Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  Chiba was eventually released and went on to serve on the so-called second national high command under Wilton Mkwayi, who took over as commander from Mandela. Chiba began carrying out more acts of terrorism and was arrested again a year later, in July 1964, when he was interrogated at the notorious Gray’s Building, by the equally notorious Special Branch officer, Theunis “Rooi Rus” (Red Russian) Swanepoel. He was not physically harmed this time but—and this was a popular tactic employed by Special Branch at the time—he was made to stand on one spot, on a sheet of A4 paper that had been laid on the floor for the purpose, for around fifty hours. He was not allowed to move or sleep, but again did not give anything away. Chiba served eighteen years on Robben Island, alongside Mandela. He was freed in 1982.

  Many others of course were severely tortured and some suffered more than Chiba. He was not dangled from a high window, as others were, with one leg being held by an officer, who would let go and then catch the other leg before the prisoner fell. Sometimes, it seems, they fell anyway.

  Suliman “Babla” Saloojee, an MK comrade, was arrested at the same time as Chiba in July 1964. He smuggled a message to his wife, Rokaya: Pray for me.

  On September 9, 1964, he fell to his death from a seventh-floor window at the Gray’s Building during questioning by Swanepoel, who said Saloojee had jumped in an attempt to escape. By 1990 there had been seventy-three deaths during detention, five of them people who had fallen, jumped, been pushed or thrown from buildings.

  Rokaya Saloojee was still on medication when she testified to the TRC thirty-one years later. Her husband’s inquest had lasted five minutes, she said.

  She still hated some whites, she was sorry to say.

  Sixteen

  NOT EVERYONE APPRECIATED Frene Ginwala’s role as the ANC’s “travel agent” in Dar es Salaam, the capital of newly independent Tanganyika. What was this Indian woman doing in the heart of black Africa, in a place that had become the liberation movement’s gateway to the rest of the continent? Julius Nyerere had just become the country’s first prime minister. In 1964 he would become president of Tanzania—the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar. Nyerere was a committed socialist who lived modestly and drove around in a small Austin or Ford Prefect saloon car. He was a friend to the struggle in South Africa and much admired by Mandela. But he was also a keen nationalist.

  Ginwala, who in 1961 was around thirty years old, had been sent to Dar es Salaam by Walter Sisulu, the day after Sharpeville. He had told her to prepare the way for somebody coming through and she had assumed it was Chief Luthuli, but it turned out to be Oliver Tambo. Ostensibly, she was running a magazine, a pan-African publication, Spearhead, but in practice she was arranging travel for exiles and recruits to training. They would send her a photo of whoever was on their way and she would file it in a box until they turned up.

  One day, in late 1961, Tambo arrived unexpectedly and asked, “When is Nel coming?” Ginwala told him she had no information, though in truth she already had an inkling.

  “What?” said Tambo. “Haven’t you been told?” She pulled out her box and showed him one of the recent photos that had arrived. “Is this Mandela?” she asked. It was the Eli Weinberg image that would soon be famous around the world. In the photo Mandela looked to Ginwala as if he was already a prisoner. “He should be here by now,” said Tambo. So the two of them went to the main bus station and sat waiting for a couple of days. Ginwala knew Mandela was living underground and speculated that he might have changed his appearance.

  “How will I know him?” she asked Tambo. “Has he had plastic surgery?”

  Tambo laughed. “Frene, I promise you, when Nel comes he’ll be wearing a three-piece suit.”

  Ginwala was doing a good job, she knew, but she was quite aware that her presence as a woman of Indian origin was resented sometimes. Even some of the ANC people didn’t like it. Paul Joseph said there was “disquiet” around Africa at the ANC’s use of non-Africans. Ginwala’s presence was not always appreciated. He knew of another occasion when African leaders were expecting a fellow African representative at a conference and Mary Turok, a white comrade, turned up instead, which did not go down well. According to Ginwala, having a non-racial nationalist organization in southern Africa was unheard of then. “People used to think, about me, what is she doing? And not only me—when whites came out and so forth. Oliver would not compromise on that and his biggest challenge often was to ensure African leadership and yet not ignore people who’d sacrificed so much. That balance caused confusion and at times people felt marginalized.”

  The original idea was for the ANC to work together with the PAC—the slogan was unity in action. There was an occasion when two PAC people were in Dar waiting for passports from Ghana, where Kwame Nkrumah was a particular friend of the PAC. Tambo asked Ginwala to help them and she laughed to herself, thinking: what, you want this Indian woman to put you in contact with Ghana? But when she spoke to Tambo about it, he told her she must never think in those terms.

  Some days after their wait at the bus station, Ginwala took a call from the border town of Mbeya. It was the regional commissioner who said he had two men with him claiming to be South African leaders and was it OK to clear them. The commissioner passed the phone to one of the men. It was Joe Matthews, the son of the Prof. Ginwala told the commissioner they could be let through.

  Later that afternoon her doorbell rang and there on her doorstep was “the most enormous man” in a conical Sotho hat, mosquito boots and a khaki safari suit. “Ha!” said Ginwala. “And I’m supposed to hide you?”

  “That’s a nice way to greet me,” said Mandela.

  He could not go to a hotel so Ginwala arranged for him to stay at a Tanganyikan minister’s beach house. He soon met Nyerere and brought him up to date with recent events, the launch of MK the previous month, the need for funds and support for military training. The response was not what Mandela had hoped for. Nyerere said they should delay the armed struggle until Robert Sobukwe had been released and then joined forces with the PAC.

  Suddenly, since Sharpeville, the whole world was aware of the PAC and, if he hadn’t known before, Mandela certainly knew now what he would be up against when seeking help from other African nations. He told Nyerere that the PAC was weak and a delay in the military campaign would be disastrous.

  Mandela had begun touring Africa in early 1962, after the ANC was invited to address the forthcoming conference of the Pan-African Freedom Movement for East and Central Africa (PAFMECA). The ANC was anxious to forge links across the region and hoped to be admitted to the organization. Mandela’s wider task was to raise funds for the armed struggle and pave the way for MK recruits to receive training in friendly countries. Mandela also hoped to have some training of his own—he was a commander-in-chief with absolutely no military experience beyond the books he had read. The only weapon he had ever fired was the airgun at Liliesleaf.

  He also needed to leave the country so that he could discuss the turn to armed struggle with Tambo, who remained in exile. There were hints in the messages going back and forth between Tambo and the South African–based leadership that Tambo was feeling marginalized or out of the loop.

  On the eve of his departure, Mandela had been to see Chief Luthuli at a secret meeting in Groutville, Natal. In the sparing notes of these events that he kept in a diary, Mandela wrote, “Monday 8th January. At 11pm I see AJ [Albert John Luthuli]. He is in high spirits. Approve of trip. Suggests consultation on new op.”

  The “new op” was the launch of the armed struggle. In truth, Luthuli complained to Mandela that he had not been consulted about the formation of MK and knew nothing about it. This was bizarre as, of course, he had been present at the long meeting of the Congress Alliance in July 1961 where it was finally approved. There could be no doubt he had been there, but now, in a development that Mandela blamed on Luthuli’s poor health and failing memory, some would cast doubt on his role in the decision, and on the legitimacy of the armed struggle itself
. Perhaps, with the peace prize on his shelf, he had reimagined himself as a man of peace. There was no other obvious explanation for the paradox and, equally, no doubt he had been a party to the original decision.

  Mandela returned to Johannesburg, where he called a meeting with Duma Nokwe (nicknamed Gowanini in his diary), Sisulu (Qamela) and Kathrada (K). K failed to turn up. Mandela noted this in his diary. Kathrada said it was really all Madiba’s fault because he was in Johannesburg a day earlier than expected. The diary entry led later to a funny exchange at the Rivonia Trial when the prosecutor, Percy Yutar, had Kathrada on the stand and was trying to humiliate him by teasing out the truth behind the diary entry. Yutar asked Kathrada whether he was sometimes referred to as K.

  He was not, he said. He didn’t know anybody who referred to him as K.

  Do you know anybody else, asked Yutar, who goes under the initial of K?

  Yes, said Kathrada, Mr. Khrushchev. Even the judge laughed.

  Mandela’s diary for the following day records that he and K had a brief tiff and then patted each other and made up. Meanwhile, Kathrada’s friend and underground comrade Amien Cajee (AM) was arrested. Mandela was censorious and complained of AM getting himself arrested as an act of amazing irresponsibility and betrayal. He was supposed to be driving Mandela out of South Africa. Mandela had never ever left his own country before and was nervous on a number of fronts about his forthcoming trip.

  When he reached Lobatse in Bechuanaland (later Botswana), he discovered there would be a delay. He was forced to wait there for some days until Joe Matthews joined him and Mandela insisted they press on, after being warned of the threat of being kidnapped by the South Africa police if he remained. The British security services were already monitoring his movements and filing reports on his trip.

  A plane was chartered and they eventually took off from the nearby town of Gaborone, aiming for the small northern airstrip at Kasane. During the flight there was a storm, which Mandela, a master of understatement, described to his friend Kathrada as “disturbing.” They could not land at the usual place in Kasane because the strip was waterlogged and littered with grazing animals. They landed further along the road and by the time they were picked up—the driver told them he had been delayed by rogue elephants—it was dark. There was a sleeping lion on the road and others roaring outside the rooms where they slept. Mandela was unused to these aspects of African life and admitted he was scared of the animals.

  The journey did not get any easier the following day when they took off again for Tanganyika. This time the pilot got lost and Mandela called out in panic when he feared they were heading straight into a mountain. Instead they hit some mist. As the pilot didn’t know where he was, he dropped down and followed the road, while trying to call the airport. “Mbeya? Mbeya!” the pilot exclaimed, becoming annoyed by the silence on the other end of the radio. When Mbeya finally answered, he said, “Shut up! I’m landing!” Mandela told Kathrada the controller at Mbeya airport had been playing draughts, but that may just have been one of his little jokes. “I am sometimes adept at appearing brave and pretended that I was unconcerned.”

  They went to a Mbeya hotel where whites and blacks were mingling on the terrace. A black guest was telling off a white receptionist. This was all new to Mandela and he felt the burden of oppression—a burden he must have known from childhood—begin to lift.

  An aide of Nyerere’s assisted with onward travel documents—Mandela had no passport at this stage, only a letter of authentication from the Tanganyikan government. He set off for the PAFMECA conference in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, flying first into Nairobi, Kenya, and then going on to a smaller conference in Lagos, Nigeria, where he met a minister from the Congo who appeared “extremely arrogant and not altogether sober.” He met the Liberian president, Tubman, who invited him to visit his country during this trip. Mandela kept a low profile in Lagos, not wanting to alert the South African authorities to his whereabouts before he went public at PAFMECA.

  On the plane out of Lagos he met his old friend and early political influence, Gaur Radebe, who was no longer in ANC or a communist but had joined the PAC. Although disappointed by his choice of affiliation, Mandela did not want to let it affect their friendship. He continued to hold the door open to all PAC activists in spite of the difficulties they had created for Mandela and the ANC.

  The last leg took him via Khartoum in the Sudan where he was in the queue next to another old legal colleague, the white Jewish attorney Hymie Basner, who was going into exile. Basner had the same Tanganyikan papers as Mandela but he was stopped and was being questioned. Mandela went back and stood by him, bowing silently to the Sudanese official, who realized Mandela was endorsing Basner and let him through.

  On January 30, 1962, Mandela finally arrived in Addis Ababa and was reunited with Tambo at the airport. Both men had changed and barely recognized each other to begin with. Tambo was bearded and had adopted military-style dress. Mandela was bearded too and, as he told Kathrada, “I used to pay attention to new clothing and so on. Now I was wearing a windbreaker, corduroy trousers and sandals and I had long hair which was not properly combed.”

  The reunion must have evoked some sadness and nostalgia in Mandela as he reflected on their lives together at college, then in the Youth League, which they had started together, and in their legal practice. He thought too of the sacrifices Tambo had made: “A man of ability, a musician, a well-groomed speaker, an individual; a man who had now thrown all these wonderful opportunities away and committed himself to the struggle.”

  Mandela had to apply for the ANC to be accepted into PAFMECA. There were objections from delegates, the Ugandans complaining that the ANC was a tribal organization, which was an echo of a grievance sometimes aired in South Africa: that the ANC was dominated by Xhosa, though Chief Luthuli was actually a Zulu.

  Other countries were seeking affiliation too and there were moves to deny them as well, which Mandela argued against, running the risk of being dismissed himself for interfering. One objection was that some of the other new delegates were too long-winded, making speeches of several hours’ length. It was agreed that they should be warned to be more brief.

  Mandela was accepted and PAFMECA took South Africa into its name, becoming PAFMECSA. His success was mainly due to his impressive opening words, rousing the conference with his warning to the South African authorities that the recent explosions were only a small beginning “with much bigger explosions to come.” His speech was reported in The Times of London. Another speaker was Kenneth Kaunda who was leading the way for Northern Rhodesia to become independent as Zambia. He was famous for crying during speeches; here too he was overcome and had to pause. The delegates sang the African anthem until he was able to continue.

  Kaunda’s party had already aligned itself with the PAC. Mandela hoped to change Kaunda’s mind, but when he approached him, he was told he would be preaching to the converted. Although Kaunda already believed in the ANC, it was the rest of his party, especially his deputy, who needed to be convinced. Mandela spent the day with the deputy and discovered the black arts of the PAC propaganda machine. They were going around telling African leaders that MK had been formed in Swaziland by the communists and the Liberal Party, and that they planned to use Africans as cannon fodder.

  Mandela demolished this tall tale and won over Kaunda’s deputy, who said that actually he had admired the ANC from the moment their delegation arrived at the conference, and they had carried themselves more like leaders. He went back and persuaded his party to support the ANC.

  Mandela was also playing politics with the PAC over a white Christian activist, the Reverend Michael Scott, who had been involved in the squatter camps around Orlando and had been to jail for passive resistance. He had gone over to the PAC because he was anti-communist. The PAC had accepted his support and he had raised funds for them, but in public at PAFMECSA they disowned him, not wanting to be seen with a white supporter. Mandela took Scott under his
wing and had dinner with him, which was a risk, as many of the Africans at the conference were uneasy at the ANC being too close to whites. Scott said he was disgusted with the way the PAC had behaved.

  The conference had been opened by the Emperor Hailie Selassie. Mandela was fascinated by his tiny, uniformed, overdecorated frame—“a small man but an African giant”—and the way he bowed without moving his body, with just a slight inclination of his head. At the end of the conference the Emperor received all the delegations in turn and Tambo invited Mandela to address him on behalf of the ANC. The Lion of Judah sat in a chair listening impassively, never once even nodding or moving. The ANC group watched the Emperor at a military parade later, giving medals to a group of white Americans who stepped forward to receive them. White soldiers bowing before a black monarch! Mandela liked that.

  He continued his journey with Tambo, Joe Matthews and Robert Resha, flying via Tripoli in Libya into Cairo, Egypt. That must have seemed very exotic? Mandela was asked by his ghost-writer, Richard Stengel. “Gee whizz, it was,” said Mandela. He and Tambo haggled over the price of a boat-ride on the Nile. They saw the pyramids and the Sphinx, and went to the museum where Mandela was fascinated by the preserved mummies. He told Fatima Meer he was dazzled by the beauty of an unbandaged, partially restored mummy of a young woman with black African features, thousands of years old, looking “lovely in death.” There was another, more earthly beauty working at the ANC offices in Cairo, an Egyptian girl who could have been a beauty queen, but who was also “well-behaved.”

  While he was there he went to the home of an old comrade, Vusumzi Make, now a PAC representative in exile. Make was living with a young African-American woman, Maya Angelou, then working as a desk editor at a weekly newspaper, the Arab Observer. Mandela spent some hours talking with the couple and planned to keep in touch with them but that was ended by his arrest. As the years passed, he became aware of Angelou’s rise as a writer of prose and poetry. They have never met, but spoke on the phone when he visited Washington, DC, after his release in 1990.