The Long Walk to Freedom

12

IN 1946, a number of critical events occurred that shaped my political development and the direction of the struggle. The mineworkers’ strike of 1946, in which 70,000 African miners along the Reef went on strike, affected me greatly. At the initiative of J. B. Marks, Dan Tloome, Gaur Radebe, and a number of ANC labor activists, the African Mine Workers Union (AMWU) had been created in the early 1940s. There were as many as 400,000 African miners working on the Reef, most of them making no more than two shillings a day. The union leadership had repeatedly pressed the Chamber of Mines for a minimum wage of ten shillings a day, as well as family housing and two weeks’ paid leave. The chamber ignored the union’s demands.

In one of the largest such actions in South African history, the miners went on strike for a week and maintained their solidarity. The state’s retaliation was ruthless. The leaders were arrested, the compounds surrounded by police, and the AMWU offices ransacked. A march was brutally repulsed by police; twelve miners died. The Natives Representative Council adjourned in protest. I had a number of relations who were mineworkers, and during the week of the strike I visited them, discussed the issues, and expressed my support.

J. B. Marks, a longtime member of the ANC and the Communist Party, was then president of the African Mine Workers Union. Born in the Transvaal, of mixed parentage, Marks was a charismatic figure with a distinctive sense of humor. He was a tall man with a light complexion. During the strike I sometimes went with him from mine to mine, talking to workers and planning strategy. From morning to night, he displayed cool and reasoned leadership, with his humor leavening even the most difficult crisis. I was impressed by the organization of the union and its ability to control its membership, even in the face of such savage opposition.

In the end, the state prevailed: the strike was suppressed and the union crushed. The strike was the beginning of my close relationship with Marks. I visited him often at his house, and we discussed my opposition to communism at great length. Marks was a stalwart member of the party, but he never personalized my objections, and felt that it was natural for a young man to embrace nationalism, but that as I grew older and more experienced, my views would broaden. I had these same discussions with Moses Kotane and Yusuf Dadoo, both of whom believed, like Marks, that communism had to be adapted to the African situation. Other Communist members of the ANC condemned me and the other Youth Leaguers, but Marks, Kotane, and Dadoo never did.

After the strike, fifty-two men, including Kotane, Marks, and many other Communists, were arrested and prosecuted, first for incitement then for sedition. It was a political trial, an effort by the state to show that it was not soft on the Red Menace.

That same year, another event forced me to recast my whole approach to political work. In 1946, the Smuts government passed the Asiatic Land Tenure Act, which curtailed the free movement of Indians, circumscribed the areas where Indians could reside and trade, and severely restricted their right to buy property. In return, they were provided with representation in Parliament by token white surrogates. Dr. Dadoo, president of the Transvaal Indian Congress, castigated the restrictions and dismissed the offer of parliamentary representation as “a spurious offer of a sham franchise.” This law — known as the Ghetto Act — was a grave insult to the Indian community and anticipated the Group Areas Act, which would eventually circumscribe the freedom of all South Africans of color.

The Indian community was outraged and launched a concerted, two-year campaign of passive resistance to oppose the measures. Led by Drs. Dadoo and G. M. Naicker, president of the Natal Indian Congress, the Indian community conducted a mass campaign that impressed us with its organization and dedication. Housewives, priests, doctors, lawyers, traders, students, and workers took their place in the front lines of the protest. For two years, people suspended their lives to take up the battle. Mass rallies were held; land reserved for whites was occupied and picketed. No less than two thousand volunteers went to jail, and Drs. Dadoo and Naicker were sentenced to six months’ hard labor.

The campaign was confined to the Indian community and the participation of other groups was not encouraged. Even so, Dr. Xuma and other African leaders spoke at several meetings and along with the Youth League gave full moral support to the struggle of the Indian people. The government crippled the rebellion with harsh laws and intimidation, but we in the Youth League and the ANC had witnessed the Indian people register an extraordinary protest against color oppression in a way that Africans and the ANC had not. Ismail Meer and J. N. Singh suspended their studies, said good-bye to their families, and went to prison. Ahmed Kathrada, who was still a high-school student, did the same thing. I often visited the home of Amina Pahad for lunch, and then suddenly, this charming woman put aside her apron and went to jail for her beliefs. If I had once questioned the willingness of the Indian community to protest against oppression, I no longer could.

The Indian campaign became a model for the type of protest that we in the Youth League were calling for. It instilled a spirit of defiance and radicalism among the people, broke the fear of prison, and boosted the popularity and influence of the NIC and TIC. They reminded us that the freedom struggle was not merely a question of making speeches, holding meetings, passing resolutions, and sending deputations, but of meticulous organization, militant mass action, and, above all, the willingness to suffer and sacrifice. The Indian campaign hearkened back to the 1913 passive resistance campaign in which Mahatma Gandhi led a tumultuous procession of Indians crossing illegally from Natal to the Transvaal. That was history; this campaign was taking place before my own eyes.

Early in 1946, Evelyn and I moved to a two-room municipal house of our own in Orlando East and thereafter to a slightly larger house at No. 8115 Orlando West. Orlando West was a dusty, spartan area of boxy municipal houses that would later become part of Greater Soweto, Soweto being an acronym for South-Western Townships. Our house was situated in an area nicknamed Westcliff by its residents after the fancy white suburb to the north.

The rent of our new home was seventeen shillings and sixpence per month. The house itself was identical to hundreds of others built on postage-stamp-size plots on dirt roads. It had the same standard tin roof, the same cement floor, a narrow kitchen, and a bucket toilet in back. Although there were streetlamps outside, we used kerosene lamps inside as the homes were not yet electrified. The bedroom was so small that a double bed took up almost the entire floor space. These houses were built by the municipal authorities for workers who needed to be near town. To relieve the monotony, some people planted small gardens or painted their doors bright colors. It was the very opposite of grand, but it was my first true home of my own and I was mightily proud. A man is not a man until he has a house of his own. I did not know then that it would be the only residence that would be entirely mine for many, many years.

The state had allocated the house to Evelyn and me because we were no longer just two, but three. That year, our first son, Madiba Thembekile, was born. He was given my clan name of Madiba, but was known by the nickname Thembi. He was a solid, happy little boy who most people said resembled his mother more than his father. I had now produced an heir, though I had little as yet to bequeath to him. But I had perpetuated the Mandela name and the Madiba clan, which is one of the basic responsibilities of a Xhosa male.

I finally had a stable base, and I went from being a guest in other people’s homes to having guests in my own. My sister Leabie joined us and I took her across the railroad line to enroll her at Orlando High School. In my culture, all the members of one’s family have a claim to the hospitality of any other member of the family; the combination of my large extended family and my new house meant a great number of guests.

I enjoyed domesticity, even though I had little time for it. I delighted in playing with Thembi, bathing him and feeding him, and putting him to bed with a little story. In fact, I love playing with children and chatting with them; it has always been one of the things that make me feel most at peace. I enjoyed relaxing at home, reading quietly, taking in the sweet and savory smells emanating from pots boiling in the kitchen. But I was rarely at home to enjoy these things.

During the latter part of that year, the Reverend Michael Scott came to stay with us. Scott was an Anglican clergyman and a great fighter for African rights. He had been approached by a man named Komo, who was representing a squatter camp outside of Johannesburg that the government was seeking to relocate. Komo wanted Scott to make a protest against the removal. Scott said, “If I am going to help you I must be one of you,” and he proceeded to move to the squatter camp and start a congregation there. Scott’s shantytown for the homeless was built near a rocky knoll and the residents christened it Tobruk, after the battle in the North Africa campaign of the war. It was a place I sometimes took Thembi on Sunday morning, as he liked to play hide-and-seek among the rocks. After Scott had set up his congregation, he found that Komo was embezzling money from people who were contributing to the fight against the removal. When Scott confronted Komo, Komo drove Scott out of camp and threatened his life.

Scott took refuge with us in Orlando and brought along an African priest named Dlamini, who also had a wife and children. Our house was tiny, and Scott slept in the sitting room, Dlamini and his wife slept in another room, and we put all the children in the kitchen. Reverend Scott was a modest, unassuming man, but Dlamini was a bit hard to take. At mealtimes, he would complain about the food. “Look, here,” he would say, “this meat of yours, it’s very lean and hard, not properly cooked at all. I’m not used to meals like this.” Scott was appalled by this, and admonished Dlamini, but Dlamini took no heed. The next night he might say, “Well, this is a bit better than yesterday, but far from well prepared. Mandela, you know your wife just cannot cook.”

Dlamini indirectly caused the situation to be resolved because I was so eager to have him out of the house that I went to the squatter camp myself and explained that Scott was a true friend of theirs, unlike Komo, and that they had to choose between the two. They then organized an election in which Scott triumphed, and he moved back to the squatter camp, taking Father Dlamini with him.

Early in 1947, I completed the requisite period of three years for articles and my time at Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman came to an end. I resolved to become a full-time student in order to earn my LL.B. so that I could go out on my own and practice as an attorney. The loss of the eight pounds, ten shillings, and one penny per month that I earned at Sidelsky was devastating. I applied to the Bantu Welfare Trust at the South African Institute of Race Relations in Johannesburg for a loan of £250 sterling to help finance my law studies, which included university fees, textbooks, and a monthly allowance. I was given a loan of £150.

Three months later, I wrote to them again, noting that my wife was about to take maternity leave, and we would lose her salary of seventeen pounds per month, which was absolutely necessary to our survival. I did receive the additional money, for which I was grateful, but the circumstances which warranted it were unfortunate. Our daughter Makaziwe’s birth was not difficult, yet she was frail and sickly. From the start, we feared the worst. Many nights, Evelyn and I took turns looking after her. We did not know the name of whatever was consuming this tiny girl and the doctors could not explain the nature of the problem. Evelyn monitored the baby with the combination of a mother’s tirelessness and a nurse’s professional efficiency. When she was nine months old, Makaziwe passed away. Evelyn was distraught, and the only thing that helped temper my own grief was trying to alleviate hers.

In politics, no matter how much one plans, circumstances often dictate events. In July of 1947, during an informal discussion with Lembede about Youth League business, he complained to me of a sudden pain in his stomach and an accompanying chill. When the pain worsened, we drove him to Coronation Hospital, and that same night, he was dead at the age of thirty-three. Many were deeply affected by his death. Walter Sisulu seemed almost prostrate with grief. His passing was a setback to the movement, for Lembede was a fount of ideas and attracted others to the organization.

Lembede was succeeded by Peter Mda, whose analytical approach, ability to express himself clearly and simply, and tactical experience made him an excellent politician and an outstanding leader of the Youth League. Mda was a lean fellow; he had no excess weight, just as he used no excess words. In his broad-minded tolerance of different views, his own thinking was more mature than that of Lembede. It took Mda’s leadership to advance Lembede’s cause.

Mda believed the Youth League should function as an internal pressure group, a militant nationalistic wing within the ANC as a whole that would propel the organization into a new era. At the time, the ANC did not have a single full-time employee, and was generally poorly organized, operating in a haphazard way. (Later, Walter became the first and only full-time ANC staff member at an extremely meager salary.)

Mda quickly established a branch of the Youth League at Fort Hare under the guidance of Z. K. Matthews and Godfrey Pitje, a lecturer in anthropology. They recruited outstanding students, bringing in fresh blood and new ideas. Among the most outstanding were Professor Matthews’s brilliant son Joe, and Robert Sobukwe, a dazzling orator and incisive thinker.

Mda was more moderate in his nationalism than Lembede, and his thinking was without the racial tinge that characterized Lembede’s. He hated white oppression and white domination, not white people themselves. He was also less extreme in his opposition to the Communist Party than Lembede — or myself. I was among the Youth Leaguers who were suspicious of the white left. Even though I had befriended many white Communists, I was wary of white influence in the ANC, and I opposed joint campaigns with the party. I was concerned that the Communists were intent on taking over our movement in the guise of joint action. I believed that it was an undiluted African nationalism, not Marxism or multiracialism, that would liberate us. With a few of my colleagues in the league, I even went so far as breaking up CP meetings by storming the stage, tearing up signs, and capturing the microphone. At the national conference of the ANC in December, the Youth League introduced a motion demanding the expulsion of all members of the Communist Party, but we were soundly defeated. Despite the influence the Indian passive resistance campaign of 1946 had on me, I felt about the Indians the same way I did about the Communists: that they would tend to dominate the ANC, in part because of their superior education, experience, and training.

In 1947, I was elected to the Executive Committee of the Transvaal ANC and served under C. S. Ramohanoe, president of the Transvaal region. This was my first position in the ANC proper, and represented a milestone in my commitment to the organization. Until that time, the sacrifices I had made had not gone much further than being absent from my wife and family during weekends and returning home late in the evening. I had not been directly involved in any major campaign, and I did not yet understand the hazards and unending difficulties of the life of a freedom fighter. I had coasted along without having to pay a price for my commitment. From the time I was elected to the Executive Committee of the Transvaal region, I came to identify myself with the congress as a whole, with its hopes and despairs, its successes and failures; I was now bound heart and soul.

Ramohanoe was another one of those from whom I learned. He was a staunch nationalist and a skillful organizer who was able to balance divergent views and come forward with a suitable compromise. While Ramohanoe was unsympathetic to the Communists, he worked well with them. He believed that the ANC was a national organization that should welcome all those who supported our cause.

In 1947, in the wake of the Indian passive resistance campaign, Drs. Xuma, Dadoo, and Naicker, presidents, respectively, of the ANC, the Transvaal Indian Congress, and the Natal Indian Congress, signed the Doctors’ Pact agreeing to join forces against a common enemy. This was a significant step toward the unity of the African and Indian movements. Rather than create a central political body to direct all the various movements, they agreed to cooperate on matters of common interest. Later, they were joined by the APO, the African People’s Organization, a Coloured organization.

But such an agreement was at best tentative, for each national group faced problems peculiar to itself. The pass system, for example, barely affected Indians or Coloureds. The Ghetto Act, which had prompted the Indian protests, barely affected Africans. Coloured groups at the time were more concerned about the race classification and job reservation, issues that did not affect Africans and Indians to the same degree.

The Doctors’ Pact laid a foundation for the future cooperation of Africans, Indians, and Coloureds, since it respected the independence of each individual group, but acknowledged the achievements that could be realized from acting in concert. The Doctors’ Pact precipitated a series of nonracial, antigovernment campaigns around the country, which sought to bring together Africans and Indians in the freedom struggle. The first of these campaigns was the First Transvaal and Orange Free State Peoples Assembly for Votes for All, a campaign for the extension of the franchise to all black South Africans. Dr. Xuma announced ANC participation at a press conference over which I presided. At the time, we believed the campaign would be run by the ANC, but when we learned that the ANC would not be leading the campaign, the Transvaal Executive Committee decided that the ANC should withdraw. My idea at the time was that the ANC should be involved only in campaigns that the ANC itself led. I was more concerned with who got the credit than whether the campaign would be successful.

Even after the withdrawal, Ramohanoe, the president of the Transvaal region of the ANC, issued a press statement calling on Africans in the province to take part in the campaign of Votes for All in clear contravention of the decision of the Transvaal Executive Committee. This was an act of disobedience the committee could not tolerate. At a conference called to resolve this dispute, I was asked to move a no-confidence motion against Ramohanoe for his disobedience. I felt an acute conflict between duty and personal loyalty, between my obligations to my organization and to my friend. I well knew that I would be condemning the action of a man whose integrity and devotion to the struggle I never questioned, a man whose sacrifice in the liberation struggle was far greater than my own. I knew that the action that he had called for was in fact a noble one; he believed that Africans should help their Indian brothers.

But the seriousness of Ramohanoe’s disobedience was too strong. While an organization like the ANC is made up of individuals, it is greater than any of its individual parts, and loyalty to the organization takes precedence over loyalty to an individual. I agreed to lead the attack and offered the motion condemning him, which was seconded by Oliver Tambo. This caused an uproar in the house, with verbal battles between those in the region who supported their president and those who were on the side of the executive. The meeting broke up in disorder.

13

AFRICANS could not vote, but that did not mean that we did not care who won elections. The white general election of 1948 matched the ruling United Party, led by General Smuts, then at the height of his international regard, against the revived National Party. While Smuts had enlisted South Africa on the side of the Allies in World War II, the National Party refused to support Great Britain and publicly sympathized with Nazi Germany. The National Party’s campaign centered around the swart gevaar (the black danger), and they fought the election on the twin slogans of Die kaffer op sy plek (The nigger in his place) and Die koelies uit die land (The coolies out of the country) — coolies being the Afrikaner’s derogatory term for Indians.

The Nationalists, led by Dr. Daniel Malan, a former minister of the Dutch Reform Church and a newspaper editor, were a party animated by bitterness — bitterness toward the English, who had treated them as inferiors for decades, and bitterness toward the African, who the Nationalists believed was threatening the prosperity and purity of Afrikaner culture. Africans had no loyalty to General Smuts, but we had even less for the National Party.

Malan’s platform was known as apartheid. Apartheid was a new term but an old idea. It literally means “apartness” and it represented the codification in one oppressive system of all the laws and regulations that had kept Africans in an inferior position to whites for centuries. What had been more or less de facto was to become relentlessly de jure. The often haphazard segregation of the past three hundred years was to be consolidated into a monolithic system that was diabolical in its detail, inescapable in its reach, and overwhelming in its power. The premise of apartheid was that whites were superior to Africans, Coloureds, and Indians, and the function of it was to entrench white supremacy forever. As the Nationalists put it, “Die wit man moet altyd baas wees” (The white man must always remain boss). Their platform rested on the term baasskap, literally boss-ship, a freighted word that stood for white supremacy in all its harshness. The policy was supported by the Dutch Reform Church, which furnished apartheid with its religious underpinnings by suggesting that Afrikaners were God’s chosen people and that blacks were a subservient species. In the Afrikaner’s worldview, apartheid and the church went hand in hand.

The Nationalists’ victory was the beginning of the end of the domination of the Afrikaner by the Englishman. English would now take second place to Afrikaans as an official language. The Nationalist slogan encapsulated their mission: “Eie volk, eie taal, eie land” — Our own people, our own language, our own land. In the distorted cosmology of the Afrikaner, the Nationalist victory was like the Israelites’ journey to the Promised Land. This was the fulfillment of God’s promise, and the justification for their view that South Africa should be a white man’s country forever.

The victory was a shock. The United Party and General Smuts had beaten the Nazis, and surely they would defeat the National Party. On election day, I attended a meeting in Johannesburg with Oliver Tambo and several others. We barely discussed the question of a Nationalist government because we did not expect one. The meeting went on all night and we emerged at dawn and found a newspaper vendor selling the Rand Daily Mail: the Nationalists had triumphed. I was stunned and dismayed, but Oliver took a more considered line. “I like this,” he said. “I like this.” I could not imagine why. He explained, “Now we will know exactly who our enemies are and where we stand.”

Even General Smuts realized the dangers of this harsh ideology, decrying apartheid as “a crazy concept, born of prejudice and fear.” From the moment of the Nationalists’ election, we knew that our land would henceforth be a place of tension and strife. For the first time in South African history, an exclusively Afrikaner party led the government. “South Africa belongs to us once more,” Malan proclaimed in his victory speech.

That same year, the Youth League outlined its policy in a document written by Mda and issued by the league’s executive committee. It was a rallying cry to all patriotic youth to overthrow white domination. We rejected the Communist notion that Africans were oppressed primarily as an economic class rather than as a race, adding that we needed to create a powerful national liberation movement under the banner of African nationalism and “led by Africans themselves.”

We advocated the redivision of land on an equitable basis; the abolition of color bars prohibiting Africans from doing skilled work; and the need for free and compulsory education. The document also articulated the push-and-pull between two rival theories of African nationalism, between the more extreme, Marcus Garvey–inspired, “Africa for the Africans” nationalism and the Africanism of the Youth League, which recognized that South Africa was a multiracial country.

I was sympathetic to the ultra-revolutionary stream of African nationalism. I was angry at the white man, not at racism. While I was not prepared to hurl the white man into the sea, I would have been perfectly happy if he climbed aboard his steamships and left the continent of his own volition.

The Youth League was marginally more friendly to the Indians and the Coloureds, stating that Indians, like Africans, were oppressed, but that Indians had India, a mother country that they could look to. The Coloureds, too, were oppressed, but unlike the Indians had no mother country except Africa. I was prepared to accept Indians and Coloureds provided they accepted our policies; but their interests were not identical with ours, and I was skeptical of whether or not they could truly embrace our cause.

In short order, Malan began to implement his pernicious program. Within weeks of coming to power, the Nationalist government pardoned Robey Leibbrandt, the wartime traitor who had organized uprisings in support of Nazi Germany. The government announced their intention to curb the trade union movement and do away with the limited franchises of the Indian, Coloured, and African peoples. The Separate Representation of Voters Act eventually robbed the Coloureds of their representation in Parliament. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act was introduced in 1949 and was followed in rapid succession by the Immorality Act, making sexual relations between white and nonwhite illegal. The Population Registration Act labeled all South Africans by race, making color the single most important arbiter of individuals. Malan introduced the Group Areas Act — which he described as “the very essence of apartheid” — requiring separate urban areas for each racial group. In the past, whites took land by force; now they secured it by legislation.

In response to this new and much more powerful threat from the state, the ANC embarked on an unaccustomed and historic path. In 1949, the ANC launched a landmark effort to turn itself into a truly mass organization. The Youth League drafted a Program of Action, the cornerstone of which was a campaign of mass mobilization.

At the ANC annual conference in Bloemfontein, the organization adopted the league’s Program of Action, which called for boycotts, strikes, stay-at-homes, passive resistance, protest demonstrations, and other forms of mass action. This was a radical change: the ANC’s policy had always been to keep its activities within the law. We in the Youth League had seen the failure of legal and constitutional means to strike at racial oppression; now the entire organization was set to enter a more activist stage.

These changes did not come without internal upheaval. A few weeks before the conference, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, and I met privately with Dr. Xuma at his home in Sophiatown. We explained that we thought the time had come for mass action along the lines of Gandhi’s nonviolent protests in India and the 1946 passive resistance campaign, asserting that the ANC had become too docile in the face of oppression. The ANC’s leaders, we said, had to be willing to violate the law and if necessary go to prison for their beliefs as Gandhi had.

Dr. Xuma was adamantly opposed, claiming that such strategies were premature and would merely give the government an excuse to crush the ANC. Such forms of protest, he said, would eventually take place in South Africa, but at the moment such a step would be fatal. He made it clear that he was a doctor with a wide and prosperous practice that he would not jeopardize by going to prison.

We gave Dr. Xuma an ultimatum: we would support him for reelection to the presidency of the ANC provided he supported our proposed Program of Action. If he would not support our program, we would not support him. Dr. Xuma became heated, accusing us of blackmail and laying down conditions on which we would vote for him. He told us that we were young and arrogant, and treating him without respect. We remonstrated with him, but to no avail. He would not go along with our proposal.

He unceremoniously showed us out of his house at 11 P.M., and closed the gate behind him. There were no streetlights in Sophiatown and it was a moonless night. All forms of public transport had long since ceased and we lived miles away in Orlando. Oliver remarked that Xuma could have at the very least offered us some transport. Walter was friendly with a family that lived nearby, and we prevailed upon them to take us in for the night.

At the conference that December, we in the Youth League knew we had the votes to depose Dr. Xuma. As an alternative candidate, we sponsored Dr. J. S. Moroka for the presidency. He was not our first choice. Professor Z. K. Matthews was the man we wanted to lead us, but Z.K. considered us too radical and our plan of action too impractical. He called us naive firebrands, adding that we would mellow with age.

Dr. Moroka was an unlikely choice. He was a member of the All-African Convention (AAC), which was dominated by Trotskyite elements at that time. When he agreed to stand against Dr. Xuma, the Youth League then enrolled him as a member of the ANC. When we first approached him, he consistently referred to the ANC as the African National “Council.” He was not very knowledgeable about the ANC nor was he an experienced activist, but he was respectable, and amenable to our program. Like Dr. Xuma, he was a doctor, and one of the wealthiest black men in South Africa. He had studied at Edinburgh and Vienna. His great-grandfather had been a chief in the Orange Free State, and had greeted the Afrikaner voortrekkers of the nineteenth century with open arms and gifts of land, and then been betrayed. Dr. Xuma was defeated and Dr. Moroka became president-general of the ANC. Walter Sisulu was elected the new secretary-general, and Oliver Tambo was elected to the National Executive Committee.

The Program of Action approved at the annual conference called for the pursuit of political rights through the use of boycotts, strikes, civil disobedience, and noncooperation. In addition, it called for a national day of work stoppage in protest against the racist and reactionary policies of the government. This was a departure from the days of decorous protest, and many of the old stalwarts of the ANC were to fade away in this new era of greater militancy. Youth League members had now graduated to the senior organization. We had now guided the ANC to a more radical and revolutionary path.

I could only celebrate the Youth League’s triumph from a distance, for I was unable to attend the conference myself. I was then working for a new law firm and they did not give me permission to take two days off to attend the conference in Bloemfontein. The firm was a liberal one, but wanted me to concentrate on my work and forget politics. I would have lost my job if I had attended the conference and I could not afford to do that.

The spirit of mass action surged, but I remained skeptical of any action undertaken with the Communists and Indians. The “Defend Free Speech Convention” in March 1950, organized by the Transvaal ANC, the Transvaal Indian Congress, the African People’s Organization, and the District Committee of the Communist Party, drew ten thousand people at Johannesburg’s Market Square. Dr. Moroka, without consulting the executive, agreed to preside over the convention. The convention was a success, yet I remained wary, as the prime mover behind it was the party.

At the instigation of the Communist Party and the Indian Congress, the convention passed a resolution for a one-day general strike, known as Freedom Day, on May 1, calling for the abolition of the pass laws and all discriminatory legislation. Although I supported these objectives, I believed that the Communists were trying to steal the thunder from the ANC’s National Day of Protest. I opposed the May Day strike on the grounds that the ANC had not originated the campaign, believing that we should concentrate on our own campaign.

Ahmed Kathrada was then barely twenty-one and, like all youth, eager to flex his muscles. He was a key member of the Transvaal Indian Youth Congress and had heard I was opposed to the May Day strike. One day, while walking on Commissioner Street, I met Kathrada and he heatedly confronted me, charging that I and the Youth League did not want to work with Indians or Coloureds. In a challenging tone, he said, “You are an African leader and I am an Indian youth. But I am convinced of the support of the African masses for the strike and I challenge you to nominate any African township for a meeting and I guarantee the people will support me.” It was a hollow threat, but it angered me all the same. I even complained to a joint meeting of the Executive Committee of the ANC, the South African Indian Congress, and the Communist Party, but Ismail Meer calmed me down, saying, “Nelson, he is young and hotheaded, don’t you be the same.” I consequently felt a bit sheepish about my actions and I withdrew the complaint. Although I disagreed with Kathrada, I admired his fire, and it was an incident we came to laugh about.

The Freedom Day strike went ahead without official ANC support. In anticipation, the government banned all meetings and gatherings for May 1. More than two-thirds of African workers stayed at home during the one-day strike. That night, Walter and I were in Orlando West on the fringes of a Freedom Day crowd that had gathered despite the government’s restrictions. The moon was bright, and as we watched the orderly march of protesters, we could see a group of policemen camped across a stream about five hundred yards away. They must have seen us as well, because all of a sudden, they started firing in our direction. We dove to the ground, and remained there as mounted police galloped into the crowd, smashing people with batons. We took refuge in a nearby nurses’ dormitory, where we heard bullets smashing into the wall of the building. Eighteen Africans died and many others were wounded in this indiscriminate and unprovoked attack.

Despite protest and criticism, the Nationalist response was to tighten the screws of repression. A few weeks later, the government introduced the notorious Suppression of Communism Act and the ANC called an emergency conference in Johannesburg. The act outlawed the Communist Party of South Africa and made it a crime, punishable by a maximum of ten years’ imprisonment, to be a member of the party or to further the aims of communism. But the bill was drafted in such a broad way that it outlawed all but the mildest protest against the state, deeming it a crime to advocate any doctrine that promoted “political, industrial, social or economic change within the Union by the promotion of disturbance or disorder.” Essentially, the bill permitted the government to outlaw any organization and to restrict any individual opposed to its policies.

The ANC, the SAIC, and the APO again met to discuss these new measures, and Dr. Dadoo, among others, said that it would be foolish to allow past differences to thwart a united front against the government. I spoke and echoed his sentiments: clearly, the repression of any one liberation group was repression against all liberation groups. It was at that meeting that Oliver uttered prophetic words: “Today it is the Communist Party. Tomorrow it will be our trade unions, our Indian Congress, our APO, our African National Congress.”

Supported by the SAIC and the APO, the ANC resolved to stage a National Day of Protest on June 26, 1950, against the government’s murder of eighteen Africans on May 1 and the passage of the Suppression of Communism Act. The proposal was ratified, and in preparation for the Day of Protest, we closed ranks with the SAIC, the APO, and the Communist Party. Here, I believed, was a sufficient threat that compelled us to join hands with our Indian and Communist colleagues.

Earlier that year I had been coopted onto the National Executive Committee of the ANC, taking the place of Dr. Xuma, who had resigned after his failure to be reelected president-general. I was not unmindful of the fact that it had been Dr. Xuma who had tried to help me get my first job when I came to Johannesburg ten years before, when I had no thought of entering politics. Now, as a member of the National Executive Committee, I was playing on the first team with the most senior people in the ANC. I had moved from the role of a gadfly within the organization to one of the powers that I had been rebelling against. It was a heady feeling, and not without mixed emotions. In some ways, it is easier to be a dissident, for then one is without responsibility. As a member of the executive, I had to weigh arguments and make decisions, and expect to be criticized by rebels like myself.

Mass action was perilous in South Africa, where it was a criminal offense for an African to strike, and where the rights of free speech and movement were unmercifully curtailed. By striking, an African worker stood not only to lose his job but his entire livelihood and his right to stay in the area in which he was living. In my experience, a political strike is always riskier than an economic one. A strike based on a political grievance rather than on clear-cut issues like higher wages or shorter hours is a more precarious form of protest and demands particularly efficient organization. The Day of Protest was a political rather than an economic strike.

In preparation for June 26, Walter traveled around the country consulting local leaders. In his absence, I took charge of the bustling ANC office, the hub of a complicated national action. Every day, various leaders looked in to see that matters were going according to plan: Moses Kotane, Dr. Dadoo, Diliza Mji, J. B. Marks, president of the Transvaal ANC, Yusuf Cachalia and his brother Maulvi, Gaur Radebe, secretary of the Council of Action, Michael Harmel, Peter Raboroko, Nthato Motlana. I was coordinating the actions in different parts of the country, and talking by phone with regional leaders. We had left ourselves little time, and the planning was hastily done.

The Day of Protest was the ANC’s first attempt to hold a political strike on a national scale and it was a moderate success. In the cities, the majority of workers stayed home and black businesses did not open. In Bethal, Gert Sibande, who later became president of the Transvaal ANC, led a demonstration of five thousand people, which received headlines in major papers all across the country. The Day of Protest boosted our morale, made us realize our strength, and sent a warning to the Malan government that we would not remain passive in the face of apartheid. June 26 has since become a landmark day in the freedom struggle and within the liberation movement it is observed as Freedom Day.

It was the first time I had taken a significant part in a national campaign, and I felt the exhilaration that springs from the success of a well-planned battle against the enemy and the sense of comradeship that is born of fighting against formidable odds.

The struggle, I was learning, was all-consuming. A man involved in the struggle was a man without a home life. It was in the midst of the Day of Protest that my second son, Makgatho Lewanika, was born. I was with Evelyn at the hospital when he came into the world, but it was only a brief respite from my activities. He was named for Sefako Mapogo Makgatho, the second president of the ANC, from 1917 until 1924, and Lewanika, a leading chief in Zambia. Makgatho, the son of a Pedi chief, had led volunteers to defy the color bar that did not permit Africans to walk on the sidewalks of Pretoria, and his name for me was an emblem of indomitability and courage.

One day, during this same time, my wife informed me that my elder son, Thembi, then five, had asked her, “Where does Daddy live?” I had been returning home late at night, long after he had gone to sleep, and departing early in the morning before he woke. I did not relish being deprived of the company of my children. I missed them a great deal during those days, long before I had any inkling that I would spend decades apart from them.

I was far more certain in those days of what I was against than what I was for. My long-standing opposition to communism was breaking down. Moses Kotane, the general-secretary of the party and a member of the executive of the ANC, often came to my house late at night and we would debate until morning. Clear-thinking and self-taught, Kotane was the son of peasant farmers in the Transvaal. “Nelson,” he would say, “what do you have against us? We are all fighting the same enemy. We do not seek to dominate the ANC; we are working within the context of African nationalism.” In the end, I had no good response to his arguments.

Because of my friendships with Kotane, Ismail Meer, and Ruth First, and my observation of their own sacrifices, I was finding it more and more difficult to justify my prejudice against the party. Within the ANC, party members J. B. Marks, Edwin Mofutsanyana, Dan Tloome, and David Bopape, among others, were devoted and hardworking, and left nothing to gainsay as freedom fighters. Dr. Dadoo, one of the leaders of the 1946 resistance, was a well-known Marxist whose role as a fighter for human rights had made him a hero to all groups. I could not, and no longer did, question the bona fides of such men and women.

If I could not challenge their dedication, I could still question the philosophical and practical underpinnings of Marxism. But I had little knowledge of Marxism, and in political discussions with my Communist friends I found myself handicapped by my ignorance of Marxist philosophy. I decided to remedy this.

I acquired the complete works of Marx and Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and others and probed into the philosophy of dialectical and historical materialism. I had little time to study these works properly. While I was stimulated by the Communist Manifesto, I was exhausted by Das Kapital. But I found myself strongly drawn to the idea of a classless society, which, to my mind, was similar to traditional African culture where life was shared and communal. I subscribed to Marx’s basic dictum, which has the simplicity and generosity of the Golden Rule: “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.”

Dialectical materialism seemed to offer both a searchlight illuminating the dark night of racial oppression and a tool that could be used to end it. It helped me to see the situation other than through the prism of black and white relations, for if our struggle was to succeed, we had to transcend black and white. I was attracted to the scientific underpinnings of dialectical materialism, for I am always inclined to trust what I can verify. Its materialistic analysis of economics rang true to me. The idea that the value of goods was based on the amount of labor that went into them seemed particularly appropriate for South Africa. The ruling class paid African labor a subsistence wage and then added value to the cost of the goods, which they retained for themselves.

Marxism’s call to revolutionary action was music to the ears of a freedom fighter. The idea that history progresses through struggle and change occurs in revolutionary jumps was similarly appealing. In my reading of Marxist works, I found a great deal of information that bore on the type of problems that face a practical politician. Marxists gave serious attention to national liberation movements and the Soviet Union in particular supported the national struggles of many colonial peoples. This was another reason why I amended my view of Communists and accepted the ANC position of welcoming Marxists into its ranks.

A friend once asked me how I could reconcile my creed of African nationalism with a belief in dialectical materialism. For me, there was no contradiction. I was first and foremost an African nationalist fighting for our emancipation from minority rule and the right to control our own destiny. But at the same time, South Africa and the African continent were part of the larger world. Our problems, while distinctive and special, were not entirely unique, and a philosophy that placed those problems in an international and historical context of the greater world and the course of history was valuable. I was prepared to use whatever means to speed up the erasure of human prejudice and the end of chauvinistic and violent nationalism. I did not need to become a Communist in order to work with them. I found that African nationalists and African Communists generally had far more uniting them than dividing them. The cynical have always suggested that the Communists were using us. But who is to say that we were not using them?

14

IF WE HAD ANY HOPES or illusions about the National Party before they came into office, we were disabused of them quickly. Their threat to put the kaffir in his place was not an idle one. Apart from the Suppression of Communism Act, two laws passed in 1950 formed the cornerstones of apartheid: the Population Registration Act and the Group Areas Act. As I have mentioned, the Population Registration Act authorized the government officially to classify all South Africans according to race. If it had not already been so, race became the sine qua non of South African society. The arbitrary and meaningless tests to decide black from Coloured or Coloured from white often resulted in tragic cases where members of the same family were classified differently, all depending on whether one child had a lighter or darker complexion. Where one was allowed to live and work could rest on such absurd distinctions as the curl of one’s hair or the size of one’s lips.

The Group Areas Act was the foundation of residential apartheid. Under its regulations, each racial group could own land, occupy premises, and trade only in its own separate area. Indians could henceforth only live in Indian areas, Africans in African, Coloureds in Coloured. If whites wanted the land or houses of the other groups, they could simply declare the land a white area and take them. The Group Areas Act initiated the era of forced removals, when African communities, towns, and villages in newly designated “white” urban areas were violently relocated because the nearby white landowners did not want Africans living near them or simply wanted their land.

At the top of the list for removal was Sophiatown, a vibrant community of more than fifty thousand people, which was one of the oldest black settlements in Johannesburg. Despite its poverty, Sophiatown brimmed with a rich life and was an incubator of so much that was new and valuable in African life and culture. Even before the government’s efforts to remove it, Sophiatown held a symbolic importance for Africans disproportionate to its small population.

The following year, the government passed two more laws that directly attacked the rights of the Coloureds and Africans. The Separate Representation of Voters Act aimed to transfer Coloureds to a separate voters’ roll in the Cape, thereby diluting the franchise rights that they had enjoyed for more than a century. The Bantu Authorities Act abolished the Natives Representative Council, the one indirect forum of national representation for Africans, and replaced it with a hierarchical system of tribal chiefs appointed by the government. The idea was to restore power to traditional and mainly conservative ethnic leaders in order to perpetuate ethnic differences that were beginning to erode. Both laws epitomized the ethos of the Nationalist government, which pretended to preserve what they were attempting to destroy. Laws stripping people of their rights were inevitably described as laws restoring those rights.

The Coloured people rallied against the Separate Representation of Voters Act, organizing a tremendous demonstration in Cape Town in March of 1951 and a strike in April that kept shops closed and schoolchildren at home. It was in the context of this spirit of activism by Indians, Coloureds, and Africans that Walter Sisulu first broached the idea to a small group of us of a national civil disobedience campaign. He outlined a plan under which selected volunteers from all groups would deliberately invite imprisonment by defying certain laws.

The idea immediately appealed to me, as it did to the others, but I differed with Walter on the question of who should take part. I had recently become national president of the Youth League, and in my new role I urged that the campaign should be exclusively African. The average African, I said, was still cautious about joint action with Indians and Coloureds. While I had made progress in terms of my opposition to communism, I still feared the influence of Indians. In addition, many of our grassroots African supporters saw Indians as exploiters of black labor in their role as shopkeepers and merchants.

Walter vehemently disagreed, suggesting that the Indians, Coloureds, and Africans were inextricably bound together. The issue was taken up at a meeting of the National Executive Committee and my view was voted down, even by those who were considered staunch African nationalists. But I was nevertheless persistent and I raised the matter once more at the national conference in December 1951, where the delegates dismissed my view as emphatically as the National Executive Committee had done. Now that my view had been rejected by the highest levels of the ANC, I fully accepted the agreed-upon position. While my speech advocating a go-it-alone strategy was met with a lukewarm reception, the speech I gave as president of the Youth League after the league pledged its support for the new policy of cooperation was given a resounding ovation.

At the behest of a joint planning council consisting of Dr. Moroka, Walter, J. B. Marks, Yusuf Dadoo, and Yusuf Cachalia, the ANC conference endorsed a resolution calling upon the government to repeal the Suppression of Communism Act, the Group Areas Act, the Separate Representation of Voters Act, the Bantu Authorities Act, the pass laws, and stock limitation laws by February 29, 1952. The law was intended to reduce overgrazing by cattle, but its impact would be to further abridge land for Africans. The council resolved that the ANC would hold demonstrations on April 6, 1952, as a prelude to the launching of the Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws. That same day white South Africans would be celebrating the three hundredth anniversary of Jan Van Riebeeck’s arrival at the Cape in 1652. April 6 is the day white South Africans annually commemorate as the founding of their country — and Africans revile as the beginning of three hundred years of enslavement.

The ANC drafted a letter to the prime minister advising him of these resolutions and the deadline for repealing the laws. Because the letter was to go out under the name of Dr. Moroka, and Dr. Moroka had not participated in the writing of it, I was instructed to take him the letter by driving to his home in Thaba ’Nchu, a town near Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, a very conservative area of the country. I almost did not make it there to see him.

Only a few weeks before, I had taken my driver’s test. In those days, a driver’s license was an unusual thing for an African, for very few blacks had cars. On the appointed day, I borrowed a car to use for the test. I was a bit cocky, and decided to drive the car there myself. I was running late and was driving faster than I should have been, and as I maneuvered the car along a side street that met a main road, I failed to look both ways and collided with a car coming in another direction. The damage was minimal, but now I would certainly be late. The other driver was a reasonable fellow and we simply agreed to pay our own expenses.

When I reached the testing station, I observed a white woman ahead of me in the middle of her test. She was driving properly and cautiously. When the test was finished, the driving inspector said, “Thank you. Would you please park the car over there,” gesturing to a space nearby. She had performed the test well enough to pass, but as the woman drove over to the parking place, she did not negotiate a corner properly and the back wheel jumped the curb. The inspector hurried over and said, “I’m sorry, madam, you’ve failed the test; please make another appointment.” I felt my confidence ebbing. If this fellow tricks a white woman into failing her test, what hope would I have? But I performed well on the test, and when the inspector told me to park the car at the end of the exam, I drove so carefully that I thought he might penalize me for going too slowly.

Once I could legally drive, I became a one-man taxi service. It was one’s obligation to give rides to comrades and friends. I was thus deputized to take the letter to Dr. Moroka. This was no hardship to me as I have always found it enjoyable to gaze out the window while driving. I seemed to have my best ideas while driving through the countryside with the wind whipping through the window.

On my way down to Thaba ’Nchu, I passed through Kroonstad, a conservative Free State town about 120 miles south of Johannesburg. I was driving up a hill and saw two white boys ahead of me on bicycles. My driving was still a bit unsteady, and I came too close to the boys, one of whom suddenly made a turn without signaling, and we collided. He was knocked off his bicycle and was groaning when I got out of the car to help him. He had his arms out signaling for me to pick him up, but just as I was about to do so, a white truck driver yelled for me not to touch the boy. The truck driver scared the child, who then dropped his arms as though he did not want me to pick him up. The boy was not badly hurt, and the truck driver took him to the police station, which was close by.

The local police arrived a short time later, and the white sergeant took one look at me and said, “Kaffer, jy sal kak vandag!” (Kaffir, you will shit today!) I was shaken by the accident and the violence of his words, but I told him in no uncertain terms that I would shit when I pleased, not when a policeman told me to. At this, the sergeant took out his notebook to record my particulars. Afrikaans policemen were surprised if a black man could speak English, much less answer back.

After I identified myself, he turned to the car, which he proceeded to ransack. From under the floor mat he pulled out a copy of the left-wing weekly The Guardian, which I had hidden immediately after the accident. (I had slipped the letter for Dr. Moroka inside my shirt.) He looked at the title and then held it up in the air like a pirate with his booty: “Wragtig ons her ’n Kommunis gevang!” he cried. (My word, we’ve caught a Communist!) Brandishing the newspaper, he hurried off.

The sergeant returned after about four hours, accompanied by another officer. This sergeant, while also an Afrikaner, was intent on doing his duty correctly. He said he would need to take measurements at the site of the accident for police records. I told the sergeant that it was not proper to take the measurements at night when the accident had occurred in the daylight. I added that I intended to spend the night in Thaba ’Nchu, and that I could not afford to stay in Kroonstad. The sergeant eyed me impatiently and said, “What is your name?”

“Mandela,” I said.

“No, the first one,” he said. I told him.

“Nelson,” the sergeant said, as if he were talking to a boy, “I want to help you resume your journey. But if you are going to be difficult with me I will have no alternative but to be difficult with you and lock you up for the night.” That brought me down to earth and I consented to the measurements.

I resumed my journey late that night, and the next morning I was traveling through the district of Excelsior when my car ground to a halt. I had run out of petrol. I walked to a nearby farmhouse and explained in English to an elderly white lady that I would like to buy some petrol. As she was closing the door, she said, “I don’t have any petrol for you.” I tramped two miles to the next farm and, chastened by my unsuccessful first effort, tried a different approach. I asked to see the farmer, and when he appeared I assumed a humble demeanor. “My baas has run out of petrol,” I said. (Baas, the Afrikaans word for boss or master, signifies subservience.) Friendly and helpful, the farmer was a relation of Prime Minister Strydom. Yet, I believe he would have given me the petrol had I told him the truth and not used the hated word baas.

The meeting with Dr. Moroka proved far less eventful than my journey there. He approved of the letter and I made my way back to Johannesburg without incident. The letter to the prime minister noted that the ANC had exhausted every constitutional means at our disposal to achieve our legitimate rights, and that we demanded the repeal of the six “unjust laws” by February 29, 1952, or else we would take extra-constitutional action. Malan’s reply, signed by his private secretary, asserted that whites had an inherent right to take measures to preserve their own identity as a separate community, and ended with the threat that if we pursued our actions the government would not hesitate to make full use of its machinery to quell any disturbances.

We regarded Malan’s curt dismissal of our demands as a declaration of war. We now had no alternative but to resort to civil disobedience, and we embarked on preparations for mass action in earnest. The recruitment and training of volunteers was one of the essential tasks of the campaign and would in large part be responsible for its success or failure. On April 6, preliminary demonstrations took place in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Port Elizabeth, Durban, and Cape Town. While Dr. Moroka addressed a crowd at Freedom Square in Johannesburg, I spoke to a group of potential volunteers at the Garment Workers Union. I explained to a group of several hundred Africans, Indians, and Coloureds that volunteering was a difficult and even dangerous duty, as the authorities would seek to intimidate, imprison, and perhaps attack the volunteers. No matter what the authorities did, the volunteers could not retaliate, otherwise they would undermine the value of the entire enterprise. They must respond to violence with nonviolence; discipline must be maintained at all cost.

On May 31, the executives of the ANC and the SAIC met in Port Elizabeth and announced that the Defiance Campaign would begin on June 26, the anniversary of the first National Day of Protest. They also created a National Action Committee to direct the campaign and a National Volunteer Board to recruit and train volunteers. I was appointed national volunteer-in-chief of the campaign and chairman of both the Action Committee and the Volunteer Board. My responsibilities were to organize the campaign, coordinate the regional branches, canvass for volunteers, and raise funds.

We also discussed whether the campaign should follow Gandhian principles of nonviolence, or what the Mahatma called satyagraha, a nonviolence that seeks to conquer through conversion. Some argued for nonviolence on purely ethical grounds, saying it was morally superior to any other method. This idea was strongly affirmed by Manilal Gandhi, the Mahatma’s son and the editor of the newspaper Indian Opinion, who was a prominent member of the SAIC. With his gentle demeanor, Gandhi seemed the very personification of nonviolence, and he insisted that the campaign be run along identical lines to that of his father’s in India.

Others said that we should approach this issue not from the point of view of principles but of tactics, and that we should employ the method demanded by the conditions. If a particular method or tactic enabled us to defeat the enemy, then it should be used. In this case, the state was far more powerful than we, and any attempts at violence by us would be devastatingly crushed. This made nonviolence a practical necessity rather than an option. This was my view, and I saw nonviolence in the Gandhian model not as an inviolable principle but as a tactic to be used as the situation demanded. The principle was not so important that the strategy should be used even when it was self-defeating, as Gandhi himself believed. I called for nonviolent protest for as long as it was effective. This view prevailed, despite Manilal Gandhi’s strong objections.

The joint planning council agreed upon an open-ended program of noncooperation and nonviolence. Two stages of defiance were proposed. In the first stage, a small number of well-trained volunteers would break selected laws in a handful of urban areas. They would enter proscribed areas without permits, use Whites Only facilities such as toilets, Whites Only railway compartments, waiting rooms, and post office entrances. They would deliberately remain in town after curfew. Each batch of defiers would have a leader who would inform the police in advance of the act of disobedience so that the arrests could take place with a minimum of disturbance. The second stage was envisioned as mass defiance, accompanied by strikes and industrial actions across the country.

Prior to the inauguration of the Defiance Campaign, a rally, called the Day of the Volunteers, was held in Durban on June 22. Chief Luthuli, president of the Natal ANC, and Dr. Naicker, president of the Natal Indian Congress, both spoke and committed themselves to the campaign. I had driven down the day before and was the main speaker. About ten thousand people were in attendance, and I told the crowd that the Defiance Campaign would be the most powerful action ever undertaken by the oppressed masses in South Africa. I had never addressed such a great crowd before, and it was an exhilarating experience. One cannot speak to a mass of people as one addresses an audience of two dozen. Yet I have always tried to take the same care to explain matters to great audiences as to small ones. I told the people that they would make history and focus the attention of the world on the racist policies of South Africa. I emphasized that unity among the black people — Africans, Coloureds, and Indians — in South Africa had at last become a reality.

All across the country, those who defied on June 26 did so with courage, enthusiasm, and a sense of history. The campaign began in the early morning hours in Port Elizabeth, where thirty-three defiers, under the leadership of Raymond Mhlaba, entered a railway station through a Whites Only entrance and were arrested. They marched in singing freedom songs, to the accompanying cheers of friends and family. In a call and response, the defiers and the crowd yelled, “Mayibuye Afrika!” (Let Africa come back!)

On the morning of the twenty-sixth, I was in the ANC office overseeing the day’s demonstrations. The Transvaal batch of volunteers was scheduled to go into action at midday at an African township near Boksburg, east of Johannesburg. Led by Reverend N. B. Tantsi, they were to court arrest by entering the township without permission. Reverend Tantsi was an elderly fellow, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the acting president of the Transvaal ANC.

It was late morning, and I was waiting for Reverend Tantsi to arrive from Pretoria, when he telephoned me at the office. With regret in his voice, he told me that his doctor advised him against defying and going to prison. I assured him that we would provide him with warm clothing and that he would spend only a night in jail, but to no avail. This was a grave disappointment, for Reverend Tantsi was a distinguished figure and had been selected in order to show the authorities that we were not just a group of young rabble-rousers.

In place of Reverend Tantsi, we quickly found someone equally venerable: Nana Sita, the president of the Transvaal Indian Congress, who had served a month in jail for his passive resistance during the 1946 protest campaign. Despite his advanced age and acute arthritis, Sita was a fighter and agreed to lead our defiers.

In the afternoon, as we were preparing to go to Boksburg, I realized that the secretary of the Transvaal branch of the ANC was nowhere to be found. He was meant to accompany Nana Sita to Boksburg. This was another crisis, and I turned to Walter and said, “You must go.” This was our first event in the Transvaal, and it was necessary to have prominent figures lead the defiers, otherwise the leaders would appear to be hanging back while the masses took the punishment. Even though Walter was one of the organizers and was scheduled to defy later, he readily agreed. My main concern was that he was wearing a suit, impractical dress for prison, but we managed to find him some old clothes instead.

We then left for Boksburg, where Yusuf Cachalia and I planned to deliver a letter to the Boksburg magistrate, advising him that fifty of our volunteers would enter the African township in his area that day without permits. When we arrived at the magistrate’s office, we found a large contingent of pressmen and photographers. As I handed the envelope to the magistrate, the photographers went into action. The magistrate shielded himself from the camera flashes and then invited Yusuf and myself into his chambers to discuss the matter privately. He was a reasonable man, and said his office was always open to us, but that excessive publicity would only worsen matters.

From the magistrate’s office, we went straight to the township where the demonstration was taking place, and even from half a mile away we heard the robust singing of our volunteers and the great crowd of supporters who had come to encourage them. At the scene, we found the high metal gates to the township locked and our volunteers waiting patiently outside, demanding entrance. There were fifty-two volunteers in all, both Africans and Indians, and a crowd of several hundred enthusiastic spectators and journalists. Walter was at the head of the defiers; his presence was evidence that we meant business. But the guiding spirit of the demonstrators was Nana Sita, who, despite his arthritis, was moving among the demonstrators in high spirits, clapping them on the back, and bolstering their confidence with his own.

For the first hour there was a standoff. The police were uncharacteristically restrained and their behavior baffled us. Was their restraint a strategy to exhaust the volunteers? Were they waiting for the journalists to depart and then stage a massacre under the cover of darkness? Or were they faced with the dilemma that by arresting us — which is what they would have normally done — they would be doing the very thing we wanted? But even while we were wondering, the situation suddenly changed. The police ordered the gates opened. Immediately the volunteers surged through the gates, thus breaking the law. A police lieutenant blew a whistle and seconds later the police surrounded the volunteers and began arresting them. The campaign was under way. The demonstrators were carted off to the local police station and charged.

That same evening, the leaders of the Action Committee, which included Oliver Tambo, Yusuf Cachalia, and myself, attended a meeting in the city to discuss the day’s events and to plan for the week ahead. It was near the area where the second batch of defiers, led by Flag Boshielo, chairman of the central branch of the ANC, were courting arrest. Shortly after eleven o’clock, we found them marching in unison in the street; at eleven, curfew regulations went into effect and Africans needed a permit to be outside.

We emerged from our meeting at midnight. I felt exhausted and was thinking not of defiance but of a hot meal and a night’s sleep. At that moment, a policeman approached Yusuf and me. It was obvious that we were going home, not protesting. “No, Mandela,” the policeman called out. “You can’t escape.” He pointed with his nightstick to the police wagon parked nearby and said, “Into the van.” I felt like explaining to him that I was in charge of running the campaign on a day-to-day basis and was not scheduled to defy and be arrested until much later, but of course, that would have been ridiculous. I watched as he arrested Yusuf, who burst out laughing at the irony of it all. It was a lovely sight to see him smiling as he was led away by the police.

Moments later, Yusuf and I found ourselves among the more than fifty of our volunteers led by Flag Boshielo who were being taken in trucks to the red-brick police station known as Marshall Square. As the leaders of the Action Committee, we were worried that the others would wonder at our absence and I was concerned about who would be running the campaign. But spirits were high. Even on the way to prison, the vans swayed to the rich voices of the defiers singing “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” (God Bless Africa), the hauntingly beautiful African national anthem.

That first night, in the drill yard, one of us was pushed so violently by a white warder that he fell down some steps and broke his ankle. I protested to the warder about his behavior, and he lashed out at me by kicking me in the shin. I demanded that the injured man receive medical attention and we initiated a small but vocal demonstration. We were curtly informed that the injured man could make a request for a doctor the next day if he so wished. We were aware throughout the night of his acute pain.

Until then I had spent bits and pieces of time in prison, but this was my first concentrated experience. Marshall Square was squalid, dark, and dingy, but we were all together and so impassioned and spirited that I barely noticed my surroundings. The camaraderie of our fellow defiers made the two days pass very quickly.

* * *

On that first day of the Defiance Campaign, more than 250 volunteers around the country violated various unjust laws and were imprisoned. It was an auspicious beginning. Our troops were orderly, disciplined, and confident.

Over the next five months, 8,500 people took part in the campaign. Doctors, factory workers, lawyers, teachers, students, ministers, defied and went to jail. They sang, “Hey, Malan! Open the jail doors. We want to enter.” The campaign spread throughout the Witwatersrand, to Durban, to Port Elizabeth, East London, and Cape Town, and smaller towns in the eastern and western Cape. Resistance was beginning to percolate even in the rural areas. For the most part, the offenses were minor, and the penalties ranged from no more than a few nights in jail to a few weeks, with the option of a fine which rarely exceeded ten pounds. The campaign received an enormous amount of publicity and the membership of the ANC shot up from some 20,000 to 100,000 with the most spectacular increase occurring in the eastern Cape, which contributed half of all new members.

During the six months of the campaign I traveled a great deal throughout the country. I generally went by car, leaving at night or very early in the morning. I toured the Cape, Natal, and the Transvaal, explaining the campaign to small groups, sometimes going from house to house in the townships. Often, my task was to iron out differences in areas that were about to launch actions or had recently done so. In those days, when mass communication for Africans was primitive or nonexistent, politics were parochial. We had to win people over one by one.

On one occasion I drove to the eastern Cape to resolve a dispute involving Alcott Gwentshe, who was running the campaign in East London. Gwentshe had been a successful shopkeeper and had played an important role in organizing East London for the stay-at-home of June 26, two years before. He had briefly gone to jail at the beginning of the Defiance Campaign. He was a strong and able man, but he was an individualist who ignored the advice of the executive and took decisions unilaterally. He was now at odds with his own executive, which was mainly populated with intellectuals.

Gwentshe knew how to exploit certain issues in order to discredit his opponents. He would speak before local members who were workers not intellectuals, and say — in Xhosa, never English, for English was the language of the intellectuals — “Comrades, I think you know that I have suffered for the struggle. I had a good job and then went to jail at the beginning of the Defiance Campaign and I lost that job. Now that I am out of prison, these intellectuals have come along and said, ‘Gwentshe, we are better educated than you, we are more capable than you, let us run this campaign.’ ”

When I investigated the situation I found that Gwentshe had indeed ignored the advice of the executive. But the people were behind him, and he had created a disciplined and well-organized group of volunteers who had defied in an orderly fashion even while Gwentshe was in prison. Although I thought Gwentshe was wrong for disregarding the executive, he was doing a good job and was so firmly entrenched that he could not easily be dislodged. When I saw the members of the executive, I explained that it was impractical to do anything about the situation now, but if they wanted to remedy it, they must defeat him at the next election. It was one of the first times that I saw that it was foolhardy to go against the masses of people. It is no use to take an action to which the masses are opposed, for it will then be impossible to enforce.

The government saw the campaign as a threat to its security and its policy of apartheid. They regarded civil disobedience not as a form of protest but as a crime, and were perturbed by the growing partnership between Africans and Indians. Apartheid was designed to divide racial groups, and we showed that different groups could work together. The prospect of a united front between Africans and Indians, between moderates and radicals, greatly worried them. The Nationalists insisted that the campaign was instigated and led by Communist agitators. The minister of justice announced that he would soon pass legislation to deal with our defiance, a threat he implemented during the 1953 parliamentary session with the passage of the Public Safety Act, which empowered the government to declare martial law and to detain people without trial, and the Criminal Laws Amendment Act, which authorized corporal punishment for defiers.

The government tried a number of underhanded means to interrupt the campaign. Government propagandists repeatedly claimed that the leaders of the campaign were living it up in comfort while the masses were languishing in jail. This allegation was far from the truth, but it achieved a certain currency. The government also infiltrated spies and agents provocateurs into the organization. The ANC welcomed virtually anyone who wanted to join. In spite of the fact that our volunteers were carefully screened before they were selected to defy, the police managed to penetrate not only our local branches but some of the batches of defiers. When I was arrested and sent to Marshall Square, I noticed two fellows among the defiers, one of whom I had never seen before. He wore unusual prison garb: a suit and tie with an overcoat and a silk scarf. What kind of fellow goes to jail dressed like that? His name was Ramaila, and on the third day when we were due to be released, he simply vanished.

The second fellow, whose name was Makhanda, stood out because of his military demeanor. We were out in the courtyard and we were all in high spirits. The defiers would march in front of Yusuf and myself and salute us. Makhanda, who was tall and slender, marched in a soldierly manner and then gave a crisp, graceful salute. A number of the fellows teased him that he must be a policeman to salute so well.

Makhanda had previously worked as a janitor at ANC headquarters. He was very industrious and was popular among the fellows because he would run out and get fish and chips whenever anyone was hungry. But at a later trial we discovered that both Makhanda and Ramaila were police spies. Ramaila testified that he had infiltrated the ranks of the defiers; the trusty Makhanda was actually Detective-Sergeant Motloung.

Africans who worked as spies against their own brothers generally did so for money. Many blacks in South Africa believed that any effort by the black man to challenge the white man was foolhardy and doomed to failure; the white man was too smart and too strong. These spies saw us as a threat not to the white power structure but to black interests, for whites would mistreat all blacks based on the conduct of a few agitators.

Yet, there were many black policemen who secretly aided us. They were decent fellows and found themselves in a moral quandary. They were loyal to their employer and needed to keep their jobs to support their families, but they were sympathetic to our cause. We had an understanding with a handful of African officers who were members of the security police that they would inform us when there was going to be a police raid. These men were patriots who risked their lives to help the struggle.

The government was not our only impediment. Others who might have helped us instead hindered us. At the height of the Defiance Campaign, the United Party sent two of its MPs to urge us to halt the campaign. They said that if we abandoned our campaign in response to a call made by J. G. N. Strauss, the United Party leader, it would help the party defeat the Nationalists in the next election. We rejected this and Strauss proceeded to attack us with the same scorn used by the Nationalists.

We also came under attack from a breakaway ANC group called the National Minded Bloc. Led by Selope Thema, a former member of the National Executive Committee, the group bolted from the ANC when J. B. Marks was elected president of the Transvaal ANC. Thema, who was editor of the newspaper the Bantu World, fiercely criticized the campaign in his paper, claiming that Communists had taken over the ANC and that Indians were exploiting the Africans. He asserted that the Communists were more dangerous now that they were working underground, and that Indian economic interests were in conflict with those of Africans. Although he was in a minority in the ANC, his views got a sympathetic hearing among certain radical Youth Leaguers.

In May, during the middle of the Defiance Campaign, J. B. Marks was banned under the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act for “furthering the aims of communism.” Banning was a legal order by the government, and generally entailed forced resignation from indicated organizations, and restriction from attending gatherings of any kind. It was a kind of walking imprisonment. To ban a person, the government required no proof, offered no charges; the minister of justice simply declared it so. It was a strategy designed to remove the individual from the struggle, allowing him to live a narrowly defined life outside of politics. To violate or ignore a banning order was to invite imprisonment.

At the Transvaal conference that year in October, my name was proposed to replace the banned J. B. Marks, who had recommended that I succeed him. I was the national president of the Youth League, and the favorite for Marks’s position, but my candidacy was opposed by a group from within the Transvaal ANC that called itself “Bafabegiya” (Those Who Die Dancing). The group consisted mainly of ex-Communists turned extreme African nationalists. They sought to cut all links with Indian activists and to move the ANC in the direction of a more confrontational strategy. They were led by MacDonald Maseko, a former Communist who had been chairman of the Orlando Branch of the ANC during the Defiance Campaign, and Seperepere Marupeng, who had been the chief volunteer for the Defiance Campaign in the Witwatersrand. Both Maseko and Marupeng intended to stand for the presidency of the Transvaal.

Marupeng was considered something of a demagogue. He used to wear a military-style khaki suit replete with epaulets and gold buttons, and carried a baton like that made famous by Field Marshal Montgomery. He would stand up in front of meetings, his baton clutched underneath his arm, and say: “I am tired of waiting for freedom. I want freedom now! I will meet Malan at the crossroads and I will show him what I want.” Then, banging his baton on the podium, he would cry, “I want freedom now!”

Because of speeches like these, Marupeng became extremely popular during the Defiance Campaign, but popularity is only one factor in an election. He thought that because of his newfound prominence he would win the presidency. Before the election, when it was known that I would be a candidate for the presidency, I approached him and said, “I would like you to stand for election to the executive so that you can serve with me when I am president.” He regarded this as a slight, that I was in effect demoting him, and he refused, choosing instead to run for the presidency himself. But he had miscalculated, for I won the election with an overwhelming majority.

On July 30, 1952, at the height of the Defiance Campaign, I was at work at my then law firm of H. M. Basner when the police arrived with a warrant for my arrest. The charge was violation of the Suppression of Communism Act. The state made a series of simultaneous arrests of campaign leaders in Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth, and Kimberley. Earlier in the month, the police had raided homes and offices of ANC and SAIC officials all over the country and confiscated papers and documents. This type of raid was something new and set a pattern for the pervasive and illegal searches that subsequently became a regular feature of the government’s behavior.

My arrest and those of the others culminated in a trial in September in Johannesburg of twenty-one accused, including the presidents and general-secretaries of the ANC, the SAIC, the ANC Youth League, and the Transvaal Indian Congress. Among the twenty-one on trial in Johannesburg were Dr. Moroka, Walter Sisulu, and J. B. Marks. A number of Indian leaders were arrested, including Dr. Dadoo, Yusuf Cachalia, and Ahmed Kathrada.

Our appearances in court became the occasion for exuberant political rallies. Massive crowds of demonstrators marched through the streets of Johannesburg and converged on the city’s Magistrate’s Court. There were white students from the University of the Witwatersrand; old ANC campaigners from Alexandra; Indian school-children from primary and secondary schools; people of all ages and colors. The court had never been deluged with such crowds before. The courtroom itself was packed with people, and shouts of “Mayibuye Afrika!” punctuated the proceedings.

The trial should have been an occasion of resolve and solidarity, but was sullied by a breach of faith by Dr. Moroka. Dr. Moroka, the president-general of the ANC and the figurehead of the campaign, shocked us all by employing his own attorney. The plan was for all of us to be tried together. My fellow accused designated me to discuss the matter with Dr. Moroka and attempt to persuade him not to separate himself. The day before the trial, I went to see Dr. Moroka at Village Deep, Johannesburg.

At the outset of our meeting, I suggested alternatives to him, but he was not interested and instead aired a number of grievances. Dr. Moroka felt that he had been excluded from the planning of the campaign. Yet, Moroka was often quite uninterested in ANC affairs and content to be so. But he said the matter that disturbed him more than any other was that by being defended with the rest of us, he would be associated with men who were Communists. Dr. Moroka shared the government’s animosity to communism. I remonstrated with him and said that it was the tradition of the ANC to work with anyone who was against racial oppression. But Dr. Moroka was unmoved.

The greatest jolt came when Dr. Moroka tendered a humiliating plea in mitigation to Judge Rumpff and took the witness stand to renounce the very principles on which the ANC had been founded. Asked whether he thought there should be equality between black and white in South Africa, Dr. Moroka replied that there would never be such a thing. We felt like slumping in despair in our seats. When his own lawyer asked him whether there were some among the defendants who were Communists, Dr. Moroka actually began to point his finger at various people, including Dr. Dadoo and Walter. The judge informed him that that was not necessary.

His performance was a severe blow to the organization and we all immediately realized that Dr. Moroka’s days as ANC president were numbered. He had committed the cardinal sin of putting his own interests ahead of the organization and the people. He was unwilling to jeopardize his medical career and fortune for his political beliefs, thereby he had destroyed the image that he had built during three years of courageous work on behalf of the ANC and the Defiance Campaign. I regarded this as a tragedy, for Dr. Moroka’s faintheartedness in court took away some of the glow from the campaign. The man who had gone round the country preaching the importance of the campaign had now forsaken it.

On December 2, we were all found guilty of what Judge Rumpff defined as “statutory communism” — as opposed to what he said “is commonly known as communism.” According to the statutes of the Suppression of Communism Act, virtually anyone who opposed the government in any way could be defined as — and therefore convicted of — being a “statutory” Communist, even without ever having been a member of the party. The judge, who was fair-minded and reasonable, said that although we had planned acts that ranged from “open noncompliance of laws to something that equals high treason,” he accepted that we had consistently advised our members “to follow a peaceful course of action and to avoid violence in any shape or form.” We were sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment with hard labor, but the sentence was suspended for two years.

We made many mistakes, but the Defiance Campaign marked a new chapter in the struggle. The six laws we singled out were not overturned; but we never had any illusion that they would be. We selected them as the most immediate burden pressing on the lives of the people, and the best way to engage the greatest number of people in the struggle.

Prior to the campaign, the ANC was more talk than action. We had no paid organizers, no staff, and a membership that did little more than pay lip service to our cause. As a result of the campaign, our membership swelled to 100,000. The ANC emerged as a truly mass-based organization with an impressive corps of experienced activists who had braved the police, the courts, and the jails. The stigma usually associated with imprisonment had been removed. This was a significant achievement, for fear of prison is a tremendous hindrance to a liberation struggle. From the Defiance Campaign onward, going to prison became a badge of honor among Africans.

We were extremely proud of the fact that during the six months of the campaign, there was not a single act of violence on our side. The discipline of our resisters was exemplary. During the later part of the campaign, riots broke out in Port Elizabeth and East London in which more than forty people were killed. Though these outbreaks had nothing whatsoever to do with the campaign, the government attempted to link us with them. In this, the government was successful, for the riots poisoned the views of some whites who might otherwise have been sympathetic.

Some within the ANC had unrealistic expectations and were convinced that the campaign could topple the government. We reminded them that the idea of the campaign was to focus attention on our grievances, not eradicate them. They argued that we had the government where we wanted them, and that we should continue the campaign indefinitely. I stepped in and said that this government was too strong and too ruthless to be brought down in such a manner. We could embarrass them, but overthrowing them as a result of the Defiance Campaign was impossible.

As it was, we continued the campaign for too long. We should have listened to Dr. Xuma. The Planning Committee met with Dr. Xuma during the tail end of the campaign and he told us that the campaign would soon lose momentum and it would be wise to call it off before it fizzled out altogether. To halt the campaign while it was still on the offensive would be a shrewd move that would capture the headlines. Dr. Xuma was right: the campaign soon slackened, but in our enthusiasm and even arrogance, we brushed aside his advice. My heart wanted to keep the campaign going but my head told me that it should stop. I argued for closure but went along with the majority. By the end of the year, the campaign foundered.

The campaign never expanded beyond the initial stage of small batches of mostly urban defiers. Mass defiance, especially in the rural areas, was never achieved. The eastern Cape was the only region where we succeeded in reaching the second stage and where a strong resistance movement emerged in the countryside. In general, we did not penetrate the countryside, an historical weakness of the ANC. The campaign was hampered by the fact that we did not have any full-time organizers. I was attempting to organize the campaign and practice as a lawyer at the same time, and that is no way to wage a mass campaign. We were still amateurs.

I nevertheless felt a great sense of accomplishment and satisfaction: I had been engaged in a just cause and had the strength to fight for it and win. The campaign freed me from any lingering sense of doubt or inferiority I might still have felt; it liberated me from the feeling of being overwhelmed by the power and seeming invincibility of the white man and his institutions. But now the white man had felt the power of my punches and I could walk upright like a man, and look everyone in the eye with the dignity that comes from not having succumbed to oppression and fear. I had come of age as a freedom fighter.

Part Four

THE STRUGGLE IS MY LIFE

15

AT THE ANC annual conference at the end of 1952, there was a changing of the guard. The ANC designated a new, more vigorous president for a new, more activist era: Chief Albert Luthuli. In accordance with the ANC constitution, as provisional president of the Transvaal, I became one of the four deputy presidents. Furthermore, the National Executive Committee appointed me as first deputy president, in addition to my position as president of the Transvaal. Luthuli was one of a handful of ruling chiefs who were active in the ANC and had staunchly resisted the policies of the government.

The son of a Seventh-Day Adventist missionary, Luthuli was born in what was then Southern Rhodesia and educated in Natal. He trained as a teacher at Adam’s College near Durban. A fairly tall, heavyset, dark-skinned man with a great broad smile, he combined an air of humility with deep-seated confidence. He was a man of patience and fortitude, who spoke slowly and clearly as though every word was of equal importance.

I had first met him in the late 1940s when he was a member of the Natives Representative Council. In September of 1952, only a few months before the annual conference, Luthuli had been summoned to Pretoria and given an ultimatum: he must either renounce his membership in the ANC and his support of the Defiance Campaign, or he would be dismissed from his position as an elected and government-paid tribal chief. Luthuli was a teacher, a devout Christian, and a proud Zulu chief, but he was even more firmly committed to the struggle against apartheid. Luthuli refused to resign from the ANC and the government dismissed him from his post. In response to his dismissal, he issued a statement of principles called “The Road to Freedom Is via the Cross,” in which he reaffirmed his support for nonviolent passive resistance and justified his choice with words that still echo plaintively today: “Who will deny that thirty years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately and modestly at a closed and barred door?”

I supported Chief Luthuli, but I was unable to attend the national conference. A few days before the conference was to begin, fifty-two leaders around the country were banned from attending any meetings or gatherings for six months. I was among those leaders, and my movements were restricted to the district of Johannesburg for that same period.

My bans extended to meetings of all kinds, not just political ones. I could not, for example, attend my son’s birthday party. I was prohibited from talking to more than one person at a time. This was part of a systematic effort by the government to silence, persecute, and immobilize the leaders of those fighting apartheid and was the first of a series of bans on me that continued with brief intervals of freedom until the time I was deprived of all freedom some years hence.

Banning not only confines one physically, it imprisons one’s spirit. It induces a kind of psychological claustrophobia that makes one yearn not only for freedom of movement but spiritual escape. Banning was a dangerous game, for one was not shackled or chained behind bars; the bars were laws and regulations that could easily be violated and often were. One could slip away unseen for short periods of time and have the temporary illusion of freedom. The insidious effect of bans was that at a certain point one began to think that the oppressor was not without but within.

Although I was prevented from attending the 1952 annual conference, I was immediately informed as to what had transpired. One of the most significant decisions was one taken in secret and not publicized at the time.

Along with many others, I had become convinced that the government intended to declare the ANC and the SAIC illegal organizations, just as it had done with the Communist Party. It seemed inevitable that the state would attempt to put us out of business as a legal organization as soon as it could. With this in mind, I approached the National Executive Committee with the idea that we must come up with a contingency plan for just such an eventuality. I said it would be an abdication of our responsibility as leaders of the people if we did not do so. They instructed me to draw up a plan that would enable the organization to operate from underground. This strategy came to be known as the Mandela-Plan, or simply, M-Plan.

The idea was to set up organizational machinery that would allow the ANC to make decisions at the highest level, which could then be swiftly transmitted to the organization as a whole without calling a meeting. In other words, it would allow an illegal organization to continue to function and enable leaders who were banned to continue to lead. The M-Plan was designed to allow the organization to recruit new members, respond to local and national problems, and maintain regular contact between the membership and the underground leadership.

I held a number of secret meetings among ANC and SAIC leaders, both banned and not banned, to discuss the parameters of the plan. I worked on it for a number of months and came up with a system that was broad enough to adapt itself to local conditions and not fetter individual initiative, but detailed enough to facilitate order. The smallest unit was the cell, which in urban townships consisted of roughly ten houses on a street. A cell steward would be in charge of each of these units. If a street had more than ten houses, a street steward would take charge and the cell stewards would report to him. A group of streets formed a zone directed by a chief steward, who was in turn responsible to the secretariat of the local branch of the ANC. The secretariat was a subcommittee of the branch executive, which reported to the provincial secretary. My notion was that every cell and street steward should know every person and family in his area, so that he would be trusted by the people and would know whom to trust. The cell steward arranged meetings, organized political classes, and collected dues. He was the linchpin of the plan. Although the strategy was primarily created for more urban areas, it could be adapted to rural ones.

The plan was accepted, and was to be implemented immediately. Word went out to the branches to begin to prepare for this covert restructuring. The plan was accepted at most branches, but some of the more far-flung outposts felt that the plan was an effort by Johannesburg to centralize control over the regions.

As part of the M-Plan, the ANC introduced an elementary course of political lectures for its members throughout the country. These lectures were meant not only to educate but to hold the organization together. The lectures were given in secret by branch leaders. Those members in attendance would in turn give the same lectures to others in their homes and communities. In the beginning, the lectures were not systemized, but within a number of months there was a set curriculum.

There were three courses, “The World We Live In,” “How We Are Governed,” and “The Need for Change.” In the first course, we discussed the different types of political and economic systems around the world as well as in South Africa. It was an overview of the growth of capitalism as well as socialism. We discussed, for example, how blacks in South Africa were oppressed both as a race and an economic class. The lecturers were mostly banned members, and I myself frequently gave lectures in the evening. This arrangement had the virtue of keeping banned individuals active as well as keeping the membership in touch with these leaders.

During this time, the banned leadership would often meet secretly and alone, and then arrange to meet the present leaders. The old and the new leadership meshed very well, and the decision-making process was collective as it had been before. Sometimes it felt as if nothing had changed except that we had to meet in secret.

The M-Plan was conceived with the best intentions, but it was instituted with only modest success and its adoption was never widespread. The most impressive results were once again in the eastern Cape and Port Elizabeth. The spirit of the Defiance Campaign continued in the eastern Cape long after it vanished elsewhere, and ANC members there seized on the M-Plan as a way of continuing to defy the government.

The plan faced many problems: it was not always adequately explained to the membership; there were no paid organizers to help implement or administer it; and there was often dissension within branches that prevented agreement on imposing the plan. Some provincial leaders resisted it because they believed it undermined their power. To some, the government’s crackdown did not seem imminent so they did not take the precautions necessary to lessen its effect. When the government’s iron fist did descend, they were not prepared.

16

MY LIFE, during the Defiance Campaign, ran on two separate tracks: my work in the struggle and my livelihood as an attorney. I was never a full-time organizer for the ANC; the organization had only one, and that was Thomas Titus Nkobi. The work I did had to be arranged around my schedule as an attorney. In 1951, after I had completed my articles at Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman, I went to work for the law firm of Terblanche & Briggish. When I completed my articles, I was not yet a fully-fledged attorney, but I was in a position to draw court pleadings, send out summonses, interview witnesses — all of which an attorney must do before a case goes to court.

After leaving Sidelsky, I had investigated a number of white firms — there were, of course, no African law firms. I was particularly interested in the scale of fees charged by these firms and was outraged to discover that many of the most blue-chip law firms charged Africans even higher fees for criminal and civil cases than they did their far wealthier white clients.

After working for Terblanche & Briggish for about one year, I joined the firm of Helman and Michel. It was a liberal firm and one of the few that charged Africans on a reasonable scale. In addition, the firm prided itself on its devotion to African education, toward which they donated handsomely. Mr. Helman, the firm’s senior partner, was involved with African causes long before they became popular or fashionable. The firm’s other partner, Rodney Michel, a veteran of World War II, was also extremely liberal. He was a pilot, and years later helped fly ANC people out of South Africa during the worst periods of repression. Michel’s only discernible vice was that he was a heavy smoker who puffed on one cigarette after another all day long at the office.

I stayed at Helman and Michel for a number of months while I was studying for my qualification exam, which would establish me as a fully-fledged attorney. I had given up studying for an LL.B. degree at the University of the Witwatersrand after failing my exams several times. I opted to take the qualifying exam so that I could practice and begin to earn enough money to support my family. At the time, my sister was living with us, and my mother had come to visit, and Evelyn’s wages as a nurse trainee plus my own paltry income were not enough to keep everyone warm and fed.

When I passed the qualification exam, I went to work as a fully-fledged attorney at the firm of H. M. Basner. Basner had been an African Representative in the Senate, an early member of the Communist Party, and a passionate supporter of African rights. As a lawyer, he was a defender of African leaders and trade unionists. For the months that I worked there, I was often in court representing the firm’s many African clients. Mr. Basner was an excellent boss and as long as I got my work done at the firm he encouraged my political work. After the experience I gained there, I felt ready to go off on my own.

In August of 1952, I opened my own law office. What early success I enjoyed I owed to Zubeida Patel, my secretary. I had met her when she had gone to work at H. M. Basner as a replacement for an Afrikaans-speaking secretary, Miss Koch, who had refused to take my dictation. Zubeida was the wife of my friend Cassim Patel, a member of the Indian Congress, and she was without any sense of color bar whatsoever. She had a wide circle of friends, knew many people in the legal world, and when I went out on my own, she agreed to work for me. She brought a great deal of business through the door.

Oliver Tambo was then working for a firm called Kovalsky and Tuch. I often visited him there during his lunch hour, and made a point of sitting in a Whites Only chair in the Whites Only waiting room. Oliver and I were very good friends, and we mainly discussed ANC business during those lunch hours. He had first impressed me at Fort Hare, where I noticed his thoughtful intelligence and sharp debating skills. With his cool, logical style he could demolish an opponent’s argument — precisely the sort of intelligence that is useful in a courtroom. Before Fort Hare, he had been a brilliant student at St. Peter’s in Johannesburg. His even-tempered objectivity was an antidote to my more emotional reactions to issues. Oliver was deeply religious and had for a long time considered the ministry to be his calling. He was also a neighbor: he came from Bizana in Pondoland, part of the Transkei, and his face bore the distinctive scars of his tribe. It seemed natural for us to practice together and I asked him to join me. A few months later, when Oliver was able to extricate himself from his firm, we opened our own office in downtown Johannesburg.

“Mandela and Tambo” read the brass plate on our office door in Chancellor House, a small building just across the street from the marble statues of Justice standing in front of the Magistrate’s Court in central Johannesburg. Our building, owned by Indians, was one of the few places where Africans could rent offices in the city. From the beginning, Mandela and Tambo was besieged with clients. We were not the only African lawyers in South Africa, but we were the only firm of African lawyers. For Africans, we were the firm of first choice and last resort. To reach our offices each morning, we had to move through a crowd of people in the hallways, on the stairs, and in our small waiting room.

Africans were desperate for legal help in government buildings: it was a crime to walk through a Whites Only door, a crime to ride a Whites Only bus, a crime to use a Whites Only drinking fountain, a crime to walk on a Whites Only beach, a crime to be on the streets past eleven, a crime not to have a pass book and a crime to have the wrong signature in that book, a crime to be unemployed and a crime to be employed in the wrong place, a crime to live in certain places and a crime to have no place to live.

Every week we interviewed old men from the countryside who told us that generation after generation of their family had worked a scraggly piece of land from which they were now being evicted. Every week we interviewed old women who brewed African beer as a way to supplement their tiny incomes, who now faced jail terms and fines they could not afford to pay. Every week we interviewed people who had lived in the same house for decades only to find that it was now declared a white area and they had to leave without any recompense at all. Every day we heard and saw the thousands of humiliations that ordinary Africans confronted every day of their lives.

Oliver had a prodigious capacity for work. He spent a great deal of time with each client, not so much for professional reasons but because he was a man of limitless compassion and patience. He became involved in his clients’ cases and in their lives. He was touched by the plight of the masses as a whole and by each and every individual.

I realized quickly what Mandela and Tambo meant to ordinary Africans. It was a place where they could come and find a sympathetic ear and a competent ally, a place where they would not be either turned away or cheated, a place where they might actually feel proud to be represented by men of their own skin color. This was the reason I had become a lawyer in the first place, and my work often made me feel I had made the right decision.

We often dealt with a half-dozen cases in a morning, and were in and out of court all day long. In some courts we were treated with courtesy; in others we were treated with contempt. But even as we practiced and fought and won cases, we always knew that no matter how well we pursued our careers as attorneys, we could never become a prosecutor, a magistrate, a judge. Although we were dealing with officials whose competence was no greater than our own, their authority was founded on and protected by the color of their skin.

We frequently encountered prejudice in the court itself. White witnesses often refused to answer questions from a black attorney. Instead of citing them for contempt of court, the magistrate would then pose the questions they would not answer from me. I routinely put policemen on the stand and interrogated them; though I would catch them in discrepancies and lies, they never considered me anything but a “kaffir lawyer.”

I recall once being asked at the outset of a trial to identify myself. This was customary. I said, “I am Nelson Mandela and I appear for the accused.” The magistrate said, “I don’t know you. Where is your certificate?” A certificate is the fancy diploma that one frames and hangs on the wall; it is not something that an attorney ever carries with him. It would be like asking a man for his university degree. I requested that the magistrate begin the case, and I would bring in my certificate in due course. But the magistrate refused to hear the case, even going so far as to ask a court officer to evict me.

This was a clear violation of court practice. The matter eventually came before the Supreme Court and my friend George Bizos, an advocate, appeared on my behalf. At the hearing, the presiding judge criticized the conduct of the magistrate and ordered that a different magistrate must hear the case.

Being a lawyer did not guarantee respect out of court either. One day, near our office, I saw an elderly white woman whose motorcar was sandwiched between two cars. I immediately went over and pushed the car, which helped free it. The English-speaking woman turned to me and said, “Thank you, John” — John being the name whites used to address any African whose name they did not know. She then handed me a sixpence coin, which I politely refused. She pushed it toward me, and again I said no thank you. She then exclaimed, “You refuse a sixpence. You must want a shilling, but you shall not have it!” and then threw the coin at me, and drove off.

Within a year, Oliver and I discovered that under the Urban Areas Act we were not permitted to occupy business premises in the city without ministerial consent. Our request was denied, and we received instead a temporary permit, under the Group Areas Act, which soon expired. The authorities refused to renew it, insisting that we move our offices to an African location many miles away and virtually unreachable for our clients. We interpreted this as an effort by the authorities to put us out of business, and occupied our premises illegally, with threats of eviction constantly hanging over our heads.

Working as a lawyer in South Africa meant operating under a debased system of justice, a code of law that did not enshrine equality but its opposite. One of the most pernicious examples of this is the Population Registration Act, which defined that inequality. I once handled the case of a Coloured man who was inadvertently classified as an African. He had fought for South Africa during World War II in North Africa and Italy, but after his return, a white bureaucrat had reclassified him as African. This was the type of case, not at all untypical in South Africa, that offered a moral jigsaw puzzle. I did not support or recognize the principles in the Population Registration Act, but my client needed representation, and he had been classified as something he was not. There were many practical advantages to being classified as Coloured rather than African, such as the fact that Coloured men were not required to carry passes.

On his behalf, I appealed to the Classification Board, which adjudicated cases falling under the Population Registration Act. The board consisted of a magistrate and two other officials, all white. I had formidable documentary evidence to establish my client’s case and the prosecutor formally indicated that he would not oppose our appeal. But the magistrate seemed uninterested in both my evidence and the prosecutor’s demurral. He stared at my client and gruffly asked him to turn around so that his back faced the bench. After scrutinizing my client’s shoulders, which sloped down sharply, he nodded to the other officials and upheld the appeal. In the view of the white authorities those days, sloping shoulders were one stereotype of the Coloured physique. And so it came about that the course of this man’s life was decided purely on a magistrate’s opinion about the structure of his shoulders.

We tried many cases involving police brutality, though our success rate was quite low. Police assaults were always difficult to prove. The police were clever enough to detain a prisoner long enough for the wounds and bruises to heal, and often it was simply the word of a policeman against our client. The magistrates naturally sided with the police. The coroner’s verdict on a death in police custody would often read, “Death due to multiple causes,” or some vague explanation that let the police off the hook.

Whenever I had a case outside Johannesburg, I applied to have my bans temporarily lifted, and this was often granted. For example, I traveled to the eastern Transvaal, and defended a client in the town of Carolina. My arrival caused quite a sensation, as many of the people had never before seen an African lawyer. I was received warmly by the magistrate and prosecutor, and the case did not begin for quite a while, as they asked me numerous questions about my career and how I became a lawyer. The court was similarly crowded with curious townspeople.

In a nearby village I appeared for a local medicine man charged with witchcraft. This case also attracted a large crowd — not to see me, but to find out whether the white man’s laws could be applied to a sangoma. The medicine man exerted tremendous power in the area, and many people both worshipped and feared him. At one point, my client sneezed violently, causing a virtual stampede in the courtroom; most observers believed he was casting a spell. He was found not guilty, but I suspect that the local people attributed this not to my skill as a lawyer, but to the power of the medicine man’s herbs.

As an attorney, I could be rather flamboyant in court. I did not act as though I were a black man in a white man’s court, but as if everyone else — white and black — was a guest in my court. When trying a case, I often made sweeping gestures and used high-flown language. I was punctilious about all court regulations, but I sometimes used unorthodox tactics with witnesses. I enjoyed cross-examinations, and often played on racial tension. The spectators’ gallery was usually crowded, because people from the township attended court as a form of entertainment.

I recall once defending an African woman employed as a domestic worker in town. She was accused of stealing her “madam’s” clothes. The clothing that was allegedly stolen was displayed on a table in court. After the “madam” had testified, I began my cross-examination by walking over to the table of evidence. I perused the clothing and then, with the tip of my pencil, I picked up an item of ladies’ underwear. I slowly turned to the witness box brandishing the panties and simply asked, “Madam, are these . . . yours?” “No,” she replied quickly, too embarrassed to admit that they were hers. Because of this response, and other discrepancies in her evidence, the magistrate dismissed the case.

17

SITUATED FOUR MILES WEST of Johannesburg’s center, on the face of a rocky outcrop overlooking the city, was the African township of Sophiatown. Father Trevor Huddleston, one of the township’s greatest friends, once compared Sophiatown to an Italian hill town and from a distance the place did indeed have a good deal of charm: the closely packed, red-roofed houses; the smoke curling up into a pink sky; the tall and slender gum trees that hugged the township. Up close one saw the poverty and squalor in which too many of Sophiatown’s people lived. The streets were narrow and unpaved, and every lot was filled with dozens of shanties huddled close together.

Sophiatown was part of what was known as the Western Areas townships, along with Martindale and Newclare. The area was originally intended for whites, and a real estate developer actually built a number of houses there for white buyers. But because of a municipal refuse dump in the area, whites chose to live elsewhere. Reluctantly, the developer sold his houses to Africans. Sophiatown was one of the few places in the Transvaal where Africans had been able to buy stands, or plots, prior to the 1923 Urban Areas Act. Many of these old brick and stone houses, with their tin-roofed verandas, still stood in Sophiatown, giving the township an air of Old World graciousness. As industry in Johannesburg grew, Sophiatown became the home of a rapidly expanding African workforce. It was convenient and close to town. Workers lived in shanties that were erected in the back and front yards of older residences. Several families might all be crowded into a single shanty. Up to forty people could share a single water tap. Despite the poverty, Sophiatown had a special character; for Africans, it was the Left Bank in Paris, Greenwich Village in New York, the home of writers, artists, doctors, and lawyers. It was both bohemian and conventional, lively and sedate. It was home to both Dr. Xuma, where he had his practice, and assorted tsotsis (gangsters), like the Berliners and the Americans, who adopted the names of American movie stars like John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart. Sophiatown boasted the only swimming pool for African children in Johannesburg.

In Johannesburg, the Western Areas Removal scheme meant the evacuation of Sophiatown, Martindale, and Newclare, with a collective population that was somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000. In 1953, the Nationalist government had purchased a tract of land called Meadowlands, thirteen miles from the city. People were to be resettled there in seven different “ethnic groups.” The excuse given by the government was slum clearance, a smoke screen for the government policy that regarded all urban areas as white areas where Africans were temporary residents.

The government was under pressure from its supporters in the surrounding areas of Westdene and Newlands, which were comparatively poor white areas. These working-class whites were envious of some of the fine houses owned by blacks in Sophiatown. The government wanted to control the movements of all Africans, and such control was far more difficult in freehold urban townships, where blacks could own property, and people came and went as they pleased. Though the pass system was still in effect, one did not need a special permit to enter a freehold township as was the case with municipal locations. Africans had lived and owned property in Sophiatown for over fifty years; now the government was callously planning on relocating all Sophiatown’s African residents to another black township. So cynical was the government’s plan that the removal was to take place even before the houses were built to accommodate the evacuated people. The removal of Sophiatown was the first major test of strength for the ANC and its allies after the Defiance Campaign.

Although the government’s removal campaign for Sophiatown had started in 1950, efforts by the ANC to combat it did not begin in earnest until 1953. By the middle of the year, the local branches of the ANC and the TIC and the local Ratepayers Association were mobilizing people to resist. In June of 1953, a public meeting was called by the provincial executive of the ANC and the TIC at Sophiatown’s Odin cinema to discuss opposition to the removal. It was a lively, exuberant meeting attended by more than twelve hundred people, none of whom seemed intimidated by the presence of dozens of heavily armed policemen.

Only a few days before the meeting, my banning orders, as well as Walter’s, had expired. This meant that we were no longer prevented from attending or speaking at gatherings, and arrangements were quickly made for me to speak at the theater.

Shortly before the meeting was to begin, a police officer saw Walter and me outside the cinema talking with Father Huddleston, one of the leaders of the opposition to the removal. The officer informed the two of us that as banned individuals we had no right to be there, and he then ordered his officers to arrest us. Father Huddleston shouted to the policemen coming toward us, “No, you must arrest me instead, my dears.” The officer ordered Father Huddleston to stand aside, but he refused. As the policemen moved Father Huddleston out of the way, I said to the officer, “You must make sure if we are under a ban or not. Be careful, because it would be a wrongful arrest to take us in if our bans have expired. Now, do you think we would be here tonight talking to you if our bans had not expired?”

The police were notorious for keeping very poor records and were often unaware when bans ended. The officer knew this as well as I did. He pondered what I had said, then told his officers to pull back. They stood aside as we entered the hall.

Inside, the police were provocative and contemptuous. Equipped with pistols and rifles, they strutted around the hall pushing people around, making insulting remarks. I was sitting onstage with a number of other leaders, and as the meeting was about to begin, I saw Major Prinsloo come swaggering in through the stage door, accompanied by a number of armed officers. I caught his eye, and I made a gesture as if to say, “Me?” and he shook his head no. He then walked over to the podium, where Yusuf Cachalia had already begun to speak, and ordered the other officers to arrest him, whereupon they took him by the arms and started to drag him off. Outside, the police had already arrested Robert Resha and Ahmed Kathrada.

The crowd began yelling and booing, and I saw that matters could turn extremely ugly if the crowd did not control itself. I jumped to the podium and started singing a well-known protest song, and as soon as I pronounced the first few words the crowd joined in. I feared that the police might have opened fire if the crowd had become too unruly.

The ANC was then holding meetings every Sunday evening in Freedom Square, in the center of Sophiatown, to mobilize opposition to the removal. These were vibrant sessions, punctuated by repeated cries of “Asihambi!” (We are not moving!) and the singing of “Sophiatown likhaya lam asihambi” (Sophiatown is my home; we are not moving). The meetings were addressed by leading ANC members, standholders, tenants, city councillors, and often by Father Huddleston, who ignored police warnings to confine himself to church affairs.

One Sunday evening, not long after the incident at the Odin, I was scheduled to speak in Freedom Square. The crowd that night was passionate, and their emotion undoubtedly influenced mine. There were a great many young people present, and they were angry and eager for action. As usual, policemen were clustered around the perimeter, armed with both guns and pencils, the latter to take notes as to who was speaking and what the speaker was saying. We tried to make this into a virtue by being as open with the police as possible to show them that in fact we had nothing to hide, not even our distaste for them.

I began by speaking about the increasing repressiveness of the government in the wake of the Defiance Campaign. I said the government was now scared of the might of the African people. As I spoke, I grew more and more indignant. In those days, I was something of a rabble-rousing speaker. I liked to incite an audience, and I was doing so that evening.

As I condemned the government for its ruthlessness and lawlessness, I stepped across the line: I said that the time for passive resistance had ended, that nonviolence was a useless strategy and could never overturn a white minority regime bent on retaining its power at any cost. At the end of the day, I said, violence was the only weapon that would destroy apartheid and we must be prepared, in the near future, to use that weapon.

The crowd was excited; the youth in particular were clapping and cheering. They were ready to act on what I said right then and there. At that point I began to sing a freedom song, the lyrics of which say, “There are the enemies, let us take our weapons and attack them.” I sang this song and the crowd joined in, and when the song was finished, I pointed to the police and said, “There, there are our enemies!” The crowd again started cheering and made aggressive gestures in the direction of the police. The police looked nervous, and a number of them pointed back at me as if to say, “Mandela, we will get you for this.” I did not mind. In the heat of the moment I did not think of the consequences.

But my words that night did not come out of nowhere. I had been thinking of the future. The government was busily taking measures to prevent anything like the Defiance Campaign from reoccurring. I had begun to analyze the struggle in different terms. The ambition of the ANC was to wage a mass struggle, to engage the workers and peasants of South Africa in a campaign so large and powerful that it might overcome the status quo of white oppression. But the Nationalist government was making any legal expression of dissent or protest impossible. I saw that they would ruthlessly suppress any legitimate protest on the part of the African majority. A police state did not seem far off.

I began to suspect that both legal and extra-constitutional protests would soon be impossible. In India, Gandhi had been dealing with a foreign power that ultimately was more realistic and farsighted. That was not the case with the Afrikaners in South Africa. Nonviolent passive resistance is effective as long as your opposition adheres to the same rules as you do. But if peaceful protest is met with violence, its efficacy is at an end. For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon. But my thoughts on this matter were not yet formed, and I had spoken too soon.

That was certainly the view of the National Executive Committee. When they learned of my speech, I was severely reprimanded for advocating such a radical departure from accepted policy. Although some on the executive sympathized with my remarks, no one could support the intemperate way that I had made them. The executive admonished me, noting that the impulsive policy I had called for was not only premature but dangerous. Such speeches could provoke the enemy to crush the organization entirely while the enemy was strong and we were as yet still weak. I accepted the censure, and thereafter faithfully defended the policy of nonviolence in public. But in my heart, I knew that nonviolence was not the answer.

In those days, I was often in hot water with the executive. In early 1953, Chief Luthuli, Z. K. Matthews, and a handful of other high-ranking ANC leaders were invited to a meeting with a group of whites who were in the process of forming the Liberal Party. A meeting of the ANC executive took place afterward at which a few of us asked for a report of the earlier meeting with the white liberals. The attendees refused, saying that they had been invited in their private capacity, not as members of the ANC. We continued to pester them, and finally Professor Matthews, who was a lawyer, said that it had been a privileged conversation. In a fit of indignation, I said, “What kind of leaders are you who can discuss matters with a group of white liberals and then not share that information with your colleagues at the ANC? That’s the trouble with you, you are scared and overawed of the white man. You value his company more than that of your African comrades.”

This outburst provoked the wrath of both Professor Matthews and Chief Luthuli. First, Professor Matthews responded: “Mandela, what do you know about whites? I taught you whatever you know about whites and you are still ignorant. Even now, you are barely out of your student uniform.” Luthuli was burning with a cold fire and said, “All right, if you are accusing me of being afraid of the white man then I have no other recourse but to resign. If that is what you say then that is what I intend to do.” I did not know whether Luthuli was bluffing or not, but his threat frightened me. I had spoken hastily, without thinking, without a sense of responsibility, and I now greatly regretted it. I immediately withdrew my charge and apologized. I was a young man who attempted to make up for his ignorance with militancy.

At the same time as my speech in Sophiatown, Walter informed me that he had been invited to attend the World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace and Friendship in Bucharest as a guest of honor. The timing of the invitation gave Walter virtually no opportunity to consult with the National Executive Committee. I was keen that he should go and encouraged him to do so, whether or not he conferred with the executive. Walter resolved to go and I helped him arrange for a substitute passport, an affidavit stating his identity and citizenship. (The government would never have issued him a proper passport.) The group, which was headed by Walter Sisulu and Duma Nokwe, traveled on the only airline that would accept such an affidavit: the Israeli airline, El Al.

I was convinced, despite my reprimand from the executive, that the policies of the Nationalists would soon make nonviolence an even more limited and ineffective policy. Walter was privy to my thoughts and before he left, I made a suggestion: he should arrange to visit the People’s Republic of China and discuss with them the possibility of supplying us with weapons for an armed struggle. Walter liked the idea and promised to make the attempt.

This action was taken purely on my own and my methods were highly unorthodox. To some extent, they were the actions of a hotheaded revolutionary who had not thought things through and who acted without discipline. They were the actions of a man frustrated with the immorality of apartheid and the ruthlessness of the state in protecting it.

Walter’s visit caused a storm within the executive. I undertook the task of personally conveying his apologies. I did not mention my secret request. Luthuli objected to the flouting of the ANC’s code of conduct, and Professor Matthews expressed dismay about Walter visiting socialist countries. The executive was skeptical about Walter’s motives, and questioned my explanation of the circumstances. A few wanted to formally censure Walter and me, but in the end did not.

Walter managed to reach China, where the leadership received him warmly. They conveyed their support of our struggle, but they were wary and cautious when he broached the idea of an armed struggle. They warned him that an armed struggle was an extremely grave undertaking and they questioned whether the liberation movement had matured sufficiently to justify such an endeavor. Walter came back with encouragement but no guns.

18

IN JOHANNESBURG, I had become a man of the city. I wore smart suits; I drove a colossal Oldsmobile, and I knew my way around the back alleys of the city. I commuted daily to a downtown office. But in fact I remained a country boy at heart, and there was nothing that lifted my spirits as much as blue skies, the open veld, and green grass. In September, with my bans ended, I decided to take advantage of my freedom and get a respite from the city. I took on a case in the little dorp of Villiers in the Orange Free State.

The drive to the Orange Free State from Johannesburg used to take several hours, and I set out on my journey from Orlando at 3 A.M., which has always been my favorite hour for departure. I am an early riser anyway, and at 3 A.M. the roads are empty and quiet, and one can be alone with one’s thoughts. I like to see the coming of dawn, the change between night and day, which is always majestic. It was also a convenient hour for departure because the police were usually nowhere to be found.

The province of the Orange Free State has always had a magical effect on me, though some of the most racist elements of the white population call the Free State their home. With its flat dusty landscape as far as the eye can see, the great blue ceiling above, the endless stretches of yellow mealie fields, scrub and bushes, the Free State’s landscape gladdens my heart no matter what my mood. When I am there I feel like nothing can shut me in, that my thoughts can roam as far and wide as the horizons.

The landscape bore the imprint of General Christiaan De Wet, the gifted Boer commander who outclassed the British in dozens of engagements during the final months of the Anglo-Boer War; fearless, proud, and shrewd, he would have been one of my heroes had he been fighting for the rights of all South Africans, not just Afrikaners. He demonstrated the courage and resourcefulness of the underdog, and the power of a less sophisticated but patriotic army against a tested war machine. As I drove, I imagined the hiding places of General De Wet’s army and wondered whether they would someday shelter African rebels.

The drive to Villiers cheered me considerably, and I was laboring under a false sense of security when I entered the small courthouse on the morning of the third of September. I found a group of policemen waiting for me. With nary a word, they served me with an order under the Suppression of Communism Act requiring me to resign from the ANC, restricting me to the Johannesburg district, and prohibiting me from attending any meetings or gatherings for two years. I knew such measures would come, but I had not expected to receive my bans in the remote town of Villiers.

I was thirty-five years old and these new and more severe bans ended a period of nearly a decade of involvement with the ANC, years that had been the time of my political awakening and growth, and my gradual commitment to the struggle that had become my life. Henceforth, all of my actions and plans on behalf of the ANC and the liberation struggle would become secret and illegal. Once served, I had to return to Johannesburg immediately.

My bans drove me from the center of the struggle to the sidelines, from a role that was primary to one that was peripheral. Though I was often consulted and was able to influence the direction of events, I did so at a distance and only when expressly asked. I no longer felt like a vital organ of the body — the heart, lungs, or backbone — but a severed limb. Even freedom fighters, at least then, had to obey the laws, and at that point, imprisonment for violating my bans would have been useless to the ANC and to myself. We were not yet at the point where we were open revolutionaries, overtly fighting the system no matter what the cost. We believed then that it was better to organize underground than to go to prison. When I was forced to resign from the ANC, the organization had to replace me, and no matter what I might have liked, I could no longer wield the authority I once possessed. While I was driving back to Johannesburg, the Free State scenery did not have quite the same elevating effect on me as before.

19

WHEN I RECEIVED my banning, the Transvaal conference of the ANC was due to be held the following month, and I had already completed the draft of my presidential address. It was read to the conference by Andrew Kunene, a member of the executive. In that speech, which subsequently became known as “The No Easy Walk to Freedom” speech, a line taken from Jawaharlal Nehru, I said that the masses now had to be prepared for new forms of political struggle. The new laws and tactics of the government had made the old forms of mass protest — public meetings, press statements, stay-aways — extremely dangerous and self-destructive. Newspapers would not publish our statements; printing presses refused to print our leaflets, all for fear of prosecution under the Suppression of Communism Act. “These developments,” I wrote, “require the evolution of new forms of political struggle. The old methods,” I said, were now “suicidal.”