Mandela

by Anthony Sampson

  THE ARGUMENTS about future economic systems were beginning to be overshadowed by the more immediate activities of the Afrikaner government. By the mid-fifties the Nationalists were extending their policy of apartheid much more rapidly and thoroughly than Mandela and his colleagues had first anticipated. In 1954, at the age of eighty, Dr. Malan retired, to be succeeded as Prime Minister by Hans Strijdom, a cruder advocate of white domination, with little intellectual subtlety. But a much more ambitious concept of “grand apartheid” was being prepared by Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd, the Minister of Native Affairs, who would become Prime Minister in 1958.

  Verwoerd, with his innocent face and gentle voice, was a visionary who had no doubts about the moral rightness of his plan to completely separate blacks from whites, a plan which attracted Afrikaner intellectuals and others as the ultimate solution to the problem of race relations. But it could be achieved only by a program of drastic social engineering and mass removals which was closer to the actions of communist governments in Eastern Europe than to any free-enterprise model in the West. While Afrikaner governments were representing themselves as champions of free enterprise, they were embarking on unprecedented state intervention which constantly impinged on the daily lives of Africans. The new black townships, with their thousands of identical houses unrelieved by shops or businesses, looked like caricatures of socialist housing for the lumpenproletariat.

  Mandela spent much time analyzing and criticizing “Verwoerd’s Grim Plot,” as he called it.45 He regarded Verwoerd as following the broad ideas of Hitler’s national socialism and racial principles, through which he had planned to rule Germany’s African colonies. “Fascism has become a living reality in our country,” Mandela wrote in June 1957, “and its defeat has become the principal task of the entire people of South Africa.”46 But Verwoerd had reason to believe that he could gain support from tribal leaders, by encouraging their rivalries and differences. He had a special opportunity to do this in the rural areas, where the chiefs were jealous of their territorial influence and privileges. Only a few chiefs, like Albert Luthuli, were prepared to resign their chieftainship rather than serve an alien power. As in wartime Europe, it required great courage to resist the temptation to collaborate with an all-powerful regime.

  Mandela now saw himself as belonging firmly to Johannesburg, which had forged his mature attitudes and politics. But he still kept his links with the countryside, and his royal ancestry and upbringing had given him a deeper sense of involvement with his home territory than most of his colleagues. “Fourteen years of crammed life in South Africa’s largest city,” he wrote later, “had not killed the peasant in me.” In September 1955 his travel ban had again expired, and he decided to revisit the Transkei.

  Driving through Natal, he again enjoyed the wild, open landscape and his closeness to nature, with a relish which comes through in his writings. He recalled the land’s historical associations, and reflected on the old battles for territory: first between Zulus and British, then between Afrikaners and British. “Was it the same Afrikaner who fought so tenaciously for his own freedom,” he wondered, “who had now become such a tyrant, and was persecuting us?”47 In Durban he stayed with his Indian friends Ismail and Fatima Meer, and visited the banned Luthuli in Groutville. Arriving home in the Transkei he saw his mother again, with a mixture of nostalgia and guilt. He had invited her to come and stay with him in Johannesburg, but she had chosen to continue living alone, twenty miles from a doctor, still a simple peasant woman plowing the fields and surviving in the rugged conditions.48 In jail he would always have an uneasy conscience about her; but she had encouraged him to fight for his beliefs, and he reassured himself that his struggle was giving his people a new meaning to life.49

  His main purpose in visiting the Transkei was political. The government was now determined to extend apartheid by means of the new Bantu Authorities Act, which would promote the chiefs locally while subordinating them to their white rulers in Pretoria. The Transkei was to be the showpiece. The Bunga, the council of Transkei chiefs, had rejected the new act in 1952, but the government had lured them with greater juridical and financial powers, and in 1955 the Bunga voted to accept it. Mandela was upset, but realistic: with his own chiefly background he clearly understood the temptation to collaborate. In July 1955 he wrote a well-argued article for Fighting Talk called “Bluffing the Bunga into Apartheid.” He pointed out how every chief and headman would now be paid by the government, and fired if they defied it, as Chief Luthuli had been fired in 1952. It was “part of a deliberate bluff” to deceive the credulous tribal leaders into believing that they had a voice in their own government. But he recognized the weakness of ANC propaganda in the face of the chiefs’ influence over their people, and urged the ANC to reconsider its decision to boycott the forthcoming Transkei elections: “Should these bodies not be used as platforms to expose the policies of the Nationalist government, and to win the people over to the liberation movement?”50

  Mandela saw the conflict in very personal terms. Kaiser Matanzima, his nephew and onetime hero at Fort Hare, was now an influential chief in the territory of Western Tembuland, and he had helped to persuade the Bunga to accept the new act. The two men, both born to rule, both confident lawyers, had much in common, and they would always maintain a family intimacy. But they now had very different loyalties, and found themselves on opposite sides in the classic debate between collaborator and resister. Mandela no longer believed in the hereditary principle which had benefited Matanzima, while Matanzima saw Mandela as now being a Johannesburger, “far away from his home people.”

  During his visit to the Transkei Mandela argued with Matanzima through the night, carefully avoiding theoretical “isms.” He warned him that the government aimed to divide and rule the black people, and claimed that resistance would avoid future massacres. Matanzima replied that the chiefs would be strengthened by the apartheid system, and that multiracial policies would increase racial friction, leading to bloodshed and bitterness. He saw himself as being in the thick of battle. “My attitude was one of reconciliation with the Afrikaners,” Matanzima recalled forty years later. “Black and white must meet together in the Transkei.”51 Mandela was distressed by the deadlock. “I would have loved to fight side by side with him,” he wrote later in jail, “and share with him the laurels of victory.” But by then Matanzima was firmly allied with the ANC’s enemies.

  Mandela continued his tour of the country. He drove on to Port Elizabeth, where he first met Govan Mbeki, the Marxist activist who was organizing the ANC in the Eastern Cape. Then he visited the campaigning Englishman Christopher Gell, who lived in an iron lung—from which he dictated shrewd advice to the ANC and sharp critiques of apartheid for the newsletter Africa X-Ray Report. Mandela never forgot this unusual ally: when Gell died the ANC organized his funeral, with more blacks than whites among the mourners.

  Mandela went on to Cape Town, enchanted by the famous Garden Route, stopping near Clarkson to appreciate both the glorious view and the opportunities for guerrilla fighters to hide in the forests: “My head was full of dangerous ideas.” In Cape Town he did not see the Trotskyists with whom he had argued seven years earlier, but moved between communists and clergy. He visited the offices of New Age to find the police searching them and seizing papers: an omen of trouble to come. He stayed for two weeks in the black township of Langa with Methodist ANC activists, driving around the Cape to organize branches (though resting on Sundays). Before he left the Methodists knelt and prayed for his safe journey home.

  Mandela returned to his family in Orlando feeling refreshed and reactivated, and much better informed about rural realities. He warned his colleagues that the ANC was very weak in the Transkei, faced by conservative chiefs and strong security police, and urged a “boycott from within.” The argument was urgent, as the government pressed ahead with “grand apartheid.” A government commission, headed by Professor F. R. Tomlinson and including no blacks, had outlined an ambitious scheme to in
vest in separate homelands, or Bantustans, in which Africans would “develop along their own lines,” with their own administration and industries. The government accepted much of it, while rejecting its more liberal proposals, and prepared to cut up South Africa into separate Bantustans: the Transkei would be the first. Mandela warned that the Bantustans would have no real scope for developing their own policies, while providing reserves of cheap labor for white employers.52

  Apartheid plans were stretching out everywhere, and the government was also determined to enforce complete segregation in schools. The Bantu Education Act of April 1953 gave Pretoria control over all the mission schools, in order to enforce the principle (in Verwoerd’s famous words) that: “There is no place for the Bantu in the European community above the level of certain forms of labor.” As Verwoerd told Parliament: “Racial relations cannot improve if the wrong type of education is given to Natives. They cannot improve if the result of Native education is the creation of frustrated people who, as a result of the education they received, have expectations in life which circumstances in South Africa do not allow to be fulfilled immediately.”53

  Mandela was just such a frustrated native. For all his past complaints about the missionaries’ imperialism, he was always appreciative of his teachers—and he would become more grateful to them later. He was saddened when the Methodists agreed to hand over their schools to the government: “Verwoerd must have danced.”54 Most Anglican schools were likewise handed over, but the Roman Catholics kept their schools going without the help of the state.55 Mandela feared that the new tribal education system, on top of the territorial segregation, would further undermine the national unity of the ANC: “The African people are being broken up into small tribal units, isolated one from the other, in order to prevent the rise of national consciousness amongst them and to foster a narrow and insulated tribal outlook.”56

  The Bantu Education Act brought to a head the thorny question of apartheid schools. Mandela was more realistic than most of the National Executive of the ANC, who wanted a permanent boycott. He warned that they would not be able to sustain it, and could not provide an effective alternative: they should not promise what they could not deliver. He was overruled, and the ANC called for children to stay away, and tried to create schools of its own. But the ANC schools were harassed by the police, and parents became desperate for some kind of education. The ANC was compelled to give up the boycott. Historians would judge its mistake harshly: “Of all campaigns conducted by the ANC,” wrote Frank Welsh in 1998, “that against Bantu education was the most poorly-planned, the most confused and, for Africans generally, the most confusing.”57 Mandela’s warning had been vindicated. “It was a heavy responsibility,” he wrote, “to choose between two evils: fighting to the bitter end, even if all the children were turned into the streets, and a compromise which at least would keep them in the classroom.”58

  Apartheid in schools was soon followed by apartheid in universities, as the government forced higher education into the same mold. The Extension of University Education Act of 1959 would remove the independence of Mandela’s old academies, Fort Hare and Wits, and impose strict segregation. It would kick away the ladder by which he and his friends had reached a wider world, and break black students’ contacts with other races, which threatened the government’s system. “The friendship and interracial harmony,” Mandela wrote in Liberation in 1957, “constitute a direct threat to the entire policy of apartheid and baasskaap [white domination].”59

  Mandela watched the avenues of his hopeful youth closing behind him. The schools and universities were being cut off from the wider influences of English liberal culture which had forged his own attitudes. The government was showing the full ruthlessness of its policies, while dividing his people to frustrate their opposition. Mandela still believed the new structures should be resisted from within; but he had to wait twenty years to be proved right, by the schoolchildren of Soweto. In the meantime his old schools had been first cut back, then devastated, by apartheid: when Jack Dugard, the former principal of the teacher-training school at Healdtown, returned there in 1976 he found that all but one of the staff were Afrikaners, obsessed by their own personal safety, while the classrooms had been wrecked by fires. He asked: “How could education progress in such an atmosphere?”60

  Keeping in touch with his rural roots gave Mandela a special perspective. In February 1956 he made another brief trip to the Transkei with Sisulu, to buy a plot of land in Umtata, following his principle that a man should own land near his birthplace.61 Soon after returning to Johannesburg he was banned for the third time, preventing him from leaving the city for another five years. He judged that “The police thought they had given me enough rope to run around.” But he was now more defiant, and contemptuous of bans. “I was determined,” he wrote in jail, “that my involvement in the struggle, and the scope of my political activities, would be determined by nobody else but myself.”62 His bans had compelled him to become more self-reliant, more detached from any party machine. But at the same time the government’s oppression was forcing the ANC and its allies closer together.

  Mandela was set on a clear collision course with the government, which was watching him carefully. After being served with his bans he wrote to the Minister of Justice on April 13 asking him for his reasons. Three months later he received a long reply (still retained in the department’s archives) stating that he had vilified the whites and incited blacks to disobey laws and establish a black government, and reminding him of inflammatory speeches he had made over the previous six years. On June 22, 1950, he had said: “It is about three hundred years since the Europeans came to this country. Heroes and beauties of Africa died. Our country was taken away and slavery came up.” “This is the organization,” he had said of the ANC on March 22, 1952, “which will be the future government of this country.” “If everybody stood together and remained together,” he said on November 7, 1952, “there would come a time when we would repay the blood of those killed.” “We are in a better position against the Afrikaner people than they were when they fought the British imperialists,” he said on March 7, 1954. “I know as sure as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow that a major clash will come and all forces of reaction will collapse against the forces of liberation.”63

  He was right about the clash, but wrong about the collapse.

  9

  Treason and Winnie

  1956–1957

  EVER SINCE the Congress of the People in June 1955, and the subsequent raids, the government had threatened mass arrests and charges. In April 1956 the Minister of Justice, C. R. Swart, told Parliament that the police were investigating a serious case of high treason, and that about two hundred people would eventually be arrested. But ANC officials were inclined to dismiss the urgency. In November 1956 the President of the Transvaal ANC, E. P. Moretsele, told his conference: “The whole affair is an election stunt to win them votes. In all probability the Nationalists will carry out their threat, but they are in no hurry to do so, for the election takes place two years from now.”1

  There was some hurry. A month later, early in the morning of December 5, 1956, Mandela was awakened by loud knocking, and found three white policemen at the door with warrants to search the house and to arrest him on a charge of high treason. Over the next ten days another 155 leaders of all races within the Congress alliance were arrested on the same charge.

  Mandela was not altogether surprised, but he was not prepared for a marathon trial which would cripple his political activity and his law practice for five years. Most of the prominent participants of the Congress of the People were now in jail—with some important exceptions, including Dr. Dadoo, Yusuf Cachalia, J. B. Marks and Govan Mbeki. Trevor Huddleston, the monk who had been honored at the Congress and who would have given the accused a special Christian respectability, had been recalled to Britain by his superior. The Liberals, having stayed away from the Congress, were also not included in the arrests, and as a r
esult nearly all the whites at the trial were communists, which gave credence to the government’s allegations of a Marxist conspiracy—and also gave the communists a new prestige among Africans as fellow martyrs who shared their sacrifices for the cause.

  The mass arrests marked the end of the “phony war.” On the night before they took place, the black Johannesburg writer and journalist Can Themba was, as he put it, “doing my routine round-up of the shebeens with my news nose stuck out.” In one he came upon a drunken gathering which included three prominent ANC activists, Robert Resha, Tennyson Makiwane and Lionel Morrison, who were accusing a fellow boozer of leading a dissolute life. They decided to hold a mock trial, with Resha as defense counsel and Makiwane as prosecutor. Themba joined in as the magistrate, and after lively pleadings found the accused guilty. The next morning all three of the activists were arrested for high treason. When Themba described the shebeen scene in the next issue of Drum, which appeared while the suspects were preparing their defense, Mandela was furious with him for showing his Congress colleagues in such a frivolous light.2

  There was nothing frivolous about the arrests. Mandela had joked with his arresting officer, Detective Constable Rousseau, but the policeman had warned him, “You are playing with fire”; Mandela had replied, “Playing with fire is my game.”3 The police were determined to humiliate the prisoners, who were eventually all collected together in the Fort, the legendary prison on the hill looking over Johannesburg. All of them, including venerable dignitaries like Luthuli, Z. K. Matthews and James Calata, were ordered to strip naked in the outdoor quadrangle, where they waited for an hour for a white doctor to question them, shyly not looking at each other, revealing their bellies and trying to cover their private parts. Mandela, conscious of his own fine physique, remembered the proverb that “Clothes make the man,” and reflected that if a fine body was thought essential to leadership, few of the prisoners would qualify: “Only a handful had the symmetrical build of Shaka or Moshoeshoe in their younger days.” His Natal colleague Masabalala (Martin) Yengwa draped himself in a blanket and recited a traditional Zulu praise song honoring Shaka. The other prisoners listened in delight, and the staid Chief Luthuli exclaimed in Zulu, “That is Shaka!” and began to chant and to join in the dance with the others—though most were in fact not Zulus. “We were all nationalists,” Mandela reflected, “bound together by love of our history.”4