The ANC, still placing hopes in military activity, was training more guerrillas in camps outside South Africa, and infiltrated propaganda through leaflets or broadcasts over Radio Freedom from Zambia and Tanzania. But the small remaining groups of courageous internal activists were soon rounded up with the help of informers and torture.
The Robben Islanders received a huge boost to their morale in April 1974 from a completely unexpected event: a military coup in Portugal, which ousted the government of Marcello Caetano, soon followed by the promise of independence to the two Portuguese colonies in southern Africa, Angola and Mozambique. It appeared to undermine Pretoria’s strategy of using “buffer states” to protect it from military infiltration. The ANC now saw the prospect of military bases in Mozambique, along the South African border, supported by the country’s new revolutionary government, FRELIMO. The arrival of Marxist governments in Mozambique and Angola thrilled militant young black South Africans, who began chanting slogans like “Viva FRELIMO!” or “La lutta continua!” On Robben Island, Mandela felt confident that “the tide was turning our way.” He was delighted to hear that Tambo had attended a state banquet in Mozambique.34
But with all these hopes for the future, the MK was still ineffective inside South Africa. By 1976 it had not fired a single shot within the country’s borders.35 Mandela in his detachment was more realistic than most exiles about the immediate prospects, but he remained hopeful in the longer term. As he wrote in jail, in his remarkable unpublished paper “National Liberation” in early 1976:
Fourteen years after the first MK recruits were sent out, the armed struggle is still to begin inside South Africa. Even the independence of Mozambique and Angola is no guarantee that our problems in this regard have been solved. Newly independent states have numerous problems to contend with and they may find it quite difficult to do what they wish. The initiative is still in enemy hands and the most pressing task after the question of unity is to wrest that initiative from the enemy. I have the confidence that this historic moment will come, and that the results will more than compensate for the agonising moments of suspense and tension the movement has experienced for more than a decade.…
We cannot resist the optimism that the prospects of a new era have been greatly advanced by the liberation of Mozambique and Angola. It is only a question of time before the ideal conditions exist which the movement can fully exploit to come to grips with the last racialist regime in our continent. When that moment comes the enemy may be forced to fight on many fronts.36
But the South African Prime Minister, John Vorster, was sufficiently flexible to come to terms with the new black government in Mozambique, continuing to use the country’s ports and to provide jobs for migrant workers in return for restraint of military activity. By now the economic boom had subsided, and South Africa’s businessmen urgently needed markets in the rest of Africa. Vorster reached discreet agreements with countries farther north, culminating in a secret visit to the Ivory Coast and Liberia. He also brought pressure on Ian Smith to negotiate with the black rebel movements in Rhodesia. At the UN in November 1974 Vorster’s Foreign Minister, Pik Botha, boldly explained that his country was set on reform: “We shall do everything in our power to move away from discrimination based on race or colour.” A few days later Vorster told black Africa: “If you give South Africa a chance, you will be surprised where we will stand.”37 Mandela had few illusions when he heard about Vorster’s speech: he had seen how the government had ignored past opportunities to avert the threat of armed revolution, and was convinced there would be no fundamental changes.
Mandela remained preoccupied with maintaining unity, both within the ANC and with its partners. But there were growing tensions in the ANC in exile, once again between the communists and nationalists, and by 1975 Tambo was facing an imminent split. The immediate cause was the premature death in 1973 of Robert Resha, aged only fifty-three, the fiery nationalist from Sophiatown who had become the ANC representative in London, and who had often criticized the communists, particularly after he was ejected from the National Executive. Mandela had admired Resha, and wrote a long, moving letter to his widow, Maggie, comparing him to his other dead heroes like Luthuli, Z. K. Matthews and J. B. Marks: “Together we took solemn oaths, shared intimate secrets, suffered common setbacks and enjoyed the fruits of victory.”38 But Resha’s memorial service in London became a battleground when the young nationalist Ambrose Makiwane, from the prominent Transkei family Mandela had known as a child, delivered a diatribe against the “small clique” who had hijacked the ANC: “The Africans hate the domination of the Communist Party.”39 Soon afterward a group of eight rebel ANC members formed, including Ambrose Makiwane and his cousin Tennyson. Tambo faced a “venomous” campaign against himself, as he wrote to Mandela, which resorted to “unbridled anti-communism and racism,” using the same language as the white oppressors.40 Tambo still tried to keep the anti-communist rebels inside the fold, but in September 1975 the National Executive voted to expel “the gang of eight,” as they were called. The “treacherous faction,” wrote Alfred Nzo, the ANC Secretary-General, was “deliberately and publicly launched to try to confuse and divide our people.”41
Mandela was distressed by the breakaway: with his own nationalist past, he had some sympathy with the rebels, and hoped that the ANC would adopt “a softer, more lenient attitude.” But he realized that they had deeply offended the leadership, and he was too late to intervene.42 The rebels set up their own body, provocatively called the ANC (African Nationalists). They claimed Mandela as their true leader, but Mandela himself left no doubt that Tambo was his leader. “There is only one ANC,” he wrote in a smuggled message, “and that is the ANC which has its head office in Lusaka, and whose President is O.T.”43 Eventually most of the rebels would rejoin the ANC, and Ambrose Makiwane would welcome Tambo back to South Africa when he returned in 1990. But his cousin Tennyson joined the Transkei government under Kaiser Matanzima, and was killed in July 1980 by an assassin suspected of being an ANC gunman.44
Tambo was under heavy fire, attacked for dull and uninspiring leadership, and worried about further splits—as he wrote to Mandela using a code which described factions as “sports clubs” and the ANC as “the Federation”: “A proliferation of clubs are being formed, but they do not engage in profitable sport unless recognized and admitted into the sporting Federation.” But he was confident that members of the Federation would “arrange private informal bilateral games with new clubs.”45 He still looked to the Robben Islanders for leadership. “The air resounds with the voices of our youth singing in praise of our jailed leaders,” he wrote to Mandela in 1975. “You are making a glorious contribution to the unity of our people.”46
The prospects for the ANC on the mainland still looked bleak. But while the prisoners followed the ups and downs of the armed struggle, they were much less aware of the groundswells of social change within South Africa, which were slowly weakening the iron structures of apartheid and widening the opposition to it. The most obvious centers of unrest were the factories, where the recession and inflation of the early seventies had stirred up black workers to demand higher wages. Strikes were illegal, but black workers went on strike in Durban early in 1973, and later in East London. It was a broad and unexpected movement, with no formal leaders who could be picked up or victimized. These semiskilled workers could not easily be replaced, so they quickly won wage increases. Their success made them more interested in trade unions. They were politically cautious, and linked themselves to white-led unions which the ANC had condemned. But as the ANC had foreseen, there now emerged “the most turbulent period of industrial and political unrest.”47 Mandela in jail appreciated the strikes’ significance, and the role that Harry Gwala and his colleagues had played in fomenting them.48 “There was hardly any evidence that the workers were now looking beyond the limited horizons of purely local interest and concentrating their attention on the defeat of apartheid in general,” he wrote in early
1976. “But the speed at which the strikes escalated, the stubbornness and solidarity among the workers, their defiant attitude, showed that in their respective factories they were no longer prepared to tolerate any kind of discrimination.”
Mandela also took heart from the opposition to apartheid from white liberals, churchmen and students. He was hopeful that the new Progressive Party, which had six MPs elected in the 1974 elections, would help educate whites about the evils of discrimination. He was particularly interested in the students, both black and white, who were defending civil liberties and demanding the release of political prisoners. Christian leaders, he noted, were becoming more outspoken in criticizing apartheid. He urged his colleagues in exile to reach out to all possible friends: “The problems facing us appear insurmountable only so long as we try to solve them through a liberation movement which is divided,” he wrote in his paper “National Liberation” in 1976, “and which cannot rally the people to concentrate all their resources on the defeat of the common enemy.”
Mandela was determined to open up lines to more liberal Afrikaners, all the more so after his contacts with warders. He warned his colleagues not to reject any dealings with Afrikaners, or to be misled by “the well-known hostility and contempt of the Englishmen for this group.” In the same paper he was already anticipating the opportunity which would arise fifteen years later:
Afrikaner politicians have no monopoly of their people just as we have none over ours. We ought to speak directly to the Afrikaner and fully explain our position. Honest men are to be found on both sides of the colour line and the Afrikaner is no exception. We have a strong case and the Afrikaner leaders will command undivided support only as long as their people are ignorant of the issues at stake.…
A violent clash is now unavoidable and when we have fought it out and reduced this country to ashes it will still be necessary for us to sit down together and talk about the problems of reconstruction—the black man and the white man, the African and the Afrikaner.49
Throughout all the setbacks of the sixties and seventies, Mandela continued to look to the Western powers for support, and saw economic sanctions as the main future weapon against apartheid. But neither the British nor the American government was encouraging. When Tambo had first arrived in London he had spent much time seeking support from the Conservative government, first under Harold Macmillan, then Alec Douglas-Home, and had waited endlessly for interviews with the Foreign Office: “He never stopped knocking,” said his wife, Adelaide.50 But the diplomats were wary. One of them, I. J. M. Sutherland, discovered that he was living opposite Tambo’s house in Highgate in 1964, and asked the Foreign Office for background about him: they had only a minimal reference, but they were prepared to meet him if “he has anything interesting to say about South Africa.”51 Tambo found deep suspicions in London about the ANC’s links with the communists, and much support for the anticommunist PAC. In Western Europe he was helped only by the Dutch and Scandinavian governments—to whom Mandela would always be grateful. Tambo felt compelled to seek assistance in Moscow, where he was promised military training and weapons free of charge.52 It inevitably strengthened Pretoria’s argument that the ANC was on the communist side of the Cold War.
When the Labour Party came to power in Britain in October 1964, the full news took some time to reach the prisoners on Robben Island: a letter in which Kathrada’s brother briefly mentioned it was delayed for eighteen months.53 Mandela and Tambo had hopes that the British would take sanctions more seriously, and the new Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, swiftly ordered that “all shipment of arms to South Africa should cease forthwith.”54 But documents recently released show how effectively Whitehall obstructed further sanctions. George Brown, the Economic Secretary, was already concerned about the financial consequences of the arms embargo, and the Colonial Secretary, Anthony Greenwood, was worried that Pretoria would retaliate by moving against the three British protectorates on its borders. “If Dr. Verwoerd decided to ‘take it out on the Territories,’ ” Greenwood reported, “he could inflict very heavy damage on them.”55 Lord Caradon, the British member of the UN Expert Group on South Africa, was pressing for sanctions, but the Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, asked the Prime Minister to speak strongly to him, and Caradon then agreed that the government was opposed to economic sanctions; though he still told the Foreign Office: “We should on no account remove from the South Africans the ultimate threat of sanctions.” As he put it: “The sword of Damocles, though perhaps tied firmly to the ceiling, should nevertheless be there.”56 The fake sword may have helped to placate the Labour left, but it hardly fooled Pretoria.
Washington, under President Lyndon Johnson, appeared to be pressing more seriously for sanctions, which worried the Foreign Office in London. When a State Department paper suggested that selective sanctions “would be an effective and relatively painless way of bringing pressure to bear on South Africa,” the British diplomats quickly responded that sanctions would have no effect, while they concealed their real financial concerns: “Britain would suffer by far the most,” said a confidential draft, “because of the scale of our export and import trade with South Africa.”57
Harold Wilson was anyway soon distracted by a much more immediate crisis in southern Africa. In November 1965 Ian Smith’s white government in the next-door colony of Rhodesia defied all British pressures for democratic elections, and declared unilateral independence. Wilson, ruling out the use of force, imposed sanctions, including an oil embargo which was apparently enforced by a naval blockade; but he turned a blind eye to the flow of oil into Rhodesia via South Africa arranged by British companies.58 Tambo was not impressed. “The British Labour government,” he said in 1969, “has permitted and encouraged the white minority to seize and monopolise political power.”59
Wilson’s government had little time to think about South Africa, let alone the prisoners on Robben Island. In 1967 Pretoria had still less reason to believe in the “sword of Damocles” when the British Minister of Defence, Denis Healey, reopened the question of supplying some arms to South Africa. The move was eventually quashed by Wilson, but not before raising further doubts about the Cabinet’s moral stand on apartheid.60 Three years later, after his visit to Mandela on Robben Island, Healey conceded to the ANC: “I now think I was wrong even to support the matter being considered.” But by that time he was out of office.
The Americans were even less involved. Preoccupied with Vietnam and uninterested in Rhodesia, they entered a period of “benign neglect” of South Africa, as Senator Charles Percy called it.61 In the wake of the civil rights campaign, black Americans provided indignation and rhetoric against apartheid, and some white politicians, including the Kennedy brothers, maintained a radical stance. Bobby Kennedy paid a much-publicized visit to South Africa in 1966, after which he said: “If I lived in this country I would gather up everything I have and get out now.”62 But the rhetoric was at odds with the actions—as Roger Morris of the U.S. National Security Council put it: “Through the 1960s the public face of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations was to deplore the racist regimes at regular intervals at the UN and elsewhere while doing discreet business with them on the side.”63
By the seventies the prospect of Western intervention looked still more remote; and the return of a Conservative government in Britain in 1970 was a new setback. The new Prime Minister, Ted Heath, had been shocked by the inhumanity of apartheid when he first visited South Africa in 1954, but he believed that the British naval base at Simonstown, near Cape Town, was crucial to Western defenses against the communist powers; and he had already pledged to resume arms sales.64 Pretoria turned out at first to want only a few helicopters, since South Africa now had its own growing arms industry, augmented by Mirage fighters from France. But it also needed sophisticated communications technologies from Britain and America, which many companies were glad to supply; the ANC saw the West as underpinning the apartheid economy and its military-industrial complex. The r
eturn of Harold Wilson’s Labour government in 1974 gave the Robben Islanders some new hope; but Wilson was again bogged down in the Rhodesian deadlock, and had little time left for South Africa. “Without the backing of the imperialist countries,” Tambo said on the sixtieth anniversary of the ANC in 1972, “South Africa would long ago have gone bankrupt even while we were fighting, literally, with our bare hands.”65
The Americans had become more conciliatory toward apartheid governments after the arrival of Richard Nixon’s Republican administration in 1969. His adviser Henry Kissinger was bored by South Africa, which he did not mention in the first two volumes of his memoirs, and instinctively in favor of the status quo. He commissioned a secret policy review (NSSM 39)—an “infamous document,” said Tambo after it became public in April 1972—which tilted toward white regimes in southern Africa, and judged that: “For the foreseeable future South Africa will be able to maintain internal stability and effectively counter insurgent activity.” Kissinger chose one of the five options which proposed to relax American pressures and to ease the arms embargo, while increasing aid to black Africa. It argued that the Americans could encourage reforms by opening doors to Pretoria, but the first result was simply to reassure Vorster.66 Soon after the policy shift the American Ambassador went pheasant shooting with government leaders—on Robben Island.67 American diplomats nicknamed the Kissinger policy the “Tar Baby Option,” because Washington was stuck with its new friends in Pretoria; it continued under the presidency of Gerald Ford.68
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