But at the time, Mandela opposed closer political cooperation with Indians. He was convinced that only separate Congresses could effectively mobilize their masses, and was worried that the Indians or the Communist Party would take over or dominate the ANC for their own purposes, watering down the concept of African nationalism.13 He still had a burning sense of the Africans’ special suffering and identity, and he felt defensive, both personally and politically, in face of the more qualified and sophisticated Indians.
The two showdowns of 1946 both ended in defeat. The African Mineworkers’ Union was effectively destroyed, not to be resurrected until the 1980s, and the Indians were increasingly restricted to their ghettos.14 The setbacks left a deep mark on Mandela and other young black politicians. The Old Guard of delegations and petitions, epitomized by the Natives’ Representative Council, was now discredited, and there were signs of a more courageous leadership emerging among the Indians and the communists.
The independence of India in August 1947 provided a powerful precedent for the struggle in South Africa, as in the rest of the continent, by showing how an established ruling power could be defeated by a unified and organized mass movement. India’s first Prime Minister, Nehru, had been urging Indians to cooperate with Africans in South Africa ever since 1927, and he would soon show himself a determined ally of both Congresses, making India the first country to impose sanctions against South Africa.15 Mandela would always be grateful to Nehru for this. The influence of Indian communists would become an obsession for both the South African and the British governments, but Nehru, without being a communist, could provide a broader message for Mandela and others, to see beyond racial and local nationalism. “Nationalism is good in its place,” Mandela would quote Nehru, “but it is an unreliable friend and an unsafe historian. It blinds us to many happenings and sometimes distorts the truth, especially when it concerns us and our country.”16
The ANC Youth League in the meantime was moderating some of its nationalism. In July 1947 its firebrand founder, Anton Lembede, suddenly died, aged thirty-three, only a few hours after Mandela had been talking to him.17 Mandela was appalled; but Lembede’s successor, Peter Mda, proved a clearer political thinker and a greater influence (though Mandela would later find him too cautious).18 Mda was a spellbinding talker, with a rich vocabulary, a small head and a huge laugh. The son of a Xhosa shoemaker, he had been educated by Catholics, and as a former teacher and lawyer he had both practical and intellectual training.19
Mandela himself became Secretary of the Youth League, responsible for political organization and setting up branches.20 With Mda he recruited more members beyond the Transvaal, in Natal and the Cape. He tried to infiltrate African schools, visiting St. Peter’s in Johannesburg, where Oliver Tambo had taught, in an attempt to address the students. But the headmaster, D. H. Darling (as he told Tambo afterward), felt he could not allow the school to be used as a platform.21 Mda had more success at Fort Hare, where he persuaded a young lecturer in anthropology, Godfrey Pitje, to start a branch of the Youth League, to “soak them in our nationalistic outlook” and to work hand in hand with the executive in Johannesburg, “of which the general secretary is N. R. D. Mandela Esq, BA, a law student.”22 Pitje’s professor, Z. K. Matthews, was skeptical of the “armchair intellectualism” of the Youth League but did not prevent it from operating in Fort Hare. The university became the Youth League’s most valuable seedbed, attracting a militant new generation of students that included Robert Sobukwe, Joe Matthews and T. T. Letlaka into the ANC.23
Mda insisted that he was not against white men as such, only against white domination; but he warned that Africans could not expect whites to side with them “at the time when the horizontal color bar gave them a privileged way of life.”24 He wrote a new manifesto for the Youth League, less rhetorical and more analytical than Lembede’s, which Mandela approved. It defined African nationalism as “the militant outlook of an oppressed people seeking a solid basis for waging a long, bitter and unrelenting struggle for its national freedom.” It warned Africans not to “look up to Europeans either for inspiration or for help in their political struggle.” But it was more conciliatory about Indians, recognizing that they were an oppressed group who “had not come to South Africa as conquerors and exploiters, but as the exploited.”25
Mandela, in spite of his Indian friendships, was still worried that Indians would dominate the ANC in the Transvaal.26 The tension came to a head after a Votes for All campaign was launched in May 1948 at a People’s Assembly in Johannesburg, opened by Michael Scott, demanding universal suffrage. The Transvaal branch of the ANC was divided: Mandela complained that the People’s Assembly had bypassed existing organizations, while Walter Sisulu insisted that Africans must find allies where they could.27 Mandela and Tambo went to a meeting of the Indian Congress with Sisulu, and were so angry when he supported the Indians’ arguments that they did not talk to him after the meeting, and departed in different directions.28 But they were gradually becoming less suspicious of communist friends like J. B. Marks and Moses Kotane. “If Moses represents the Party,” said Tambo, “I don’t think I will quarrel with it.”29
Mandela joined the Transvaal National Executive of the ANC in 1947, and became fiercely loyal to it. He was befriended by its President, Constantine Ramohanoe, who taught him how to keep in touch with the grass roots.30 But Ramohanoe wanted to cooperate with Indians and communists, a move which was opposed by the majority, including Mandela. When he defied them by making his own statement, Mandela, seconded by Oliver Tambo, moved to depose him, which led to a stormy meeting and Ramohanoe’s departure. “Loyalty to an organization,” Mandela would always maintain, “takes precedence over loyalty to an individual.”31 He maintained that stern rule over the next fifty years, as dissidents would learn to their cost. Having subjugated his own will to the movement, he was determined that others should do so too.
Mandela encountered many intellectuals who were fiercely critical of the ANC; particularly in Cape Town, where Trotskyists had formed the Unity Movement, which included many leading African and Coloured academics who insisted on total noncollaboration. In 1948 he visited Cape Town for the first time, staying for three months. He went up Table Mountain by the cable car, and gazed across at Robben Island.32 He was invited to visit A. C. Jordan, a university lecturer prominent in the Unity Movement, who had written a book much admired by his Tembu friends, Ingaymbo Ygminganya (The Wrath of the Ancestral Spirits), and was impressed by his intellect. With Jordan was Isaac Tabata, a founder and propagandist for the Unity Movement, who talked brilliantly about South African history, but criticized Mandela with venom for joining the ANC: “I am sure you did so simply because your father was a member.”33 (In fact, Mandela’s father was only part of his tribe’s collective membership.) Mandela was in some awe of Tabata: “It was difficult for me to cope with his arguments.… I didn’t want to continue arguing with the fellow because he was demolishing me just like that.”34 He was shocked that Tabata seemed more hostile to the ANC than to the government.35 Afterward Tabata wrote him a very long letter, warning him against the “collaborators” of the ANC and pressing him to base his actions on principles, to “swim against the stream.”36 But Mandela thought the Trotskyists’ insistence on noncollaboration was merely “their pet excuse for doing nothing.” Cape Town left him more than ever convinced that only the ANC could mobilize his people to provide effective mass action.37
However disillusioned he was by the Smuts government, Mandela—like many of his friends—still placed some hope in the liberalism of the postwar transatlantic alliance, of the UN and of the Labour government in Britain. In April 1947 King George VI, with his Queen and the two young Princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, made a spectacular two-month state visit to South Africa which was intended to bolster the links between the two countries. But the British High Commissioner in South Africa, Sir Evelyn Baring, correctly warned London that Afrikaner nationalists would attack the visit as a symbol of
the “Empire bond which they had pledged themselves to break.”38 The royal party spent thirty-five days touring the whole country in a special white train. Smuts—more of a hero to the British than to the South Africans—made the most of it, declaring a public holiday to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of Princess Elizabeth, later Queen, who would always look back on the tour warmly as her first experience of the Commonwealth. The celebrations were officially boycotted by the ANC, including the Youth League, which met at Mandela’s house to discuss it.39
The King’s contacts with Africans during the tour were strictly limited by the Smuts government. He was not allowed to shake black hands at official ceremonies, but crowds of black spectators cheered the royal visitors, and Dr. Xuma, the President of the ANC, could not resist traveling to Zululand to see the King.40 The left-wing Guardian in Cape Town was exasperated by the Africans’ celebrations: “If the pitch and tone of the people’s struggles for freedom can be lowered by these spectacular feudal devices,” complained an editorial, “it will be extremely difficult to recover the ground that has been lost.”41 Mandela himself, with his own chiefly background, thought the British monarchy should be respected as a long-lasting institution, and noted the veneration which the Xhosa chiefs showed for George VI. One Xhosa poet described how the then Paramount Chief, Velile Sandile, “pierced the ground” in front of the King. “He was groveling really,” Mandela recalled, “but I can’t blame him. I might have done the same.”42
Smuts was already losing much of his popularity with white South Africans, particularly Afrikaners, before the general election of May 1948. He had been careful not to alarm the white electorate by making concessions to blacks, but the Afrikaner National Party under Dr. Daniel Malan, with its doctrine of apartheid and its warnings against the “black peril” and the “red menace,” was gaining support as Africans became more visible in the cities. The ANC saw the white election as a choice between two evils, while Dr. Xuma claimed that apartheid was nothing new, merely “a natural and logical growth of the Union Native policy.”43 Educated black Africans in Orlando despised the raw Afrikaners who made up most of Malan’s supporters. “We only knew Afrikaners as tram drivers, ticket collectors, policemen,” said Mandela’s friend Esme Matshikiza. “We thought they couldn’t run the country. We didn’t know that their leaders had studied in Nazi Germany.”44
In the election Dr. Malan’s National Party gained victory, in alliance with the smaller Afrikaner Party. Its majority was only eight, but this was enough for the country to be ruled for the first time by Afrikaner nationalists without more moderate English-speaking support. Smuts was humiliated, and when he died two years later he was venerated in the outside world as a statesman and war leader, but blamed in his own country for ignoring both Afrikaners and Africans—a warning to his successors that a statesman must not forget to remain a politician.
Malan’s new government soon changed the whole character and perspective of the South African state. The Afrikaners, descendants of Calvinist Dutch settlers in the seventeenth century, had retained a very separate culture from the English speakers, little influenced by subsequent European liberalism. Their oppression by British imperialists, culminating in the Boer War at the turn of the century, had forged a powerful nationalism, with its own religion and epics, and they nursed their grievances against the British. When the Union of South Africa was created in 1910 the British had hoped to retain an English-speaking majority, gradually softening the Afrikaners’ resentment. But the numbers of Afrikaners had multiplied, while their relative poverty and continuing experience as underdogs fueled their nationalism. The Afrikaners (as British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan would tell them in 1960) were really the first of the African nationalists, with their own need to prove themselves and defend their culture; and they would inevitably come into conflict with black African nationalists who threatened their jobs and their supremacy.45 As Mandela later looked back on forty years of rivalry: “Perhaps history ordained that the people of our country should pay this high price because it bequeathed to us two nationalisms that dominate the history of twentieth-century South Africa.… Because both nationalisms laid claim to the same piece of earth—our common home, South Africa—the contest between the two was bound to be brutal.”46
The new Afrikaner government did not conceal its intention to further separate the races and to build an Afrikaner state. “For the first time since Union,” said Dr. Malan, “South Africa is our own.” Sir Evelyn Baring had few illusions: his dispatches to London would compare Afrikaner nationalism to Nazism, and he came to dislike the Afrikaner ministers so much (his wife complained) that he could hardly keep the venom out of his voice.47 But at first most British politicians and commentators were not seriously worried by the change in government. “Dr. Malan’s majority is far too small,” wrote the Economist, “to enable him to do anything drastic.”48 The Labour government in London, beset by economic crises, needed South African uranium and was anxious not to offend the Malan government lest it take over the three British protectorates—Swaziland, Basutoland and Bechuanaland—on its borders.
Many Africans, including Oliver Tambo, actually welcomed the victory of Malan’s party, an unambiguous enemy that would unite the blacks against it; but Mandela was “stunned and dismayed.”49 Twelve years later he would still explain the possibility that growing black pressure would gradually compel white governments to extend the vote, leading eventually to universal suffrage.50 But now that prospect seemed much less likely. And, like nearly all black politicians, he seriously underestimated the Afrikaner determination to impose total segregation and to suppress black resistance, against the trend elsewhere in Africa and in America. Hardly anyone foresaw that over the next forty years successive National Party governments would pass laws which would ban the black leadership, imprison them or force them into exile.
In the face of this new threat, the Africans proved slow to unite. In December 1948 the ANC held a joint meeting with its rival body, the All-African Convention, which was dominated by Trotskyists, including Mandela’s opponent Isaac Tabata. Dr. Xuma called for blacks to “speak with one voice.” J. B. Marks warned that “the people are being crushed while we complacently quibble about technical difficulties.” Peter Mda insisted that the basis of unity must be African nationalism. But Tabata called for unity among all non-Europeans on the basis of total noncollaboration, which ANC delegates could not accept.51 The meeting was inconclusive, and the arguments continued at another assembly four months later.
The need for unity emerged much more sharply with riots in Durban in January 1949, when enraged Zulus set on Indians and the police and military intervened, leaving 142 dead. Mandela heard from his Indian friends that whites had encouraged the riots by transporting Zulus to the scene.52 The bloodshed, Mandela thought, put the Doctors’ Pact to the test, and he was impressed to see Dr. Naicker playing a critical role in quickly restoring peace and promoting goodwill. “The year 1949,” he wrote thirty years later, “was an unforgettable experience for those who have given their lives to the promotion of interracial harmony.”53 Dr. Xuma blamed the riots on the government’s divisive policies, and warned against “the law of the jungle.” The black fury spread to the Johannesburg area, where some Indian and African leaders hoped the Congresses would jointly appeal for calm. Ahmed Kathrada went with a journalist, Henry Nxumalo, to Mandela’s house in Orlando to try to persuade him to support a joint statement, but Mandela, still wary of the ANC being influenced by Indians, insisted that the ANC should act on its own.54
By mid-1949 Dr. Malan’s government was preparing to enforce apartheid with drastic laws: each person would be classified by race; the races would live in separate parts of the cities; and mixed marriages would be forbidden. The firebrands of the Youth League, including Mandela, felt challenged to respond. Their President, Peter Mda, advocated a Programme of Action based on organizing mass protests against the government. The Youth League was gaining more support in the A
NC as a whole, and was losing patience with Xuma’s caution. In November 1949, a few weeks before the ANC’s annual conference,
Mda went with Sisulu, Mandela and Tambo to see Xuma in Sophiatown. They argued that the ANC must adopt mass action and passive resistance like Gandhi’s in India, or the Indians’ in South Africa three years before. Xuma retorted that it was too early, that action would only provoke the government to crush the ANC. The Youth Leaguers warned him that if he did not support them they would vote against his presidency at the conference. Xuma replied angrily that they were young and arrogant, and showed them the door.55
Looking around for an alternative President, they first asked Professor Matthews, who thought they were naïve and immature, with their emotive rhetoric, and turned them down.56 Then they made a rash choice, turning to Dr. James Moroka, a dignified and relatively wealthy African doctor who had inherited a small estate in the Orange Free State, where a century before his great-grandfather Chief Moroka had welcomed the Afrikaner Voortrekkers—who then betrayed him. Moroka, a courteous gentleman, had, like Dr. Xuma, many white friends and patients. He had been courageous in opposing the Hertzog Bills in 1936, but he had since been attracted by the Trotskyists, and had become President of the ANC’s rival, the All-African Convention. Now, surprisingly, he told the Youth Leaguers that he supported their radical Programme of Action, and agreed to stand against Xuma even though he was not even a member of the ANC—which he kept calling the “African National Council.”57
The ANC Youth League opened its own conference on December 15, 1949, just before the main ANC conference at Bloemfontein, with a humble prayer:
Thou, Heavenly Father, art continuing to lift us up from the sinks of impurity and cesspools of ignorance. Thou art removing the veil of darkness from this race of the so-called “Dark Africa.”58
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