Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  These loans are made on the understanding that they will be repaid so as to enable the trustees to continue assisting other deserving Africans and your failure to repay your loan makes this impossible.

  That was the last letter in the file, but Mandela did not finally begin repaying the Trust for a further six months, when he sent them £15 in September 1954, eight years after the first loan, with a promise to pay off the rest in installments. In his covering letter, he wrote: “May I be permitted to convey my sincere appreciation of assistance given to me by your Trust.”

  In spite of his failure to pay his debt in a timely manner, he was in so many ways a controlled and disciplined character. Mandela did not gamble, as far as is known, only ever drank a little and is supposed to have admitted he had tried dagga— marijuana—just the once. He didn’t like it and never touched it again because he said it made him feel silly. He still had a weakness for a little pomp and flash, however.

  Makgatho remembered for Fatima Meer the impact of his father’s presence as he would set off from Orlando for the city in his big car, which Mandela called his “colossal Oldsmobile.” Two-tone green, it was smooth on its springs over the bumps of the unmade township roads, a rare and extravagant vehicle outside the white suburbs. “He was very popular where we lived. When he would leave the house and get into our car the children would come running and they would shout ‘Afrika! Mayibuye!’ We would feel so proud. Daddy would explain the meaning of the words to us. He would tell us that they were not just words, that when the people called ‘Mayibuye! iAfrika’ they meant that they wanted what was theirs returned to them.” Come back, Africa.

  Adelaide Joseph and her husband, who would ride in that car too in Orlando, also saw how everyone knew and greeted its driver. Adelaide would say that was when she first knew for certain he would become a leader. There was something about him that made you want to look at him.

  There went Mandela, heading for the city in his car. He must be wearing a suit from Alfred Khan, the Jewish tailor. Kathrada had seen him wearing those smart clothes, especially that brass-buttoned, double-breasted jacket with the ANC emblem sewn into the breast pocket. Thinking he must have one for himself, he had demanded of Mandela, where did you get that jacket, and then gone and ordered it without regard to the cost. He nearly choked when he went to collect it, the price was so high. Who did Mandela think he was, Harry Oppenheimer? Khan made Oppenheimer’s suits too.

  And of course, even when he put on the blazer, Kathrada could still never be quite so smart as his friend as no one wore clothes quite like Mandela. They were part of his ego and his self-respect, as George Bizos sees it. When Mandela was imprisoned he wore regulation shorts like all the other African prisoners. When asked whether those shorts had a great impact on Mandela’s dignity, Bizos conjures a rich phrase in reply: “No, nothing is going to deprive Mandela of his evaluation of himself.”

  He was, as others saw him, tall and handsome, beautifully dressed, dapper but not dandy, stately, particular about himself, smiling often and listening carefully, usually cool and controlled in the face of provocation, but not always. There is a story Winnie once related to Paul Joseph of Mandela stopping his car to assist a white woman whose own car had stalled. Telling her to get back in, he pushed the car back to life, at which the woman offered Mandela a sixpence. He smiled and refused, then refused again when she tried to insist. Finally she got annoyed. “What do you want, a shilling?” But still Mandela stayed calm.

  Then one night in the early 1950s he was out in a car with Sisulu and Amina Cachalias’ husband, Yusuf. Some or all of them had been drinking. They saw two white Afrikaners beating up an African man with a horse and cart. They stopped and got out, all fired up and ready for a fight, but the situation was defused and they were denied the ruckus.

  Some people won’t hear a word against him; he is truly sanctified in their eyes. One such is AnnMarie Wolpe, who says there are no “buts” with Mandela, no “He’s lovely, but… ” “He is just totally charming, a man of stature, a very impressive person. I was very conscious of that,” says AnnMarie. “I liked him enormously, enormously.”

  At dinner at the Wolpes’ one night he said he had just been turned over by ruffians—tsotsis—on the road in Orlando, who had knocked him to the ground and started to beat him. Suddenly they stopped. “Wait! It’s Mandela.” They lifted him up and dusted him off and sent him on his way with a profound apology. Mandela told the Wolpes that night, privately, that he feared personal violence and especially feared the threat of it in prison.

  The drive to the city in the big car usually came to an end at his law office, which opened for business at eight, invariably with a queue, closed at five, and often shut down for an hour in the middle of the day when the two partners stepped out for a lunchtime curry. A fresh queue sometimes formed during that hour. On one occasion Jack Hodgson was waiting impatiently outside when Ruth Mompati returned from her own lunch. He was quite angry.

  Have a heart, Ruth said, we must have our break.

  Mandela was an effective lawyer, according to Bizos, if not a lawyer’s lawyer. That would be Tambo, who was reserved and careful, where Mandela was flamboyant, a showman in the court. The courtroom was the last refuge of the oppressed, where there could still be some hope of a fair hearing and a black lawyer could be the pride of his black client, playing his small part in attempting to stem the overwhelming tide of prosecutions linked to the apartheid laws.

  That did not mean, of course, that the court did not harbor racists. One weekend Mandela called on Bizos for his advice as an advocate, visiting him at a house in a white suburb where Bizos was staying as a guest. Even the act of arriving at this house was fraught, as Mandela shocked the children of the host family by parking his sedan on their drive and knocking at their front door.

  He told Bizos about the provincial magistrate, Dormehl, who had clearly taken exception to having a black lawyer in his courtroom. He seemed determined to make life as difficult for Mandela as possible. Mandela was famous enough by then and everyone involved in the law knew who he was. But, as Bizos observed, magistrates and prosecutors had a tendency to see Mandela as “uppity.” His customary self-confidence and commanding presence rubbed up against the white folks’ idea of how a black man should behave.

  The Dormehl had been absurdly hostile to Mandela, threatening to jail him for impertinence and refusing to proceed with the case until his certificate—his right to appear in court—was produced.

  Mandela returned with the document and the case commenced, only for Dormehl to begin interrupting his attempts at cross-examining witnesses with objections that his questions were irrelevant. Mandela was icy but calm and persisted with the procedure, which merely further inflamed Dormehl. The magistrate now dropped all the usual niceties of the court and started barking at Mandela, not using his name, but by calling him, “Hey, you.” “Hey, you, sit down,” he had ordered Mandela as he tried to ask a question. “Hey, you, I have warned you before.” They broke for lunch and after the adjournment the face-off continued as Mandela stood once more to question the witness.

  “Hey, you, sit down.” Mandela sat down. Dormehl ordered the witness to leave the box. Mandela stood to say he was not finished. “Hey, you, I told you to sit down. Will you sit down. I will count up to three and if you are still standing when I have counted three I will call the orderly to eject you from the court. One… two… three… Get this man out.

  Only when the orderly was practically on top of him did Mandela sit down. He said he would have to withdraw from the case, but his client, a clerk accused of minor corruption, refused to let him and insisted he wanted only Mandela. After talking to Bizos, Mandela agreed to petition the Supreme Court for the magistrate to withdraw as he had objected to having a black attorney in his court.

  By the time the case came before a Supreme Court judge, Dormehl had presented an affidavit, along with supporting statements from others, to the effect that he had appeared in court w
ith his hands in his pockets and behaved in such an arrogant manner that the magistrate could not believe he was an attorney. The affidavit did not refer to Mandela by name but called him die natural, “the native.” The judge ordered the magistrate to step down.

  Bizos tried to persuade Mandela to return to Kempton Park to see his moment of triumph but Mandela was not interested, now that he had the result. Justice had prevailed, as it sometimes did.

  Ruth Mompati remembered another occasion, closer to home, when an African bellboy in a hotel came into the office at Chancellor House, looking for Mandela’s help. He had embarked on a relationship with the hotel manager, his white female employer, and they used to have sex together in her room when he had finished his shift. Another member of the staff had told the police, who had burst into the room and arrested the bellboy under the Immorality Act of 1950. They had not arrested the white woman.

  Immediately after he was freed on bail, the bellboy came to Mandela & Tambo for help. He was very worried and had every right to be. As Ruth knew, it would be a difficult case to defend. Ruth watched Mandela and the bellboy leave the office and head across the street to the magistrates’ building, a journey of no more than a few yards. Ten minutes later they were back. So soon? They had won. Mandela had succeeded in having the case thrown out. The white woman had helped by refusing to give evidence.

  A future comrade, Denis Goldberg, would listen to Mandela recounting tales from the bench too, and was not always happy with what he heard. Mandela told him how he had defended a black man accused of rape by cross-examining his alleged white victim in deliberate detail. Was there penetration, did he remove your underwear, did he actually put his penis into your vagina? She couldn’t answer because he was a black lawyer and for a racist white woman that would be a renewed violation. Mandela’s client went free. Goldberg said he didn’t know whether to applaud his legal skills or not.

  Mandela knew what he was doing, playing on racial fears and turning a trial into a show with his theatrics, often for the benefit of the township crowd in the gallery who sometimes came to court to see the fun. Once, while defending an African servant accused of stealing her employer’s clothes, Mandela hooked a pair of allegedly purloined panties on the tip of his pencil and held them up for the white woman to see. “Madam, are these yours?” he asked. She was too embarrassed to say yes and the case was dismissed.

  As time went on, politics began to dominate Mandela and Tambo’s lives. It became harder and harder for their firm to operate effectively as lawyers and they started to struggle financially. Bizos remembered Tambo expressing his concerns to him in the late 1950s, worrying about Mandela’s recent expensive wedding to Winnie.

  “I don’t know how he could afford it… ”

  Eight

  IT IS DIFFICULT to grasp the impact upon Mandela of the strain that he must surely have been under in the mid-1950s as he negotiated his way, daily, through an ever more complicated existence. He shared with all African men the many routine humiliating and emasculating strictures of apartheid and, additionally, contended with the renewed banning orders that were designed to further inhibit him. Mandela also faced a mounting burden of responsibilities. He was juggling a young family and an unhappy marriage with a hectic love life; he had his own business in which the hours were long, the work was constant, and he would never get to the end of the queue of needy clients; he had a modest budget with which to finance his expensive tastes; he was deeply immersed in the leadership of the ANC, shaping policy, attending meetings, making speeches, campaigning on any number of different causes from the forced removals of black families from Sophiatown to the bus boycotts in Alexandra, from the resistance to Bantu education to the growing clamor for a Freedom Charter.

  White radicals were becoming increasingly important to the struggle and the Africanists resented their presence. Cracks were opening up in the movement and Mandela was trapped in the middle. He was among a small group of senior ANC figures who had transformed a lobby group into a mass movement and, as a consequence, now carried the hopes and expectations of the general population of black Africans. The threat of jail was never far away. He often sounds overheated in his speeches during this period. One can only wonder how he managed to fit everything in.

  Late in 1953 the ANC was still transfixed by its success in the Defiance Campaign and the resulting “upsurge in national consciousness,” as Mandela called it in his speech as Transvaal president to the regional conference. Since he was banned from addressing crowds, the speech had to be read for him. He said he and others who were banned had been “exiled from their own people.”

  The speech is remembered now for its introduction of the so-called M-Plan, the Mandela-Plan, which has since been trumpeted as a means of enabling the ANC to operate underground. With its leaders banned, and the Communist Party banned too, it seemed only a matter of time before the ANC itself would also be shut down. The M-Plan appeared to offer the basis by which the ANC could function as a secret organization with cells.

  In fact, the M-Plan was not so much a secret strategy as an attempt to create a tighter and more efficient ANC in keeping with the swelling ranks of its membership. The “cells” were part of that trickle-down structure, with cell-stewards in charge of cell-blocks, which were in fact simply several houses grouped together on a street. Streets were managed by wards and wards by branches with a central committee at the top. The center wanted closer control of the regions, which did not always fall into line. The regions, in turn, were suspicious of the plan. The concentration of power would create dictators, they said.

  Mandela’s speech envisaged the plan as the machinery for a modern ANC, rather than one still reliant on “public meetings and printed circulars.” He urged local action and called, “Never surrender!” He spoke of the enemy within, the “shady characters, political clowns, place-seekers, splitters, saboteurs, agents-provocateurs, informers and policemen” who masqueraded as committed activists but were simply trying to create internal strife to wreck the Congress. His obsession with those “politically backward individuals” in this keynote speech was testimony to the internal divisions that continued to hinder the struggle. Old-guard conservatives did not always appreciate the upstart Mandela and his continuing drive to militancy.

  He assured the speech its place in ANC history when he quoted—but did not attribute to its source—something he had read by the Indian leader, Jawaharlal Nehru:

  You can see that there is no easy walk to freedom anywhere and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow [of death] again and again before we reach the mountain tops of our desires. Dangers and difficulties have not deterred us in the past, they will not frighten us now. But we must be prepared for them, like men in business who do not waste energy in vain talk or idle action. The way of preparation [for action] lies in our rooting out all impurity and indiscipline from our organization and making it the bright and shining instrument that will cleave its way to [Africa’s] freedom.

  “No easy walk” was Nehru’s phrase, not Mandela’s. He later told writer Anthony Sampson that he had often used the writings of Nehru without acknowledging them, which, he said, “was a silly thing to do.” But, he added, “when there is a paucity of views in you, you are inclined to do just that.”

  The ANC adopted the M-Plan but always struggled to implement it. At least the plan offered some platform for continuity when the ANC was finally banned, after the Sharpeville massacre in March 1960.

  Meanwhile, some eight years ahead of the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military arm of the ANC, Mandela was already anticipating the necessity for armed conflict. At the time of his “no easy walk” speech, Walter Sisulu was on a mission abroad, with fellow ANC communist Duma Nokwe. They were part of a broader South African delegation to the Youth and Student Festival in Bucharest, the capital of the communist state of Romania. Sisulu was looking to establish links with other African activists, as well as communists in Eastern Europe and el
sewhere. The trip took Sisulu to London en route to Romania and then on to Moscow, where he took the trans-Siberian train to Peking.

  Mandela had supported Sisulu’s trip and persuaded Chief Luthuli to agree to it. Before Sisulu left, Mandela had asked his friend to take soundings in China on their support for a turn to violence by the ANC. “Though we believed in the policy of non-violence we knew in our hearts it wasn’t going to be a satisfactory answer,” Sisulu has said of this early development. When he asked the Chinese, they warned him that revolution was a very serious affair, not to be embarked on lightly. The ANC should not be misled by slogans, he was told, and should analyze the situation carefully before reaching a decision.

  Sisulu discovered on his return that there was quite widespread speculation that he had been abroad to try to procure arms, so evidently Mandela’s militaristic intentions were already getting some circulation. Also, back in South Africa, he and Mandela faced hostility from those who suspected Mandela of misusing funds to finance the trip without authorization. Chief Luthuli claimed he had never been asked to authorize it, which did not help.

  The anti-left element within the ANC was finding its focus within the Orlando Youth League, which would be the wellspring later of the breakaway Pan-Africanist Congress. They resented all white, Indian, and communist involvement. One of the most vocal supporters of “Africa for the Africans” was the League’s newly elected chairman, Potlako Leballo, who satirized the ANC left-wingers as “Eastern functionaries” and nicknamed Sisulu “Mao Tse Tung.”