Mandela suffered a very personal anguish when in October 1976, four months after the Soweto uprising, his own home region, the Transkei, became a so-called independent republic (though the only foreign states which recognized it were Israel and Taiwan). His nephew Kaiser Matanzima was elected its first President, and was soon to establish himself, with his brother George, as a virtual dictator, supported by Pretoria. Matanzima saw himself as a friend of the Afrikaners, and thought his uncle Mandela deserved to be in jail for having broken the law.6 He continued to press him to accept Pretoria’s offer to release him to the Transkei. Mandela now had no illusions about his nephew, but he still maintained the family friendship. When in September 1977 Matanzima asked to visit him on the island, which Pretoria was glad to allow, Mandela was tempted to agree, optimistically believing that he might persuade him to turn to democracy if they talked face to face. He consulted his close colleagues, but Sisulu and Kathrada were against the visit, Mbeki and Mhlaba were also unhappy about it and most of the other prisoners were opposed to having any dealings with a sellout such as Matanzima.7
In 1980 Matanzima showed his full ruthlessness when he deposed the Thembu King Sabata—whom the young Mandela had been expected to serve as counselor, and who had become increasingly supportive of the ANC.8 After Sabata’s dismissal a group of Thembu chiefs came to Robben Island to ask Mandela’s advice, and he urged them to support Sabata against Matanzima. Sabata soon afterward escaped and made his way to the Zambian capital, Lusaka, where he formally joined the ANC and became known as “Comrade King.”
Mandela still kept in touch with Matanzima, and even sought financial help for Matanzima’s daughter, who had written him warm letters in jail.9 But he was sure that the Bantustans would never win popular support. As he wrote in 1980:
The so-called independent Bantustans are no more than glorified reservoirs of cheap labour crippled by overpopulation, soil erosion and poverty. They are pseudo-states that have been snubbed and humiliated by the international community and that have hardly any prospect for economic growth. It is for this reason mainly that several Bantustans are now reluctant to take independence.10
Mandela had equally ambivalent feelings about Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the Zulu chief who by the seventies had become the most prominent black leader inside South Africa. Buthelezi was the first Zulu chief—as Matanzima was the first Xhosa chief—to go to university, and Mandela had admired him ever since he had been expelled from Fort Hare for belonging to the ANC. Now a shrewd politician, combining intellectual agility with tribal understanding, in 1970 he had agreed to become Chief Executive of the new Zulu Territorial Authority, thus collaborating with Bantustan policies, and he was increasingly ambiguous toward the ANC. He kept in contact with Tambo, however, and in 1973 called for Mandela’s release, so as to “create a wholesome climate for meaningful dialogue.”11
Buthelezi was thriving on the government’s patronage and publicity while the ANC was silenced. In 1975, with Tambo’s encouragement, he relaunched an earlier Zulu cultural body, Inkatha, as a means of mobilizing the Zulu masses, adopting the ANC flag and uniform.12 But Buthelezi, as Tambo lamented, “built Inkatha as a personal power base far removed from the kind of organization we had visualised.” He controlled Kwa-Zulu as his own fiefdom, and presented himself abroad as the key black leader, meeting a number of heads of government, including the American President, Jimmy Carter. In 1978 a team of West German researchers found that 44 percent of urban Africans in three main South African cities admired Buthelezi more than any other political figure, compared to only 19 percent for Mandela.13 By 1980 Inkatha could claim 350,000 members in nearly a thousand branches. But young black militants began to see Buthelezi as a quisling: at the funeral of Robert Sobukwe in 1978 he was forced to flee by furious youths shouting “stooge” and “sell-out.”14
Mandela remained personally friendly to Buthelezi, as he was to Matanzima. When Buthelezi sent him greetings on his sixtieth birthday he replied cordially, mentioning that he had seen pictures of him in government publications and films. Realizing the letter was politically sensitive, he showed it to his close colleagues, only two of whom objected, and then had it smuggled out via Tambo, leaving him to decide whether to forward it to Buthelezi.15
Buthelezi continued to claim support from the Robben Islanders. “From jail I hear a message from Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu,” he said in Soweto on October 21, 1979, “telling me to go on doing what I am doing on behalf of millions of black people.” But only ten days later he was in headlong collision with the ANC. He went to London for a secret meeting with Tambo, which seemed cordial, although Buthelezi fundamentally opposed the armed struggle and sanctions. But on his return he leaked details of the meeting to the Johannesburg Sunday Times, which proclaimed “Buthelezi Plans a Black Front,” and made him appear to be the dominant black leader. He soon turned against the ANC, and in July 1980 Tambo announced that Buthelezi had “emerged on the side of the enemy against the people.” Mandela still kept in touch with him, as an old chiefly friend; but Inkatha would remain at loggerheads with the ANC for the next sixteen years, the biggest single obstacle to a unified black opposition to apartheid.
Mandela could find more encouragement elsewhere, particularly from the Churches, which had been so cautious in opposing apartheid at the time when he had gone to jail. Now “the winds of change were howling inside the churches,” as the Catholic Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa had foreseen in 1968, and black priests were breaking the pattern of white domination. The Catholics had produced a “black priests’ manifesto” attacking racism within their Church, and were becoming much more vocal against apartheid.16
The Anglicans had appointed the irrepressible black cleric Desmond Tutu as Dean of Johannesburg; he later became Secretary of the interdenominational South African Council of Churches (SACC). Tutu, a neighbor of the Mandelas in Soweto, was fearless in predicting black rule. “We need Nelson Mandela,” he said in April 1980, “because he is almost certainly going to be that first black prime minister.”17 Mandela wrote gratefully to Tutu recalling other Anglican heroes—Michael Scott, Trevor Huddleston and Ambrose Reeves—and noting that the Churches were undermining the government’s excuse that it was persecuting freedom fighters as part of a global communist conspiracy: “The rising indignation of churchmen against all kinds of racial oppression has deprived the government of its only propaganda weapon.”18
Mandela was reaching out to all the main churches, with a politician’s eye for future friends. He congratulated Dr. Gqubule on becoming President of the Methodist Church, noting that his new secretary, Stanley Mogoba, had been “steeled through suffering” on Robben Island. He was glad that the Methodists had started “the momentous task” of putting their house in order: he recalled his own Methodist upbringing, and welcomed the recent conference, which he saw as “vindicating the great principles upon which the early apostles built the Christian Church.”19
Mandela especially welcomed the wind of change within the Dutch Reformed Church, the original seedbed of apartheid. He was inspired by the courage of Dr. Beyers Naude, a fashionable preacher whose father had been a founder of the Broederbond, who rebelled against his own Church and became the first Director of the new Christian Institute, befriending many black leaders including Steve Biko. He was delighted by a report of the DRC’s Synod which denounced all forms of racial oppression and recognized that the Church could not isolate itself from other problems; and he wrote to Sam Buti, a black preacher affiliated with the Dutch Reformed Church whose father he had known well, to congratulate him on joining the South African Council of Churches.20
Mandela was also extending his diplomacy abroad, in letters full of understanding and flattery. When he was awarded an honorary doctorate in Lesotho he accepted it as “a tangible expression of the unqualified and consistent support our struggle has always enjoyed among the people of Lesotho.” He praised the great Basuto King Moshoeshoe, who was “one of the very first black statesmen to
appreciate the dangers of divisions among our people in their struggle against imperialist aggression.” He recalled that the Basuto King Griffiths was a founder member of the ANC in 1912, and how he had met the Basuto Queen in Johannesburg.21
After the death in office of Seretse Khama, the first President of Botswana, in 1980, Mandela wrote to his successor recalling his friendship with Sir Seretse and congratulating Botswana on its government. It was remarkable, he said, that in Africa “men who had no previous experience whatsoever in government as it functions today should be able to run modern states with such success.” And he was grateful to Botswana for providing a haven for South African refugees from political persecution.22
Mandela was becoming reassured by more signs of recognition from around the world. In 1979 he was awarded the annual Nehru Prize for International Understanding, whose previous laureates included Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King and Marshall Tito. Tambo flew to Delhi to deliver Mandela’s acceptance speech, in which he recalled how much Nehru had influenced him, and how Nehru in prison had refused to succumb to mundane hardships, or a closed mind: “The most terrible walls are the walls that grow up in the mind.”23 Mandela himself was not even allowed to see the album commemorating the award ceremony, but a warder sneaked it into his cell overnight.24 “You have to know this place well to appreciate the value of photos to prisoners,” he told Adelaide Tambo. “They are among those things that minimise or even remove altogether the feeling of rejection and isolation.”25
In December 1980 the city of Glasgow provoked a fierce Scottish dispute by awarding him its freedom.* Mandela fulsomely thanked Dr. Michael Kelly, the Lord Provost, praising the Scots and recalling how as a child he had learned about Scots patriots like William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and the Earl of Argyll. He gave a vivid picture of his present predicament:
I live in a prison within a prison, on a notorious island in a country where my people are virtually imprisoned by a minority of racial fanatics who are preoccupied with issues of colour and creed; the phantom gods who have made racial prejudice a religion. In my own country, and because of the colour of my skin, I have never enjoyed the freedom of the streets, let alone the freedom of the city.27
In his letters Mandela was sounding not at all like a prisoner serving a life sentence, and much more like the leader of a government in exile who was waiting to create a new unified nation. He had some reason to be more optimistic about international support. Western liberal opinion had been outraged by the torture and murder of the Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko in September 1977, which revealed all the brutality of the apartheid state. Two months later the United Nations had imposed a mandatory embargo on all arms sales to South Africa—the first in its history.28 The new American Ambassador to the United Nations, the black Congressman Andrew Young, denounced the Pretoria government as “illegitimate,” while the American Vice President, Walter Mondale, warned Pretoria not to have “any illusions that the United States will, in the end, intervene to save South Africa.”29 In London the new Labour Foreign Secretary, David Owen, was increasingly critical of apartheid, although he was frustrated by Whitehall, which he found “adamantly opposed to the application of any sanctions,” and by the British Ambassador to Pretoria, David Scott, who later became Vice President of the trading lobby UKSATA.30
In South Africa itself, the government appeared to be undermined from within by deepening scandals. The Minister of Information, Connie Mulder, had connived with his flamboyant director, Eschel Rhoodie, and the intelligence chief, General van den Bergh, to create their own corrupt web of media and undercover diplomacy with a huge secret budget. By 1978 the “Infogate” scandals were incriminating the Prime Minister himself, and Vorster was forced to resign, pushed upstairs to become briefly State President.31
It looked as if Mandela’s hopes of a split in Afrikaner ranks were at last being realized, and that liberal Afrikaners might begin to break up the solid front of apartheid. “With proper planning and better knowledge of Afrikaans,” he wrote in 1978, “we can speak directly to a wider audience and win more Bram Fischers, Jack Simonses, Piet Vogelses and Breyten Breytenbachs.”32 He and Sisulu were particularly encouraged by Afrikaner writers like André Brink and Jan Rabie, who were attacking oppression. “In the field of literature,” wrote Sisulu in 1976, “Afrikaner writers appear to be rapidly showing themselves more forthright and outspoken on questions of oppression and racial discrimination than their English-speaking counterparts who have delved somewhat delicately into such questions over a much longer period.”33
But in place of Vorster the National Party chose the Minister of Defence, P. W. Botha, as Prime Minister, who soon proved a much tougher opponent. Botha was a fierce champion of his people, a big, bullying man with a loyal army behind him, who saw himself as both fighter and reformer. He soon launched reforms aimed at placating local businessmen and world opinion, and at establishing a more docile black middle class. He allowed blacks in urban areas to buy long leases, and agreed to legalize black trade unions. Despite these reforms, the CIA noted in its publication Africa Review: “The government’s failure to meet demands by black labor for equality in the workplace will damage prospects for economic growth and political stability.”34
Botha also massively strengthened the military machine under the new Minister of Defence, General Magnus Malan, stepping up the campaign to combat the “total onslaught” of communist powers. And he soon co-opted business leaders into the security system and growing arms industry.
Mandela had no confidence in Botha’s reforms. “There is not even a whisper about majority rule or any kind of direct representation for blacks in the country’s Parliament,” he told Dr. Kelly in Glasgow, and recalled the last twenty years of bannings, killings and torture: “Every upheaval such as school boycotts and demonstrations is violently suppressed and turned to a bloodbath.”35
The ANC in exile was now facing a more formidable military force. But Tambo had gained strength from the Soweto uprising. He had been more sympathetic to the young rebels than Mandela, recalling his past in the Youth League: “In a way we started from the point of Black Consciousness too,” he wrote in the ANC magazine Sechaba in late 1977.36 And as thousands of young refugees escaped from South Africa, the ANC recruited large numbers into their training camps. Few of them were able to penetrate back into South Africa, where the military was increasingly effective, with the help of informers and torture. But since Soweto the ANC had been giving more emphasis to political mobilization inside South Africa to complement the armed struggle. In October 1978 Tambo led an ANC delegation, including Joe Modise, Joe Slovo and Thabo Mbeki, to Vietnam after its reunification. On their return they produced a “Green Book” of new priorities which were largely accepted by the National Executive. They foresaw a “protracted people’s war” rather than a “nationwide insurrection,” and identified the main task as being “to concentrate on political mobilisation and organisation so as to build up political revolutionary bases throughout the country.”37
Mandela saw a new ray of hope for himself in March 1980, when the editor of the Johannesburg Sunday Post, Percy Qoboza, launched a petition for his release under the headline “FREE MANDELA.” It had been inspired by the ANC in Lusaka, which had broken with the tradition of promoting only collective leadership, though some Robben Islanders were worried about creating a personality cult.38 The campaign quickly gained momentum inside South Africa. At a meeting at Wits University twenty years after Sharpeville, Mandela’s daughter Zindzi explained that the purpose of the petition was “merely to say there is an alternative to the inevitable bloodbath.”39 Support came from surprising quarters: many whites put “Free Mandela” stickers on their cars, and even General van den Bergh, having been ousted from the secret service after the Infogate scandal, now said that Mandela should be freed: “I know the man’s history well,” he told Kitt Katzin of the Johannesburg Sunday Express, “and I challenge anyone to produce one shred of evidence to prove th
at Mandela was a member of the Communist Party.”40 But the Minister for Police, Louis le Grange, insisted that Mandela “remains just as staunch a communist … as he had been all his life.” P. W. Botha, after being heckled by Afrikaner students, reiterated that he would not release the “arch-Marxist.”41
The campaign led to renewed allegations about Mandela’s communism, against the evidence. “There are nevertheless strong presumptions that Mandela in fact is a member of the Communist Party,” said a top secret (uiters geheim) report from the State Security Council in May 1982. But they relied on the old charges that he had attended a meeting of the Central Committee in 1962, and on his transcription of “How to Be a Good Communist,” exhibited at the Rivonia trial (see this page).42
The Free Mandela campaign reverberated around the world. In New York the UN Security Council joined the call to release him, as the only way to achieve “meaningful discussion of the future of the country.”43 In London Tambo appealed for 1980 to be “a year of united mass struggle,” and republished the statement which Mandela had written after the Soweto uprising, with its militant call: “Those who live by the gun shall perish by the gun. Unite! Mobilise! Fight on!”44
The ANC was beginning to cause more effective sabotage, in keeping with its new policy of “armed propaganda” while avoiding civilian targets and terrorism. In June 1980 ANC guerrillas put bombs in three major oil-from-coal installations: the explosions lit up the sky fifty miles away. South Africa, said the Rand Daily Mail, was now in a “state of revolutionary war.”45 Such attacks, Mandela wrote to Tambo, had “considerably enhanced the ANC profile and made us walk tall. We are undoubtedly a force to be reckoned with.”
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