In April 1959 the Africanists formed their own party, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), at a national conference in Orlando. The conference was held on the national holiday celebrating the first permanent white settlement in South Africa by Jan van Riebeck of the Dutch East India Company in 1665—which gave the PAC a cue to protest against “the Act of Aggression against the Sons and Daughters of Afrika, by which the African people were dispossessed of their land, and subjected to white domination.”17 The PAC liked to compare themselves to African nationalists in other parts of the continent, who were now confidently moving toward independence, and the new “African Personality” proclaimed by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana was certainly more in tune with the PAC’s rhetoric than with the multiracialism of the ANC.
As their President the PAC delegates did not choose a fiery demagogue like Madzunya or Leballo, but the much more reflective Robert Sobukwe, a lecturer in African languages at Witwatersrand University. At thirty-five, Sobukwe was six years younger than Mandela, and like him tall, handsome and physically strong; but he was from a humbler origin, and combined his intellectual grasp with a peasant’s simplicity. Sobukwe was brought up in the Karoo, the half-desert region of the Cape, the son of a shop worker. He was taken up by the Methodists and went to Healdtown school and Fort Hare, where he was much more academically successful than Mandela. He became a militant Youth Leaguer, fiercely attacking the missionaries and invoking the growing power of Africa: “Even as the dying so-called Roman civilisation received new life from the barbarians, so also will the decaying so-called Western civilisation find a new and purer life from Africa.”
In 1949 Sobukwe became Secretary of the Youth League, enthusiastically supporting the Programme of Action of Mandela and his friends. For a few years he was preoccupied with teaching and cultural interests (including translating Macbeth into Zulu), but just before the Congress of the People, shocked by what he saw as the growing influence of communists and non-Africans, he was drawn back into ANC politics.18 Whites, he believed, could never fully identify with the black cause because “a group in a privileged position never voluntarily relinquishes that position.”19 Like other Africanists he complained about the multiracial activities of the ANC leaders, whom he accused of “dancing with white women in the Johannesburg interracial parties instead of getting down to the job of freeing Africa from white domination.”20
The emergence of the PAC, headed by an eloquent, intellectual anti-communist, was welcomed by conservatives in Europe and America as providing a promising alternative to the ANC. Mandela thought the U.S. State Department “hailed its birth as a dagger in the heart of the African left.”21 British diplomats were unsure which was the greater danger to the West, communism or racialism; the British High Commission had praised Luthuli’s “staunch and comparatively moderate stance” on racial tolerance.22 But the British acquired an exaggerated respect for the PAC, influenced by the South African Police. On August 17 the Police Commissioner gave a long report to the British High Commission explaining that “the Africanists look upon their own organisation as being but one of a number of similar organisations throughout the African continent, all dedicated to the task of freeing the African from ‘imperialism’ and ‘white domination’ and the eventual establishment of a so-called United States of Africa.”23 Meanwhile, both the British and the Americans still saw the apartheid government as ultimately an ally against global communism. As the State Department’s African expert Joseph Satterthwaite said in October 1958: “When the chips are down, they’re such very loyal friends.”24
Mandela still hoped that the two factions of the ANC could be reunited. He had been Sobukwe’s attorney as well as Leballo’s; he respected Sobukwe’s sense of honor, and regarded him as “a dazzling orator and incisive thinker.”25 But Mandela was impatient with the immaturity of Sobukwe’s crude black nationalism—which he himself had abandoned a decade ago—and the Africanist bandwagon of politicians settling old scores. He was especially worried by Sobukwe’s intolerance of the rights of minorities, which was summed up in the Africanist manifesto: “The African people will not tolerate the existence of other national groups within the confines of one nation.” Mandela would always argue that tribal and ethnic minorities—whites included—must have their rights guaranteed. Sobukwe, he thought, was evading the issue.26
But Mandela underestimated the threat that Sobukwe represented to the ANC, and the appeal of the PAC’s nationalism to young black intellectuals. He was now facing his first serious political challenge; and looking back forty years later, he would recognize Sobukwe as his most formidable rival.27
When the Treason Trial resumed it was moved to the Afrikaner stronghold of Pretoria, an hour’s drive from Johannesburg, where the ANC’s support was much weaker, and the white population more hostile. Three judges presided in the ornate courtroom—a converted Jewish synagogue—led by the same Justice Rumpff who had already tried many of the accused during the Defiance Campaign. Mandela respected Rumpff, but thought he wanted a conviction: “He wanted to send us to jail, but he was too brilliant a judge to commit a disgrace.”28
The defense team still included Vernon Berrangé, “the human lie detector,” but it was now augumented by two very senior lawyers, Israel Maisels and Bram Fischer. Fischer, who became one of Mandela’s closest friends, was already a hero to the ANC. He was a true Afrikaner, the son of a Judge-President of the Orange Free State, with the chubby red face and open style of a farmer. He had begun as an Afrikaner nationalist, but after studying at Oxford and visiting the Soviet Union he joined the Communist Party, and was influenced by J. B. Marks, Moses Kotane and Yusuf Dadoo. Mandela was deeply impressed by Fischer’s stoic self-sacrifice and commitment: “We embraced each other as brothers.”29 Fischer devoted all his energies to organizing both a political and a legal defense, and his skills attracted many of the accused to the law.
The trial stopped and started, with intricate wrangles. In August 1958 Berrangé embarked on a long legal argument questioning the vaguely worded indictment. In October the prosecution suddenly withdrew their charges altogether; but a month later they returned with a more precise indictment, which left out sixty-one of the accused to be tried later, and was directed against only thirty people who were thought to be guilty of particularly revolutionary or violent incitement. Mandela was among them.
The trial was due to start again in Pretoria in February 1959. The night before, Mandela went to the first night of the black musical King Kong, composed by his friend Todd Matshikiza, which told the story of the black heavyweight boxer from Sophiatown, whom Mandela had known, and who murdered his girlfriend. The premiere was held in the main hall of Wits University, the only auditorium in Johannesburg which would admit blacks and whites together (though segregated by rows). The show, which was later taken to London, expressed all the creative energy of the black townships, with an exuberant cast including Mandela’s friend Nathan Mdledle of the Manhattan Brothers, who played King Kong. Mandela was thrilled by the performance, and afterward he embraced Todd Matshikiza and his wife, Esme. He was particularly moved, he said, by the song “Sad Times, Bad Times,” with its refrain “What have these men done that they should be destroyed?,” which reminded him of the trial beginning the next day.30
The trial resumed, was adjourned, and then started again, making Mandela’s life still more unpredictable, and his work in his law practice more difficult. The activities of most of the ANC leaders were circumscribed, either by the trial or by bans. The President, Luthuli, was no longer on trial, but in June 1959 he was confined again for a further five years to his home district in Natal. Luthuli now had a high international profile. The British diplomat Eleanor Emery told London that the ban had removed “the most stable and moderate of the ANC leaders,” and predicted that it would lead to more extremism, and perhaps to a general banning of the whole ANC.31 The New York Times published a profile of Luthuli, saying that the South African government had chosen “a worthy foe,” and the new A
merican Ambassador, Philip Crowe—much more sophisticated than his predecessors—went to visit Luthuli in Groutville three months after he was banned.32 But Western diplomats continued to steer clear of the more militant ANC leaders like Mandela.
Mandela was under still greater pressure in the trial, but he remained very active behind the scenes. He could see Tambo nearly every day in their law offices, and was closely in touch with Sisulu both in the courtroom and in Orlando. Sisulu remained very influential. “I was still looked upon by everybody as Secretary-General,” he explained later, “because I was doing the work, although it was Oliver Tambo or Duma Nokwe who was formally Secretary-General. I was having a discussion with Nelson, I think, daily.”33
But the ANC had remained disorganized through the 1950s. As a “banned leader” described it in Liberation with devastating candor in 1955:
There exists great inefficiency at varying levels of Congress leadership: the inability to understand simple local situations, inefficiency in attending to the simple things, such as small complaints, replying to letters, visiting of branches. There is complete lack of confidence of one another, lack of teamwork in committees, individualism and the lust for power. The result is sabotage of Congress decisions and directives, gossip and unprincipled criticisms.34
Mandela was aware of the incompetence, but was touchy about criticism of the ANC, particularly from whites. The reporter Martin Leighton wrote an article in the Rand Daily Mail which described how the ANC did not have a real organization, with no files or membership lists, while its officials were cringing compared to Africans in bordering countries. Mandela was furious, and when Leighton called on him later he said he felt like choking him; but not, he reflected later, because the article was false: “The criticism which hurts me is the criticism which is correct.”35
The ANC’s Transvaal branch was both the most important and one of the most incompetent. “There is no awareness of the need to be alert and vigilant in branch activities,” the Transvaal executive had complained in November 1956. “There is a great deal of sluggishness and inefficiency in our style of work.” The more leaders were banned, the more urgent the problem became: in December 1958 the National Executive reported that “our aim should be to make the Congress a body that can survive any attack or onslaught made upon it, however severe.” They advocated an immediate efficiency campaign. But a year later the new Secretary-General, Duma Nokwe, who had succeeded Tambo, was lamenting that the problems of organization “have now become hardy annuals.” He warned that “the idea that a huge organisation like ours with all the duties and responsibilities that fall to it, can be run on a part-time basis, is ridiculous.”36 He wanted the M-Plan—the emergency resistance network which Mandela had originated eight years earlier—put into action without further delay, to “withstand and defeat the savage onslaught.” But there was little improvement in the ANC’s defenses while the security police did not appear a ruthless enemy. When two Afrikaner policemen who spoke Xhosa well visited the ANC offices, Mandela recalled, tea would be made for them and they would be given “chairs to sit down so they could take their notes, because they were so polite.”37
After the formation of the PAC in April 1959 the ANC was forced to take a more militant stance. It placed much hope in economic boycotts, which it saw as a major political weapon, with unlimited possibilities.38 To boycott products from proapartheid companies or shops seemed the answer to the bans on other protests: “Don’t say anything, just don’t buy.”39 Luthuli wanted to put pressure on vulnerable companies, to “hit them in the stomach,” as Mandela put it.40 In May 1959, encouraged by a partial boycott of Rembrandt cigarettes, which was controlled by the Afrikaner nationalist tobacco king Anton Rupert, the ANC announced a boycott of potatoes in protest against the inhuman treatment of farmworkers. At first this had some success, and Mandela saw it as the start of a new mood of resistance.41
Mandela was warning about the ruthlessness of the new government of Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd, who had become Prime Minister in September 1958, following Strijdom’s death. But he was confident that Verwoerd’s regime, with its “grim programme of mass evictions, political persecution and police terror,” would not last long: “It is the last desperate gamble of a hated and doomed fascist autocracy—which, fortunately, is soon due to make its exit from the stage of history.”42
The ANC was under growing pressure to take mass action to defy the pass laws by making a bonfire of the hated pass-books, which were seen as the main instrument of black oppression. In theory this could have made the whole system unworkable, but the ANC was very conscious of the failure of past campaigns. At the annual conference in December 1958 the National Executive reported that resistance to passes was mounting, but they were still cautious: “To hope that by striking one blow we would defeat the system would result in disillusionment. On the other hand we cannot sit until everybody is ready to enter the battlefield … the struggle for the repeal of pass laws has begun; there is no going back but ‘forward ever.’ ”43
Duma Nokwe, the new ANC Secretary-General, was a compact, lively graduate of Wits who had become the first black barrister in South Africa. He was a protégé of Tambo, who had taught him at St. Peter’s school, and a boxer, with a pugilist’s aggression which Tambo often had to restrain.44 He was forged by the Defiance Campaign and the Treason Trials, and he became a committed communist while enjoying good living and drink. As Secretary-General he was determined to reorganize the ANC, and working closely with Sisulu, Mandela and Tambo, he prepared a detailed plan for approval at the ANC’s annual conference in December 1959. It proposed first an extension of the economic boycott, and then the launch of an antipass campaign, planned to begin on March 31, 1960—the anniversary of the first serious demonstration against the pass laws in 1919—and culminating in a bonfire of passes on June 26.
But the ANC’s thunder was being stolen by the PAC, who were impatient for immediate action. A week after the ANC’s 1959 conference, the PAC executive reported to their first national conference. Their main proposal was oddly moderate: a “status campaign” to insist on Africans receiving courteous treatment in shops or workplaces, so that they could assert their own personalities and “exorcise this slave mentality.”45 This was quickly overtaken by Sobukwe, who put forward his own campaign to defy the pass laws. It was a half-baked proposal, with no realistic assessment of the risks involved, but it was rapidly and unanimously approved. The PAC, said Sobukwe, would now “cross its historical Rubicon.”46
The ANC leaders believed the PAC were playing the role of spoilers, trying to undermine and outbid their own initiatives. “What the PAC had embarked upon,” wrote Joe Slovo, “was an ill-organised, second-class version of the 1952 Defiance Campaign.”47 Mandela was frustrated to watch his rival Sobukwe, the “dazzling orator and incisive thinker,” playing the demagogue and ignoring the historical warnings of failure. But the ANC could not afford to ignore the popular excitement Sobukwe had released. Four months later his rash plan was to prove the catalyst which transformed the whole South African scene, and impelled Mandela into a far more militant revolutionary role.
11
The Revolution That Wasn’t
1960
THE PROMISE of independence in other African countries had brought new optimism to the ANC as well as to the PAC. “The people of Africa are astir,” wrote Mandela in Liberation in March 1958, in a fierce attack on “American imperialism.” “The future of this continent lies not in the hands of the discredited regimes that have allied themselves with American imperialism. It is in the hands of the common people functioning in their mass movements.”1
“During the past year there has been an unprecedented upsurge in Africa,” said the ANC report in December 1959. “Self-government has become the cry of the peoples throughout the length and breadth of the continent.”2 “Afrika!” had become a rallying cry, and babies were being christened Kwame or Jomo, after Nkrumah and Kenyatta. White domination in South Africa was now
looking still more out of step with the rest of the continent, and more vulnerable. Nineteen-sixty was proclaimed beforehand by journalists and diplomats as the “Year of Africa.” A succession of British and French colonies were due to become independent, and the ex–imperial powers were now wooing their new leaders to maintain their trade links and join the Cold War against communism.
In Britain, the Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was becoming aware of the importance of black Africa—which he compared to a lazy hippo which had been suddenly prodded into action.3 He was concerned about the intransigent white settlers in Central Africa and the political costs of British links with the apartheid government in South Africa. After his election triumph in October 1959 he planned a tour of Africa, culminating in Cape Town.
South African black leaders and liberals feared that Macmillan would be condoning apartheid, and four of them—Albert Luthuli, Alan Paton, Monty Naicker and Jordan Ngubane—signed an open letter to Macmillan before he set off. Published in the London Observer, then known as “the black man’s friend,” it warned Macmillan that apartheid was evil and unjust, and pleaded with him not to say “one single word that could be construed to be in praise of it.”4 Macmillan privately agreed with every word of the letter, and took it seriously enough to ask his officials whether they thought its signatories would be satisfied with the speech he was already preparing for South Africa.5
Macmillan began his tour in Ghana, where he praised the Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah, and first mentioned the “wind of change” (though no journalist noticed). He continued via Nigeria, the Rhodesias and Nyasaland to South Africa. In Cape Town he stayed with Dr. Verwoerd, and soon realized his full intransigence: “Nothing one could say or put forward would have the smallest effect upon the views of this determined man.”6 Macmillan was appalled by the foolishness, as he told his press secretary, Harold Evans, of “elevating segregation into a doctrine”: “If they didn’t make an ideology of it they would almost certainly succeed in getting the results they seek with a minimum of concession. Economic differences between black and white would alone be sufficient to achieve practical separation. Of course, they would have to accept the really talented African.”7
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