Читать книгу Mandela: The Authorised Biography - Anthony Sampson - Страница 30

1961

BY THE END OF 1960 Mandela’s wide-ranging life in Johannesburg was rapidly narrowing. His law practice had collapsed, many friends were in exile, and the social network of Orlando had virtually dissolved. His family, he reckoned, was financially ruined.¹ His home life with Winnie was constantly interrupted by political tasks: when she gave birth to their second daughter, Zindzi, at the end of the year, he arrived home too late to be with her. ‘I rarely sat down with him as a husband,’ Winnie claims now. ‘The honest truth of God is that I didn’t know him at all.’²

Mandela’s political life was already moving half-underground, and he was presenting a more subterranean image: no longer the youthful, clean-shaven face and the hair parted in the middle, but a rough moustache and a short black beard, so that his narrow eyes seemed to be peering out of the undergrowth.

He was nevertheless making another attempt at peaceful organisation with other parties. In December 1960 a group of thirty-six African leaders met at a Consultative Conference in Orlando and committed themselves to hold an ‘All-In African Conference’ which would in turn call for a National Convention of all races. It seemed oddly unrealistic in the light of the government’s ruthless response at Sharpeville. It showed, argued the political scientist Tom Lodge later, ‘just how intellectually unprepared the leadership of the Congress alliance was in 1961 to embark on a revolutionary struggle’.³ But the Marxist Michael Harmel argued that it was ‘essentially a demand for revolution’.⁴

The police raided the meeting in Orlando and confiscated all the papers, but the plans went ahead through a committee with Mandela as Secretary. Mandela and Sisulu, in between the last stages of the Treason Trial, travelled around the country secretly to make preparations for the conference, even nipping over to Basutoland, where several ANC activists, including Joe Matthews, had gone into exile. At first they worked together with some Liberals, and also with the PAC, encouraged by the formation of a ‘United Front’ of the ANC and PAC abroad. But the collaboration soon broke up: the Liberals accused the ANC and communists of taking control, while the PAC decided they should crush the conference, partly because they suspected that ‘plans were afoot to build up Mandela as a hero in opposition to Sobukwe’.⁵ So Mandela and the ANC went ahead with support only from the communists. Their collaboration was becoming stronger, in a close-knit group who could trust each other.

The government was watching closely, and five days before the conference the police arrested ten of the organisers and served a warrant on Duma Nokwe. But the committee still managed to distribute leaflets with a ‘Call to the African People of South Africa’ to prepare for the ‘All-In African Conference’, to be held near Pietermaritzburg in Natal, on 22 March.

Mandela needed funds to arrange transport to the conference, and boldly asked to see Harry Oppenheimer, the Chairman of the Anglo-American Corporation. Oppenheimer was the first and only businessman Mandela would meet before he was jailed. Mandela had been influenced by labour movements, he explained later, ‘at a time of utmost hostility to businessmen’. Oppenheimer received him very politely, as he received nearly everyone: ‘When we came to his office,’ Mandela recalled, ‘he got up as if we were the president or the prime minister of a country.’ Mandela asked for a particular sum: ‘In terms of today it was peanuts.’ Oppenheimer said it was a lot of money, and asked how it would benefit him. He asked questions about the ANC, and appeared to underestimate its strength. ‘How do I know,’ he asked Mandela, ‘that after giving you assistance you will not be eliminated by the PAC?’⁶ ‘Mandela addressed me boldly like a meeting, with formal phrases,’ Oppenheimer recalled later. ‘I was ignorant about the ANC, but impressed by his sense of power.’⁷ Mandela did not get his money.

On 22 March the Maritzburg Conference, as it was called, mustered a remarkable show of support for the ANC a year after it had been banned. There were 1,400 delegates from 145 different groups from all over South Africa, including the Southern Transvaal Football Association and the Apostolic Church in Zion. But the ANC clearly dominated, with their slogans, speakers and songs, including ‘Spread the Gospel of Chief Luthuli’. The New York Times called the event ‘the biggest political meeting of Africans ever held in South Africa’, and the Rand Daily Mail gave it a big headline: ‘AFRICANS INSIST ON A NATIONAL PARLEY’.⁸

By an apparent coincidence, Mandela’s ban had expired just before the meeting – which the police seemed not to have noticed – and the Treason Trial had adjourned for a week. So Mandela was able to pop up like a jack-in-a-box, in his beard and a three-piece suit, to provide a dramatic climax to the conference and to make his first public speech since 1952.⁹ The audience was thrilled, their fists punching the air like pistons as they shouted the new slogan ‘Amandla! Ngawethu!’ (‘Power to the People’) – which was taking over from the less militant song ‘Mayibuye’ (‘Come Back Africa’).¹⁰ Mandela appealed again for African unity: ‘Africans must feel, act and speak in one voice … We should emerge from this conference with fullest preparations for a fully represented multi-racial national convention.’¹¹

The journalists present gave widely varying assessments of Mandela’s impact. New Age wrote that ‘every sentence was either cheered or greeted with cries of “shame”.’ Andrew Wilson of the Observer reported ‘tumultuous applause’.¹² ‘I was aware,’ Wilson recalled later, ‘that he was the chap on whom everyone was focusing their hopes for the future.’¹³ Benjamin Pogrund in Contact described Mandela, ‘bearded in the new nationalist fashion’, as ‘the star of the show’.¹⁴ He nevertheless thought that the communists had exaggerated the impact of the speech, and that Mandela spoke dully, with poor delivery.¹⁵ But the panache of his emergence from hiding gave his image a new magic. It was at Maritzburg, reckoned his communist friend Dennis Goldberg, that ‘the sheer romanticism of the underground activity, appearing at a conference, made him a leader’.¹⁶

Mandela himself was reassured by the fortitude of ordinary country people: he proudly watched one elderly man in an old jacket, khaki shirt and riding breeches speaking about his campaign against the Bantu Authorities and saying, ‘I will go away from here refreshed and full of confidence.’ And Mandela was sure that the delegates were prepared for ‘a stubborn and prolonged struggle, involving masses of the people from town and country’.¹⁷

The conference called on the government to summon a National Convention: if they refused, the ANC would organise multi-racial stay-athome protests beginning on 31 May – the day on which South Africa was due to become a republic – for which Mandela would be the chief organiser (while strikes at the workplace were illegal, stay-at-homes were not). Mandela disappeared from the hall, which was riddled with security police, as suddenly as he had appeared. He was not to appear on a public platform in South Africa again for twenty-nine years.

Mandela returned to Pretoria for the Treason Trial, which still had several weeks to go before the final judgement was delivered. But on 29 March Judge Rumpff interrupted the trial and announced that the three judges had reached a unanimous verdict of not guilty: ‘It is impossible for this court to come to the conclusion that the ANC had acquired or adopted a policy to overthrow the state by violence.’ The judges agreed that the prosecution had failed to prove that either the ANC or the Freedom Charter were communist, and they singled out Mandela’s June 1956 article for Liberation, which foresaw ‘a non-European bourgeois advance under the Freedom Charter’.¹⁸

The thirty accused celebrated the verdict with a show of rapture. A cine-camera smuggled into the courtroom snatched blurred scenes of the accused lifting their defence lawyers onto their shoulders, and of a smiling Mandela in a smart checked suit edging his way through the crowd. Mandela was impressed, he said afterwards, that the judges had risen above their prejudices to produce a fair decision, and he was again struck that surprising people could reveal a streak of goodness. But it was a surreal rejoicing, in the midst of bans and oppression. Mandela knew that the government would not recognise the ANC’s legitimate grievances, and would soon become much more ruthless, devising new laws that would bypass the courts.¹⁹

He had already decided that he must disappear underground. Winnie had noticed that he had been meditating silently for some weeks, not listening to her.²⁰ Walter Sisulu had been convinced that the ANC must have a single leader underground who could be much more active than Luthuli, now banned in Natal; and that it must be Mandela. Sisulu clearly foresaw the need for a martyr: ‘When we decided that he should go underground I knew that he was now stepping into a position of leadership … We had got the leadership outside but we must have a leader in jail.’²¹

Just before the treason verdict, Mandela had arrived at the Orlando house with Sisulu, Nokwe and Joe Modise, and told Winnie: ‘Darling, just pack some of my clothes in a suitcase with my toiletries. I will be going away for a long time.’ She packed tearfully, asked the gods of Africa to take care of him, and appealed to him to sometimes spare some minutes for his family: ‘He scolded me for reminding him of his duties.’²²

Mandela’s colleagues had decided that he should remain in hiding, to organise the protest planned for 31 May. But he still had to avoid arrest, while he simultaneously needed to publicise the strike as widely as possible. It was, paradoxically, from underground that he became chief spokesman for his people. He was to become more famous in the shadows than he had ever been in broad daylight.

Mandela still needed to persuade white liberals and well-wishers to support the ANC, and to counter the PAC’s propaganda. For two months he kept popping up from hiding to talk to white editors, attempting to allay their worries, particularly about communist influence in the ANC. In Johannesburg he argued with Laurence Gandar, the sympathetic and self-effacing editor of the Rand Daily Mail. In Port Elizabeth he visited John Sutherland, the quiet, liberal editor of the Evening Post – who was concerned for Mandela’s safety, since the paper’s offices were opposite the police station. Mandela thanked Sutherland warmly for his past support before quickly rejoining Govan Mbeki, who was waiting outside; he was delighted when the Post splashed the stay-at-home campaign. In Cape Town he talked for two hours with Victor Norton, the experienced editor of the Cape Times. Norton, who had met many world leaders, afterwards told his political editor Tony Delius that he’d never met a more impressive man than Mandela.²³ He also told the British High Commission about his remarkable visitor: few white South Africans, he said to the British diplomat Peter Foster, ‘had any idea of the calibre of the Africans with whom they would have to deal’. Norton virtually despaired of the whites’ keeping the initiative in their hands for much longer, but nothing about Mandela or his planned strike appeared in the Cape Times.²⁴

In Johannesburg Mandela saw his old ally from the Defiance Campaign Patrick Duncan, now editor of the fortnightly magazine Contact, who was fiercely criticising the banned ANC leaders for their communist influence and projected stay-at-homes. Finally Mandela said, ‘Do you think I’m so stupid that I can’t run an organisation without being influenced by people we’ve associated with?’²⁵ But at a second meeting in Cape Town, according to Randolph Vigne, who was present, the two men talked like old friends who never had any rows. This time Duncan admitted that the Treason Trial had clearly shown that the ANC was not communist, and promised to correct his past reports and to support the National Convention – which he did with a bold turnabout in the next issue of Contact.²⁶ He later told Peter Foster that he was impressed by Mandela’s intelligence and confidence – though he ‘made little secret of his left-wing sympathies’.²⁷

The communist influence was still perplexing foreign diplomats. ‘I must confess that we have very little idea of what the South African communists are up to,’ Foster wrote to London in January 1961, adding that the government ‘do not pass on much detailed information to us (if they possess it)’.²⁸ Later he blamed the government for banning moderates like Luthuli, thus putting a premium on the conspiratorial activities of militant ‘neo-communists’. He reported that ‘Mandela, though less certainly a communist than Nokwe, belongs to the group of highly intelligent younger leaders of the ANC who now appear to be in effective control.’²⁹

The British government was now rethinking its relations with South Africa, which left the Commonwealth in March 1961. After the vote for a republic, Verwoerd had applied to remain within the Commonwealth, and Macmillan had tried hard to persuade the new black members and Canada – whose Prime Minister John Diefenbaker was especially hostile to apartheid – to allow South Africa to stay. But Verwoerd still refused to accept a black High Commissioner in Pretoria, which proved the last straw, and in the end he withdrew his application. Macmillan was devastated and depressed. ‘The wind of change has blown us away, for the time,’ he wrote to Sir John Maud, ‘but peace will come one day, although perhaps after much sorrow and tribulation.’³⁰ But Oliver Tambo in London regarded white South Africa’s exclusion as a victory; and he would later maintain that black South Africans had never left the Commonwealth.³¹

Mandela continued to place hope in pressure from the Commonwealth, influenced by its new Asian and African members; and he had been encouraged by the opposition to apartheid, particularly by Diefenbaker. The British Embassy, as it now became, felt somewhat less obliged to placate the apartheid government now that South Africa was outside the family atmosphere of the Commonwealth. By June the Ambassador Sir John Maud was proposing that the Embassy should ‘reinsure’ against the possibility of a future black government by making discreet contacts with black politicians – though these contacts did not amount to much.³² The British government also decided to use its intelligence services to make every effort to penetrate the white citadel in Pretoria, which they knew would be difficult and delicate. So it proved: four years later a senior agent of MI6, acting as an Embassy official, was ‘severely interrogated’ about his contacts with the white opposition, and was soon afterwards ‘PNG’d’ – declared persona non grata. But MI6 decided that making links with black opposition leaders would be too risky, and could get them tortured or killed.³³

Mandela was now concentrating on the three-day stay-at-home strike scheduled to begin on 31 May. His Action Committee wrote to Dr Verwoerd explaining the call for a National Convention. Verwoerd later told Parliament: ‘A letter has been received, signed by N.R. Mandela, in arrogant terms, to which no reply has been given.’³⁴ Mandela also wrote to Sir de Villiers Graaff, the leader of the United Party, who had voted for the ANC to be banned in 1960. He warned Graaff that South Africans must choose between ‘talk it out or shoot it out’, and asked him: ‘But where, sir, does the United Party stand?… If the country’s leading statesmen fail to lead at this moment, then the worst is inevitable.’ Graaff evidently took no notice: he made no mention of Mandela in his memoirs, published thirty years later.³⁵

A month before Republic Day, Mandela went to Durban to discuss the protest with the banned ANC executive and their allies. Some delegates argued strongly that a stay-at-home was now quite inadequate in the face of the people’s anger and the state’s violence, and favoured a general strike. The run-up to Republic Day would clearly be a testing time for ANC discipline. Luthuli warned the New York Times that violence could easily be provoked: ‘The police sometimes act in a manner that gives the impression they want to shoot the people.’³⁶ Mandela, who had been touring the country, was very conscious of the people’s impatience, particularly since they had been provoked by the PAC. He had heard many complaints within the ANC that it was not politically correct to stress non-violence when the enemy was ‘relying on naked force’.³⁷ The far left was much more critical: ‘We thought this was an impossible demand to make on the workers,’ said the Marxist historian Baruch Hirson, who was later to be sentenced to nine years in jail for sabotage.³⁸

But Mandela kept emphasising the importance of non-violence in dramatic messages from hiding. Ten days before Republic Day he rang up the Johannesburg Sunday Express from a coin box: ‘We emphatically deny reports that violence will take place or that the three-day stay-away will be extended.’³⁹ His campaign was gaining him brief support from English-speaking editors who were themselves opposed to an Afrikaner republic.⁴⁰ On 12 May the Johannesburg Star profiled Mandela for the first time, alongside a bright, smiling photograph: he had ‘assumed the mantle of official spokesman for the Native people’, though he stressed that ‘native leadership is a collective leadership’.⁴¹ He was also beginning to feature in British papers: as ‘a large lawyer, untravelled but enormously well read, slow speaking, nattily dressed’, in the Manchester Guardian of 27 May; and as a ‘big handsome bearded man with a deep resonant voice’ two days later.⁴²

Meanwhile, the government was preparing an alarming show of strength, mustering its defence forces, cancelling leave and making mass arrests. On the morning of the strike Saracen tanks patrolled the townships, helicopters hovered overhead, and troops were posted at crossroads. It was, Mandela reckoned, ‘the greatest peacetime force in South Africa’s history’. The PAC, to the fury of the ANC, was helping the government by calling on everyone to go to work.⁴³ And the English-language press were now more anxious. Two days before the strike the Star reported: ‘Next Monday promises to be as nearly normal in Johannesburg as any other Monday.’⁴⁴ Mandela thought the press and radio ‘played a thoroughly shameful role’, publicising every warning against the strike beforehand, and playing down its successes on the first day.⁴⁵ The Rand Daily Mail rushed out a special edition with the headline ‘MOST GO TO WORK: ALL QUIET’. When Mandela rang his friend on the Mail, Benjamin Pogrund, Pogrund began apologising for the sub-editing of the article, until Mandela interrupted: ‘It’s all right, Benjie. I know it wasn’t your fault.’ In fact, as Pogrund looked back on it, ‘The headline and the report was fatally flawed, the result of rushed and sloppy journalism.’⁴⁶

Mandela and his secret Action Committee were in hiding and unable to watch the strike for themselves, which made them all the more sensitive to the press headlines they saw. They made the agonising judgement to call off the strike after the first day. ‘It was a courageous decision,’ wrote Rusty Bernstein, ‘but left a deep depression in the movement.’⁴⁷

In fact the strike, and the boycott of trains and buses, had been more successful than the ANC realised, and state evidence at the Rivonia trial three years later would reveal its effectiveness. The political scientist Tom Lodge reckoned afterwards that ‘there was a surprisingly widespread degree of participation.’⁴⁸ But at the time Dr Verwoerd could convincingly proclaim the calling off of the strike as a victory, which made Mandela deeply aware of the power of the media. It was a lesson he would never forget.

Some liberal whites welcomed the defeat of the strike as providing an opportunity for conciliation. ‘The best use which opposition forces can make of this breathing space,’ wrote Allister Sparks in the Rand Daily Mail, ‘is to start organising a multi-racial National Convention without delay.’⁴⁹ But most whites now felt able to ignore the black threat.

Mandela was now convinced that peaceful protest policies had reached a dead end, and recognised that he must move into a new stage of his struggle. On the day of the strike Ruth First had arranged for a British reporter, Brian Widlake of Independent Television News, to interview him on television for the first time – and, as it turned out, the last time for nearly thirty years. Widlake was taken to the house near Zoo Lake of Professor Julius Lewin of Witwatersrand University. Mandela was filmed – with a brick wall behind him, which was thought an appropriate symbol – for twenty minutes, of which three were transmitted.⁵⁰ The atmosphere was tense, and Mandela’s television debut was not inspiring – ‘He appeared glum, weary and patently depressed,’ Rusty Bernstein reckoned.⁵¹ It did not cause much of a stir in Britain, but what Mandela said was to be crucial to South Africa’s future. ‘If the government reaction is to crush by naked force our non-violent demonstrations,’ he declared, ‘we will have to seriously reconsider our tactics. In my mind, we are closing a chapter on this question of non-violent policy.’⁵² The ANC executive later criticised Mandela for defying their policy on non-violence, but he believed that ‘sometimes one must go public with an idea to push a reluctant organisation in the direction you want to go.’⁵³

Over the next few days Mandela kept popping up from hiding to act as the ANC’s chief spokesman. But journalists were not excited by his stiff style. Ruth First – his usual go-between – took Stanley Uys of the Johannesburg Sunday Times to see Mandela in Hillbrow for a half-hour interview. Uys found him very tense, and when they met again thirty years later Mandela reminded him: ‘You weren’t impressed.’⁵⁴ Ruth First also took Patrick O’Donovan from the Observer and Robert Oakeshott from the Financial Times, together with Mary Benson, to a flat in the white suburb of Yeoville, where they found Mandela wearing a striped sports shirt and grey trousers. Benson was struck by his relaxed air and his laughter, but Oakeshott thought his formal rhetoric fell short of the occasion. Mandela claimed that the strike had been a tremendous success, and that non-violence was the only realistic policy against a highly industrialised state, while denying that it was a policy of moderation: ‘Our feeling against imperialism is intense. I detest it!’ But as they left he again said that he thought ‘we are closing a chapter on this question of a non-violent policy.’⁵⁵ O’Donovan wrote in the Observer on 4 June that the ANC’s recent tactics had ‘served only to hand the government a well-publicised triumph’.⁵⁶ It was only at this time – on 7 June – that the Foreign Office in London at last opened a file on Mandela.⁵⁷

In fact Mandela had been discussing abandoning non-violence with his colleagues since early 1960, when the government had ruthlessly suppressed the pass-burning campaigns. So long as the Treason Trial was continuing all the accused had to insist publicly that they supported non-violence as a principle, but many of them, including Mandela, had begun to see it as a tactic which might have to be abandoned.⁵⁸ Mandela was always more impatient of non-violence than Sisulu or Tambo, as he had shown in Sophiatown in 1953. But now ordinary people were overtaking him with an impatience that, as a politician responding to public opinion, he could not ignore.

Across much of the political spectrum there was a clamour for violent action, often wild and desperate, like the attacks of anarchists and assassins in Russia in the late nineteenth century. In Pondoland, Tambo’s home area in the Eastern Cape, a peasant movement called Intaba (‘the mountain’) had taken over whole areas through guerrilla tactics before they were crushed by the government: Govan Mbeki, who met their leaders in the forests, now insisted that ANC must have a strategy ‘that would mobilise both city and country dwellers’.⁵⁹ The PAC was soon to produce a terrorist offshoot in the Cape called Poqo (‘alone’), which assassinated whites in reprisal for brutal oppression. A few liberals and leftists organised the African Resistance Movement (ARM), which aimed to blow up buildings. The Communist Party was forming its own semi-military units to cut power lines. Even members of the Unity Movement in the Cape were preparing their own sabotage movement, called the Yu Chi Chan Club after Mao’s term for guerrilla warfare. As one of them, Neville Alexander, later wrote: ‘All of us, regardless of political organisations or tendency, we were all pushed, willy-nilly, across this great divide, towards the armed struggle, from a non-violent background, totally unprepared.’⁶⁰

Mandela and the ANC would often be criticised for the rashness and amateurishness of their armed struggle, but they felt compelled to move quickly, both to catch up with the mood of the people and to forestall the alternative of uncontrollable atrocities. ‘Violence would begin whether we initiated it or not,’ Mandela wrote afterwards. ‘If we did not take the lead now, we would soon be latecomers and followers in a movement we did not control.’⁶¹

The ANC and the Communist Party were already talking about violence, as Rusty Bernstein recalls, in an unstructured way, without formal meetings.⁶² ‘At the moment when you’re considering a new road,’ said Joe Slovo, ‘it doesn’t come in one flash with everyone simultaneously realising it. It’s a process – with Mandela playing a very important part in the process.’⁶³ The communists were more ready to advocate violence than the ANC, which under its President Albert Luthuli had been committed to non-violence; and the government liked to equate violence with communism. But the arguments crossed party lines, and many of the communist leaders were concerned to restrain black militancy.⁶⁴

A month after Republic Day, Mandela put forward to the ANC working committee his historic proposal: that the ANC must abandon non-violence and form its own military wing. He argued persuasively, quoting the African proverb, ‘The attacks of the wild beast cannot be averted with only bare hands’. To his surprise he was opposed by Moses Kotane, the veteran black communist who was close to Luthuli. Kotane still saw scope for non-violent methods, and warned that violence would provoke massacres. Sisulu privately agreed with Mandela that there was no alternative to violence, but kept quiet, and later arranged for Mandela to talk privately with Kotane, whom he persuaded to accept the armed struggle.

The crucial argument was then taken up in Stanger, in Natal, at two dramatic meetings presided over by Luthuli, who immediately made clear his Christian concerns about the move to violence. He nevertheless reluctantly agreed that there should be a military campaign with its own autonomous leadership, which would be separate from the ANC, though ultimately responsible to it. The second meeting, at which the ANC met with its Indian, white and Coloured allies, went on through the night. Mandela’s plan for a military wing was opposed by many Indians, several of whom were still influenced by Gandhi. J.N. Singh, one of Mandela’s oldest friends, restated his belief that it was not non-violence that had failed them, but ‘we have failed non-violence’.⁶⁵ Other friends, including Monty Naicker and Yusuf Cachalia, prophetically warned that violent tactics would undermine the more pressing task of political organisation. Mandela would admit later that the ANC did make precisely that mistake: they drained the political organisations of enthusiastic and experienced men, concentrated their attention on the new organisation, and neglected the ‘normal but vital task of pure political organisation’.⁶⁶

Many younger Indians had rejected passive resistance, and Mandela and Sisulu were also supported by white communists, including Slovo and Bernstein. ‘They had a sober approach,’ Sisulu said later. ‘You could reason everything, and they did not have a mechanical Party approach: they relied on people.’⁶⁷ The Party certainly played a major role in creating the military force, but the idea did not come from Moscow. ‘It was presented as a fact,’ said the Russian expert on Africa Apollon Davidson. ‘Moscow was sometimes more moderate than the groups it supported, in Palestine, Algeria or South Africa.’⁶⁸ And the ANC had growing control over the military wing. After 1963, according to Slovo, it was almost exclusively directed by ANC exiles, while ‘the Party involvement was negligible’.

By early morning the Congresses had agreed that Mandela should form a new military organisation, which came to be called Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), or ‘Spear of the Nation’. He could recruit his own staff, and MK would be kept quite distinct from the ANC, to avoid threatening the ANC’s legal status (though within eighteen months the link between MK and the ANC became generally known when the ANC firebrand Robert Resha publicly proclaimed it).⁶⁹ It was the historic dawn of the new phase of struggle.

Luthuli remained ambivalent. He was worried about a violent struggle, but he was not a pacifist. Mandela would always remember him saying at Stanger: ‘If anybody thinks I am a pacifist, let him go and take my chickens; he will know how wrong he is.’ Luthuli would later complain that he had not been properly consulted, but he had deliberately kept his distance.⁷⁰ He never endorsed the decision, while he did not attack it. ‘Despite his deep Christian commitment to non-violence,’ wrote Slovo afterwards, ‘he never forbade or condemned the new path, blaming it on the regime’s intransigence rather than on those who created MK.’

But Mandela was now totally committed to the armed struggle as commander-in-chief of MK, and he threw himself into his new military role with enthusiasm. He was becoming a soldier overnight, like the Afrikaner guerrillas in the Boer War such as Jan Smuts or Deneys Reitz, about whom he had read much. It marked a complete break with ANC tradition: ‘The decision that Mandela should become a fugitive, and henceforth live the life of a professional revolutionary,’ as Slovo wrote later, ‘was a major watershed in our history. It pointed the way to a qualitatively different style of clandestine work and set the scene for the complete break with pacifism or “legalism” which was made soon afterwards.’⁷¹

‘We plan to make government impossible,’ said Mandela in a press statement issued from hiding on 26 June, now proclaimed as ‘Freedom Day’. He did not explain how this would be done, but warned that there would be ‘other forms of mass pressure to force the race maniacs who govern our beloved country to make way for a democratic government of the people, by the people and for the people’. There was a warrant out for his arrest but he would not surrender himself, because in the present conditions ‘to seek for cheap martyrdom by handing myself to the police is naïve and criminal’. ‘I have chosen this latter course,’ he continued, ‘which is more difficult and which entails more risk and hardship than sitting in jail. I have had to separate myself from my dear wife and children, from my mother and sisters, to live as an outlaw in my own land. I have had to close my business, to abandon my profession, and live in poverty and misery.’⁷² As he put it a year later, he had to ‘say goodbye to the good old days when, at the end of a strenuous day at an office, I could look forward to joining my family at the dinner-table, and instead to take up the life of a man hunted continuously by the police’.⁷³

For the first few weeks he hid in the homes of several Indian families in Johannesburg, emerging for secret meetings with the ANC executive, including Kathrada, Duma Nokwe, Alfred Nzo and Harold Wolpe, most of whom were forbidden to meet with more than two people. A small group was responsible for finding safe houses, among them Kathrada, who found the Indian hosts, and Wolfie Kodesh, an ebullient white journalist on New Age.

It was a precarious existence. One night Kodesh found a flat near his home in Yeoville which was temporarily vacant. Ten members of the executive converged there, including Mandela, in his favourite disguise as a chauffeur. But when Sisulu arrived Kodesh noticed two old people in the corridor looking closely at him, and overheard one of them say, ‘Go phone up.’ Kodesh quickly warned them all to disperse, but as they did not know where to hide Mandela, Kodesh suggested his own flat at 52 Webb Street. ‘The police would never have thought that a black man would be in a white area like that,’ said Kodesh, ‘where he’d stick out like a sore thumb.’ Mandela stayed there for two months, the tall, athletic commander and the stocky journalist an odd duo. As Kodesh remembers Mandela’s first night: ‘He insisted on sleeping on the camp-bed, against my protests. I was woken up at 4.30 a.m. by the creaking camp-bed, to find him getting dressed in longjohns and a tracksuit. He explained he was going out for a run, but I refused to give him the key, so he ran on the spot for an hour. He repeated it every morning, and later I joined in, gradually improving until I was running with him for the whole hour.’

It was dangerous for Mandela to go out, so he began to read voraciously, from books Kodesh had on his shelves or which Kathrada brought him from the public library. Kodesh told him that Clausewitz was to war what Shakespeare was to literature, so Mandela devoured Clausewitz’s classic On War. ‘I never saw a chap concentrate as he did,’ said Kodesh; ‘underlining, taking notes, as if it was for a legal examination.’⁷⁴ Mandela read widely, including the Afrikaner poet Ingrid Jonker (whom he was to quote in his inauguration speech forty years later). But his overriding interest was in books about liberation struggles: Mao Tse-tung and Edgar Snow on China, Menachem Begin on Israel, Louis Taruc’s Born of the People, about the guerrilla uprising in the Philippines, and Deneys Reitz’s classic about the Boer War, Commando.⁷⁵ He read carefully and attentively, as Mac Maharaj, who had found some of the books for him in London, discovered when they were later imprisoned together on Robben Island.

It was a time when many revolutionaries around the world appeared to be triumphant – Mao in China, Ben Bella in Algeria, Castro in Cuba. Mandela studied the rebellions throughout Africa – in Ethiopia, Kenya, the Cameroons, and particularly in Algeria, which the ANC saw as a parallel to their own struggle. But it was the Cuban revolution which most inspired him and many of his colleagues. It was a dangerous model, a freak victory, but they were fired by the story of how Castro and Che Guevara, with only ten other survivors from their ship the Granma, had mustered a guerrilla army of 10,000 in eighteen months, and had marched on Havana in January 1959.⁷⁶ Mandela was especially interested in the account by Blas Roca, the Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, which described how it was Castro, not the Party, who had realised that the moment of revolution had come. He would never lose his admiration for Castro.

Mandela found it hard to adjust to his solitary life in Wolfie Kodesh’s flat. ‘I suddenly found that I had too much privacy,’ he recalled from jail, ‘and really missed the family, company and the gym where I could completely relax. It required a lot of discipline to keep the routine demanded by my new style of life.’⁷⁷ Particularly he missed Winnie, and Kodesh noticed that when Mandela talked about her and the children he dropped his military style, and had tears in his eyes. Kodesh helped to arrange several visits by Winnie, which were always tricky, as her house in Soweto was under constant watch from a nearby hill. She had to be driven by circuitous routes, changing cars on the way, exactly timed: if the car was late, the visit would be aborted. Sometimes she and Mandela would meet in a safe house elsewhere. They could always find friends of the movement who would take the risk, but they agreed never to cause them anxiety. Once they met at a house in Parktown owned by a sympathetic but nervous white editor. When he came into the room nervously rattling the drink-glasses on their tray, Kodesh quickly mentioned another appointment, and took Mandela away.

Kodesh worried more about Mandela’s safety as the newspapers began publicising his disappearance, dubbing him ‘the Black Pimpernel’. ‘All the police have photos of the Black Pimpernel,’ he warned him. ‘Aren’t you afraid of being caught?’ Mandela replied: ‘I don’t think about it, I concentrate on my work.’⁷⁸ But two things happened to alarm them. Once Mandela overheard some domestic workers talking about the sour milk which he had left on the windowsill. This was an African delicacy, which they realised meant that there was a black man living in the white building.⁷⁹ Finally, Kodesh went one day to see the Zulu cleaner living at the top of the building, who had been told that the black stranger was a student who was waiting for a bursary to go overseas. On the man’s bed he spotted a newspaper clipping. It was an ‘article about the Black Pimpernel, with pictures of Nelson – though without a beard. I thought, “This is bad, he knows who I’m looking after.” I said to Nelson: “Pack up, you’re off, he’s seen all the pictures.”’ Kodesh took Mandela to a house in the Johannesburg suburb of Norwood owned by a friendly doctor, where he stayed in the servants’ quarters, pretending to be the gardener.⁸⁰

Mandela had been recruiting a small group of experts to embark on MK’s campaign of sabotage. The Communist Party already had its own group of specialists for its sabotage plans, but it was clear that the two groups needed each other, and they eventually merged. Mandela would always rightly insist that MK was founded by Africans, but it needed expertise and tactical skills which the ANC alone could not provide.⁸¹ He recruited Joe Slovo, whom he trusted and admired, to serve on the High Command. ‘The word “surrender” was not in his vocabulary,’ Mandela said later. ‘He was daring through and through.’⁸² Slovo in turn praised Mandela in his own terms: ‘My affection and admiration for him grew. There was nothing flabby or condescending about Nelson. Ideologically he had taken giant strides since we confronted one another in the corridors of the university during the early 1950s on the role of the Party in the struggle. His keen intelligence taught him to grasp the class basis of national oppression. But the hurt of a life whose every waking moment was dominated by white arrogance left scars.’

Slovo brought in a small group of communist experts, including Jack Hodgson and Wolfie Kodesh, who knew about explosives from their experience in North Africa during the Second World War, and Arthur Goldreich, who had fought the British in Palestine in the late 1940s. Their expertise, it turned out, was amazingly amateurish. ‘Among the lot of us we did not have a single pistol,’ wrote Slovo afterwards. ‘Our knowledge of the techniques for this early stage of the struggle was extremely rudimentary.’⁸³ They practised their skills very rashly. One morning, when Kodesh went out to a brickworks outside Johannesburg to experiment with bombs with Jack Hodgson, Mandela insisted on coming along. At the brickworks Kodesh saw a black man who clearly recognised him, and wanted to abort the exercise. But Mandela went to talk to the man, then came back and told them to carry on. The bomb duly exploded, producing a cloud of topsoil, like a miniature atom bomb. As they drove away Mandela was ecstatic, said Kodesh, congratulating them all.⁸⁴

It was in October 1961 that Mandela found a new hiding place at Lilliesleaf Farm, an isolated house with some huts in Rivonia, then a semi-rural suburb of market gardens and bungalows outside the municipal limits of Johannesburg. The farm had been secretly bought by the Communist Party, which disguised its ownership through Arthur Goldreich, who settled there with his family to establish a respectable front with a lifestyle that included horse-riding on Saturdays. It appeared in safe hands for Mandela when his friend Michael Harmel drove him out there, and was, he later testified in court, ‘an ideal place for the man who lived the life of an outlaw. Up to that time I had been compelled to live indoors during the daytime and could only venture out under cover of darkness. But at Lilliesleaf I could live differently, and work far more efficiently.’⁸⁵ He felt happy at Lilliesleaf, he wrote later from jail, because ‘the whole place reminded me of the happiest days of my life, my days of childhood.’⁸⁶ Lilliesleaf served as a safe house for members of the Communist Party as well as for Mandela, although only he and the Goldreich family were actually living there: he took over a small room in the outbuildings, and was known as David Motsamayi. The farm was not, he told the court later, the actual headquarters of either MK or the ANC; but Rusty Bernstein, who often visited, worried that it appeared to be turning into MK’s semi-permanent headquarters.⁸⁷

From Lilliesleaf, Mandela frequently left in the evenings in disguise to meet ANC leaders and others. Sometimes he would be in mechanics’ overalls, sometimes as a nightwatchman in a long grey overcoat and big earrings, once even as a priest leading a fake funeral procession of disguised activists. He enjoyed the sense of theatre: in October a group of Indian activists assembled in a house in Fordsburg, and a man in dirty Caltex service station overalls walked in. It was not until he said, ‘Sit down, comrades,’ that they recognised Mandela.⁸⁸ Ahmed Kathrada was one of a small group deputed to make sure Mandela appeared as a ‘new man’. They persuaded him to abandon his stylish clothes, but he still had his vanity: they could not get him to shave off his beard, which had become part of his revolutionary style.⁸⁹

Many of Mandela’s friends were worried about his lack of precautions. ‘He was probably the most wanted man in the country at the time, and was taking great risks,’ wrote Bernstein. ‘But that was his style. He was one who led from the front. He never asked anyone to take a risk which he was not prepared to take first for himself.’ Bernstein worried that there was an expanding circle of aides, drivers and visitors who knew about Mandela’s hiding place at Lilliesleaf, and that the responsibility for security was dangerously divided between the Communist Party and Mandela himself: ‘We were slow to realise the dangers in what was happening,’ Bernstein recalled.⁹⁰

Winnie visited Mandela several times at Lillisleaf, bringing him vegetables, and would then go on to see their Indian friends Paul and Adelaide Joseph. ‘I used to see the car was full of mud, clearly from a farming area,’ said Paul. ‘We knew that our house was under constant observation. They were all terribly careless. But it was the early days of the underground movement, with a certain amount of romanticism.’ One day the Josephs were surprised when they were driven by Walter Sisulu to a small room in Fordsburg, near central Johannesburg. ‘We walked in to find Nelson there. He gave us hugs, talked about family matters, and after a while said, “I’m glad I’ve seen you.” That was that.’ Years later they learnt that Mandela had been upset by a false story that their marriage was breaking up, and wanted to help.⁹¹

Underground life was a strain for many of the conspirators. ‘I truly believe that people underground come to believe themselves invulnerable,’ said Dennis Goldberg, who was working secretly in Cape Town. ‘Eventually the stress becomes so great that they make mistakes subconsciously to put an end to it … It’s like coming out of the cold.’ Goldberg saw Mandela’s ‘Pimpernel phase’ as inherently unstable: ‘There’s a downside to being the romantic leader: it makes you take more and more risks, because you must maintain that publicity, and when you’re underground you’re caught between disappearing into a hole in the ground and pulling in the lid, because you’re then safe; and emerging to do more and more daring operations.’⁹²

While he was in hiding Mandela travelled throughout South Africa, without much concern. Once when he drove down to Durban to stay with the Meers, Fatima was shocked to receive a phone call from a friend who asked: ‘Has Nelson arrived?’ When he stayed for two weeks on a sugar farm at Tongaat, near Luthuli’s house, he pretended to be an agricultural demonstrator, until a farm worker asked him, ‘What does Luthuli want?’⁹³ But he was determined to keep in touch with ordinary people, and was buoyed up by their support. In mid-November Mary Benson was invited to meet him outside Johannesburg. He was wearing his chauffeur’s white coat, and had just toured Natal and the Cape. ‘You can’t comprehend,’ he told her, ‘unless you stay right there with the people.’ She recalled how he joked about a recent narrow escape, reminisced about old times, then gave her a lift back to her sister’s flat, driving an erratic old car which kept spluttering to a halt.⁹⁴

While the MK command was plotting sabotage, white South Africans felt little sense of danger after the suppression of the stay-at-home strike. The ruling National Party had gained support from white voters by promising tougher measures against agitators. In October 1961 there had been a first shock of sabotage, when an electric pylon was cut and a government office burnt down; it turned out to be the work of the National Committee of Liberation (NCL), a group of liberals and leftists which later developed into the African Resistance Movement (ARM).⁹⁵ MK publicly dissociated itself from these saboteurs, whom they thought ‘temperamentally inclined towards deeds of derring-do’; but privately they agreed to co-ordinate their actions.⁹⁶ The sabotage only increased the solidarity of most whites, and in the election soon afterwards the Nationalists achieved their biggest victory, with the electorate for the first time giving them a clear majority.⁹⁷

16 December was Dingane’s Day, which commemorated the Afrikaners’ massacre of Zulus in 1838 but which had now become a focus for African protests. And it was then that MK performed its first acts of sabotage, with explosions in Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and Durban. They caused a national furore, though the saboteurs had not been very efficient: one of them, Petrus Molife, was killed, and another had his arm blown off. Joe Slovo tried to blow up the Drill Hall in Johannesburg, but had to retreat after being discovered by an army sergeant.⁹⁸ But MK saboteurs succeeded in attacking government offices and an electrical transformer.

On the previous night ANC volunteers had scattered leaflets and stuck up posters proclaiming the founding of MK and explaining the need for new methods alongside the traditional organisations: ‘The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight.’ MK, they said, hoped to bring the government to its senses ‘before matters reach the desperate stage of civil war’.⁹⁹ The police tore down most of the posters by morning, so few people got the message. ‘Contrary to our intentions,’ wrote one conspirator afterwards, ‘the sabotage created only a ripple of concern in the government or the country at large.’¹⁰⁰ But Mandela and his colleagues were at first buoyant, believing that white South Africans would now realise that they were sitting on top of a volcano, and that the ANC had a ‘powerful spear that would take the struggle to the heart of white power’.¹⁰¹ ‘We were elated by our initial successes,’ Mandela wrote later from jail, ‘and even those who had first doubted the wisdom of the new line were also swept away by the tide of excitement.’¹⁰²

The timing of the explosions proved embarrassing to the ANC, as Mandela admitted; only six days before, its President Albert Luthuli had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. But they had made sure that Luthuli was safely back home before the sabotage took place, and the ANC was not publicly linked to MK. Luthuli continued to worry about the turn to violence. He had told a Canadian diplomat two months earlier that younger ANC members were thinking of violence, but that it would in his opinion be ‘suicidal folly’ to try to overthrow the government by force.¹⁰³

Luthuli’s Nobel Prize gave a formidable international endorsement to the ANC’s struggle, and Mandela had been ‘enormously pleased’ when he heard the news of the award on the radio at Rivonia.¹⁰⁴ But the British Foreign Office remained wary of contact with Luthuli. When he stopped off in London on his way to Norway, an official advised that a meeting ‘would be taken greatly amiss by the South African government and it would do nothing to enhance Chief Luthuli’s cause in South Africa’.¹⁰⁵

In fact there was no immediate contradiction between MK’s explosions and the peaceful pressures still being applied by the ANC. The high command of MK remained optimistic that successive acts of sabotage would serve as ‘a shot across the bows’ to bring white South Africa to its senses.¹⁰⁶ But soon after the first explosions MK was thinking less about sabotage and more about guerrilla warfare. ‘There was no formal decision,’ said Bernstein, who was involved. ‘It was something that seemed to develop spontaneously from the idea that sabotage would somehow lead to a “next phase”.’¹⁰⁷ The high command began arranging for key leaders to go abroad for training, followed by young volunteers.

Mandela was now commander-in-chief of a burgeoning fighting force. He had the authority and prestige of a revolutionary leader taking on an unpopular military regime, in an age of revolutions when the forces of oppression seemed in retreat throughout Africa. All his previous roles – the boxer, the man-about-town, the lawyer, the family man – had been left behind by the new role of guerrilla leader underground. It was a surprising and unprepared translation, from many-sided politician to dedicated soldier. Mandela was to be a short-lived and amateurish soldier compared to Cuban or Chinese revolutionaries. He remained above all the politician who saw the need for symbolic gestures to lead his people to a new style of confrontation.