Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  Many messages were simple demands, or statements that defied the categories: “freedom and equality,” “justice for all,” “no more racialism,” “we’re not moving,” “life too heavy.”

  Bernstein recalled eventually being left alone with the scraps and giving them a last look through before returning them to the trunk. The trunk and its contents later vanished, and have never been traced. In their place came Bernstein’s imaginative distillation of the themes, which he transformed into a draft charter, finally topped and tailed with an “oratorical flourish” that he came to regard as “considerably overblown.”

  Bernstein seems skeptical that anyone ever actually read and agreed the draft before it went to press in time for distribution at the conference. The historians Thomas Karis, Gwendolyn Carter and Gail Gerhart claim it was read by Mandela, Sisulu and Joe Matthews, son of the Prof, as members of the ANC working committee, while also suggesting it was by then too late to make changes as “thousands of copies had already been reproduced.”

  Professor Matthews was not alone in never seeing that draft. The ANC president was never shown it either. Chief Luthuli was banned and still back in Groutville, recuperating from the stroke he had suffered some weeks earlier. In earlier times, surely, such a vital paper could not simply have been printed and sent off without first being chewed over and put to the vote at executive committees and conferences of the ANC. The history of the creation of the Freedom Charter carried with it an unspoken sense that power was changing hands at this climactic moment; of Luthuli and Matthews stepping back, or being gently elbowed aside, while Tambo, Sisulu and Mandela came forward to take charge. It was the moment too that the alliance with white communists was set and sealed. Bernstein recalled the initial resistance he sensed from Tambo, whose faith did not favor communists, but they found common ground and became friends and colleagues.

  Did the triumvirate ever stop to consider that truly bizarre, thoroughly awkward paradox: that it had taken a white comrade to articulate the hopes and dreams of a black nation? It seems likely at least that Mandela was alive to the political sensitivities. He must have known exactly who wrote the Freedom Charter, but in Mandela’s memoir Bernstein’s name does not figure in this context. Instead, he emphasizes that “the ANC branches contributed a great deal to the process of writing the charter” and that regional drafts were circulated for comments and questions before “the charter itself was drafted by a small committee of the National Action Council.”

  A committee of one, in fact.

  Perhaps because he had never been consulted, Chief Luthuli did not mind acknowledging that the charter was open to criticism. “It is by no means a perfect document. But its motive must be understood, as must the deep yearning for security and human dignity from which it springs.”

  Not many of the principal players were actually on the platform at Kliptown—they were all banned from speaking in public. Even the man who had written the charter, Rusty Bernstein, was banned, along with his wife. They traveled out to the site and stood on a pile of coal against the fence for a while, peering over, until they attracted the attention of the police and went home. Mandela and Sisulu stood on the roof of a shop owned by Jada, an Indian friend of Sisulu. Later, Mandela put on a modest disguise and walked a little among the crowds. Bernstein had found the spectacle disappointing—drawing fewer people than he had anticipated after all those months of planning—but Mandela thought it was impressive, “both serious and festive,” as the reading and approving of the charter took place alongside songs and speeches, with food being served and children dancing.

  There was a “peace pavilion” and many stalls with banners, posters and leaflets bearing the slogans of various shades of left-wing political opinion. Even the Africanists had set up there, selling a special edition of their publication, The Africanist. Potlako Leballo later claimed he had got into a physical fight while he was at the congress.

  The police were present and kept a careful note of proceedings, useful later as a record of what occurred. After the opening frills, the Freedom Charter was read, first in Zulu, then in Sotho and finally in English. Each section was presented as a resolution to be adopted, punctuated by many cries and choruses of Mayibuye! Mayibuye! And Afrika! Afrika! The police record noted that when people were not addressing the crowd in English, they were “speaking in native.”

  At some point, late in the proceedings, the records tell us that the organizers announced that there were 2,884 delegates, comprising 2,186 African, 320 Indian, 230 colored and 112 white people. That actually totals 2,848, so perhaps a digit got transposed somewhere along the way. Of that total, 721 were women.

  On the second day, the police were still standing around, taking notes and photographs, creating an intimidating presence. Yusuf Cachalia turned to Sisulu and said, “The dogs just stand there and do nothing.” At that precise moment the police barged forward, swarming onto the platform or lining up before it with their peaked, strapped hats and their Sten guns. An officer announced over the microphone that treason was suspected. Special Branch officers set about seizing every document they could find, including a treasonous sign saying, “Comrades. Tea 3d. Tea and sandwich 6d.”

  The organizers of the congress had been unable to arrange any lighting, but the police set up hurricane lamps over table tops and began collecting the names and address of everyone there, as darkness fell. The crowd began singing the African anthem. Mandela briefly considered offering himself for arrest but thought better of it and slipped away back to the city.

  The Congress of the People took its rightful place as a defining moment in the story of the struggle and the bumpy field at Kliptown was consecrated. It became ANC “holy ground,” as Robert Resha had called it in a closing speech on the last day. The date of June 26th would be Freedom Day forever more. Although the congress adopted the Freedom Charter, that did not quell the fierce controversies that swirled around the document and surged into the breach it created in the movement, from the opening words onwards:

  “We, the people of South Africa,” Bernstein had written, “declare for all our country and the world to know, that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.”

  In the mid-1950s, when a tiny minority of whites still held the black majority in their grip, the notion of togetherness was perhaps too woolly, resembling more the loose thinking of a white liberal perhaps than a black political party at the forefront of the struggle. For the Africanists, the country did not belong to all who lived in it; it belonged to black Africans and the whites were there only as uninvited guests. That was the single, central, unpalatable proposition at the heart of the charter, for the nationalists of the Orlando Youth League as well as for many others who were not necessarily so extreme as the Africanists, but who still wanted their country to themselves or were suspicious of white people and did not feel they shared in that country too.

  The resonance of the Freedom Charter has never gone away. Many, maybe even most, black South Africans—Mandela’s own daughter Zindzi declared herself among them—felt at times resentful after 1990 that the (relatively) peaceful transition to majority rule had denied them the fight they had hoped for, their moment of revenge, the chance to “drive the white people into the sea.”

  There is no doubt that Mandela’s triumph was to avoid a bloodbath. By his own example of forgiveness and reconciliation, he had shown a way forward from a seemingly impossible position. In those later years he embraced that aspect of the Freedom Charter and drove it forward into government by the sheer strength of his character and his moral authority. He held the line between hope and chaos.

  As its end-of-year conference approached, the ANC was tying itself in knots, trying to find a way to adopt the Freedom Charter—a stable door closing after a bolted horse, if ever there was—without usurping the voice of the people that had spoken at Kliptown.

  Bernst
ein said he had tried his best to keep his own prejudices out of the charter but there were still a number of left-wing values embedded in it that were equally difficult to manage. No one was going to argue with “The people shall govern” or “The people shall share in the country’s wealth”—they were vague enough and desirable enough aims to please everyone—but the prospect of mass nationalization envisaged by the phrase “the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole” sounded distinctly Marxist.

  Perhaps to avoid an immediate and lasting schism, the ANC put off adopting the charter to a special conference the following April. Nevertheless, the controversy still dominated the annual gathering in December 1955, where Africanists were outraged at the suppression of a letter from the former ANC president, Dr. Xuma, that complained that the new leadership was forgetting its old values and was too quick to join with other races who could more easily be “making sacrifices themselves.” The ANC was losing its identity, Xuma wrote. ANC officials refused to read out the whole letter as it would be too damaging. Africanists tried to shout down speakers, calling out, “Africa for the Africans!”

  There was even greater scuffling and squabbling at the special conference four months later, in April 1956, in Orlando when the Freedom Charter was finally adopted. One of Mandela’s former close colleagues on the ANCYL, A. P. Mda, wrote a bitter article for The Africanist, reminding readers of what they had once stood for, as “from our inception we saw the burning need of ridding the ANC of foreign domination.” He said, “No white man has ever impressed us.”

  He was way out of step with Mandela, who sought to explain the Freedom Charter in an article of his own, published in Liberation in mid-1956. He was asked to “correct the assumption that the Freedom Charter was the embryo of a socialist state.” And, indeed, he did stress that trade and private enterprise would flourish while explaining that “the Charter strikes a fatal blow at the financial and gold-mining monopolies that have for centuries plundered the country and condemned its people to servitude.”

  Others were poring over the Freedom Charter too, finding treason in its terms and in the unuttered idea that its aims could be achieved only by violence against the state. Before the year was out, the Police would be ready to act.

  * * *

  In late 1955, with life in full swirl, Mandela’s latest ban expired. He suddenly decided to take a trip home to the eastern Cape, saying it was to assess the political state of play in the provinces, but also to reconnect with the countryside and his old friends and comrades. Some city friends gathered at number 8115 to mark the occasion and he was seen off, after midnight, by a song from Duma Nowke. Mandela liked driving into the dawn and often adopted that time of departure. Perhaps also it was a tactic to avoid the attention of the police. The car radio was tuned to Radio Bantu and the popular show Rediffusion Service, which played songs from Miriam Makeba, Dolly Rathebe, Dorothy Masuku and “the smooth sound of the Manhattan Brothers.” The African music went straight to his heart, he said.

  He drove through Natal into Durban, stopping for meetings, and then southwards following the line of the coast before turning inland towards Umtata and his former family home at Qunu where he visited his mother, Nosekeni.

  He had not been home for many years, although his mother had been staying with him in Orlando periodically since the late 1940s. As Evelyn had claimed, Mandela’s mother had returned home because of the domestic unpleasantness at number 8115.

  In Mandela’s memoir, his arrival at his mother’s home is recorded as if it were a reunion following many years apart. He describes how he felt guilty seeing her poor and alone, and tried to persuade her to come back to Johannesburg, but she refused and swore that she would not leave the countryside she loved. But Mandla, the son of Makgatho, argued this could not be correct as Nosekeni often went and stayed with Mandela in Johannesburg. Mandla speculated that her refusal to leave Qunu may have been a gesture of disapproval, because of his conduct towards Evelyn. Perhaps, in fact, he had gone there to try to persuade his mother to return, as he needed her help with childcare. On the other hand, it was also the case that he had not made much effort to visit his mother while she was in Qunu. According to Evelyn, Nosekeni missed her son. Mandela said he had not been to Qunu for thirteen years, but it may well have been his first trip back there since he had run away in 1941. He had left on a wrong note, as Mandla put it. The idea was also expressed in simple, traditional terms by Mandela’s cousin Sitsheketshe. He said it was true that Mandela had not returned home for a long time, which was not right because as a man you worked for your family, you went to work and then you came back to your family.

  Mandela recalls in his memoir that he neither hugged nor kissed his mother. “That was not our custom,” he said. Others in his family have noted his difficulty with being physically demonstrative. It is said that he appeared to find it easier to embrace a stranger than to express physical affection with one of his own family. During the additional interviews he conducted with Ahmed Kathrada, Mandela elaborated on the question of custom, saying that it had been his practice in the past “not to kiss your mother and so on,” but he had got used to it now and would do it with family, though it was not something he was raised to do. He conceded that he had tended to neglect his family, something that really only changed when Winnie came along and made him do things differently. Previously he would send home an occasional lump sum with “one of our fellows who was going down home.” Winnie had told him, no, that’s not the correct way, because his mother just used that money and finished it. A regular payment was better.

  When he arrived in Qunu it was already night and his mother was asleep. She woke up and at first looked as if she was seeing a ghost, he writes. “And, to show the conditions under which she lived, she got up and whilst I was talking to her she got stuck into the groceries. I brought some chicken for her and fruit and other pieces of meat and sugar, tea. I bought a stove for her, you know, brought paraffin with me, and milk. As she was talking to me she got up and started lighting the stove, preparing tea for herself and, I don’t know, the way she was eating, you see, I didn’t think there would be space for the tea.” What Mandela may have been describing was seeing his mother so hungry that she gorged herself on the food and it made him uncomfortable, perhaps even embarrassed, as he sat watching her.

  He spent a couple of weeks in the area, moving between Qunu, Umtata and Mqhekezweni where he was reunited with the wife of Jongintaba who had been like a mother to him after he left his own mother in Qunu. He felt renewed affection for his past but also sensed the ways in which he had moved on and embraced new ideas while others had stayed put. He was glad he had not returned there, as his cousin Matanzima had urged him to do, after graduation twelve years earlier.

  Matanzima—whom Mandela knew as Daliwonga—was immersed in the new Bantu Authority that would soon be established in Umtata, with Matanzima at its head. Mandela, of course, was profoundly opposed to these government-imposed pretend-parliaments, and he and his cousin would never be reconciled because of them, even though their family ties kept them close. When they debated the Bantustans, Mandela hoped to persuade his cousin to resist them, but Matanzima explained how he planned to use them to restore the status of his own royal house, which had been destroyed by the British many years earlier. He too wanted freedom, but found common ground with the government that it was achievable through “separate development.” Matanzima believed the ANC could bring only bloodshed and bitterness. They ended up talking until dawn without ever shifting their positions. Mandela felt grief for the “loss” of his former mentor.

  He continued his journey, driving west to Cape Town via Port Elizabeth, where he met Govan Mbeki for the first time. He was then still running a co-operative store but was about to have a change of career and begin work as an editor at the left publication New Age. People would be suspicious, later, that Govan had seemed to ascend so rapidl
y within the ANC, without ever paying his due in terms of bannings and arrests. He could also be fierce and disagreeable.

  Mandela was in Cape Town in late September when the police launched a widespread series of raids and arrests under the Suppression of Communism Act. He was heading up the steps of the New Age offices when he heard the police moving around inside and turned away to avoid being arrested himself. He would not be so lucky next time.

  He returned to Johannesburg and a renewed banning order. By now it was 1956 and his wife Evelyn was petitioning for a separation.

  Elsewhere in the city a young woman was about to start work as the first black pediatric medical social worker at Baragwanath Hospital near Orlando. She would commute daily by bus from the Helping Hand hostel where she lived, downtown. Sometimes she would be waiting a while by the hospital bus stop. Soon Mandela would notice her there as he drove past, be drawn to her beauty, as others were. The young woman claimed not to know she was beautiful. No one had ever mentioned it to Winnie Madikizela back in Bizana in the eastern Cape.

  Nine

  ACCORDING TO WINNIE Madikizela-Mandela, she was a country girl from Pondoland who knew nothing of the big city when she arrived there for the first time in 1953, round about the age of eighteen. She had never seen a train before she boarded the one that took her to Johannesburg, entrusted by her father into the care of some men he knew, illiterate tribesmen in traditional dress who were on their way to work in the mines. Her home, her entire horizon, was the one-street village of Bizana and she had previously only ever left it to go to Shawbury High School, a few hours away in Qumbu.

  It was at Shawbury that she had first heard of the fighting in Johannesburg and the leaders who were inspiring people to protest. One of them was Oliver Tambo, who also came from Bizana. Another was Nelson Mandela, a name that meant nothing to Winnie. She herself had been caught up in a student rebellion at Shawbury, the small beginnings of her own political awareness.