Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  By mid-1961, when the Hodgsons’ small rented flat in Hillbrow became the center of bomb-making operations for Mandela’s MK, Jack had already turned fifty. He was very inventive and could do anything with his hands, said Rica. He liked reading but was very fidgety and needed to be busy. He had once said to her that he would go mad if he didn’t get something to do with his hands, so she had found him some string and he had started making hammocks, which Rica had given away as Christmas gifts.

  She remembered a kitchen drawer stuffed to overflowing with ballpoint pen tubes, which he had bought to experiment with as timing devices for bombs. Wolfie Kodesh occasionally worked with Hodgson on these experiments or was involved in the testing. He recollected how Jack heated the tubes, bent them and then pushed nitroglycerine inside, before connecting them to a container of gunpowder. The nitroglycerine would be forced round the tube and detonate the explosion of the gunpowder. Rica recalled all this experimenting and preparation of explosive materials as taking place at her kitchen table, but Spencer says it was not just in the kitchen, it was in the lounge too. All round the flat, his father would have little experiments going on. Plastic tubes containing acid sat on bedside tables while Jack timed how long it was taking for the acid to eat through the plastic.

  Jack took his son into his confidence and soon Spencer, who was then aged around fourteen, was an important member of the bomb factory, grinding crystals of potassium permanganate with a mortar and pestle to make gunpowder. They would store the powder, which was very strong smelling, in plastic bags, which Spencer remembered were a new thing then. Some of the particles would get into the carpet and became difficult to remove.

  On one occasion, Spencer was sitting grinding when a school friend came round and sat down to chat. He wanted to help and as he took his turn grinding he asked Jack why they were doing it. Jack fobbed him off with some plausible explanation. The boy said, oh yeah, and carried on for a while before saying, you can make bombs with this.

  Spencer knew just what was going on and why. The cause was fed to him in his mother’s milk, he says, and he shared his parents’ sense of injustice, not least because he had once seen an African man beaten to death outside a shop for stealing some fruit. It wasn’t always easy, being a committed anti-racist in the wider world where casual racism was commonplace. Spencer would often be unsure whether to confront his friends over their comments and behavior or just keep quiet.

  Like the communist cell that Wolfie Kodesh had led, the initial MK cells in Johannesburg comprised mainly Indian activists. Ahmed Kathrada was among them and remembered going round to the Hodgsons’ flat one Sunday afternoon in the company of some friends and being horrified to find Jack sitting at the table, making bombs. Had he not heard of security? Or secrecy? Was it a kind of arrogance, that he could carry on doing this in front of people? Kathrada always had doubts then about the amateurishness of MK and concerns about the risks he was taking. Hodgson was too gung-ho for his liking.

  No one now seems sure whether Jack Hodgson was actually on the national high command of MK or merely the leader of the Transvaal regional command, with Wolfie Kodesh below him. The two of them went out together on their own to practice cutting telephone wires. Wolfie would also sit with Jack and Spencer in the flat, working on the bombs.

  Hodgson was a polarizing figure. There was no gray with him; it was all or nothing, black or white. He placed great importance on loyalty and would not be talked out of his steadfast belief in Stalinism, even after Khrushchev’s famous speech in 1956, which was the first official acknowledgment of the terrible atrocities Stalin had committed, especially during the purges of the 1930s. The speech made it impossible for many communists to pretend Stalin had been the great and compassionate leader of the post-revolutionary Soviet Union. But others, like Hodgson, continued to believe his legacy was the victim of Western anti-communist propaganda.

  In 1961, the party in South Africa was still accepting funds from Moscow, using a Johannesburg travel agent as a conduit for the money. Mandela himself never fled from communism, though neither does it appear he was ever actually a party member, more a “fellow traveler,” as Senator Joe McCarthy might have called him, had Mandela been around during the post-war witch-hunts in the United States. One or two people have claimed he actually joined the party but Mandela himself always denied it. Others accept he was never formally a “card-carrier”—not that South African communists actually had cards.

  There is no doubt, however, that Mandela embraced communism and communists, considering them among his closest friends and political allies, and enjoying the benefit of their support and fellowship, never more so than as he prepared to launch an armed struggle. One day, in the summer of 1961, Mandela got into a Chevrolet sedan with several communists, including Wolfie and Jack, and set off for a remote brick factory.

  The car was laden with explosives.

  Fourteen

  THOUGH WOLFIE KODESH had lived in the slums of Cape Town as a boy, his father had been a successful businessman until he was brought low by the economic depression of the early 1930s that flowed from the Wall Street crash. Then, like a phoenix, Wolfie’s father had risen again, so that by the time of his death, while Wolfie was abroad serving with the army during the Second World War, he had created a mini-empire, which Wolfie inherited along with his brother.

  The business was based on a number of plots of land or stands around Johannesburg and two brick factories on a substantial site of around twenty acres, including a small wood, which Wolfie described as being located in the triangle between the suburbs of Primrose, Kempton Park and Edenvale.

  Returning to Johannesburg after the war, Wolfie had found himself rich, but conflicted, incurring the wrath of his brother and fellow brickworks’ owners, first when he had tried to pay his employees a fair wage and then again when he tried to unionize them. So far as Wolfie was concerned, he and his brother were paying slave wages to their African employees, and it was stabbing him in the heart, every payday. As Wolfie himself said, “On the one hand here I am enjoying the good life, having all the luxuries in the world, and on the other hand becoming more and more involved during weekends and during the evenings with the CP people.” It was difficult, being a capitalist and a communist at the same time. When he was awarded a special prize of a book for being the best member of the Yeoville branch of the party, Wolfie knew that something would have to give.

  The break came after one of the numerous raids, when the police would burst into the brick factories on weekends looking for illegal beer. They would assault the black workers and break up the tins and drums full of liquor with their police-issue iron staves.

  One Monday morning, Wolfie heard that one of his workers was actually an undercover policeman who had been going around handcuffing those arrested during the weekend raid, when he thought no one was looking. Wolfie called the man in and sacked him even as he protested his innocence. He subsequently heard the man had returned to the police station where they all had a good laugh at the officer being sacked by Baas Wolfie.

  That was it, Baas Wolfie could be a boss no longer. He sold his stake in the business to his brother for a modest £250 and the company car he’d been using. “I arranged with my brother, and I said, ‘Look, I’m going down to Cape Town. I’m finished with the brickworks, and you can have my share. Take everything. I’m not interested in that.’ ”

  By 1960, Wolfie was back in Johannesburg and the brickworks were no longer in operation, though still owned by his brother, who was away on holiday. So Wolfie used the site for an underground Communist Party conference. Members converged there from Cape Town, Durban and all over, meeting for a day of talks while concealed by the overgrown grass, before moving on to a house for the second day of the conference.

  A year later the site of the brickworks became useful once again, when the fledgling MK, under Commander-in-Chief Mandela, wanted to test some of its bombs and weapons in a safe place where they could go undetected. Jack Hodgson h
ad around a dozen Molotov cocktails and a bomb, which, of course, he had made at his flat in Hillbrow. Keen they should not be caught as the whole operation would be exposed, he emphasized the need for a secure testing place.

  Wolfie immediately thought of the brickworks because, even though they were no longer in operation, they were a place where the sound of explosions was not uncommon, as dynamite was often used to loosen the clay to be excavated for the making of bricks. There was a noisy engineering works next door as well, which would help to drown out the sound of an explosion.

  Wolfie’s brother had never known of the escapade, so far as Wolfie knew. He had taken Mandela there—Mandela had insisted on being present himself—with Jack Hodgson and a sympathetic pharmacist who had been advising them on bomb-making. You could say it was the first MK mission: one black commander and three white comrades.

  With Wolfie driving them in his roomy 1948 Chevrolet, they arrived at the seemingly deserted site and parked the car so that it was hidden from view. According to Mandela in his memoir, they went there at night, with only a small light to work from, but Wolfie says that it was in fact a morning expedition, which would make more sense as night-time explosions would surely have been more unusual and more likely to attract unwanted attention.

  A figure emerged from the woods. Wolfie recognized him as an African who had worked there years ago and had stayed on as a watchman for his brother, with a khaya, a small, galvanized-iron building tucked away in the trees. Wolfie turned back to the others. “No, it’s out. Here’s a fellow who knows me and he’ll talk.”

  Mandela said, “No. Just wait a minute. Let me talk to him.” He told the others to carry on with what they were doing, unloading and preparing the bombs. The watchman spoke Zulu and soon he was deep in conversation with Mandela, who put a friendly arm around the watchman’s shoulder. After a few minutes Wolfie saw that the man was going back to his hut. Mandela said, “Come on, it’s all right. I’ve spoken to him. He’s going back to his khaya. He’s not going to see or hear anything.” Wolfie always wondered, but never found out, what Mandela had said to the watchman. He never gave them away.

  In an interview for an archive project in the late 1980s, Wolfie said they left before they had time to test the petrol bombs, and he and Hodgson went back later, alone, to try them out. In an earlier account, outlined in a pamphlet “Recollections of Nelson Mandela,” by an unnamed author who was obviously Wolfie (one section was called “Nelson Mandela in my flat”), he gave a different account in which, as soon as the watchman had left them alone, they began igniting the Molotovs and bombarding them against the wall of one of the disused buildings.

  “Every time a bottle exploded and burst into flames, Comrade Nelson shook his head gleefully and smiled the smile of victory. We all joined in his glee and enthusiasm of course. These were the first known explosions of the new era.”

  After dousing the remaining flames, which had spread over the wall and surrounding scraps of wood and rubbish, they moved away from the buildings to the open spaces to find a pit where the bomb could be placed. The bomb was constructed from a tin can used for paraffin but now filled, Wolfie said, with nitroglycerine. At the cap was a timing device made from the thin tube inside a pen. (It is perhaps worth noting that Wolfie refers to the thin tube inside the pen as the part that was used, whereas Jack Hodgson’s wife, Rica, believed her husband threw that part away and used the outer tube. Perhaps he experimented with both parts.) They had calculated that the timer would be triggered after fifteen minutes.

  Once the bomb had been set and put in position, they stood as near the hole as they dared and waited and waited but nothing happened. After more than twenty minutes, Wolfie went, with some trepidation, and retrieved the bomb from the pit. Jack Hodgson adjusted the timer. Wolfie very carefully returned the bomb to its position and clambered back out of the hole, the others’ hands reaching in to pull him up, just a few seconds ahead of the explosion.

  “An almighty bang!” Wolfie said. Much, much louder than any regular dynamite explosion he remembered from the old days when the brickworks had been active. Of course, back then the dynamite was put into small holes and the sound was muffled, whereas this was in a deep, wide pit full of loose soil so that a huge cloud of dirt and dust was thrown up into the air, a miniature version of the mushroom cloud that might follow a nuclear explosion.

  They did not hang around but all, Mandela included, instinctively began running back to the car, diving hurriedly into the Chevy to get the hell out of there, Wolfie at the wheel not bothering to take the winding path but cutting a bumpy route straight through the bushes.

  They were triumphant. Mandela, elated, could not stop congratulating them, once they were all OK, and telling Hodgson, “Now, Jack, you must go and show everyone throughout South Africa how this thing is made. Now we know we can do it!”

  There was considerable secret activity around this time, much of it involving members of the Communist Party, acting either for party interests or the purposes of MK. The party was keen to find an isolated safe house to use as an underground meeting place and headquarters, and a three-man committee had been formed to scout for locations. Ahmed Kathrada, Michael Harmel and another white communist, Dave Kitson, spent some weeks searching and, according to Kathrada, never had any success.

  If that’s the case, then Harmel must have continued looking alone.

  The owner of Liliesleaf Farm, a Mr. D. R. Fyffe, had been trying to sell the place for over a year as he was suffering from ill health and running a farm had become too much to cope with. In those days, it was extremely rural out there in the northern suburb of Rivonia and not to everyone’s taste. George Bizos, the city advocate, called it a mink and manure suburb, a hoity-toity sort of place where people wore mink coats and rode horses to pass the time. A comrade who later came up to join them from Cape Town, Denis Goldberg, said it was so barren out there in the wilds that a night trip to Rivonia from the city became a daring adventure, plunging out into the dark with no street lights. There’d be no reason to go, except to get pissed.

  Fyffe had been at the farm since 1954. When he bought it, the main building had a thatched roof. It was (and still is) an area at high risk of fierce electrical storms and a thatched roof was vulnerable to fire, in spite of the lightning roads that had been put in position. Fyffe had replaced the thatch with tiles but had not removed the rods—which the police later suspected were not actually rods at all but secret aerials for underground broadcasts.

  He was grateful and relieved when a buyer finally appeared, but he found the whole set-up very unusual, to say the least.

  First this man calling himself Jacobson had turned up, one Friday in the middle of August 1961, saying he was looking for a place to live for his brother-in-law who was mentally ill. Jacobson had not seemed so stable himself, always badly dressed—sometimes very badly—and sometimes unshaven. He was not, in Fyffe’s view, a man of substance.

  Even though Jacobson was at all times gentle and courteous, Fyffe said that all along the whole transaction felt phony. Jacobson—badly dressed? Unshaven? This was Michael Harmel, of course—came back the next day for a second inspection, accompanied by two other men. Fyffe caught the name of only one of them and thought he heard Gellybrand. In fact it was Jelliman, an old communist.

  Valeloo Percival Jelliman, then in his sixties, later explained that he used to be in the organization Friends of the Soviet Union and had attended lectures by Michael Harmel at the Trades Hall. He had been called into the offices of the newspaper New Age and been interviewed by Ruth First before being sent off to see Harmel, who told him he was looking for a man with no dependents whom he could trust to look after a house and smallholding.

  Fyffe described Jelliman in his letter as a small, insignificant, elderly man who clutched a grubby white handkerchief and said nothing. The unnamed other, who introduced himself as an architect, was tall, thin, sandy-haired, clean-shaven and approaching fifty. That was Rusty Bernstein. />
  When Jacobson returned alone to measure for curtains, Fyffe discovered that his mentally ill brother-in-law was named Vivian Ezra. Fyffe was not to know that Ezra was in fine mental health and had been chosen to become the nominal owner of the property as he was a communist but unknown to the police. When Fyffe tried to call Ezra, he could only reach his wife who knew nothing about the whole thing. As Fyffe said, that just seemed like another fragment in the “general insanity” of the sale.

  But at least there was a sale, as within a few days a price was agreed at 25,000 rand, which was then around £12,500. Ezra had the purchase drawn up in a company name, Navian (Pty) Ltd., and on September 22, 1961, Mr. Fyffe handed over the keys to the twenty-five-acre site, including house and outbuildings, known as Liliesleaf Farm, Rivonia.

  Nearly fifty years later, Ahmed Kathrada could still become agitated at the way in which, as he saw it, history had distorted the truth and people would keep insisting that Liliesleaf had been the underground headquarters of Umkhonto we Sizwe. That, he said wearily, was “another thing that had to be corrected over and over again.” It was true Madiba had stayed there, but that was only because the Communist Party bought it and made it available to him, just as they had made it available to others later, too.

  Kathrada was caught up with the idea of the party and MK as separate entities, whereas, in reality, they were profoundly enmeshed with each other. Though Liliesleaf may have started out as a Communist Party hideaway, its greater significance came later, when it served briefly as the hub of the country’s MK network and a place of anguished discussions during the planning for a violent revolution.