Winnie did not seem the worse for wear from her prison experience. If she had suffered, she would not have told me anyway. While she was in prison Winnie became friendly with two teenaged Afrikaner wardresses. They were sympathetic and curious, and after Winnie was released on bail, we invited them to visit us. They accepted and traveled by train to Orlando. We gave them lunch at the house and afterward Winnie took them for a tour of the township. Winnie and the two wardresses were about the same age and got on well. They laughed together as though they were all sisters. The two girls had an enjoyable day and thanked Winnie, saying that they would like to return. As it turned out, this was not to be, for in traveling to Orlando they had, of necessity, sat in a non-White carriage. (There were no white trains to Orlando for the simple reason that no whites went to Orlando.) As a result, they attracted a great deal of attention and it was soon widely known that two Afrikaner wardresses from the Fort had visited Winnie and me. This was not a problem for us, but it proved to be one for them: the prison authorities dismissed them. We never saw nor heard from them again.
29
FOR SIX MONTHS — ever since the end of the preparatory hearings in January — we had been awaiting and preparing for our formal trial, which was to commence in August 1958. The government set up a special high court — Mr. Justice F. L. Rumpff, president of the three-man court, Mr. Justice Kennedy, and Mr. Justice Ludorf. The panel was not promising: it consisted of three white men, all with ties to the ruling party. While Judge Rumpff was an able man and better informed than the average white South African, he was rumored to be a member of the Broederbond, a secret Afrikaner organization whose aim was to solidify Afrikaner power. Judge Ludorf was a well-known member of the National Party, as was Judge Kennedy. Kennedy had a reputation as a hanging judge, having sent a group of twenty-three Africans to the gallows for the murder of two white policemen.
Shortly before the case resumed, the state played another unpleasant trick on us. They announced that the venue of the trial was to be shifted from Johannesburg to Pretoria, thirty-six miles away. The trial would be conducted in an ornate former synagogue that had been converted into a court of law. All of the accused as well as our defense team resided in Johannesburg, so we would be forced to travel each day to Pretoria. The trial would now take up even more of our time and money — neither of which we had in abundance. Those who had managed to keep their jobs had been able to do so because the court had been near their work. Changing the venue was also an attempt to crush our spirits by separating us from our natural supporters. Pretoria was the home of the National Party, and the ANC barely had a presence there.
Nearly all of the ninety-two accused commuted to Pretoria in a lumbering, uncomfortable bus, with stiff wooden slats for seats, which left every day at six in the morning and took two hours to reach the Old Synagogue. The round-trip took us nearly five hours — time far better spent earning money to pay for food, rent, and clothes for the children.
Once more we were privileged to have a brilliant and aggressive defense team, ably led by advocate Israel Maisels, and assisted by Bram Fischer, Rex Welsh, Vernon Berrangé, Sydney Kentridge, Tony O’Dowd, and G. Nicholas. On the opening day of the trial, they displayed their combativeness with a risky legal maneuver that a number of us had decided on in consultation with the lawyers. Issy Maisels rose dramatically and applied for the recusal of Judges Ludorf and Rumpff on the grounds that both had conflicts of interest that prevented them from being fair arbiters of our case. There was an audible murmur in the courtroom. The defense contended that Rumpff, as the judge at the 1952 Defiance Trial, had already adjudicated on certain aspects of the present indictment and therefore it was not in the interest of justice that he try this case. We argued that Ludorf was prejudiced because he had represented the government in 1954 as a lawyer for the police when Harold Wolpe had sought a court interdict to eject the police from a meeting of the Congress of the People.
This was a dangerous strategy, for we could easily win this legal battle but lose the war. Although we regarded both Ludorf and Rumpff as strong supporters of the National Party, there were far worse judges in the country who could replace them. In fact, while we were keen to have Ludorf step down, we secretly hoped that Rumpff, whom we respected as an honest broker, would decide not to recuse himself. Rumpff always stood for law, no matter what his own political opinions might be, and we were convinced that when it came to law, we could only be found innocent.
That Monday, the atmosphere was expectant when the three red-robed judges marched into the courtroom. Judge Ludorf announced that he would withdraw, adding that he had completely forgotten about the previous case. But Rumpff refused to recuse himself and instead offered the assurance that his judgment in the Defiance case would have no influence on him in this one. To replace Ludorf, the state appointed Mr. Justice Bekker, a man we liked right from the start and who was not linked to the National Party. We were happy about Rumpff’s decision.
After the success of this first maneuver, we tried a second, nearly as risky. We began a long and detailed argument contesting the indictment itself. We claimed, among other things, that the indictment was vague and lacked particularity. We also argued that the planning of violence was necessary to prove high treason, and the prosecution needed to provide examples of its claim that we intended to act violently. It became apparent by the end of our argument that the three judges agreed. In August, the court quashed one of the two charges under the Suppression of Communism Act. On October 13, after two more months of legal wrangling, the Crown suddenly announced the withdrawal of the indictment altogether. This was extraordinary, but we were too well versed in the devious ways of the state to celebrate. A month later the prosecution issued a new, more carefully worded indictment and announced that the trial would proceed against only thirty of the accused; the others would be tried later. I was among the first thirty, all of whom were members of the ANC.
Under the new indictment, the prosecution was now required to prove the intention to act violently. As Pirow put it, the accused knew that the achievement of the goals of the Freedom Charter would “necessarily involve the overthrow of the State by violence.” The legal sparring continued through the middle of 1959, when the court dismissed the Crown’s indictment against the remaining sixty-one accused. For months on end, the activity in the courtroom consisted of the driest legal maneuvering imaginable. Despite the defense’s successes in showing the shoddiness of the government’s case, the state was obdurately persistent. As the minister of justice said, “This trial will be proceeded with, no matter how many millions of pounds it costs. What does it matter how long it takes?”
* * *
Just after midnight on the 4th of February, 1958, I returned home after a meeting to find Winnie alone and in pain, about to go into labor. I rushed her to Baragwanath Hospital, but was told that it would be many hours before her time. I stayed until I had to leave for the trial in Pretoria. Immediately after the session ended, I speeded back with Duma Nokwe to find mother and daughter doing extremely well. I held my newborn daughter in my arms and pronounced her a true Mandela. My relative, Chief Mdingi, suggested the name Zenani, which means “What have you brought to the world?” — a poetic name that embodies a challenge, suggesting that one must contribute something to society. It is a name one does not simply possess, but has to live up to.
My mother came from the Transkei to help Winnie, and planned to give Zenani a Xhosa baptism by calling in an inyanga, a tribal healer, to give the baby a traditional herbal bath. But Winnie was adamantly opposed, thinking it unhealthy and outdated, and instead smeared Zenani with olive oil, plastered her little body with Johnson’s Baby Powder, and filled her stomach with shark oil.
As soon as Winnie was up and about, I undertook the task of teaching the new mother of the household how to drive. Driving, in those days, was a man’s business; very few women, especially African women, were to be seen in the driver’s seat. But Winnie was independent-minded
and intent on learning, and it would be useful because I was gone so much of the time and could not drive her places myself. Perhaps I am an impatient teacher or perhaps I had a headstrong pupil, but when I attempted to give Winnie lessons along a relatively flat and quiet Orlando road, we could not seem to shift gears without quarreling. Finally, after she had ignored one too many of my suggestions, I stormed out of the car and walked home. Winnie seemed to do better without my tutelage than with it, for she proceeded to drive around the township on her own for the next hour. By that time, we were ready to make up, and it is a story we subsequently laughed about.
Married life and motherhood were an adjustment for Winnie. She was then a young woman of twenty-five who had yet to form her own character completely. I was already formed and rather stubborn. I knew that others often saw her as “Mandela’s wife.” It was undoubtedly difficult for her to create her own identity in my shadow. I did my best to let her bloom in her own right, and she soon did so without any of my help.
30
ON APRIL 6, 1959, on the anniversary of Jan Van Riebeeck’s landing at the Cape, a new organization was born that sought to rival the ANC as the country’s premier African political organization and repudiate the white domination that began three centuries before. With a few hundred delegates from around the country at the Orlando Communal Hall, the Pan Africanist Congress launched itself as an Africanist organization that expressly rejected the multiracialism of the ANC. Like those of us who had formed the Youth League fifteen years before, the founders of the new organization thought the ANC was insufficiently militant, out of touch with the masses, and dominated by non-Africans.
Robert Sobukwe was elected president and Potlako Leballo became national secretary, both of them former ANC Youth Leaguers. The PAC presented a manifesto and a constitution, along with Sobukwe’s opening address, in which he called for a “government of the Africans by the Africans and for the Africans.” The PAC declared that they intended to overthrow white supremacy and establish a government Africanist in origin, socialist in content, and democratic in form. They disavowed communism in all its forms and considered whites and Indians “foreign minority groups” or “aliens” who had no natural place in South Africa. South Africa was for Africans, and no one else.
The birth of the PAC did not come as a surprise to us. The Africanists within the ANC had been loudly voicing their grievances for more than three years. In 1957, the Africanists had called for a vote of no confidence in the Transvaal executive at the national conference, but had been defeated. They had opposed the election day stay-at-home of 1958, and their leader, Potlako Leballo, had been expelled from the ANC. At the November 1958 ANC conference, a group of Africanists had declared their opposition to the Freedom Charter, claiming it violated the principles of African nationalism.
The PAC claimed that they drew their inspiration from the principles surrounding the ANC’s founding in 1912, but their views derived principally from the emotional African nationalism put forth by Anton Lembede and A. P. Mda during the founding of the Youth League in 1944. The PAC echoed the axioms and slogans of that time: Africa for the Africans and a United States of Africa. But the immediate cause for their breakaway was their objection to the Freedom Charter and the presence of whites and Indians in the Congress Alliance leadership. They were opposed to interracial cooperation, in large part because they believed that white Communists and Indians had come to dominate the ANC.
The founders of the PAC were all well known to me. Robert Sobukwe was an old friend. He was the proverbial gentleman and scholar (his colleagues called him “Prof”). His consistent willingness to pay the penalty for his principles earned my enduring respect. Potlako Leballo, Peter Raboroko, and Zephania Mothopeng were all friends and colleagues. I was astonished and indeed somewhat dismayed to learn that my political mentor Gaur Radebe had joined the PAC. I found it curious that a former member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee had decided to align himself with an organization that then explicitly rejected Marxism.
Many of those who cast their lot with the PAC did so out of personal grudges or disappointments and were not thinking of the advancement of the struggle, but of their own feelings of jealousy or revenge. I have always believed that to be a freedom fighter one must suppress many of the personal feelings that make one feel like a separate individual rather than part of a mass movement. One is fighting for the liberation of millions of people, not the glory of one individual. I am not suggesting that a man become a robot and rid himself of all personal feelings and motivations. But in the same way that a freedom fighter subordinates his own family to the family of the people, he must subordinate his own individual feelings to the movement.
I found the views and the behavior of the PAC immature. A philosopher once noted that something is odd if a person is not liberal when he is young and conservative when he is old. I am not a conservative, but one matures and regards some of the views of one’s youth as undeveloped and callow. While I sympathized with the views of the Africanists and once shared many of them, I believed that the freedom struggle required one to make compromises and accept the kind of discipline that one resisted as a younger, more impulsive man.
The PAC put forward a dramatic and overambitious program that promised quick solutions. Their most dramatic — and naïve — promise was that liberation would be achieved by the end of 1963, and they urged Africans to ready themselves for that historic hour. “In 1960 we take our first step,” they promised, “in 1963, our last towards freedom and independence.” Although this prediction inspired hope and enthusiasm among people who were tired of waiting, it is always dangerous for an organization to make promises it cannot keep.
Because of the PAC’s anticommunism, they became the darlings of the Western press and the American State Department, which hailed its birth as a dagger to the heart of the African left. Even the National Party saw a potential ally in the PAC: they viewed the PAC as mirroring their anticommunism and supporting their views on separate development. The Nationalists also rejected interracial cooperation, and both the National Party and the American State Department saw fit to exaggerate the size and importance of the new organization for their own ends.
While we welcomed anyone brought into the struggle by the PAC, the role of the organization was almost always that of a spoiler. They divided the people at a critical moment, and that was hard to forget. They would ask the people to go to work when we called a general strike, and make misleading statements to counter any pronouncement we would make. Yet the PAC aroused in me the hope that even though the founders were breakaway ANC men, unity between our two groups was possible. I thought that once the heated polemics had cooled, the essential commonality of the struggle would bring us together. Animated by this belief, I paid particular attention to their policy statement and activities, with the idea of finding affinities rather than differences.
The day after the PAC’s inaugural conference, I approached Sobukwe for a copy of his presidential address, as well as the constitution and other policy material. Sobukwe, I thought, seemed pleased by my interest, and said he would make sure I received the requested material. I saw him again not long afterward and reminded him of my request and he said the material was on its way. I subsequently met Potlako Leballo and said, “Man, you chaps keep promising me your material, but no one has given it to me.” He said, “Nelson, we have decided not to give it to you because we know you only want to use it to attack us.” I disabused him of this notion, and he relented, giving me all that I had sought.
31
IN 1959, Parliament passed the Promotion of Bantu Self Government Act, which created eight separate ethnic bantustans. This was the foundation of what the state called groot or grand apartheid. At roughly the same time, the government introduced the deceptively named Extension of University Education Act, another leg of grand apartheid, which barred nonwhites from racially “open” universities. In introducing the Bantu Self Government Act, De Wet Nel, the
minister of Bantu Administration and Development, said that the welfare of every individual and population group could best be developed within its own national community. Africans, he said, could never be integrated into the white community.
The immorality of the bantustan policy, whereby 70 percent of the people would be apportioned only 13 percent of the land, was obvious. Under the new policy, even though two-thirds of Africans lived in so-called white areas, they could only have citizenship in their own “tribal homelands.” The scheme gave us neither freedom in “white” areas nor independence in what they deemed “our” areas. Verwoerd said the creation of the bantustans would engender so much goodwill that they would never become the breeding grounds of rebellion.
In reality, it was quite the opposite. The rural areas were in turmoil. Few areas fought so stubbornly as Zeerust, where Chief Abram Moilwa (with the able assistance of advocate George Bizos) led his people to resist the so-called Bantu Authorities. Such areas were usually invisible to the press, and the government used their inaccessibility to veil the cruelty of the state’s actions. Scores of innocent people were arrested, prosecuted, jailed, banished, beaten, tortured, and murdered. The people of Sekhukhuneland also revolted, and the paramount chief, Moroamotsho Sekhukhune, Godfrey Sekhukhune, and other counselors were banished or arrested. A Sekhukhune chief, Kolane Kgoloko, who was perceived as a government lackey, was assassinated. By 1960, resistance in Sekhukhuneland had reached open defiance, and people were refusing to pay taxes.
In Zeerust and Sekhukhuneland, ANC branches played a prominent part in the protests. In spite of the severe repression, a number of new ANC branches sprang up in the Zeerust area, one of them having recruited about two thousand members. Sekhukhuneland and Zeerust were the first areas in South Africa where the ANC was banned by the government, evidence of our power in these remote areas.
The Long Walk to Freedom Page 27