Mandela knew Sobukwe well, had represented him in court, and admired and respected his intelligence. He told Fatima Meer that he kept trying afterwards to obtain a copy of that speech and that Sobukwe became evasive: “Nel, I’ve got it at varsity” or “Nel, as soon as I have a moment I’ll get it to you.” Mandela said, “Robbie was always cautious, playing his cards close to his chest, but very honest.”
If it was true that Sobukwe was honest, he must have been manipulated by others within the PAC as they sought to present their new organization as attracting mass appeal while, in truth, it was failing to gather widespread support. The PAC was constantly trying to upstage the ANC and seized its opportunity in early 1960, after the ANC began organizing a new anti-pass campaign that was to begin on March 31, 1960 and culminate on Freedom Day, June 26th, with a bonfire of the passes.
On March 18th, Sobukwe called for a mass pass defiance to take place three days later, on March 21—ten days ahead of the ANC campaign. It was short notice for such a campaign and anticipated that followers would go to jail on the “no bail, no defense, no fine” slogan. He wrote a letter to the Commissioner of Police, promising a disciplined approach and seeking to avoid violence. He also wrote, asking the ANC to join them, but they refused, saying it was a sensational action that was ill prepared and had no prospect of success. Mandela claimed the ANC had asked the PAC to join their campaign and never had a reply.
On March 21, Chief Luthuli had just taken the stand in the Treason Trial at the Old Synagogue in Pretoria. Mandela was in the dock listening as Luthuli testified to the ANC’s non-violent stance while, back in Johannesburg, Robert Sobukwe was at the head of a procession of anti-pass protesters, marching to offer themselves for arrest at the Orlando police station.
There was a further protest at Vereeniging, a few miles outside Johannesburg, in the location of Sharpeville. Benjamin Pogrund had never heard of the place before, when he learned of the crowd of several thousand who had assembled there to march on the municipal offices at the entrance to the township. Later the police would say 20,000 people had gathered, but the organizers claimed the crowd numbered some 5,000. Police reinforcements were brought in with Saracen armored cars.
There was no order to open fire and it has never been explained what prompted the police to start shooting. There is no evidence that the police faced any threat, other than a large crowd of peaceful protesters. In London, the South African High Commission claimed that 20,000 “Natives” had attacked the police with assorted weapons including firearms. That was not true, according to all the first-hand accounts. Pogrund had arrived in his car a few minutes before the shooting happened and was lucky to escape with his life as the crowd became enraged by the massacre and turned on him with sticks and stones.
The reporting of Sharpeville came from Drum journalist Humphrey Tyler—“a gun opened up toc-toc-toc and another and another. The shots had a deep sound”—with pictures from his accompanying photographer, Ian Berry. Tyler noted that people were laughing at first, perhaps thinking it was a game, with blanks, but they were real bullets flying from police revolvers, rifles and Sten guns, in rounds of volleys that altogether lasted less than one minute. Pogrund says that 68 died and 186 were injured, while pointing out the uncertainty of the precise number. The usual quoted figure is sixty-nine deaths. Most of the victims were shot in the back, forty of them women and eight of them children.
Elsewhere, PAC protests had drawn patchy support—from crowds of thousands in Cape Town to far smaller numbers in Durban. In the ensuing days there were further fatalities amid greater mass demonstrations as a well of anger rose up inside the country and around the world. The government actually relaxed the pass laws in an attempt to prevent further confrontation. The South African stock market wobbled, while the ANC thought the moment might have come when the government could be pushed aside.
On the night of Sharpeville, Mandela, Sisulu, Slovo and Duma Nokwe sat up all night devising a response, which they gave to Chief Luthuli to present to the country. Slovo said it was left to the movement—the Alliance—to pick up the pieces of the PAC’s disastrous actions, but in reality the ANC had been outplayed. The effect of the shooting was to catapult Sobukwe and the PAC to the forefront of the struggle against apartheid. The terrible truth was that the tragedy of Sharpeville was the PAC’s triumph. Slovo recalled that he and Mandela waited alone together for the others to arrive and the meeting to begin. “We were both depressed and commiserated with each other about the massacre, and about the fact that the ANC national campaign into which so much effort had already been put had been so tragically pre-empted.”
Luthuli called for a day of mourning—a day’s strike—and he and Mandela and others publicly burned their passes in an orchestrated arrangement. The day of mourning was held on March 28, with hundreds of thousands staying away from work and many taking to the streets in protest. Now the state made its move and on March 30 a state of emergency was declared, habeas corpus was suspended and mass arrests took place. Mandela was arrested at number 8115 in the early hours of the morning. He had known what was coming from a tip-off the previous day. Ahmed Kathrada recalls that he was celebrating Eid with friends when he got a cryptic message from Mandela and went to number 8115 to be told that they were all going to be detained. The leadership decided that everyone should attend the Treason Trial as usual.
Oliver Tambo had left the country three days earlier, to form a leadership in exile. Ruth First crossed into Swaziland wearing a red wig, taking her three children. Most of the other key figures were among the 2,000 arrested, everyone, that is, except Wilton Mkwayi who tried to offer himself for arrest at the Treason Trial that morning and was waved away by the police. He insisted he was one of the accused and ought to be arrested but they didn’t believe him. He left South Africa and ended up in China, where he undertook military training before coming home. He would claim that muti— African witchcraft—had saved him from arrest.
The ANC and the PAC were banned. Some of the PAC leaders betrayed their commitment by posting bail. Sobukwe had expected a short jail sentence but instead was given three years and ended up in solitary confinement on Robben Island, where his sentence was endlessly extended without further trial, by the so-called Sobukwe Clause.
Sharpeville did little to divert the lumbering passage of the Treason Trial. The jubilation and partying at the withdrawal of charges in the trial back in October 1958 had been short-lived, as the case was soon revived while the number of defendants was streamlined down to a more manageable thirty. After a mere three months of legal argument, the trial proper had begun again in August 1959.
The Freedom Charter was the prosecution’s key document, albeit just one exhibit among thousands. According to the prosecutor Oswald Pirow, the aims of the charter necessarily demanded “the overthrow of the state by violence.” That proved the “hostile intent” required to make the charge of treason stick. The accused, claimed Pirow, were “inspired by communist fanaticism, Bantu nationalism and racial hatred in various degrees.”
Pirow was a Nazi sympathizer who had come out of retirement to prosecute the trial. In an unguarded moment—or perhaps he simply did not care what he said, or whom he said it to—he had told the historian Tom Karis during the trial that he wanted to see the “worst Natives” such as Robert Resha jailed for five years. Separate development, he said, appealed to most “good Natives.” But if there was a real threat to white rule, the shooting of 5,000 natives with machine guns would provide quiet for a long time to come.
When Pirow had died suddenly in late 1959, there were rumors among the defense that his death had been forecast, perhaps even caused, by witch doctors attending the trial.
Before the arrests during the 1960 state of emergency, Mandela used to catch a lift each day to Pretoria with Helen Joseph in her car, which they christened Treason Trixie. Joe Slovo, Robert Resha and Ahmed Kathrada would often travel with them. Joseph recalled how they would pick out grand houses for themse
lves as they drove out through the well-heeled northern suburbs. Kathrada chose a villa with wings for all his Muslim wives.
According to Mac Maharaj, who was not there but heard about it later, Mandela would often attack Slovo and the communists on the journey, complaining that, despite appearances to the contrary, the Communist Party was run by whites and was no beacon of equality. As Mac said, that was an indication of how well Mandela knew the party apparatus.
The trial was an appalling waste of time for all involved. People read, slept, stared into space and did crossword puzzles. Volunteers provided lunch in the walled garden of a nearby vicarage. Days passed. Very little happened. “These proceedings are not as funny as they may seem,” the giggling defendants had been warned by a stern magistrate, sometime earlier in the sequence of hearings.
By common consent some of the most entertaining exchanges occurred when the state called a witness to provide expert evidence on the nature of communism. Professor Andrew Murray, a philosopher from Cape Town, was skillfully forced by defense lawyer Issy Maisels to concede that “Native” life was so circumscribed that natives might be entitled to consider themselves oppressed, whether communist or not. And, he was bound to agree, not one of the accused had ever committed an act of violence in the name of their cause.
Murray was led through various writings in an attempt to help the court understand what they were dealing with. He identified one passage as “communism straight from the hip,” not realizing it was an extract from something he himself had written.
The prosecution case had only just ended and the defense case begun when the Sharpeville state of emergency was declared and all the defendants were detained. Their lawyers complained to no avail of the difficulty of advising their clients. It was agreed that, by way of protest, all the lawyers would withdraw, leaving the defendants to defend themselves. In a further attempt to undermine the case, each of the accused began calling their fellow accused in turn as witnesses.
With Tambo out of the country, the law partnership with Mandela could not survive. It had, in any case, been struggling financially. Before he left, Tambo had appointed a white Jewish lawyer, Hymie Davidoff, to wind up the practice. Davidoff now won permission from the Pretoria prison commander, Colonel Prinsloo, for Mandela to be freed to assist him.
Instead of returning to jail after court on Friday afternoons, Mandela drove to Johannesburg, escorted by Sergeant Kruger, and went to work at Chancellor House. Kruger might stop at a shop for biltong (sun-dried lean meat) and leave Mandela unguarded in the car. If it was a test, Mandela did not let him down. He considered running off but stayed put and in return—a kind of gentlemen’s agreement, as Mandela put it—Kruger allowed Winnie to visit him at the office and others, such as Amina Cachalia, to deliver curries to him for meals.
Back in Pretoria, many of Mandela’s fellow defendants became fed up with the strain of representing themselves in court. Technically they all still faced the death penalty. They turned on Mandela and asked him why he had driven their lawyers away. He reminded them it had been a joint decision. They complained that as a lawyer he was the expert whose opinion they had relied on. Mandela persuaded them to continue. It was a trial of strength, he said, a test of an immoral idea against a moral one. In reality, the prosecution had little evidence of any violence that it could rely on. There was only Robert Resha’s statement that volunteers should, if asked, murder. The defense tried to demonstrate that he had simply got carried away and, indeed, it was an isolated example of a call to arms.
The defense lawyers returned to court when the state of emergency was lifted in August 1960. Mandela went home for a final few months, but was still rarely there as he was desperately short of money. He tried to revive his legal practice from the lounge of Ahmed Kathrada’s flat. Just as at Chancellor House, Kholvad House was soon overrun with Mandela’s clients and Kathrada complained he could find peace only in his kitchen.
The prosecution ended its case in early March 1961, at the end of four months of closing argument, constantly interrupted by the judges asking searching questions that the prosecution could not answer about the ANC’s propensity to violence and its part in the communist conspiracy. The defense was ready for what it believed would be a three-month summing-up of its case. Bram Fischer had spent days preparing his own argument, which he believed would last for three weeks. On the third day of his presentation the judges stopped him and adjourned, returning on March 29, six days later, to pronounce a unanimous verdict of not guilty. All the defendants were discharged.
The court was packed with defense supporters who erupted in celebration, singing the African anthem and praise-songs for the lawyers and the defendants. That evening there was a victory party at the Fischers’ Beaumont Street home. Mandela wrote about that night in a letter to Amina Cachalia in 1969.
You were among those who travelled all the way to Pretoria & who warmly congratulated & cheered us on our discharge, glad to share victory with those with whom you had fought so long & hard for a new order & a new world.
Zami [Winnie] & I met you at the party the same night but you were soon gone. A few days thereafter I bade farewell to Zami & kids & now I am a citizen across the waves.
It was not an easy decision to make. I knew the hardship, misery & humiliation to which my absence would expose them. I have spent anxious moments thinking of them and have never once doubted Zami’s courage & determination. And there are times when I even fear receiving letters from her, because every occasion she comes down I see with my own eyes the heavy toll on her health caused by the turbulent events of the last 8 yrs.
Moments in my life are occupied by tormenting thoughts of this kind. But most of the time I live in hope & high spirits.
Amina had retained a vivid picture of the end of the trial. Her husband, Yusuf, couldn’t go, but Ruth First said she would pick her up, so Amina went with Joe and Ruth. They arrived with “different feelings,” not knowing what the outcome would be. Someone had taken a “lovely photograph” of Ruth and Amina walking into the building, and then they were in the court with those mixed feelings, and suddenly the defendants were free and there was absolute merriment.
“We hugged and kissed and we sat, we stood up, we didn’t quite know what was happening.”
Amina had no memory of the party, however. She had young children at home, which was perhaps why she left quickly.
Freed from the charge of promoting violence, Mandela was now free to promote violence.
Eleven
IT HAS BEEN written elsewhere that Mandela made some financial provision—six months’ rent paid up in advance—for Winnie and his two baby daughters, Zeni and Zindzi, before he left them to live out his last months of freedom as a fugitive. Winnie told me there was no such provision, that Mandela could not have raised six months’ rent even if he wanted to, and from the time of their marriage in 1958 they were always in financial difficulties.
According to Winnie, the nice clothes and the seemingly easy lifestyle were all an illusion. Most of the clothes, including the suits from Mr. Khan the tailor, were gifts. Mandela rarely paid for anything. He had bought most of the furniture for their home at 8115 Orlando West on credit from a Mr. Levine. After Mandela went underground, he stopped paying the installments. Levine turned up one day and repossessed the lot, including the carpet. Winnie went to Mandela’s former articled clerk, Godfrey Pitje, who had taken over some of the business of Mandela & Tambo, and borrowed some money to go and re-repossess the furniture, this time in her own name.
Of course, from the very beginnings of their marriage, Mandela had rarely ever been home. As Winnie often told her daughters in later years, she was the most unmarried married woman. She never lived with her husband.
Even back then, Winnie felt she was a sacrifice to the cause. Marrying Mandela was marrying the ANC, but unlike others around him who found it difficult and painful, she understood and accepted that role.
He never actually told her he was leavin
g her to live underground. In Winnie’s recollection he came home from the Treason Trial one day in March 1961 as the case was drawing to a close. He stood outside the gate, by the car, talking with comrades Joe Matthews, Joe Modise, and Duma Nokwe. Modise came to her in the house and said, Mama, can you please get me a suitcase and pack a few clothes for Madiba? Winnie had been taught never to ask questions. Whenever her husband went out, she never asked and never expected to be told where he was going.
She took a case and packed a few shirts, a couple of suits, and some underwear. Winnie handed the suitcase to Modise and he took it away. They all got into the car and drove off. Mandela had not even spoken to Winnie, but that was the end of their lives together at 8115. Next thing she knew he was in the papers, making a surprise appearance at the All-In Conference 300 miles away in Pietermartizburg.
Seventeen African countries had become independent in 1960, following the beacon examples of the former Gold Coast, which had become Ghana, and Guinea. Harold Macmillan, the British Conservative prime minister, had caught the mood on his tour of Africa at the beginning of 1960. His address to the South African parliament in Cape Town, on February 3, would pass into history for its use of the phrase “wind of change.” It was a long and carefully measured speech, betraying none of the casual, colonial language of racism that was in common usage at the time, especially in his host country. Listeners could detect, in his reserved tone, a distaste for the unpleasant structures of apartheid.
Instead, the speech set out to dignify the independence movement in Africa and warn the Union of South Africa, now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, not to ignore the pattern of history:
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