Now he had to get support, not just from the ANC but also from the Congress Alliance, where there would be committed pacifists among the Indian and colored representatives. Many had been involved at various stages of the recently concluded Treason Trial when those in the dock had successfully argued that they were truly non-violent. How would they cope with the moral switch being asked of them?
But, as Mandela well knew, his toughest opposition would come from Chief Albert Luthuli, the ANC president, who was a very religious man and naturally opposed to violence and also, perhaps, rather gentlemanly, of the old school. He had in fact been dismissed as chief by the Native Affairs department in Pretoria when he refused their order to resign from the ANC.
He continued to be called chief anyway and seems, more than most, to have embodied chiefly qualities, being described by those who had known him as a strong, charismatic, highly principled man with a powerful voice both as a singer and as an orator. Surprisingly, he was close to Moses Kotane in spite of the fact that the latter was a communist. It appears they each respected the other as men of honesty and conviction.
By 1961, Chief Luthuli had been confined to his home in Groutville for the previous two years of his presidency of the ANC, which made it difficult for the rest of the leadership to involve him in decision-making and keep him up to date with events. This tended to make Luthuli himself feel isolated from what was going on elsewhere. He had suffered a stroke in the mid-1950s and appears to have had unspecified health problems as a result. It seems possible he subsequently experienced some form of depression.
In his memoir, Mandela refers to the historic meetings that now took place as being held in Durban, but, so far as can be ascertained, the actual venue was a beach house within the grounds of a vast sugar plantation at Stanger, a little farther north along the coast from Durban, with Groutville conveniently nearby. The plantation was owned by sympathetic Indian sugar magnates, the Bodasinghs, but still the meetings were held during darkness, on consecutive nights: Mandela remained the most wanted man in the country, Chief Luthuli would be arrested if he was found outside Groutville, and others on the ANC national executive were also banned from leaving their areas or attending meetings.
It was the national executive that met on the first night, probably in the early days of July 1961, ahead of a joint meeting with Indian colleagues the following evening. Mandela again faced opposition as he argued that violence was coming anyway and the ANC risked “being latecomers and followers to a movement we did not control.” A prime concern was the impact that the decision in favor of violent action would have on the ANC, with fears that it would cease to function as a political body. Even though it had been banned after Sharpeville, there were concerns that the ANC and its remaining unbanned activists would be further outlawed.
According to Mandela, it was Chief Luthuli himself who suggested the awkward compromise that was eventually agreed on. The ANC would not itself fight the armed struggle, nor would it now form its own armed wing—at least, not publicly. A new organization would be started, which although answerable to the ANC would be otherwise entirely independent with its own separate high command. Luthuli also wanted the resolution accepted, and then forgotten. They should pretend they had never discussed it. Their hands would be clean.
As a result, there is almost no trace now of the meeting, outside the versions given by Mandela. Luthuli never mentioned it. In fact, he would later claim, and not that long afterwards either, that it never happened and that he had never been consulted about the armed struggle.
Perhaps he really was ill and experienced some kind of aberrant loss of memory. But it also must have been difficult for him to reconcile his support for an armed struggle with the announcement, just four months later, that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Those words “Nobel Peace Prize winner” appear on the cover of his memoir, Let My People Go, first published at the end of 1961. It would have been understandably tricky for the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, a man of God, to be leading a terrorist campaign at the same time. So that was left to Mandela.
Joe Matthews’ father, Z. K. Matthews, the Fort Hare professor, was there, however, and must have subsequently discussed events with his son, as Joe has since described how his father stood with Luthuli in the decision to mount the armed struggle from a separate entity.
Joe says it was a very peculiar decision and the manner in which it was made haunted the ANC for years to come, as, in a sense, the Congress remained a non-violent organization, while the new military body was immediately disowned by those who had given birth to it.
There was confusion in the ranks as the ordinary members of the ANC did not know whether the armed struggle was theirs to join, while, of course, it was to them that the military body turned to find recruits. Soon the ANC would be complaining that its numbers were being depleted by members disappearing for military training. Who was in charge? Joe Matthews remembered his father being asked by a colleague, Yintoni le high command? Who is this high command?
Eventually, after Mandela and the others had been sent to Robben Island and Oliver Tambo had become the leader in exile, he moved to resolve the confusion by claiming the armed struggle was being fought by the military wing of the ANC.
That announcement brought the struggle home, where it belonged, but the clarification was by then long overdue. The official histories gloss over the awkward period that preceded Tambo’s announcement, as if the armed struggle was always pursued by the military wing of the ANC, and they also tend to neglect to mention that half the people involved were white—which was exactly what the ANC had always feared and resisted: white people making decisions for them.
Meanwhile, Mandela took the fudged agreement to the following night’s meeting of the Congress Alliance. Many of the Indian delegates especially, who had been raised on the tactics of Gandhi, were fundamentally against ending passive resistance. At the Indian Congress meeting, which was held concurrently with the ANC meeting the previous evening, tempers had become frayed when those who wanted to stay with non-violence were accused, effectively, of being cowards, of being afraid to go to prison. The Indian Congress finally agreed to approach the ANC in the hope of persuading them that there was still time for non-violent action—but they also agreed to support the ANC if it decided otherwise.
That evening, from eight o’clock onwards at the beach house, Mandela was opposed by people he was close to, whose opinions and judgments he respected. He would never forget the words of J. N. Singh: “Non-violence has not failed us, we have failed non-violence.” Mandela answered, no, non-violence had failed them because it had done nothing to “stem the violence of the state or change the heart of our oppressors.”
The meeting must have been frustrating for members of the ANC national executive who had thrashed out the issues the previous evening, as Chief Luthuli opened the second-night session by saying they had agreed to start an organization that would engage in violent forms of struggle, but he hoped the individual ANC members would be free to express their own views during the debate. It was like starting all over again, and it was no wonder that second meeting was still going as dawn approached.
Ismail Meer, like Luthuli, was a pacifist and had aligned himself with the chief to dissent from the move to armed struggle. His wife, Fatima, on the other hand, was a supporter of armed struggle, but she was not at the meeting. Although Mandela was a persuasive advocate, even he was having difficulty overcoming the fears of comrades such as Meer, Yusuf Cachalia and M. P. Naicker who thought a move to violence would give the state the excuse it needed to kill them all.
In the early hours, just as Mandela thought the debate was moving his way, one Indian, M. D. Naidoo, chided his colleagues, saying, ah, you are afraid of going to jail, that is all. All hell broke loose at this repeated slur and it seemed to Mandela they had gone back to square one. Finally, however, as dawn broke a consensus was reached and the resolution was approved. Mandela does not take the credit himself, in h
is memoir, but it appears he gave the new military faction its name, Umkhonto we Sizwe—Spear of the Nation—often abbreviated to MK. He merely says the spear was chosen as the symbol because it had long been the Africans’ simple weapon of resistance.
Winnie relates that Mandela had been inspired to take the name from something Chief Luthuli had said. After Mandela had eventually succeeded in winning his approval, Luthuli had proclaimed: “I am an African. When a man attacks my kraal I take a spear and defend my family. I give blessing to the armed struggle.”
Luthuli is also said to have denied he was against violence, with the words, “If anyone thinks I’m a pacifist, let him try to take my chickens and he will know how wrong he is.”
The name, and the image it evoked, might have been pure African, but it was a white Jewish artist and graphic designer, Arthur Goldreich, also a communist, who designed MK’s spear logo for its public launch on December 1961. His wife, Hazel, remembers Goldreich sitting at a board working on it, when they lived at Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia.
The chief went back to isolation in Groutville, while Mandela, with no previous experience as a military leader or strategist, set about organizing MK and planning the opening salvos in a campaign of sabotage. He turned immediately to comrades from among the white Jewish communists, especially those who had fought in the Second World War, beginning with Joe Slovo.
There was, quite naturally, no hidden cache of weapons or stockpile of explosives. “Among the lot of us we did not have a single pistol,” said Slovo.
The only people with access to guns were the tsotsis, the township gangsters, and the only comrade with any real contacts among them was a rising young star of the liberation movement, Joe Modise. He made inquiries but to begin with nothing much was forthcoming.
At least, now, Mandela was free of the restraints of the ANC, which would not allow white people—any non-Africans, in fact—to become members. Since Sharpeville, much of the political talk at the dinners, the parties, the Sunday-afternoon braais (barbecues) around Bram Fischer’s pool, especially among the “inner circle,” had been of the need for a violent response. AnnMarie Wolpe remembered that Mandela had told her, as they left together following a dinner, “It is with a heavy heart that we turn to armed struggle.”
The ANC lacked experience and had no idea how to go about starting a military movement. It took Mandela to grasp the nettle, to read the histories of revolution and to bow to the reality: that they could never get off the ground without the support of the white war veterans. Indeed, it now appears that the white communists exerted an even greater influence than has previously been realized. Mandela was present at a secret meeting of the Communist Party in December 1960 when it decided to begin its own armed struggle, six months before Mandela even raised the subject with the ANC.
Bob Hepple, the young advocate and Communist Party activist, says he was then a kind of factotum for the more senior communists and was asked by party leader Bram Fischer to rent a house for a month in December, where a secret conference could be held. He found a house in Emmarentia; rented a marquee, which was erected in the garden, where people could sleep; organized food; and ferried activists to and from the meeting. He remembers that Mandela and Sisulu were there along with Fischer, Joe Slovo and Michael Harmel, a total of some thirty people altogether.
Hepple was there throughout and clearly remembers the meeting’s decision to move to a campaign of sabotage. It was not a tempestuous assembly; there was a consensus: no one was yet looking for an all-out guerrilla war, rather low-level acts of sabotage, which would target places, not people. Michael Harmel, the writer and theoretician, argued that the apartheid state was now bound to collapse. He had produced a paper saying that no further progression was possible along the traditional paths or by adhering strictly to the non-violent slogan in a situation where every democratic demand or criticism is treated as an act of rebellion or treason.
Though it appears that it never became very active, at least one unit, a military or guerrilla cell, was formed in early 1960. Perhaps there were others. The initial Communist Party cell only ever went out looking for suitable non-human targets, but it was the beginnings of the structure that became MK. Kodesh described taking the unit out once to a farming area beyond Johannesburg to cut the telephone wires to Swaziland. The men were up in the trees overhanging the cables, armed with shears, when a farmer’s lorry appeared and began reversing with his headlights, fully illuminating them. They dropped down into the open rain gullies at the roadside, but one of them was stuck, caught in the headlights. They all thought he was bound to be spotted, but the lorry passed by.
Paul Joseph, a young married man, remembers a meeting in a back room in Johannesburg where Joe Slovo told him, we are going for armed struggle. He never explained the political principle behind the move. There was no need to explain that to Joseph.
Then and later, Joseph had concerns about what he called “white baggage” in the movement, the “negrophile” attitude among white activists, by which Joseph meant a tendency to patronize black, Indian and colored colleagues and see them as somehow less able. He was always uneasy around Wolfie Kodesh and thought he was suffering from an inferiority complex, or something else that Joseph couldn’t quite identify. He was too eager to please his leaders and always seemed to be doing their bidding. One day Kodesh went to Joseph, seeming quite harassed, and blurted out to him, it’s time the whites took a back seat, we think the blacks should do it now. So there you are, thought Joseph with irony, the whites have been carrying us all along. He said to Wolfie, “Don’t think because we are black chaps we can’t think for ourselves.”
Joseph was none too impressed with Michael Harmel either. Guru theoretician? He was a lazy bastard who had never worked for a living. In Joseph’s view, they—the non-whites—fell into the trap of seeing the whites as having valuable war experience, not realizing they had limited know-how, either of explosives and sometimes of actual fighting. Joe Slovo’s war had been confined to a few months in the Signal Corps during the last days of Hitler. He had never seen action.
As Joseph said, he himself was a passive resister and no better qualified to launch an army, “but what they were doing was raw and crude and it was dangerous, risky stuff.” He thinks Mandela was taken in by the whites too. He had no more experience than anyone else and here were these white communists from the Springbok Legion who had been in the army, fought fascism, and seen their parents suffer under pogroms and Nazism. For a long time, he says, their wisdom was accepted without challenge.
While the Communist Party tried to begin a guerrilla campaign, other disaffected figures were traveling the same road. Monty Berman—a renegade communist eventually expelled by the party and, according to Joe Slovo, disappointed at being overlooked for a commanding role in the armed struggle—went off and formed the National Committee for Liberation. This subsequently became the African Resistance Movement, the ARM, when he linked up with some radical liberals, including the journalist Hugh Lewin. Lewin would later describe how they spent weeks trying to bring down an electricity pylon in Magaliesburg, by cutting through it with a hacksaw.
There was also some rural resistance and violence in the eastern Cape among unaligned young black men. And the PAC—the Pan-Africanist Congress—had a militant faction, Poqo (or Alone—as in, black Africans alone, without whites), which was also being transformed into a military wing.
So when Mandela warned the ANC that it risked being left behind, he was telling the truth but, perhaps, not quite telling the whole story, as MK became not so much a new group as a merger with the communists. Mandela was appointed commander-in-chief, with Joe Slovo and Walter Sisulu on the high command.
Jack Hodgson was given, or volunteered himself for, the task of producing the necessary explosives. Hodgson was a real soldier; he had fought with the Desert Rats under Montgomery and had also handled explosives as a young miner in the copper belt of northern Rhodesia before the war. He had grown up in an
orphanage, came from a poor background and had little formal education, but was socially aware and active from an early age as a union organizer. He had been a founder of the Springbok Legion at the end of the war and was, according to his wife, Rica, an absolute communist who never believed in owning anything. He thought you should be able to pack your case with everything you owned and move on. Consequently, they never had two pence to rub together.
Both Jack and Rica were already married when they met and got together soon after the war. From the beginning, Rica remembers, Jack was never in good health. He was well built and fine-looking but he suffered from stress and always had duodenal ulcers. It came from having to make decisions, he would say. Perhaps it was the stress that could make Hodgson seem harsh and uncompromising. Sometimes, his aggressive manner was a joy to behold. Jack’s son Spencer remembered being at home once when the police arrived to serve a banning order on his parents. They were all having breakfast at the time. Jack made the police stand and read their notice while the Hodgsons carried on eating.
Jack asked, ”Have you finished?”
“Yes,” said one of the policemen.
“Then fuck off.”
Spencer saw his father as having a natural affinity with black working-class people, because of his own background. He remembered Mandela and Winnie visiting for Sunday lunch, but more than anything, he remembered one evening in the late 1950s when Mandela had collected him—Spencer must have been about ten at the time—and taken him to the Bantu Men’s Social Centre to attend a boxing night.
So far as he could recall, Spencer was the only white person in the crowded hall, but that did not trouble him as he was with Mandela, who was already a leader by then and seemed to know and be greeted by everyone. He was a giant of a man. A giant! (Other children remembered him that way too.) Spencer had no memory of being uncomfortable, only excited, thrilled by the evening as the two of them sat together watching the boxing. In hindsight, Spencer wondered whether Mandela had taken him as some kind of test, to see whether his parents really were as non-racist as they claimed. If it was a test, they must have passed.
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