, giving more opportunities to their opponents, who were not on trial. The leaders tried to rally supporters with a ‘We Stand by our Leaders’ campaign, but they had no opportunity for speech-making or canvassing. The Africanists, who were closer to the ground, accused the leaders of being high-handed and undemocratic, treating the membership like ‘voting cattle’.²

The Africanists’ strongest base was in Mandela’s home territory of Soweto, where they were led by an impetuous populist, Potlako Kitchener Leballo. Mandela, who was his attorney, thought of Leballo as a wild-card, undeniably brave, but immature, like many of his followers.³ He had worked for the United States Information Service office in Johannesburg under the American David Dubois, where he was allowed to duplicate his leaflets.⁴ Joe Slovo claimed that the Pan Africanist Congress, which emerged in 1959 as the party of the Africanists, was founded at a meeting in the USIS offices.⁵ Leballo’s American links encouraged allegations that the CIA was backing the Africanists, which were never substantiated.

From Leballo’s house in Soweto came the journal the Africanist, burning with diatribes and vituperation against the ANC’s leftist leadership. The Africanists, like nationalists everywhere, had more scope for emotive language than the multi-racialists; their invective against ‘aliens’, ‘Eastern functionaries’ and ‘vendors of the foreign method’ was much livelier than the clichés of anti-colonialism and Marxism which Mandela and his colleagues favoured, and made better copy for the white journalists who did much to publicise them. And their spokesmen were also more colourful and picturesque. Josias Madzunya, the Africanist ANC Chairman in Alexandra, was a former peddler who wore a long overcoat in the hottest weather and who could be relied on for firebrand speeches. Peter Raboroko, their spokesman on education, was a brilliant talker who became a witty polemical journalist. Zeph Mothopeng, a dedicated teacher before he was fired for opposing Bantu Education, was an intellectual who at first sounded aridly theoretical, but who proved to be a fearless campaigner and was to be imprisoned on Robben Island.

The Africanists, including some of the old Youth Leaguers, attacked Mandela and his allies for becoming closer to the whites and the communists, and away from their own people. And Mandela was certainly now moving in different circles. ‘He was not shy to admit that he had shifted ground,’ said his law clerk Godfrey Pitje. ‘“Look, chaps, you can’t blame me for this,” Mandela would say in the office. “I’m beginning to look at things differently.”’⁶

The Africanists saw Mandela’s group being seduced by the charms of white communists like the Slovos in their comfortable suburbs, while they were men of the people who drank at the shebeens in the townships. Peter Raboroko, who had been at school with Tambo, described later how Mandela and his friends were ‘catapulted from the atmosphere of African society into this … To be on a first-name basis with white women, and this type of thing, it just became so very glittering for them.’ When Mandela denounced Raboroko as a ‘shebeen intellectual’, he took it as a compliment: ‘My political reputation is going to be in rags and tatters,’ he retorted, ‘when people learn I was seen walking with you.’ When Raboroko talked about the masses, Mandela said, ‘You mean the shebeens?’ ‘Oh yes,’ replied Raboroko. ‘By the way, I’m not as fortunate as you – you have your drinks in posh houses in Lower Houghton and Parktown. I have to be content to be drinking with the people in shebeens!’⁷ In fact Mandela spent most of his evenings working, and still avoided liquor. ‘Now and again I went to a shebeen out of curiosity,’ he said later, ‘but even now I don’t know what happens in a nightclub.’⁸

The Africanists were simmering with resentment against the ANC leadership in Mandela’s own neighbourhood of Orlando, and the tension came to a head at a special conference of the Transvaal ANC in Orlando in February 1958. Leballo led the attack against the provincial executive, which was weakened by the absence of banned leaders like Mandela and Sisulu. The meeting broke up in disorder, and the ANC National Executive had to use emergency powers to take over the Transvaal branch. Two months later the national ANC faced humiliation when it tried to mount a stay-at-home protest against the whites-only general election in April 1958. The move, opposed by the Africanists, was a fiasco: Duma Nokwe, the Assistant Secretary of the ANC, called it ‘bitterly disappointing, humiliating and exceedingly depressing’.⁹ The ANC leaders could not tolerate the Africanists’ open defiance, and at a secret meeting they expelled Leballo from the organisation.

The final break came in November 1958, when the Transvaal ANC summoned a crisis conference. It was opened by Luthuli, who again warned against reacting to the Afrikaners with ‘a dangerously narrow African nationalism’. The Africanists regarded Mandela and Tambo as among their prime enemies. Tambo, still Secretary of the ANC, tried to calm the rival factions as they wrangled over credentials and delegates, with Africanist thugs confronting loyalist thugs. To avoid defeat in a vote the Africanists retreated from the hall, sending a letter to the leadership proclaiming that they had broken away to become ‘the custodians of the ANC policy as it was formulated in 1912’.¹⁰

Could the split have been avoided? A potential mediator had been Ntatho Motlana, Mandela’s family doctor, an impish, fast-talking man who had worked with him in the Youth League and the Defiance Campaign. Motlana was a rare phenomenon in Orlando: an entrepreneur who believed in capitalism: ‘A sharp businessman,’ Mandela recalled. ‘Right from the beginning he was very shrewd.’¹¹ Motlana was suspicious of white communists, and was friendly with the Africanist Robert Sobukwe, who was his patient and who held meetings in his surgery; but he was against a split, and thought breakaways were setting back liberation struggles all over Africa: ‘I told them not to run away from the whites – to stay in the ANC and fight them from there.’¹²

Motlana warned Mandela that the Youth Leaguers were complaining about communist influences, and threatening to leave the ANC, but Mandela reassured him: ‘Don’t worry, Ntatho. The ANC is going to rule the country.’¹³ Looking back later, Mandela felt the ANC had been too quick to reject the Africanists: ‘There were cases where I think we could have exercised more tolerance and patience … We expelled too many people.’ But he saw the split as probably inevitable in the wake of the Freedom Charter: ‘I don’t think we could have avoided it.’¹⁴

Mandela now parted ways with some of his oldest political friends, including his early mentor Gaur Radebe, now fiercely anti-communist. Peter Mda, his inspiration in the Youth League, remained an Africanist, and was convinced that Mandela was a secret Communist Party member, but still felt for him ‘a friendship of the heart if not of the head’.¹⁵ Mandela was less warm in remembering Mda: ‘I never had any meaningful contact with him whatsoever as a public figure,’ he wrote from jail. ‘I have formed the picture of a man who has stuffed his bones with a lot of marrow, a thinker with a tongue that can both bite and soothe.’ He saw Mda as being as different from himself as war from peace: ‘Mda was a young man concentrating on the former and I drawing attention respectfully to the latter.’¹⁶

In April 1959 the Africanists formed their own party, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), at a national conference in Orlando. The conference was held on the national holiday celebrating the first permanent white settlement in South Africa by Jan van Riebeck of the Dutch East India Company in 1652 – which gave the PAC a cue to protest against ‘the Act of Aggression against the Sons and Daughters of Afrika, by which the African people were dispossessed of their land, and subjected to white domination’.¹⁷ The PAC liked to compare themselves to African nationalists in other parts of the continent, who were now confidently moving towards independence, and the new ‘African Personality’ proclaimed by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana was certainly more in tune with the PAC’s rhetoric than with the multi-racialism of the ANC.

As their President the PAC delegates did not choose a fiery demagogue like Madzunya or Leballo, but the much more reflective Robert Sobukwe, a lecturer in African languages at Witwatersrand University. At thirty-five, Sobukwe was six years younger than Mandela, and like him tall, handsome and physically strong; but he was from a humbler origin, and combined his intellectual grasp with a peasant’s simplicity. Sobukwe was brought up in the Karoo, the half-desert region of the Cape, the son of a shop-worker. He was taken up by the Methodists and went to Healdtown school and Fort Hare, where he was much more academically successful than Mandela. He became a militant Youth Leaguer, fiercely attacking the missionaries and invoking the growing power of Africa: ‘Even as the dying so-called Roman civilisation received new life from the barbarians, so also will the decaying so-called Western civilisation find a new and purer life from Africa.’

In 1949 Sobukwe became Secretary of the Youth League, enthusiastically supporting the Programme of Action of Mandela and his friends. For a few years he was preoccupied with teaching and cultural interests (including translating Macbeth into Zulu), but just before the Congress of the People, shocked by what he saw as the growing influence of communists and non-Africans, he was drawn back into ANC politics.¹⁸ Whites, he believed, could never fully identify with the black cause because ‘a group in a privileged position never voluntarily relinquishes that position.’¹⁹ Like other Africanists he complained about the multi-racial activities of the ANC leaders, whom he accused of ‘dancing with white women in the Johannesburg interracial parties instead of getting down to the job of freeing Africa from white domination’.²⁰

The emergence of the PAC, headed by an eloquent, intellectual anti-communist, was welcomed by conservatives in Europe and America as providing a promising alternative to the ANC. Mandela thought the US State Department ‘hailed its birth as a dagger in the heart of the African left’.²¹ British diplomats were unsure which was the greater danger to the West, communism or racialism; the British High Commission had praised Luthuli’s ‘staunch and comparatively moderate stance’ on racial tolerance.²² But the British acquired an exaggerated respect for the PAC, influenced by the South African Police. On 17 August the Police Commissioner gave a long report to the British High Commission explaining that ‘the Africanists look upon their own organisation as being but one of a number of similar organisations throughout the African continent, all dedicated to the task of freeing the African from “imperialism” and “white domination” and the eventual establishment of a so-called United States of Africa.’²³ Meanwhile, both the British and the Americans still saw the apartheid government as ultimately an ally against global communism. As the State Department’s African expert Joseph Satterthwaite said in October 1958: ‘When the chips are down, they’re such very loyal friends.’²⁴

Mandela still hoped that the two factions of the ANC could be reunited. He had been Sobukwe’s attorney as well as Leballo’s: he respected Sobukwe’s sense of honour, and regarded him as ‘a dazzling orator and incisive thinker’.²⁵ But Mandela was impatient with the immaturity of Sobukwe’s crude black nationalism – which he himself had abandoned a decade ago – and the Africanist bandwagon of politicians settling old scores. He was especially worried by Sobukwe’s intolerance of the rights of minorities, which was summed up in the Africanist manifesto: ‘The African people will not tolerate the existence of other national groups within the confines of one nation.’ Mandela would always argue that tribal and ethnic minorities – whites included – must have their rights guaranteed. Sobukwe, he thought, was evading the issue.²⁶

But Mandela underestimated the threat that Sobukwe represented to the ANC, and the appeal of the PAC’s nationalism to young black intellectuals. He was now facing his first serious political challenge; and looking back forty years later, he would recognise Sobukwe as his most formidable rival.²⁷

When the Treason Trial resumed it was moved to the Afrikaner stronghold of Pretoria, an hour’s drive from Johannesburg, where the ANC’s support was much weaker, and the white population more hostile. Three judges presided in the ornate courtroom – a converted Jewish synagogue – led by the same Justice Rumpff who had already tried many of the accused during the Defiance Campaign. Mandela respected Rumpff, but thought he wanted a conviction: ‘He wanted to send us to jail, but he was too brilliant a judge to commit a disgrace.’²⁸

The defence team still included Vernon Berrangé, ‘the human lie-detector’, but it was now augmented by two very senior lawyers, Israel Maisels and Bram Fischer. Fischer, who became one of Mandela’s closest friends, was already a hero to the ANC. He was a true Afrikaner, the son of a Judge-President of the Orange Free State, with the chubby red face and open style of a farmer. He had begun as an Afrikaner nationalist, but after studying at Oxford and visiting the Soviet Union he joined the Communist Party, and was influenced by J.B. Marks, Moses Kotane and Yusuf Dadoo. Mandela was deeply impressed by Fischer’s stoic self-sacrifice and commitment: ‘We embraced each other as brothers.’²⁹ Fischer devoted all his energies to organising both a political and a legal defence, and his skills attracted many of the accused to the law.

The trial stopped and started, with intricate wrangles. In August 1958 Berrangé embarked on a long legal argument questioning the vaguely-worded indictment. In October the prosecution suddenly withdrew their charges altogether; but a month later they returned with a more precise indictment, which left out sixty-one of the accused to be tried later, and was directed against only thirty people who were thought to be guilty of particularly revolutionary or violent incitement. Mandela was among them.

The trial was due to start again in Pretoria in February 1959. The night before, Mandela went to the first night of the black musical King Kong, composed by his friend Todd Matshikiza, which told the story of the black heavyweight boxer from Sophiatown whom Mandela had known, and who murdered his girlfriend. The premiere was held in the main hall of Wits University, the only auditorium in Johannesburg which would admit blacks and whites together (though segregated by rows). The show, which was later taken to London, expressed all the creative energy of the black townships, with an exuberant cast including Mandela’s friend Nathan Mdledle of the Manhattan Brothers, who played King Kong. Mandela was thrilled by the performance, and afterwards he embraced Todd Matshikiza and his wife Esme. He was particularly moved, he said, by the song ‘Sad Times, Bad Times’, with its refrain ‘What have these men done that they should be destroyed?’, which reminded him of the trial beginning the next day.³⁰

The trial resumed, was adjourned, and then started again, making Mandela’s life still more unpredictable, and his work in his law practice more difficult. The activities of most of the ANC leaders were circumscribed, either by the trial or by bans. The President, Luthuli, was no longer on trial, but in June 1959 he was confined again for a further five years to his home district in Natal. Luthuli now had a high international profile. The British diplomat Eleanor Emery told London that the ban had removed ‘the most stable and moderate of the ANC leaders’, and predicted that it would lead to more extremism, and perhaps to a general banning of the whole ANC.³¹ The New York Times published a profile of Luthuli, saying that the South African government had chosen ‘a worthy foe’, and the new American Ambassador Philip Crowe – much more sophisticated than his predecessors – went to visit Luthuli in Groutville three months after he was banned.³² But Western diplomats continued to steer clear of the more militant ANC leaders like Mandela.

Mandela was under still greater pressure in the trial, but he remained very active behind the scenes. He could see Tambo nearly every day in their law offices, and was closely in touch with Sisulu both in the courtroom and in Orlando. Sisulu remained very influential. ‘I was still looked upon by everybody as Secretary-General,’ he explained later, ‘because I was doing the work, although it was Oliver Tambo or Duma Nokwe who was formally Secretary-General. I was having a discussion with Nelson, I think, daily.’³³

But the ANC had remained disorganised through the 1950s. As a ‘banned leader’ described it in Liberation with devastating candour in 1955:

There exists great inefficiency at varying levels of Congress leadership: the inability to understand simple local situations, inefficiency in attending to the simple things, such as small complaints, replying to letters, visiting of branches. There is complete lack of confidence of one another, lack of teamwork in committees, individualism and the lust for power. The result is sabotage of Congress decisions and directives, gossip and unprincipled criticisms.³⁴

Mandela was aware of the incompetence, but was touchy about criticism of the ANC, particularly from whites. The reporter Martin Leighton wrote an article in the Rand Daily Mail which described how the ANC did not have a real organisation, with no files or membership lists, while its officials were cringing compared to Africans in bordering countries. Mandela was furious, and when Leighton called on him he said he felt like choking him; but not, he reflected later, because the article was false: ‘The criticism which hurts me is the criticism which is correct.’³⁵

The ANC’s Transvaal branch was both the most important and one of the most incompetent. ‘There is no awareness of the need to be alert and vigilant in branch activities,’ the Transvaal executive had complained in November 1956. ‘There is a great deal of sluggishness and inefficiency in our style of work.’ The more leaders were banned, the more urgent the problem became: in December 1958 the National Executive reported that ‘our aim should be to make the Congress a body that can survive any attack or onslaught made upon it, however severe.’ They advocated an immediate efficiency campaign. But a year later the new Secretary-General, Duma Nokwe, who had succeeded Tambo, was lamenting that the problems of organisation ‘have now become hardy annuals’. He warned that ‘the idea that a huge organisation like ours with all the duties and responsibilities that fall to it, can be run on a part-time basis, is ridiculous.’³⁶ He wanted the M-Plan – the emergency resistance network which Mandela had originated eight years earlier – put into action without further delay, to ‘withstand and defeat the savage onslaught’. But there was little improvement in the ANC’s defences while the security police did not appear a ruthless enemy. When two Afrikaner policemen who spoke Xhosa well visited the ANC offices, Mandela recalled, tea would be made for them and they would be given ‘chairs to sit down so they could take their notes, because they were so polite’.³⁷

After the formation of the PAC in April 1959 the ANC was forced to take a more militant stance. It placed much hope in economic boycotts, which it saw as a major political weapon, with unlimited possibilities.³⁸ To boycott products from pro-apartheid companies or shops seemed the answer to the bans on other protests: ‘Don’t say anything, just don’t buy.’³⁹ Luthuli wanted to put pressure on vulnerable companies, to ‘hit them in the stomach’, as Mandela put it.⁴⁰ In May 1959, encouraged by a partial boycott of Rembrandt cigarettes, which was controlled by the Afrikaner nationalist tobacco-king Anton Rupert, the ANC announced a boycott of potatoes in protest against the inhuman treatment of farm workers. At first this had some success, and Mandela saw it as the start of a new mood of resistance.⁴¹

Mandela was warning about the ruthlessness of the new government of Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, who had become Prime Minister in September 1958, following Strijdom’s death. But he was confident that Verwoerd’s regime, with its ‘grim programme of mass evictions, political persecution and police terror’, would not last long: ‘It is the last desperate gamble of a hated and doomed fascist autocracy – which, fortunately, is soon due to make its exit from the stage of history.’⁴²

The ANC was under growing pressure to take mass action to defy the pass laws by making a bonfire of the hated pass-books, which were seen as the main instrument of black oppression. In theory this could have made the whole system unworkable, but the ANC was very conscious of the failure of past campaigns. At the annual conference in December 1958 the National Executive reported that resistance to passes was mounting, but they were still cautious: ‘To hope that by striking one blow we would defeat the system would result in disillusionment. On the other hand we cannot sit until everybody is ready to enter the battlefield … the struggle for the repeal of pass laws has begun; there is no going back but “forward ever”.’⁴³

Duma Nokwe, the new ANC Secretary-General, was a compact, lively graduate of Wits who had become the first black barrister in South Africa. He was a protégé of Tambo, who had taught him at St Peter’s school, and a boxer, with a pugilist’s aggression which Tambo often had to restrain.⁴⁴ He was forged by the Defiance Campaign and the Treason Trials, and he became a committed communist while enjoying good living and drink. As Secretary-General he was determined to reorganise the ANC, and working closely with Sisulu, Mandela and Tambo, he prepared a detailed plan for approval at the ANC’s annual conference in December 1959. It proposed first an extension of the economic boycott, and then the launch of an anti-pass campaign, planned to begin on 31 March 1960 – the anniversary of the first serious demonstration against the pass laws in 1919 – and culminating in a bonfire of passes on 26 June.

But the ANC’s thunder was being stolen by the PAC, who were impatient for immediate action. A week after the ANC’s 1959 conference, the PAC executive reported to their first national conference. Their main proposal was oddly moderate: a ‘status campaign’ to insist on Africans receiving courteous treatment in shops or workplaces, so that they could assert their own personalities and ‘exorcise this slave mentality’.⁴⁵ This was quickly overtaken by Sobukwe, who put forward his own campaign to defy the pass laws. It was a half-baked proposal, with no realistic assessment of the risks involved, but it was rapidly and unanimously approved. The PAC, said Sobukwe, would now ‘cross its historical Rubicon’.⁴⁶

The ANC leaders believed the PAC were playing the role of spoilers, trying to undermine and outbid their own initiatives. ‘What the PAC had embarked upon,’ wrote Joe Slovo, ‘was an ill-organised, second-class version of the 1952 Defiance Campaign.’⁴⁷ Mandela was frustrated to watch his rival Sobukwe, the ‘dazzling orator and incisive thinker’, playing the demagogue and ignoring the historical warnings of failure. But the ANC could not afford to ignore the popular excitement Sobukwe had released. Four months later his rash plan was to prove the catalyst which transformed the whole South African scene, and impelled Mandela into a far more militant revolutionary role.