Young Mandela
David James Smith
Little, Brown and Company
NEW YORK BOSTON LONDON
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Table of Contents
Copyright Page
For Petal
and our children
Sitira, Kitty, Orealla, and Mackenzie
One
SHOSHOLOZA, MANDELA!
Within hours of Nelson Mandela’s arrest, on August 5, 1962, a white Jewish comrade, Wolfie Kodesh, was assigned the unenviable duty of breaking the news to Mandela’s wife, Winnie. Kodesh was inclined to be overly cautious and excessively conspiratorial. He had spent five months sleeping on the Observatory Golf Club course and in friends’ backyards to avoid arrest during the state of emergency after Sharpeville in 1960. Eventually, it occurred to him to rent a “safe apartment” under an assumed name and sleep there more comfortably instead.
Knowing Winnie was under regular, if not constant, surveillance by the South African Police Services Special Branch, Kodesh had prevailed on Esther, a black woman who was in charge of the distribution of food hampers at the Johannesburg offices of the newspaper New Age, to walk ahead of him and make the first approach to Mrs. Mandela at a nearby building where she was then working as a child welfare officer.
When Esther gave Kodesh the signal, the all-clear, he slipped into the entrance. Winnie came down to greet him. Kodesh had been out late the night before at meetings and must have looked scruffy, tired. The shock of Mandela’s arrest and the sadness of the task made it difficult for him to speak.
“Is it him?” Winnie asked.
“Yes.” Kodesh realized then that he must finish his task quickly and simply said, “He’s been caught at Howick. He’s being brought up here, I don’t know whether by plane or by car, but the police are bringing him up and he will appear today or tomorrow in the magistrates’ court. You must prepare for it.”
Kodesh recalled that they probably exchanged a few more words, then said goodbye. He could not remember Winnie crying.
Memory can be an unreliable, inconvenient and sometimes contradictory witness to history. Kodesh is no longer around to ask—he gave this account some years ago in a series of unpublished interviews that are stored in an archive in Cape Town—but Winnie herself says that Kodesh had come, not to her place of work, but to her home, at 8115 Orlando West. (Houses in the townships are commonly known by “stand” or plot numbers, not street numbers.)
Kodesh had not known how to express himself, she said; he just looked at her and cried. She said, is he alive?
Yes.
Where did they arrest him?
Howick.
She had known immediately she saw Kodesh what he was about to tell her and feared Mandela must be dead. Her heart was beating so fast it would burst the chest. She couldn’t have faced the world if he had been killed and says she would probably have done something stupid herself, something quite desperate.
An attempt to check the differing accounts from other sources revealed that Winnie had given a long series of interviews a quarter of a century ago, as the basis of a published memoir, in which she appeared to support Wolfie’s account. She remembered being at work, at the offices of the Child Welfare Society, and was leaving to do fieldwork in Soweto. As she came out of the lift, she bumped into one of her husband’s friends: this was Wolfie. “He was white like a ghost, his hair was standing on end. I noticed he hadn’t shaved and was wearing a dirty shirt and trousers as if he’d just jumped out of bed; you could see something drastic had happened.”
She could not remember how she got home and had only a vague recollection of throwing her files in the back of the car and driving straight back to her home to be comforted by her sister. It was the collapse of a political dream, she told her interviewer, and the end of family life.
“Part of my soul went with him at that time.”
Mandela’s arrest ended a period of seventeen months during which he had lived on the run, adopting disguises and an assumed identity to evade the police. His continued freedom had been a great embarrassment to the authorities as well as a thrilling adventure to many in the country’s black community—who might have been even more excited had they known what he was really up to during those days: plotting a revolution and launching an underground army, Umkhonto we Sizwe—Spear of the Nation. Much of his activity in those months would remain a secret for years to come.
In these early stages after his arrest, the police knew little of Mandela’s role in the terrorist campaign that he had himself initiated. Instead, he was first charged with incitement, as a result of his public calls for a strike, a “stay at home,” the year before. It was illegal for all black workers in “essential” services—domestic servants included—to withdraw their labor. He would later be charged with the additional offense of leaving the country without a passport.
Wolfie Kodesh was at the Johannesburg magistrates’ court for Mandela’s appearance on August 15. The imposing 1940s court building on Fox Street was just across the road from the former law offices of Mandela & Tambo at Chancellor House. Mandela had appeared before Johannesburg magistrates many times, representing clients who were commonly summonsed for petty infringements of the apartheid laws.
As a reporter for New Age, Kodesh was on the press bench in the well of the court and saw the seats around him filled with Special Branch detectives. There were police everywhere, with spectators overflowing onto the streets outside. A Free Mandela Committee had been hurriedly formed and Free Mandela slogans were appearing as graffiti all around the country. Kodesh could see the police were jumpy.
Just before the hearing was due to start, Winnie appeared with a suitcase, which she took up to a policeman standing in the dock. “Can you take this change of clothing to Mandela?” Sometime later the magistrate came in and took his seat. The hearing began, and the defendant was called for.
“Mandela!”
Kodesh was looking forward to seeing Comrade Nelson—they had formed a close bond during Mandela’s months on the run—and hoped to give him a conspiratorial wink.
Kodesh had noticed Mandela many years ago, long before he ever knew him. He had seen this smart, tall, athletic, handsome figure walking down Plein Street in Johannesburg city center, and had stopped to watch only because people were turning to look at Mandela as he passed.
No revolutionary ever went so well dressed as the young Nelson Mandela. Growing up in the eastern Cape, Mandela had gone barefoot in casual or traditional dress, but he had adopted a formal style in his teenage years that became ever smarter as his life progressed. Mandela favored Khan’s, the Jewish tailor shop in central Johannesburg, just opposite the entrance to the Rand Club, a private club that was a bastion of white supremacy.
George Bizos—a lifelong friend who had continued to call Mandela “Nel” even when he was president of South Africa (though only after respectfully checking with him first)—had walked into Khan’s one day in the 1950s and seen a white tailor on one knee before Mandela’s immaculate frame, sizing up his inside leg with a tape measure.
This was an extraordinary spectacle in apartheid South Africa. Bizos could almost see the horror on the faces of the two white customers who entered the shop. Bizos imagined that whilst they would be shocked that Khan would make a suit for a black man, they would rationalize that he had done it for the money, rather than for any ideological reasons.
Up came Mandela, up the steps into the dock. Kodesh had never seen anything like it. The effect on the court was electrifying. Gone were the suit and tie and the shiny shoes. Mandela was wearing a traditional Thembu tribal costume, known as a kaross, made from the skins of jackals. He wore it at an angle across his chest so that one shoulder was bare. He had bead
s around his neck and around his legs.
Kodesh glanced at all those policemen. They had gone white—well, of course, they were white already, but the color had drained from their faces—and their eyes were out on stalks at this magnificent figure of a man. To Kodesh he looked a wonderful picture of a “Zulu warrior,” though in fact Mandela is not Zulu but from the Thembu group of the Xhosa people. Winnie too is Xhosa, from Pondoland, and there she was in the public gallery, wearing a traditional beaded headdress and ankle-length skirt.
The court fell silent. There were no cries. Mandela did not look around but stared straight ahead at the magistrate. Kodesh was often in court and knew the form: the accused comes in, the magistrate nods and the prosecutor starts to speak. But now the magistrate just sat looking at the accused, caught, it seemed to Kodesh, in Mandela’s challenging, transfixing glare, like a snake trapped by a mongoose.
According to Winnie, his costume had been her idea and Mandela knew nothing about it until he opened the suitcase and saw the contents. He had simply asked her to bring him something to wear in court. Of course, she said, as soon as he saw the kaross and the beads, he understood their meaning. She had deliberately avoided taking the things to the prison and had arrived late at the court to minimize the risk that they would be confiscated.
Winnie was angry: her husband had been arrested and the Boers were still trying to destroy their culture. To the Afrikaners they were kaffirs, Bantus—nothing. “I was fighting because I wanted to say, I am an African. This is my country, you’re not going to oppress me in my own country.”
She had worn traditional dress once before to attend the Treason Trial of 1956 as a spectator. They had refused to let her in, saying she was inciting the people. What? By being herself? By being an African? So now she was fixing them up good, letting her husband wear his kaross as a protest. She was so proud when he came into court.
The hearing was brief, a simple remand and adjournment. When it ended, the crowd, which consisted of around 200 Africans and Indians, and twenty white men and women, gathered together in the corridor and began raising their thumbs in salute and singing the African National Congress (ANC) anthem, “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika”—God Bless Africa. A report in The Times of London described how “as the building echoed with lusty singing, magistrates and court staff came out to watch the procession.” The crowd marched slowly out onto the street and stopped traffic as it tried to head for an impromptu protest meeting on the steps of Johannesburg City Hall. The police were determined to stop them and eventually persuaded the crowd to disperse without violence.
While Mandela went back to his cell in the Johannesburg Fort, the Free Mandela Committee were busy coming up with a plan to spring him from jail.
At Liliesleaf Farm, the group’s underground headquarters up in the rural northern suburb of Rivonia where Mandela himself had stayed for several weeks, the escape committee spent long hours considering fantastic schemes. The white lawyers Joe Slovo and Harold Wolpe, who had access to Mandela as his defense advisers, were both involved, as were the ANC activist Joe Modise and the Indian Congress communist Ahmed Kathrada.
Kathrada remembered, when going with Slovo to see Mandela in jail, that Mandela was preoccupied with what the police might find at Rivonia.
Is it clean?
Before his arrest, he had left at the farm a considerable volume of incriminating papers, including a handwritten diary and many pages of his thoughts on communism and revolution. Now he wanted—and was given—reassurances that the material had been destroyed. In fact, it was all still there, a deliberate choice made by some of his comrades to preserve the Mandela papers for posterity. It was a decision that nearly got Mandela hanged.
Slovo and his colleagues wondered whether they could get a mask made for Mandela to wear, to exchange places with a prisoner going to court for a minor offense. Or perhaps he could switch robes with one of the group of traditionally dressed relatives who were visiting him from his family home in the eastern Cape. Could they bribe a court officer or prison official?
Eventually deciding a jailbreak was too difficult, they focused on springing him from the magistrates’ court, where Mandela was left alone in a cell during lunch breaks. Joe Modise, who was well connected across both the criminal and ordinary working communities of the townships, found an African policeman at the court who was willing to leave the cell door unlocked.
Through a second contact, an African interpreter, they obtained and copied into a modeling-clay mold the key from the court’s cell area. An engineer made up a key from this and it worked. They found an open, unguarded door leading from the court into a lane used for deliveries. This meant Mandela could be out and back in Rivonia in thirty minutes—but he was fast becoming famous and would be recognized instantly without a disguise. Some facial hair was needed.
As Slovo later described it, “Over dinner at the Delmonica [possibly Delmonico’s] restaurant in Commissioner Street, Cecil Williams, a Party member and full-time theatre director, introduces me to a professional wigmaker with radical social attitudes. He agrees to make, free of charge, an Indian-looking wig, moustache and beard for a subject whose identity is never discussed.”
A fresh obstacle appeared in the shape of the wigmaker’s daunting list of required measurements of Mandela’s face and head. He was obviously a perfectionist. Slovo eventually obtained them during a succession of legal consultations with his client. Mandela himself did the measuring, using lengths of white cotton that Slovo taped into a notebook. The hairpiece was duly delivered. When Modise tried it out on the others to test its effectiveness, they didn’t recognize him. It was handed on to a tailor, who sewed it into the shoulder padding of one of Mandela’s jackets, which was delivered to him at the prison. They were only waiting now for the next hearing at the court.
Meanwhile, a second opportunity had arisen: the possibility of bribing the colonel in charge of the prison. According to Slovo, a fellow attorney first approached him, saying a client who was at the Fort on remand for fraud had asked him to pass on the message that the prison commander wanted to meet Slovo. As it was a highly unusual request, Slovo feared a trap, so he called the colonel from a public phone, only to be invited to his home. The colonel was waiting on his veranda when Slovo arrived. “I will be brief. I take it you people are interested in Mandela?”
The colonel, who was looking for early retirement to a farm, wanted £7,000. Still mistrustful, Slovo and his comrades decided just to wait and see what would happen with the colonel. Kathrada, meanwhile, was sent to Basutoland to pick up the £7,000 bribe, in cash, in case it was needed in a hurry. The trial date was approaching and Mandela might be free soon anyway, walking out the door of the court in a wig.
In the Fort, Mandela had become friendly with an accused defrauder, the Indian businessman Moosa Dinath. They had started talking when Dinath began joining him on his daily exercises—Mandela’s lifelong habit of jogging, running on the spot, push-ups and sit-ups. Dinath evidently had the colonel in his palm already, as he had numerous privileges. One night Mandela saw the colonel take Dinath away. The prisoner was released for the night and came back to prison in the morning. “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes,” said Mandela, “I would not have believed it.”
There were those who counseled him against any attempt at escape, fearing it would give the authorities an excuse to shoot Mandela. Eventually, Mandela gave Slovo a note saying they should abandon the escape for the time being—it might be easier as well as more of a propaganda coup if he escaped, later, after his conviction. He added the postscript that the note should be destroyed after it had been read, but this document too was kept and later discovered by the police.
Two days before Mandela’s trial Joe Slovo was told that Mandela had just been moved—to Pretoria, an hour’s drive away, where the case would now be tried. Slovo was confined to Johannesburg, so he could not advise his client at the trial. Instead, Bob Hepple, a less experienced advocate, the South African
equivalent of a barrister, was assigned to take his place. Hepple, who was not yet thirty, was both an advocate and a communist activist, like Slovo. Unlike Slovo, he was increasingly uneasy at his dual role and the risks he was being asked to take.
However, Hepple was happy to be Mandela’s adviser, and duly went along to the court at the Old Synagogue in Pretoria for the first day’s hearing. As he approached the cell he saw his client changing into his African costume. Hepple had not known about this and was a bit shocked by the spectacle. With hindsight he could see he was reacting to it as a white person but he was worried that Mandela was projecting the image of the noble savage, the stereotypical African with his drum and his leopard skin.
Why are you dressing like this? he wondered. Hepple knew of Mandela as a lawyer, a fully urbanized city boy. He’d never seen him in tribal dress and so far as he knew it wasn’t the style of the ANC. Hepple’s attitude echoed a wider concern among other white comrades, some of them among the ANC-aligned Congress of Democrats, who also disapproved of the traditional dress and complained that it smacked of “tribalism.”
As Hepple later learned, during his hours of discussion with Mandela as they sat together during court sittings and adjournments, Mandela was newly keen to embrace a more Africanist image, for both political and personal reasons. The ANC had been wrong-footed and outmaneuvered by a breakaway faction led by Robert Sobukwe, who had formed a new party, the Pan-Africanist Congress, or PAC. It had been the PAC’s protest that had provoked the shootings at Sharpeville in March 1960, galvanizing world attention.
Shortly before his arrest Mandela had spent several months touring independent African countries, seeking support for an armed struggle, and himself undergoing military training. He had been dismayed to find that many of the senior figures among the independence movements in black Africa regarded the PAC as the true leaders of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. They had a low opinion of the ANC’s cozy relationship with whites, Indians and communists of any race.
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