The inner group of Youth Leaguers—headed by Mda, Sisulu, Mandela and Tambo—clearly emerged at the conference as “the kingmakers,” though Mandela could not attend. They had some differences: Mda remained a firm African nationalist, with Mandela closest to him. Sisulu was much more open to other racial groups, while Tambo remained diplomatic.59 But they all demanded mass action.
The main ANC conference was eclipsed in the South African press by a much more melodramatic event: the opening by Prime Minister Malan of the vast Voortrekker Monument outside Pretoria, commemorating the sufferings of the Great Trek, before a crowd of 100,000 Afrikaners. “The hour has come,” said Malan. “A sunbeam from the heavens is striking down on the sarcophagus.”
Dr. Xuma did his best to challenge this ceremony, with a speech in the market square of the Bloemfontein township in which he warned prophetically that the Voortrekker Monument would remind future generations of the racial strife between Europeans and Africans. The white press took little notice.
In his presidential address to the ANC conference Xuma tried to rally support, and emphasized that Africans were united against apartheid.60 But he firmly rejected the Youth League’s policy of boycotting apartheid institutions. His speech received meager applause, and Diliza Mji, an outspoken young medical student in the Youth League, then moved a vote of nonconfidence. “A shock-wave went through the hall,” as Mji described it. “Never in the history of the ANC had the President been criticised.”61 The kingmakers then turned to Moroka, who had already pledged his support, and the conference elected him as President. Xuma remained on the executive until he resigned on March 13, 1950, complaining that the Youth League had betrayed him. But Sisulu, Mandela and Tambo wrote a forceful rebuttal in the Bantu World: “We are as a nation entitled at any time to call upon any one of us to lead the struggle.”62
The ANC also elected a much more radical National Executive, including the Youth Leaguers Peter Mda, Oliver Tambo and Godfrey Pitje, the young activist from Fort Hare. Mandela himself was co-opted onto the National Executive two months later, to fill the place left by Xuma. More important, the Congress chose a new Secretary-General. The veteran clergyman James Calata stood down, finding the Programme of Action too radical, and in his place Walter Sisulu was elected by one vote.63 Sisulu was the right man at the right time. Unlike Moroka, he was totally dedicated to the ANC and its new policy. As he recalled: “Once they had decided to elect me my approach was: ‘I have nothing to live for except politics. So I cannot draw up a program of action which I am not able to follow myself.’ That required me to be confident of the future, otherwise I would weaken somewhere. That confidence kept me in.”
Mandela had a narrower view than Sisulu. “When I became Secretary-General my duty was to unite people,” Sisulu said later, “whereas Nelson and Mda were still thinking in terms of projecting the Youth League.”64 But Mandela thought the Programme of Action would transform the attitudes and methods of the Congress. “The ANC was now going to rely not on a mere change of heart on the part of the authorities,” he explained later. “It was going to exert pressure in order to compel the authorities to grant its demands.”65 He was now at the heart of a new movement toward confrontation with the Afrikaner nationalists. As Frieda Matthews, the wife of the staid professor at Fort Hare, described it: “People were excited, men and women, young and old. At last there was to be ACTION!”66
5
Nationalists vs. Communists
1950–1951
THE AFRICAN townships of Johannesburg were the key to political action. They were the magnet for most black South Africans, their opening to a newfound Westernized world of films, jazz, jiving and sport. Rural blacks, steeped in the Bible or Shakespeare by their mission teachers, were exposed here to wider influences and incentives which provoked an explosion of creative talent in music, writing and drama. Educated Africans took much more readily to city life than Afrikaners, whose culture was still rooted in the countryside. The cultural renaissance of this “new African” would be compared to the Harlem Renaissance in New York in the 1920s, displaying the same kind of passionate expression on the frontier between two cultures. But Johannesburg had the broader confidence of a black majority and a whole continent behind it.1
For the few whites who crossed the line, black Johannesburg in the fifties, with its all-night parties, shebeens (speakeasies) and jazz sessions, offered a total contrast to the formal social life of the smart northern suburbs, where white-gloved African servants served at elaborate dinner parties. Soweto had a bubbling vitality and originality which shines through the autobiographies of young black writers of the time like Can Themba, Nat Nakasa, Es’kia Mphahlele, Bloke Modisane, Casey Motsisi and Peter Abrahams, or the short stories of the young white novelist Nadine Gordimer.2 Politicians and intellectuals were pressed together with factory workers, teachers and gangsters, all feeling themselves part of the Western postwar world, which they knew through magazines, movies and advertisements. They were fascinated by the exploits of black American sporting heroes, pop stars or political campaigners, and inspired by the international idealism of the new United Nations and “The Family of Man.” The Johannesburg jazz, fashions, dancing and quick-fire talk reflected the mix of Western and African idioms and rhythms with their own original style; musical compositions like the penny-whistle “kwela-kwela” or the song “Wimoweh” would become recurring hits in America and Britain.3
But this vibrant culture was almost totally ignored by white Johannesburg. The two races converged in the city center every day as masters and servants, and separated every evening: the whites in their cars to the north, the blacks in their buses to the south, beyond the mine dumps. The whites saw blacks only as domestics, laborers or tribal villagers, barely literate and dependent on white patronage; to allow them to assert their political power appeared irresponsible, if not dangerous. But behind the color bar the squalid and overflowing townships beyond South Africa’s city centers were bursting with energy and ambition. “The truest optimism in South Africa is in the crowded, disease-ridden and crime-infested urban locations,” wrote the great South African historian C. W. de Kiewiet in 1956. “They represent the black man’s acceptance of the new life of the Western world, his willingness to endure a harsh schooling and an equal apprenticeship in its ways.”4
Urban Africans were predominantly conservative, fascinated by the West, much influenced by Christian Churches and full of optimism for the future. “It was a time of infinite hope and possibility,” wrote the young Zulu writer Lewis Nkosi, describing what he called the “Fabulous Decade” of the fifties. “It seemed not extravagant in the least to predict then that the Nationalist government would soon collapse.”5 “It was the best of times, the worst of times,” the writer Can Themba liked to quote from Dickens.6
It was only slowly that the blacks realized that they were being squeezed in a vise; that this would soon become simply the worst of times. Over the next few years the apartheid governments, backed by Western Cold Warriors, would pursue policies which seemed designed to press them toward revolutionary politics, and to look for friends among communists and in the East.
In black Johannesburg Nelson Mandela was both typical and exceptional. He moved with growing confidence among his contemporaries in Orlando West, the enclave of more prosperous blacks. He loved the world of music and dancing, and was close to township musical heroes like the Manhattan Brothers, Peter Rezant of the Merry Blackbirds, and the composer and writer Todd Matshikiza. He was beginning to earn money as a practicing lawyer, and adopted the style of the township big shot, driving his Oldsmobile and eating at the few downtown restaurants which admitted Africans—the Blue Lagoon, Moretsele’s and later Kapitan’s, the Oriental restaurant which still remains in Kort Street, and bought his provisions from a nearby delicatessen. Joe Matthews, the sophisticated son of the Fort Hare professor, was surprised to find a country boy from the Transkei with such exotic tastes.7 Above all Mandela took great trouble with his clo
thes—like Chief Jongintaba, whose trousers he had pressed as a child. Mandela’s friend George Bizos, who later defended him when he came to trial, once met him near the Rand Club in downtown Johannesburg, having a final fitting with the fashionable tailor Alfred Kahn (who also made suits for the millionaire tycoon Harry Oppenheimer). Bizos was amazed to see Kahn going down on one knee to take the black man’s inside leg measurement. Ahmed Kathrada was so impressed by a blazer with a special African badge which Kahn had made for Mandela that he ordered one for himself, only to be appalled by the bill.8
Mandela had the confidence of a man-about-town, great presence and charm and a wide smile. But he kept his distance, as befitted an aristocrat rather than a commoner. Even Nthato Motlana, who became his doctor, found Mandela’s style kingly, and felt he had to choose his words with care when he was with him.9 Mandela sounded very different from the fast-talking “city slickers” brought up in Johannesburg, and retained his formal style in both Xhosa and English. He often ate lunch at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, the teetotal meeting place for respectable middle-class blacks; it had tennis courts, table tennis, concerts and dances, and American connections through Ray Phillips, the Congregationalist who ran the Jan Hofmeyr Social Centre upstairs.10
Mandela avoided the drinking sessions which distracted many of his contemporaries, and did not venture into rowdy shebeens like the Thirty-Nine Steps or Back o’ the Moon. But I met him in 1951 at a favorite ANC drinking place—a printing shop in Commissioner Street in downtown Johannesburg. Its Falstaffian Coloured proprietor, Andy Anderson, would produce beer and brandy bottles from behind the presses after hours, and pick up scrawny fried chicken from a Chinese take-away, while ANC leaders discussed forthcoming leaflets and campaigns. Mandela remained sedate and dignified compared to his more expansive colleagues: he did not really approve, he explained later, of hard liquor.11
At six-foot-two Mandela was physically imposing, with a physique which he took care to maintain. He was a keen heavyweight boxer, sparring for ninety minutes on weekdays at the makeshift gym in Orlando where he trained from 1950 onward. He lacked the speed and power to be a champion, but he relished the skills of boxing—dodging, retreating, dancing, circling—and saw the sport as a means of developing leadership and confidence. Boxers had become role models of black achievement and power, in South Africa as in America. Joe Louis, the American heavyweight champion of the world from 1937 to 1949, had been Mandela’s boyhood hero, and Sowetans took intense pride in their local champions like Jerry Moloi and Jake Tuli, who became flyweight champion of the British Empire. Mandela would often reminisce later about the great matches. He loved to recall the last fight of the heavyweight champion “King Kong,” who began by mocking his opponent Simon “Greb” Mtimkulu. Greb waited till the third round, then “hit with a left, an over-right and a bolo to the body. End of fight.”12 Mandela saw boxing in political terms, as a contest which was essentially egalitarian and color-blind, where Africans could triumph over discrimination. He sometimes depicted his political career in boxing terms: by 1955 he felt he was in “the light heavyweight division.”13 The showmanship and individualism of the fighter, together with his physical strength, contributed to Mandela’s political style as a militant loner who understood the importance of performance.
But it was politics which was now his chief game. The Youth League was clamoring for action, and Mandela was preoccupied with how it could be achieved. He explained in the League’s journal, African Lodestar, that the organization must maintain dynamic contact with ordinary blacks: “We have a powerful ideology capable of capturing the imaginations of the masses. Our duty is now to carry that ideology fully to them.”14 But the ANC was still ill equipped for grassroots organization, and slow to react: a year after the conference of December 1949, Sisulu as Secretary-General reported that “the masses are marching far ahead of the leadership.” He complained of “general negligence of duty” by the organization’s officials, a lack of faith in the struggle and a lack of “propaganda organs such as the press.” He insisted that “if Congress is to be a force in the liberation of the African people in this country, then it must of necessity put its machinery in order.”15
The ANC still had very inadequate resources, and as an exclusively African organization it was wary of seeking help from other races; the Indian Congress was much more efficiently run, as were the communists. But the situation soon changed when the government determined to make the Communist Party illegal, with a bill which in 1950 became the Suppression of Communism Act. “Statutory communism” was defined far more widely than as following Marxist policies: it effectively meant believing in equality between the races. The government was taking advantage of white fears of a worldwide communist conspiracy even before Senator Joseph McCarthy began his witch-hunt in America. The act certainly succeeded in hampering the activities of some formidable enemies of the government, but it also soon brought many banned communists much closer to the ANC’s young activists, including Mandela, and pressed them both toward joint action.
The ban was a clear threat to free speech, and in March 1950 the Johannesburg Communist Party collaborated with the Transvaal ANC and Indian Congress to organize a Defend Free Speech Convention which attracted ten thousand people to Market Square. They also proposed a one-day strike on May Day, to protest against the banning of communist leaders. Sisulu had been quick to realize that a threat to the communists was a threat to all opposition forces, but Mandela and many other ANC members distrusted the communist initiative, which had overtaken their own planned demonstration. The African Lodestar attacked the exploitation of black workers by foreign ideologues, declaring: “the exotic plant of communism cannot flourish on African soil.”16 Joe Slovo, the young communist lawyer from Lithuania, spent hours arguing with Mandela about the party’s plan for a strike, and saw Mandela trying to resolve his internal conflict “between the emotional legacy left by the wounding experiences of racism, and the cold grey tactics of politics.”17
Mandela was still militantly anticommunist, and he and other Youth Leaguers heckled communist meetings intended to prepare for May Day, which were sometimes broken up. In Newclare, a Johannesburg suburb, Mandela physically dragged the Indian leader Yusuf Cachalia from the platform.18 “You couldn’t miss him, because he was so tall,” recalled Rusty Bernstein, a communist architect who first encountered Mandela there. He remembered that Mandela “appeared to be heckler and disrupter-in-chief.… He stood out from the gaggle of jeering, heckling Youth Leaguers, partly by sheer physical presence but mainly by the calm authority he seemed to exercise over them.”19
Mandela could be a rough agitator. At one meeting the African communist J. B. Marks delivered a clear and logical speech describing how white supremacy could be overthrown, to frequent applause. Mandela, who had been instructed by his Youth League bosses to break up the meeting, arrogantly went up to Marks and insisted on addressing the crowd. “There are two bulls in this kraal,” he declaimed. “There is a black bull and a white bull. J. B. Marks says that the white bull must rule this kraal. I say that the black bull must rule. What do you say?” The same people who had been screaming for Marks a moment earlier now turned around and said, “The black bull, the black bull!” Mandela enjoyed telling the story forty years later.20
The May Day protest was effective, despite the Youth League’s opposition, with at least half the black workers in Johannesburg staying at home. That evening Mandela experienced a moment of truth. He was walking home in Orlando with Sisulu, watching a peaceful march of protesters under the full moon, when they spotted some policemen five hundred yards away. The police began firing toward them. Mounted officers galloped into the crowd, hitting out with batons. Mandela and Sisulu hid in a nurses’ dormitory, where they could hear bullets hitting the walls. By the end of the night eighteen blacks had been killed in Orlando and three other townships on the Reef.21 Mandela was outraged. “That day was a turning point in my life,” he recalled, “both in understan
ding through first-hand experience the ruthlessness of the police, and in being deeply impressed by the support African workers had given to the May Day call.”22
Mandela was now revealing a basic pragmatism which would make him a master of politics. He warned in African Lodestar that the Suppression of Communism Act was not in fact aimed at the Communist Party (“an insignificant party with no substantial following”), but at the ANC.23 At a meeting of the Congresses he advocated joint action, and was supported by Tambo. A joint committee soon proposed a “Day of Mourning” with a stay-at-home strike on June 26, in protest against both the shootings and the new act.24 Sisulu asked Mandela to organize the small, hectic ANC office in Johannesburg, where African, Indian and white leaders were coming and going. Mandela was now in the big time, a key figure in a major national protest, working alongside activists of other races.
The Day of Mourning proved an anticlimax, and the response was very poor in the Transvaal. The Rand Daily Mail called the event “95 percent a flop.”25 Mandela, looking back, reflected that: “A political strike is always riskier than an economic one.”26 And some colleagues criticized the unnecessary loss of life. The black writer Bloke Modisane, then in the Youth League, vividly described the horrors of the police reprisals in Sophiatown: “The rifles and the sten guns were crackling death, spitting at anything which moved—anything black.” Modisane condemned the protest as “another of those political adventurisms.… If a man is asked to die he deserves the decency of an explanation.”27
The Suppression of Communism Act was pushed through Parliament with the support of the English-speaking United Party opposition. But the Communist Party of South Africa was never the formidable organization that the government had portrayed. The Central Committee of the Party in Cape Town voted to dissolve, with only two dissenters.28 In Johannesburg, where the Party was strongest, members met in a downtown house opposite Yusuf Dadoo’s surgery. They were astonished to hear Moses Kotane announce the decision that had been taken in Cape Town. “Many of us were stunned,” said Joe Slovo.29 “No one believed it,” said Rusty Bernstein. “We were convinced it was not the real story.”30 Over the next months they waited for secret instructions, but none came. Gradually they formed separate small groups, which cautiously came together. It seemed a long way from the long hand of Moscow and the Comintern.
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