By 1975 the left-wingers on the island, particularly Gwala’s followers, were coming closer to challenging Mandela’s leadership. They were reluctant to talk about it afterward, but one anonymous prisoner with his own agenda smuggled a document off the island to Lusaka which painted a picture of “gossip cells and mud-slinging camps,” and of bitter complaints against the original four members of the High Organ for their lack of self-criticism and their “casual blunders,” resurrecting old arguments from the prejail period.84 Fikile Bam reckoned that about 70 percent of Section B supported Mandela; though if the political prisoners in the general cells had been counted in, he might have been in a minority.85 Others thought Mandela’s support was much higher. After 1975 the immediate crisis passed: the question of Mandela’s leadership was put to all members of the Congresses, who reaffirmed it with an overwhelming vote of support. The motion, proposed by Sisulu and seconded by Kathrada, acknowledged him to be “first among equals.” But the arguments were to surge up again when Harry Gwala returned to Robben Island in 1977.86
The most acrimonious question had worried Mandela since the fifties—the question which torments all revolutionaries confronting government bodies which try to co-opt their people. Should they boycott such institutions altogether, or infiltrate them and try to subvert them from within? Mandela was especially concerned about the Transkei, which the Verwoerd government was preparing as the showpiece of “separate development,” as the first of the Bantustans. Soon after he had first gone to prison in 1962 the ANC held a conference in Lobatse, Bechuanaland, where it had voted to boycott the forthcoming Transkei elections. Mandela opposed that decision: he thought the ANC could not enforce a boycott anyway, and that they should instead support the opposition party of Chief Victor Poto, which was challenging Pretoria’s preferred candidate—Mandela’s nephew Kaiser Matanzima. By exploiting the elections, Mandela argued, the ANC could gradually build up a mass organization, and eventually make the Bantustan system unworkable.87
This argument was erupting again on Robben Island after 1969, when Mandela had what he tactfully called “sharp differences” with Govan Mbeki and his supporters, which led to “one of the longest and most delicate debates.”88 For some time Mandela and Mbeki had strained relations. The more rigid communists, and the Trotskyists of the Unity Movement, argued that to participate in elections was to sell out to apartheid and to distract people from the armed struggle. They wanted to follow the example of the Bolsheviks, who boycotted the elections to the Russian Duma before the revolution in 1917. Mandela conceded that participation could be dangerous, and could sow confusion among the people. But he insisted, as he had in the fifties, that the ANC must remain pragmatic; and they could use the electoral process to build up a mass following in the rural areas. He quoted the Sotho proverb “A river is filled by little streams.”89
Mandela still refused to compromise on the basic issue of apartheid. He showed his strength when in December 1974 he had an unexpected visit from a Cabinet Minister: Jimmy Kruger, the Minister of Justice. Mandela described Kruger in a letter to Winnie, with an eye on the censor, as “warm, cheerful and full of humour”; in fact he found him crude, ignorant and surprisingly unsophisticated. Kruger first tried to persuade Mandela and some of his colleagues to abandon the armed struggle. Mandela countered by explaining the history of the ANC and the Freedom Charter, which Kruger had never heard of. To Mandela’s amazement, he did not even know about the Afrikaner rebels in the First World War.90 “Kruger tried to put us on the carpet,” Mac Maharaj commented, “and Nelson put him on the carpet instead.” Kruger went on to ask Mandela, with unexpected deference, to recognize the legitimacy of the Transkei government, now under the autocratic rule of his nephew Matanzima, and suggested that he could soon be released if he went to live there. Mandela, with his colleagues’ backing, had no doubts about his reply: he could not support the fraudulent policy of separate development. He gave the same answer when Kruger returned a month later. Mandela suspected that Kruger was simply playing white politics—a suspicion which was confirmed shortly afterward when Kruger attacked Mandela in Parliament as a card-carrying communist.91
Mandela now had more time for reflection and analysis, which he could channel into writing his autobiography. It was the idea of Sisulu and Kathrada, and was endorsed by Maharaj, who suggested in 1975 that it should be published on his sixtieth birthday, in 1978, to encourage the liberation movement abroad.92 Writing the book demanded all Mandela’s powers of memory and concentration, but it was easier while the warders were more relaxed. He would sleep for part of the day and write energetically during the night, turning out a long book, complete with many complicated details, in four months. He wrote fluently, with only a few crossings-out. Some sections were headed as letters to his daughter, “my darling Zeni.” “I wish I could tell you more about the courageous band of colleagues,” he wrote in one chapter, “but a curious warder is walking up and down the passage peering in from time to time to chat. I am working under heavy pressure and on strict deadline. Every completed sheet must leave the prison daily and I never see it again.”93
It was a remarkable and well-written document, first vividly recapturing his childhood in the Transkei, then describing his growing political commitment through protests, meetings and trials. He assessed the state of the struggle candidly, from the detachment of jail. “Fourteen years ago, when I returned from abroad,” he admitted, “we were confident that the movement inside the country would be far stronger than it is at present, and be able to exert a lot of pressure on the enemy.” But he was heartened by the massive international efforts for his release. He took a long historical perspective: he looked back at the past courage of the Afrikaners in fighting for their independence against the British, but saw them as “a minority of oppressors heavily outnumbered here at home and isolated in the entire world.” Now it was the Africans who were fighting to regain their lost freedom. But he was careful to correct any impression that the struggle was motivated by revenge.
The wheel of life is there, and national heroes from Autshumao to Luthuli, in fact the entire people of our country, have been working for it for more than three centuries. It is clogged with dry wax and rust, but we have managed to make it creak and move backwards and forwards: and we live in the hope and confidence that one day we will be able to turn it full circle so that the exalted will crumble and the despised be exalted. No—so that all men, the exalted and the wretched of the earth, can live as equals.94
Every day Mandela passed Maharaj ten pages of foolscap. He could not refer to the previous pages, as Maharaj recalled: “He simply had to keep in his mind what he had already written and his train of thought.” Huddled under a blanket, Maharaj then copied out Mandela’s work in tiny writing—less than half a millimeter high—and concealed the small pages among his study books. The originals would be given to Kathrada and Sisulu for their candid comments and corrections. Maharaj then hid the revised miniature sheets inside the binding of a book of statistics, which he planned to smuggle out when he finished his sentence in 1976. Kathrada kept Mandela’s original text as a standby, burying it, with the help of colleagues, in three plastic containers under the courtyard. Disaster struck when some other prisoners began digging the foundations of a new wall on that very spot. Mandela and his friends managed to destroy two of the containers, but the third was discovered and sent to the commanding officer.95
The Commissioner of Prisons wrote a confidential report to his Minister on October 26, 1977—a very long delay—explaining that this “undesirable literature” had been found, and verified by handwriting experts of the South African police as having been written by Mandela, with additions by Maharaj and Kathrada. He summarized the ten chapters, emphasizing the influences on Mandela, including the poet Mkwayi and Bram Fischer; his meetings with black leaders in Africa, and his critical remarks about Prime Minister Vorster. He believed that the trend of the writing “certainly justifies a further case against Mandela�
��—which might not be useful, since he was already serving a life sentence for similar contraventions. He pointed out that as the prisoners had used paper supplied for studying, their study privileges might be permanently withdrawn. In fact, Mandela, Sisulu and Kathrada were all stopped from studying for four years. (Mandela’s manuscript, having been scrutinized, was kept among the prison records.)96
The loss of study privileges was a heavy price to pay for an adventure which was ultimately to be frustrated. The miniature pages were duly smuggled out by Maharaj in 1976. He sent them on to London, where they were retyped and forwarded to Oliver Tambo. The typescript was seen by very few people, but Joe Slovo and Yusuf Dadoo, the communists in exile, made it clear to Maharaj that they thought it did not give proper credit to the communists’ role in the struggle.97 It remained unpublished, and disappeared for twenty years. “Naturally I’m surprised, disappointed and distressed,” Kathrada wrote from Pollsmoor when he learned in 1989 that it had not yet appeared.98 It was not until 1994 that it was to provide the basis for the first two-thirds of Mandela’s published autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom.
By the mid-seventies most of the Robben Islanders had accepted a code of behavior and cooperation. As Neville Alexander put it, confrontations were “avoided and never provoked”: “Negotiations with the authorities, patient discussions and persuasion are the preferred methods. Civility and dignity are insisted upon, also voluntary discipline. On the other hand, no semblance of servility is tolerated. Rudeness is rebutted firmly but politely, as far as possible.”99
Mandela’s complaints to the prison authorities could infuriate the staff. In July 1976 the commanding officer, Colonel J. du Preez, sent on a letter from Mandela to the Commissioner in Pretoria, with an exasperated comment proposing that Mandela’s status be downgraded (which the Commissioner rejected):
He systematically and in a psychological manner brought the reader under the impression of his own importance, self-esteem and the very high level at which he as a prisoner communicates and clearly creates the impression that the warders, the head of the prison and even the commanding officer are of no importance in solving his problems.…
I consider Mandela and the other prisoners in his section as extremely dangerous and as serious statutory offenders who do not hesitate to admit that they have no intention of rehabilitating themselves: their main aim is to create feelings of disloyalty, corruption, abuse of authority etc. against the department and its members.…100
Three years later the Commissioner wrote to the Minister, enclosing a letter which Mandela and Raymond Mhlaba had written complaining about racial discrimination on the island: “In view of the sheer arrogance of the letter it is suggested that note be taken of the contents and that it be filed”—which it was.101
Mandela provided the model for the other prisoners, setting a style of confidence and dignity which rose above the daily tensions and humiliations, and appearing truly “master of his fate.” Alexander claimed that prison could provide personal liberation—from convention, pettiness or self-consciousness—and Mandela did indeed feel liberated in many ways. The prisoners, he reckoned, were freed from the fear of the oppressor, which had so often paralyzed the movement: “Once you have rid yourself of the fear of the oppressor and his prisons, his police, his army, there is nothing that they can do. You are liberated.… You don’t want to be assaulted, you don’t want to be hurt, and you feel the pain and humiliation. But nevertheless you feel that this is the price you have to pay in order to assert your views, your ideas.”102
After Mac Maharaj was released in December 1976, he described Mandela’s state of mind. His cruelest punishment after coming from the heat of battle, thought Maharaj, was to be outside the area of deciding tactics: “You now have to accept that you are in that sense on the sidelines, you have to trust to your comrades.” Mandela’s ideas about basic strategy were becoming stronger and firmer: he saw the armed struggle as central to liberation, but felt sanctions would play “a very important subsidiary role” by depriving the regime of support from international trade and investment. Maharaj had seen Mandela “watching his enemy”—looking for any contradictions and divisions in Pretoria, while guarding against government attempts to divide the ANC through anticommunist scares.
Maharaj, like the others, was inspired by Mandela’s morale, but his warm and welcoming style could be misleading: Mandela, he soon realized, took a long time to become an intimate friend, and even then he still kept his distance. He had developed almost total control over his anger, and behind his kind and gentle manner he had “steeled and hardened” himself: “As he has been living through prison, his anger and hatred of the system has been increasing, but the manifestations of that anger have become less visible to a person. They are more subdued, more tempered. They’ve become more cold and analytical in focusing on the evils of the system.”103
Mandela endorsed that assessment. He had successfully suppressed his emotions and maintained his rationality and self-discipline in the face of the most provocative encounters. “When one is faced with such situations you want to think clearly,” he explained, “and obviously you think more clearly if you are cool, you are steady, you are not rattled. Once you become rattled you can make serious mistakes.”104
But he was to face much more painful challenges within his family, from whom he could not keep his feelings.
17
Lady into Amazon
1962–1976
MANDELA WAS able to relate to his fellow prisoners, and even to his warders. But he found it harder to relate to his family. While he was underground or on trial, he had already become more distant from his children as his political life had absorbed him, like so many great leaders, and his divorce had left many resentments. But in jail he paid a still heavier domestic price. He was cut off from his second, younger family during their formative years; while they grew away from him, and began to see him as an impersonal myth.
Mandela had always been a demanding, ambitious father, an almost Victorian paterfamilias. He felt a heavy responsibility as head of the family, and set high educational goals for his children which they felt they could not attain. “With his family he was conservative and authoritarian,” said one of them. “He wanted a dynasty like the Kennedys.”1 His seclusion in prison multiplied the distance and the obstacles. On their rare visits, the children appeared almost as strangers: he could not touch or feel them, and he could not keep pace with their adulthood as they went their independent ways. His emotional letters from jail to his wife and children, so different from his controlled political letters and statements, express all the anguish of a man who saw his family slipping away from him.
In his first five years on Robben Island Mandela faced two family tragedies. In 1968 his sister Mabel brought their aged mother from the Transkei to see him, together with his second son, Makgatho, and his daughter Maki. Mabel had been apprehensive about the visit, fearful of their mother’s health being affected by the sea voyage and the attentions of the police, who took all her details as if they expected her to die.2 Mandela had last seen his mother very briefly at the Rivonia trial, as a bent, frail figure; in the prison his warder overheard him whispering to Mabel that he was worried by his mother’s thin, haggard look, and he was unusually silent after she left.3 A few weeks later a telegram told him she had died. Mandela was filled with self-recrimination about his past neglect of her. As her only son, he asked to be allowed to bury her in the Transkei—he recalled that Nehru had been let out of prison to take his wife to a tuberculosis clinic in Switzerland. But the government refused to grant him permission, fearing that he might escape. It was left for the tribal grandees, King Sabata and Paramount Chief Kaiser Matanzima, to arrange the funeral, while the Zulu leader Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi sent a letter of condolence.4
Mandela was distressed that he received no visits from his eldest son, Thembi, though he was living in Cape Town. Thembi had often seemed his favorite and brightest child. He had wo
rshiped his father when he went underground in 1961, even wearing his jacket, proud to share his responsibility and secrets. But Thembi was upset by his parents’ divorce, and was torn between his father’s politics and his mother’s religion. He was only sixteen when Mandela went to jail. He distressed his father by not writing to him, and by getting married very young, to the daughter of a Cape Town shopkeeper, with whom he had two daughters. In 1969, when the youngest girl was only six months old, Mandela was given a telegram with the news that Thembi had been killed in a car crash. He was devastated, and lay on his bed, taking no supper, until Sisulu came in, knelt by him and held his hand in silent sympathy. By the next morning he appeared to his colleagues to be his usual self. He sent Evelyn a message of sympathy—the only contact he was to have with her while he was in jail—but to his great sorrow he was again refused permission to attend the funeral.5
He felt all the more dependent on Winnie; but he was acutely aware that she was younger and less experienced than his contemporaries’ wives, and that she was being persecuted by the police. They had been married for only four years when he went to jail, leaving her with two daughters. In passionate letters—at first limited to only two a year, later one a month—he seemed to idealize her, without considering her mistakes and shortcomings.
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