Bregman, who later became an attorney and started his own law firm, was never heavily involved in politics, being more interested in show business. Although he remained “one of the minnows,” in his own words, he used to go to meetings and took Mandela along.
Mandela was fired both by a growing recognition of the injustice Africans were suffering and by intellectual curiosity. He realized the communists were fighting a struggle based on class, but for him race was the foremost issue and class warfare seemed almost irrelevant while there was racial oppression. The gatherings he went to with Bregman were his first taste of the multiracial world in which he would soon be immersed. He had never before seen so many whites, Indians and Africans together in one room, on equal terms, and was intimidated by the company as well as by the high-flying conversations. It is hard to credit, now, but he was too shy then to speak up at meetings.
Bregman remembered introducing Mandela to Michael Harmel, who was a leading party theorist and would later become a good friend of Mandela’s. Bregman told Mandela that Harmel was lecturing at Wits—the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg—and had an English MA from Rhodes. Mandela could not believe his eyes. Harmel’s disheveled appearance was legendary and Mandela could not understand why he wasn’t wearing a tie. That was not how he had been taught to behave at Fort Hare.
While Mandela was no more vocal at meetings of the ANC and gatherings of activists that he attended with Gaur Radebe and Walter Sisulu, they awakened in him a new sense of purpose, a kind of calling, that he recognized and embraced. There was no question now of him ending up in the Native Affairs department as an interpreter or playing adviser to a Thembu chief.
When he finally completed his BA at the beginning of 1943, he borrowed the money from Sisulu to buy a new suit and returned to Fort Hare for his graduation. He spent some time with his cousin, K. D. Matanzima. Matanzima was pursuing a different destiny, seeing himself remaining in the eastern Cape as a traditional chief. He accepted Mandela’s legal ambitions but urged him to return to work in Umtata where he was needed.
Mandela knew he could be of service there but it was no longer what he wanted. The daily grind of oppression in Johannesburg had opened his eyes. He was looking to a future in politics and identified the ANC as his natural political home, even as he became aware that the Congress leadership was looking weary, self-satisfied and out of touch with the new generation of activists, both educated and uneducated.
Although it was already three decades old, with a history of challenge and protest, the ANC had struggled to become the popular voice of its people and had yet to mount any determined resistance to racist oppression. No white newspaper had reported the 1912 conference in Bloemfontein at which several hundred African leaders and delegates agreed to form a new umbrella organization that would apply political pressure to the Union government and act as a forum for their views and grievances. It was named the South African Native National Congress and would not become the African National Congress for another eleven years.
In 1914 the Congress had been at the forefront of protests against the new Land Act and when their petition to the prime minister, General Botha, was ignored they decided to send a delegation to the king and parliament in London. This too had no effect, but that did not prevent the Congress suspending protests at the outbreak of the First World War and declaring support for the Empire.
Complaints against the Land Act continued to be aired during the war at meetings and tribunals, as many African organizations still appeared to believe they could change the direction of government policy by conventional means of debate. They turned up to give evidence to select committees and sought representation on government bodies established to consider “native affairs.” The Natal Native Congress called for a national convention of all races and representatives to determine the country’s future.
Africans might reasonably have expected some reward for their loyalty at the end of the First World War, but of course none was forthcoming. In reality, they only became even more disenfranchised, both politically and economically, prompting the first signs of unrest with a series of strikes and demonstrations that were quickly and severely quelled by the authorities.
There were signs of frustration at the ineffectiveness of the Congress. Some African women, in the Orange Free State, an independent Boer republic, organized an anti-pass protest. The first African campaign of passive resistance began in 1919 on the reef, a year after the war had ended. It had surely been influenced by the protests of Gandhi a decade earlier, when Indians had felt similarly betrayed after supporting the British government during the Boer War. In return for their loyalty, Indians had faced restrictions and enforced registration. Gandhi’s campaign of mass defiance, which began in Johannesburg, was known as satyagraha—devotion to the truth—and lasted for seven years, during which thousands of Indians were imprisoned, whipped and occasionally shot for refusing to comply with registration laws.
Defiance would sustain the ANC for many years to come but in 1919 it was still a new concept to Africans. Even though they showed the same discipline and order as Gandhi’s followers, they were subject to an even harsher response as white vigilantes joined police in breaking up their demonstrations.
Nothing changed, disillusion set in and new protest organizations sprang up, although the Congress continued to hold the greatest potential for mass support. There was a renewed petition to the king in London, seeking royal intervention in South Africa. One of the senior Congress figures, Solomon Plaatje, had been part of the first delegation to London and remained there to write Native Life in South Africa, which was considered a vivid account of the difficulties created by the 1913 Land Act.
There was a further significant publication, The Black Problem: Papers and Addresses on Various Native Problems, by the first African professor, D. D. T. Jabavu, who lectured at Fort Hare. It was not a call to action so much as a summary of concerns, advocating the training of “well-educated African leaders” to represent the people. Most of the Congress leaders were middle class and well educated already and were sometimes seen as a remote elite, out of touch with the grass roots.
Black African protest was muted in the 1920s when white mineworkers launched sometimes violent strike action in support of the privileges they wanted over black African workers. Of course the white workers won their cause at the expense of the Africans who were once more relegated to inferior jobs and opportunities. The National Party, which found a franchise among the poor white Afrikaners, became increasingly powerful and aggressive in pursuit of African repression. The 1930 Riotous Assemblies Amendment Act enshrined new powers to suppress protest. The focus was constantly directed towards solving the “native problem.”
There were still African voters in the Cape province, some of whom had hoped this could be a springboard to a wider franchise for Africans, but by the mid-1930s it had become clear that this would never happen and the last Africans with voting rights would soon be gone. Instead the government created a Natives’ Representative Council as a purely advisory forum with some elected Africans and some Africans chosen by the government—all under white leadership. This body was abolished only in 1951 and for a long time it was supported by the ANC as a way of influencing public policy.
The ANC had periodically accepted co-operation with other organizations and, even briefly, with white communists but it was a predominantly African group that assembled, back in Bloemfontein, on December 16, 1935. This was the anniversary celebrated by Afrikaners as the Day of the Covenant for a famous nineteenth-century victory over the Zulus. It had been declared an annual public holiday at the formation of the Union in 1910.
At the time, and over subsequent years, that day would be provocatively marked by the ANC and others. In 1935 it became the focus for the formation of a new body, the All African Convention, which was a fresh voice of unity for the mounting of grievances against government repression. It may have sounded like a strong challenge but of course
it was blunted by lack of force and a delegation to the government was politely rebuffed.
How much longer could black South Africans continue turning the other cheek?
The ANC seemed to be sleeping through much of the mid to late 1930s but there was renewed hope with the appointment of Dr. Xuma as president in 1940. The document it produced in 1943, Africans’ Claims in South Africa, was a confident assertion of rights by the older generation of ANC leaders. It had been inspired by the wartime Atlantic Charter, created by US president Roosevelt and British prime minister Churchill as a vision for a post-war world in which all people would be free from want and fear, and entitled to self-determination.
By 1943, however, the ANC’s national conference of the previous year had also called for the formation of a youth league. Young activists resented the timidity of their elders, the way they tried to bargain with the government while cozying up to other races and organizations, and generally betraying themselves by seeming to accept the status quo.
There was too a growing sense of nationalism, or perhaps chauvinism, among some of the young lions of the ANC, such as Anton Lembede. They were influenced by the political philosophy of Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, who promoted a “back to Africa” campaign for those who had been taken as slaves as well as supporting the idea of Africa for the Africans.
Xuma was on the left wing of Congress but even he was seen as conservative by the younger generation and was, like many, especially suspicious of South African communists as potential agents of outside influence. His letters to colleagues were said to be full of hostile references to communists.
At the 1943 ANC conference, the formation of a youth league was still the subject of fierce debate, a year after it had first been raised. Xuma was warned that such a thing would bring about his downfall, but the young lions had been canny in lobbying Xuma before the conference, encouraging him in the idea that he could be one of its initiators. His presidential address duly included a call to youth and a resolution in favor of the league was carried.
Dr. Xuma had a stylish house and surgery in the heart of Sophiatown—it is still there today, one of only two properties that survived the destruction of the township by the apartheid regime in the 1950s—and Mandela was among the young men who called there one evening in late February 1944 to push his acceptance of the Youth League’s draft constitution and manifesto.
Mandela was struck by how grand Xuma’s home was. Xuma had revived the ANC, regularized membership and subscriptions, and brought money into the coffers, yet he represented the old way of doing things: delegations, statements, committees—gentleman politics in the British tradition. As a man so recently being groomed to become a “black Englishman” himself, Mandela understood how all that worked. But now there were new voices around him, offering a more militant approach, putting his own upbringing in a different perspective.
There were informal meetings at Sisulu’s office, at the ANC and elsewhere as a nucleus was formed and the concept of a youth league began to take shape. In his memoir Mandela recalled Walter Sisulu’s home, 7372 Orlando West, as a place where young radicals would gather and talk, sustained by the home cooking of Walter’s mother, Ma Sisulu, who seemed able to produce a pot with enough food for everyone, even ten or twelve hungry young men. But the first plate, the one with the most generous helping and the tenderest, juiciest piece of meat, would be for her son.
She would look after them all, but she was not going to deprive her son.
Oliver Tambo was among the young men who went to Xuma’s home, having also fallen under Sisulu’s influence. He too had found a place to take his Articles, at a downtown law firm just a block away from Mandela at Witkin’s. Anton Lembede, perhaps the most radical and gifted in the group, was already a lawyer. Joe Matthews, the son of Z. K. Matthews, remembered Lembede once beginning a speech with the provocative remark, “As Karl Marx said, a pair of boots is better than all the plays of Shakespeare.” It caused uproar in the audience.
Lembede was close to Ashby Peter Mda, usually known as AP, who started out as a teacher and later became a lawyer, following the same trajectory as Tambo. AP was also an articulate champion of nationalism though not so inclined towards communism. The young lions were not clones and struggled to find an agreed line both on multiracial politics—or non-racial politics, as they called it—and on communism. Sisulu himself initially supported a more chauvinistic nationalist approach—that is, exclusive and not open to co-operation with non-Africans—but he softened his stance over time.
That was true too for Mandela who, perhaps influenced by Lembede, also took a more Africanist approach early on and was hostile to other groups, such as Indians and communists, especially when they were both, even as he himself was developing close friendships with Indian communists. Then, and later, it was difficult to find the right way forward. It was these issues that would cause the most painful divisions in the liberation movement.
Other key figures included Jordan Ngubane, a journalist at the popular African newspaper Bantu World who had been an early supporter of a youth movement. “As the circle in which I moved in Johannesburg widened,” he wrote, “I realized that the ferment in me was in everyone else.” A teacher, Congress Mbata, and a medical student, William Nkomo, were also closely involved and took part in the delegation to Xuma’s home. Here too, even among the young lions, was an educated elite, only the presence and influence of Sisulu pointing to a more egalitarian mix.
By all accounts, Xuma reacted angrily against the Youth League’s manifesto, which Mandela had helped to draft, with its open criticisms of the ANC for its failure to advance the national cause, its weaknesses of organization and constitution, and its “erratic policy of yielding to oppression, regarding itself as a body of gentlemen with clean hands.”
The proposed Youth League constitution revealed a sleight of hand that muted the nationalistic fervor. Membership was open “to all African men and women between the ages of twelve and forty” but it would also be open to “other sections of the community who live like and with Africans and whose general outlook on life is similar to that of Africans.”
Anton Lembede later made clear in an article that he regarded non-European unity (that is, solidarity between African, Indian and colored people) as a fantastic dream with no basis in reality, beyond occasional convenient co-operation with Africans as a single unit. He made blunt assertions: “Africa is a black man’s country,” “Africans are one,” “the leader of the Africans will come out of their own loins.”
Sisulu remembered how Xuma spoke sarcastically to the delegation of their “high learned manifesto” and attacked them for usurping the authority of the ANC national executive. In spite of his opposition to its manifesto, however, Xuma could not afford to make his disapproval of the Youth League public. It was, after all, a cause that he himself had championed at the last conference. He had been outmaneuvered by the young men and could do no more than offer his blessing, after being reassured by them that the ANC itself would remain the dominant body.
On Easter Sunday, April 9, 1944, the young men gathered together to found the African National Congress Youth League, the ANCYL. They were joined by one woman, Albertina Thethiwe, who was engaged to be married to Sisulu. The meeting took place at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre (BMSC) on Eloff Street Extension in the heart of Johannesburg. The BMSC was one of the most important venues in the city and, like that of many Africans, Mandela’s life was closely linked to the building.
It had been built on former mine land—mining had encroached upon the very middle of the city—and had been financed with funds raised from public donations that had been called for by the Johannesburg newspaper, The Star, to support the families of black people who had been murdered during the white miners’ riots on the Witwatersrand in early 1922. Just over £1,000 remained after £1,280 had been paid out. It was this sum that was used to create the center as “a nucleus for social intercourse for natives employed on the Witwatersran
d.” Some might describe it as a sop to the “natives,” to keep them happy, but it certainly became a place of significance, hosting meetings, dances and boxing tournaments, while offering plenty of opportunities to participate in everything from perusing newspapers in the reading room, “whilst enjoying a cup of tea or music over the radio,” to billiards, draughts, PT (physical training) and boxing.
The BMSC was “a beacon lighting the way for migrant labor coming to the city” and “with a slogan of Body, Mind, Spirit and Character it has continued to struggle and to impress those of our fellow beings who have accepted its coming with a feeling of one-ness.”
Mandela had very personal memories attached to the BMSC and wrote to his wife Winnie from Robben Island in 1970:
By the way, the other day I dreamt of you convulsing your entire body with a graceful Hawaiian dance at the BMSC. I stood at one end of the famous hall with my arms outstretched ready to embrace you as you whirled towards me with the enchanting smile that I miss so desperately.
I cannot explain why the scene should have located at the BMSC. To my recollection we have been there for a dance only once—on the night of Lindi’s wedding reception. The other occasion was the concert we organized in 1957 when I was courting you, or you me. I am never certain whether I am free to remind you that you took the initiative in this regard.
Anyway, the dream was for me a glorious moment. If I must dream in my sleep please Hawaii for me. I like to see you merry and full of life.
By 1944 the BMSC was also home to the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work, where the woman of Mandela’s dreams, then a beautiful but naive young girl, Winnie Madikizela, would arrive a decade later, to begin her studies.
Mandela thinks there were about 100 people at the BMSC for the formation of the Youth League, while Sisulu’s biographer puts the figure at around 200. To Mandela they were an elite group, many of them graduates of Fort Hare, and not exactly a mass movement, but under the leadership of founding president Anton Lembede they became a powerful force for change. That Easter Day was certainly the start of a new era in South African politics, even if Mandela was not yet a leading figure himself in the Youth League or, indeed, the liberation movement. He was a man on the rise, who had done enough to earn himself a place on the Youth League executive.
Young Mandela Page 7