The Long Walk to Freedom

“The oppressed people and the oppressors are at loggerheads. The day of reckoning between the forces of freedom and those of reaction is not very far off. I have not the slightest doubt that when that day comes truth and justice will prevail. . . . The feelings of the oppressed people have never been more bitter. The grave plight of the people compels them to resist to the death the stinking policies of the gangsters that rule our country. . . . To overthrow oppression has been sanctioned by humanity and is the highest aspiration of every free man.”

In April of 1954, the Law Society of the Transvaal applied to the Supreme Court for my name to be struck off the roll of accredited attorneys on the ground that the political activities for which I was convicted in the Defiance case amounted to unprofessional and dishonorable conduct. This occurred at a time when Mandela and Tambo was flourishing and I was in court dozens of times a week.

The documents were served at my office, and as soon as the application against me had been made and publicized, I began to receive offers of support and help. I even received offers of help from a number of well-known Afrikaner lawyers. Many of these men were supporters of the National Party, but they believed that the application was biased and unfair. Their response suggested to me that even in racist South Africa professional solidarity can sometimes transcend color, and that there were still attorneys and judges who refused to be the rubber stamps of an immoral regime.

My case was ably defended by advocate Walter Pollak, Q.C., chairman of the Johannesburg Bar Council. At the time that I retained Walter Pollak, I was advised that I should also retain someone who was not connected with the struggle, as that would positively influence the Transvaal bar. To that end, we retained William Aronsohn, as instructing attorney or barrister, who was head of one of the oldest law firms in Johannesburg. Both men acted for me without charge. We argued that the application was an affront to the idea of justice and that I had an inherent right to fight for my political beliefs, which was the right of all men in a state where the rule of law applied.

But the argument that had great weight was Pollak’s use of the case of a man called Strijdom, who was detained during the Second World War together with B. J. Vorster (who later became prime minister). Both were interned for their pro-Nazi stance. Following a failed escape attempt, Strijdom had been found guilty of car theft. Later, after he was released, he applied to the bar for admission as an advocate. Despite his crimes and strong objections from the Bar Council, the court decided to admit him on the ground that his offense was political and that a man cannot be barred from practicing as an advocate for his political beliefs. Pollak said, “There are of course differences between Strijdom and Mandela. Mandela is not a Nationalist and Mandela is not a white.”

Judge Ramsbottom, who heard the case, was an example of a judge who refused to be a mouthpiece for the Nationalists and upheld the independence of the judiciary. His judgment in the case completely upheld our claim that I had a right to campaign for my political beliefs even though they were opposed to the government, and he dismissed the Law Society’s application. And in a rare instance the Law Society was ordered to pay its own costs.

20

THE ANTIREMOVAL CAMPAIGN in Sophiatown was a long-running battle. We held our ground, as did the state. Through 1954 and into 1955, rallies were held twice a week, on Wednesday and Sunday evenings. Speaker after speaker continued to decry the government’s plans. The ANC and the Ratepayers Association, under the direction of Dr. Xuma, protested to the government in letters and petitions. We ran the antiremoval campaign on the slogan “Over Our Dead Bodies,” a motto often shouted from the platforms and echoed by the audience. One night, it even roused the otherwise cautious Dr. Xuma to utter the electrifying slogan used to rally African warriors to battle in the previous century: “Zemk’ inkomo magwalandini!” (The enemy has captured the cattle, you cowards!)

The government had scheduled the removal for February 9, 1955. As the day approached, Oliver and I were in the township daily, meeting local leaders, discussing plans, and acting in our professional capacity for those being forced out of the area or prosecuted. We sought to prove to the court that the government’s documentation was often incorrect and that many orders to leave were therefore illegal. But this was only a temporary measure; the government would not let a few illegalities stand in their way.

Shortly before the scheduled removal, a special mass meeting was planned for Freedom Square. Ten thousand people gathered to hear Chief Luthuli speak. But upon his arrival in Johannesburg, he was served with a banning order forcing him to return to Natal.

The night before the removal, Joe Modise, one of the most dedicated of the local ANC leaders, addressed a tense meeting of more than five hundred youthful activists. They expected the ANC to give them an order to battle the police and the army. They were prepared to erect barricades overnight and engage the police with weapons and whatever came to hand the next day. They assumed our slogan meant what it said: that Sophiatown would be removed only over our dead bodies.

But after discussions with the ANC leadership, including myself, Joe told the youth to stand down. They were angry and felt betrayed. But we believed that violence would have been a disaster. We pointed out that an insurrection required careful planning or it would become an act of suicide. We were not yet ready to engage the enemy on its own terms.

In the hazy dawn hours of February 9, four thousand police and army troops cordoned off the township while workers razed empty houses and government trucks began moving families from Sophiatown to Meadowlands. The night before, the ANC had evacuated several families to prearranged accommodation with pro-ANC families in the interior of Sophiatown. But our efforts were too little and too late, and could only be a stopgap measure. The army and the police were relentlessly efficient. After a few weeks, our resistance collapsed. Most of our local leaders had been banned or arrested, and in the end, Sophiatown died not to the sound of gunfire but to the sound of rumbling trucks and sledgehammers.

One can always be correct about a political action one is reading about in the next day’s newspaper, but when you are in the center of a heated political fight, you are given little time for reflection. We made a variety of mistakes in the Western Areas antiremoval campaign and learned a number of lessons. “Over Our Dead Bodies” was a dynamic slogan, but it proved as much a hindrance as a help. A slogan is a vital link between the organization and the masses it seeks to lead. It should synthesize a particular grievance into a succinct and pithy phrase, while mobilizing the people to combat it. Our slogan caught the imagination of the people, but it led them to believe that we would fight to the death to resist the removal. In fact, the ANC was not prepared to do that at all.

We never provided the people with an alternative to moving to Meadowlands. When the people in Sophiatown realized we could neither stop the government nor provide them with housing elsewhere, their own resistance waned and the flow of people to Meadowlands increased. Many tenants moved willingly, for they found they would have more space and cleaner housing in Meadowlands. We did not take into account the different situations of landlords and tenants. While the landlords had reasons to stay, many tenants had an incentive to leave. The ANC was criticized by a number of Africanist members who accused the leadership of protecting the interests of the landlords at the expense of the tenants.

The lesson I took away from the campaign was that in the end, we had no alternative to armed and violent resistance. Over and over again, we had used all the nonviolent weapons in our arsenal — speeches, deputations, threats, marches, strikes, stay-aways, voluntary imprisonment — all to no avail, for whatever we did was met by an iron hand. A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire.

Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farmworkers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.

Since the turn of the century, Africans owed their educational opportunites primarily to the foreign churches and missions that created and sponsored schools. Under the United Party, the syllabus for African secondary schools and white secondary schools was essentially the same. The mission schools provided Africans with Western-style English-language education, which I myself received. We were limited by lesser facilities but not by what we could read or think or dream.

Yet, even before the Nationalists came to power, the disparities in funding tell a story of racist education. The government spent about six times as much per white student as per African student. Education was not compulsory for Africans and was free only in the primary grades. Less than half of all African children of school age attended any school at all, and only a tiny number of Africans were graduated from high school.

Even this amount of education proved distasteful to the Nationalists. The Afrikaner has always been unenthusiastic about education for Africans. To him it was simply a waste, for the African was inherently ignorant and lazy and no amount of education could remedy that. The Afrikaner was traditionally hostile to Africans learning English, for English was a foreign tongue to the Afrikaner and the language of emancipation to us.

In 1953, the Nationalist-dominated Parliament passed the Bantu Education Act, which sought to put apartheid’s stamp on African education. The act transferred control of African education from the Department of Education to the much loathed Native Affairs Department. Under the act, African primary and secondary schools operated by the church and mission bodies were given the choice of turning over their schools to the government or receiving gradually diminished subsidies; either the government took over education for Africans or there would be no education for Africans. African teachers were not permitted to criticize the government or any school authority. It was intellectual “baasskap,” a way of institutionalizing inferiority.

Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd, the minister of Bantu education, explained that education “must train and teach people in accordance with their opportunities in life.” His meaning was that Africans did not and would not have any opportunities, therefore, why educate them? “There is no place for the Bantu in the European community above the level of certain forms of labor,” he said. In short, Africans should be trained to be menial workers, to be in a position of perpetual subordination to the white man.

To the ANC, the act was a deeply sinister measure designed to retard the progress of African culture as a whole and, if enacted, permanently set back the freedom struggle of the African people. The mental outlook of all future generations of Africans was at stake. As Professor Matthews wrote at the time, “Education for ignorance and for inferiority in Verwoerd’s schools is worse than no education at all.”

The act and Verwoerd’s crude exposition of it aroused widespread indignation from both black and white. With the exception of the Dutch Reform Church, which supported apartheid, and the Lutheran mission, all Christian churches opposed the new measure. But the unity of the opposition extended only to condemning the policy, not resisting it. The Anglicans, the most fearless and consistent critics of the new policy, had a divided policy. Bishop Ambrose Reeves of Johannesburg took the extreme step of closing his schools, which had a total enrollment of ten thousand children. But the archbishop of the church in South Africa, anxious to keep children out of the streets, handed over the rest of the schools to the government. Despite their protests, all the other churches did the same with the exception of the Roman Catholics, the Seventh-Day Adventists, and the United Jewish Reform Congregation — who soldiered on without state aid. Even my own church, the Wesleyan Church, handed over their two hundred thousand African students to the government. If all the other churches had followed the example of those who resisted, the government would have been confronted with a stalemate that might have forced a compromise. Instead, the state marched over us.

The transfer of control to the Native Affairs Department was set to take place on April 1, 1955, and the ANC began to discuss plans for a school boycott that would begin on that date. Our secret discussions among the executive turned on whether we should call on the people to stage a protest for a limited period or whether we should proclaim a permanent school boycott to destroy the Bantu Education Act before it could take root. The discussions were fierce and both sides had forceful advocates. The argument for an indefinite boycott was that Bantu Education was a poison one could not drink even at the point of death from thirst. To accept it in any form would cause irreparable damage. They argued that the country was in an explosive mood and the people were hungry for something more spectacular than a mere protest.

Although I had the reputation of being a firebrand, I always felt that the organization should never promise to do more than it was able, for the people would then lose confidence in it. I took the stance that our actions should be based not on idealistic considerations but on practical ones. An indefinite boycott would require massive machinery and vast resources that we did not possess, and our past campaigns showed no indication that we were up to such an undertaking. It was simply impossible for us to create our own schools fast enough to accommodate hundreds of thousands of pupils, and if we did not offer our people an alternative, we were offering next to nothing. Along with others, I urged a week’s boycott.

The National Executive Committee resolved that a weeklong school boycott should begin on April 1. This was recommended at the annual conference in Durban in December of 1954, but the delegates rejected the recommendation and voted for an indefinite boycott. The conference was the supreme authority, even greater than the executive, and we found ourselves saddled with a boycott that would be almost impossible to effect. Dr. Verwoerd announced that the government would permanently close all schools that were boycotted and that children who stayed away would not be readmitted.

For this boycott to work, the parents and the community would have to step in and take the place of the schools. I spoke to parents and ANC members and told them that every home, every shack, every community structure, must become a center of learning for our children.

The boycott began on April 1 and had mixed results. It was often sporadic, disorganized, and ineffectual. On the east Rand it affected some seven thousand schoolchildren. Predawn marches called on parents to keep their children at home. Women picketed the schools and plucked out children who had wandered into them.

In Germiston, a township southeast of the city, Joshua Makue, chairman of our local branch, ran a school for eight hundred boycotting children that lasted for three years. In Port Elizabeth, Barrett Tyesi gave up a government teaching post and ran a school for boycotting children. In 1956, he presented seventy of these children for the Standard VI exams; all but three passed. In many places, improvised schools (described as “cultural clubs” in order not to attract the attention of the authorities) taught boycotting students. The government subsequently passed a law that made it an offense punishable by fine or imprisonment to offer unauthorized education. Police harassed these clubs, but many continued to exist underground. In the end, the community schools withered away and parents, faced with a choice between inferior education and no education at all, chose the former. My own children were at the Seventh-Day Adventist school, which was private and did not depend on government subsidies.

The campaign should be judged on two levels: whether the immediate objective was achieved, and whether it politicized more people and drew them into the struggle. On the first level, the campaign clearly failed. We did not close down African schools throughout the country nor did we rid ourselves of the Bantu Education Act. But the government was sufficiently rattled by our protest to modify the act, and at one point Verwoerd was compelled to declare that education should be the same for all. The government’s November 1954 draft syllabus was a retreat from the original notion of modeling the school system on tribal foundations. In the end, we had no option but to choose between the lesser of two evils, and opt for a diminished education. But the consequences of Bantu Education came back to haunt the government in unforeseen ways. For it was Bantu Education that produced in the 1970s the angriest, most rebellious generation of black youth the country had ever seen. When these children of Bantu Education entered their late teens and early twenties, they rose up with a vehemence.

Several months after Chief Luthuli was elected president of the ANC, Professor Z. K. Matthews returned to South Africa after a year as a visiting professor in the U.S., armed with an idea that would reshape the liberation struggle. In a speech at the ANC annual conference in the Cape, Professor Matthews said, “I wonder whether the time has not come for the African National Congress to consider the question of convening a national convention, a congress of the people, representing all the people of this country irrespective of race or colour, to draw up a Freedom Charter for the democratic South Africa of the future.”

Within months the ANC national conference accepted the proposal, and a Council of the Congress of the People was created, with Chief Luthuli as chairman and Walter Sisulu and Yusuf Cachalia as joint secretaries. The Congress of the People was to create a set of principles for the foundation of a new South Africa. Suggestions for a new constitution were to come from the people themselves, and ANC leaders all across the country were authorized to seek ideas in writing from everyone in their area. The charter would be a document born of the people.

The Congress of the People represented one of the two main currents of thought operating within the organization. It seemed inevitable that the government would ban the ANC, and many argued that the organization must be prepared to operate underground and illegally. At the same time, we did not want to give up on the important public policies and activities that brought the ANC attention and mass support. The Congress of the People would be a public display of strength.

Our dream for the Congress of the People was that it would be a landmark event in the history of the freedom struggle — a convention uniting all the oppressed and all the progressive forces of South Africa to create a clarion call for change. Our hope was that it would one day be looked upon with the same reverence as the founding convention of the ANC in 1912.

We sought to attract the widest possible sponsorship and invited some two hundred organizations — white, black, Indian, and Coloured — to send representatives to a planning conference at Tongaat, near Durban, in March of 1954. The National Action Council created there was composed of eight members from each of the four sponsoring organizations. The chairman was Chief Luthuli, and the secretariat consisted of Walter Sisulu (later replaced by Oliver after Walter’s banning forced him to resign), Yusuf Cachalia of the SAIC, Stanley Lollan of the South African Coloured People’s Organization (SACPO), and Lionel Bernstein of the Congress of Democrats (COD).

Formed in Cape Town in September of 1953 by Coloured leaders and trade unionists, SACPO was the belated offspring of the struggle to preserve the Coloured vote in the Cape and sought to represent Coloured interests. SACPO’s founding conference was addressed by Oliver Tambo and Yusuf Cachalia. Inspired by the Defiance Campaign, the COD was formed in late 1952 as a party for radical, left-wing, antigovernment whites. The COD, though small and limited mainly to Johannesburg and Cape Town, had an influence disproportionate to its numbers. Its members, such as Michael Harmel, Bram Fischer, and Rusty Bernstein, were eloquent advocates of our cause. The COD closely identified itself with the ANC and the SAIC and advocated a universal franchise and full equality between black and white. We saw the COD as a means whereby our views could be put directly to the white public. The COD served an important symbolic function for Africans; blacks who had come into the struggle because they were antiwhite discovered that there were indeed whites of goodwill who treated Africans as equals.

The National Action Council invited all participating organizations and their followers to send suggestions for a freedom charter. Circulars were sent out to townships and villages all across the country. “IF YOU COULD MAKE THE LAWS . . . WHAT WOULD YOU DO?” they said. “HOW WOULD YOU SET ABOUT MAKING SOUTH AFRICA A HAPPY PLACE FOR ALL THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN IT?” Some of the flyers and leaflets were filled with the poetic idealism that characterized the planning:

WE CALL THE PEOPLE OF SOUTH AFRICA BLACK AND WHITE — LET US SPEAK TOGETHER OF FREEDOM! . . . LET THE VOICES OF ALL THE PEOPLE BE HEARD. AND LET THE DEMANDS OF ALL THE PEOPLE FOR THE THINGS THAT WILL MAKE US FREE BE RECORDED. LET THE DEMANDS BE GATHERED TOGETHER IN A GREAT CHARTER OF FREEDOM.

The call caught the imagination of the people. Suggestions came in from sports and cultural clubs, church groups, ratepayers’ associations, women’s organizations, schools, trade union branches. They came on serviettes, on paper torn from exercise books, on scraps of foolscap, on the backs of our own leaflets. It was humbling to see how the suggestions of ordinary people were often far ahead of the leaders’. The most commonly cited demand was for one-man-one-vote. There was a recognition that the country belongs to all those who have made it their home.

The ANC branches contributed a great deal to the process of writing the charter and in fact the two best drafts came from Durban and Pietermaritzburg. A combination of these drafts was then circulated to different regions and committees for comments and questions. The charter itself was drafted by a small committee of the National Action Council and reviewed by the ANC’s National Executive Committee.

The charter would be presented at the Congress of the People and each of its elements submitted to the delegates for approval. In June, a few days before the congress was scheduled, a small group of us reviewed the draft. We made few changes, as there was little time and the document was already in good shape.

The Congress of the People took place at Kliptown, a multiracial village on a scrap of veld a few miles southwest of Johannesburg, on two clear, sunny days, June 25 and 26, 1955. More than three thousand delegates braved police intimidation to assemble and approve the final document. They came by car, bus, truck, and foot. Although the overwhelming number of delegates were black, there were more than three hundred Indians, two hundred Coloureds, and one hundred whites.

I drove to Kliptown with Walter. We were both under banning orders, so we found a place at the edge of the crowd where we could observe without mixing in or being seen. The crowd was impressive both in its size and in its discipline. “Freedom volunteers” wearing black, green, and yellow armbands met the delegates and arranged for their seating. There were old women and young wearing congress skirts, congress blouses, congress doekies (scarves); old men and young wearing congress armbands and congress hats. Signs everywhere said, “FREEDOM IN OUR LIFETIME, LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE.” The platform was a rainbow of colors: white delegates from the COD, Indians from the SAIC, Coloured representatives from SACPO all sat in front of a replica of a four-spoked wheel representing the four organizations in the Congress Alliance. White and African police and members of the Special Branch milled around, taking photographs, writing in notebooks, and trying unsuccessfully to intimidate the delegates.

There were dozens of songs and speeches. Meals were served. The atmosphere was both serious and festive. On the afternoon of the first day, the charter was read aloud, section by section, to the people in English, Sesotho, and Xhosa. After each section, the crowd shouted its approval with cries of “Afrika!” and “Mayibuye!” The first day of the congress was a success.

The second day was much like the first. Each section of the charter had been adopted by acclamation and at 3:30, the final approval was to be voted when a brigade of police and Special Branch detectives brandishing Sten guns swarmed onto the platform. In a gruff, Afrikaans-accented voice, one of the police took the microphone and announced that treason was suspected and that no one was to leave the gathering without police permission. The police began pushing people off the platform and confiscating documents and photographs, even signs such as “SOUP WITH MEAT” and “SOUP WITHOUT MEAT.” Another group of constables armed with rifles formed a cordon around the crowd. The people responded magnificently by loudly singing “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.” The delegates were then allowed to leave one by one, each person interviewed by the police and his or her name taken down. I had been on the outskirts of the crowd when the police raid began, and while my instinct was to stay and help, discretion seemed the wiser course, because I would have immediately been arrested and tossed in jail. An emergency meeting had been called in Johannesburg and I made my way back there. As I returned to Johannesburg, I knew that this raid signaled a harsh new turn on the part of the government.

Though the Congress of the People had been broken up, the charter itself became a great beacon for the liberation struggle. Like other enduring political documents, such as the American Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the Communist Manifesto, the Freedom Charter is a mixture of practical goals and poetic language. It extols the abolition of racial discrimination and the achievement of equal rights for all. It welcomes all who embrace freedom to participate in the making of a democratic, nonracial South Africa. It captured the hopes and dreams of the people and acted as a blueprint for the liberation struggle and the future of the nation. The preamble reads:

We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: —

That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people;

That our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality;

That our country will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities;

That only a democratic state, based on the will of the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief;

And therefore, we, the people of South Africa, black and white, together — equals, countrymen and brothers — adopt this FREEDOM CHARTER. And we pledge ourselves to strive together, sparing nothing of our strength and courage, until the democratic changes here set out have been won.

The charter then lays out the requirements for a free and democratic South Africa.

THE PEOPLE SHALL GOVERN!

Every man and woman shall have the right to vote for and stand as a candidate for all bodies which make laws.

All the people shall be entitled to take part in the administration of the country.

The rights of the people shall be the same regardless of race, colour or sex.

All bodies of minority rule, advisory boards, councils and authorities shall be replaced by democratic organs of self-government.

ALL NATIONAL GROUPS SHALL HAVE EQUAL RIGHTS!

There shall be equal status in the bodies of state, in the courts and in the schools for all national groups and races;

All national groups shall be protected by law against insults to their race and national pride;

All people shall have equal rights to use their own language and to develop their own folk culture and customs;

The preaching and practice of national, race or colour discrimination and contempt shall be a punishable crime;

All apartheid laws and practices shall be set aside.

THE PEOPLE SHALL SHARE IN THE COUNTRY’S WEALTH!

The national wealth of our country, the heritage of all South Africans, shall be restored to the people;

The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole;

All other industries and trade shall be controlled to assist the well-being of the people;

All people shall have equal rights to trade where they choose, to manufacture and to enter all trades, crafts and professions.

THE LAND SHALL BE SHARED AMONG THOSE WHO WORK IT!

Restriction of land ownership on racial basis shall be ended, and all the land re-divided amongst those who work it, to banish famine and land hunger. . . .

Some in the ANC, particularly the Africanist contingent, who were anti-Communist and antiwhite, objected to the charter as being a design for a radically different South Africa from the one the ANC had called for throughout its history. They claimed the charter favored a socialist order and believed the COD and white Communists had had a disproportionate influence on its ideology. In June 1956, in the monthly journal Liberation, I pointed out that the charter endorsed private enterprise and would allow capitalism to flourish among Africans for the first time. The charter guaranteed that when freedom came, Africans would have the opportunity to own their own businesses in their own names, to own their own houses and property, in short, to prosper as capitalists and entrepreneurs. The charter does not speak about the eradication of classes and private property, or public ownership of the means of production, or promulgate any of the tenets of scientific socialism. The clause discussing the possible nationalization of the mines, the banks, and monopoly industries was an action that needed to be taken if the economy was not to be solely owned and operated by white businessmen.

The charter was in fact a revolutionary document precisely because the changes it envisioned could not be achieved without radically altering the economic and political structure of South Africa. It was not meant to be capitalist or socialist but a melding together of the people’s demands to end the oppression. In South Africa, to merely achieve fairness, one had to destroy apartheid itself, for it was the very embodiment of injustice.

21

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 1955, my bans expired. I had last had a holiday in 1948 when I was an untested lightweight in the ANC with few responsibilities beyond attending meetings in the Transvaal executive and addressing the odd public gathering. Now, at the age of thirty-eight, I had reached the light heavyweight division and carried more pounds and more responsibility. I had been confined to Johannesburg for two years, chained to my legal and political work, and had neglected Mandela family affairs in the Transkei. I was keen to visit the countryside again, to be in the open veld and rolling valleys of my childhood. I was anxious to see my family and confer with Sabata and Daliwonga on certain problems involving the Transkei, while the ANC was eager that I confer with them on political matters. I was to have a working holiday, the only kind of holiday I knew how to take.

The night before I left, a number of friends gathered at my home to see me off. Duma Nokwe, the young and good-natured barrister who was then national secretary of the Youth League, was among them. Duma had accompanied Walter on his trip to the Youth Conference in Bucharest, and that night he entertained us with the Russian and Chinese songs he had learned on his trip. At midnight, as my guests were getting ready to leave, my daughter Makaziwe, then two, awoke and asked me if she could come along with me. I had been spending insufficient time with my family and Makaziwe’s request provoked pangs of guilt. Suddenly, my enthusiasm for my trip vanished. But I carried her back to bed and kissed her good night and as she dropped off to sleep, I made my final preparations for my journey.

I was embarking on a fact-finding mission, which I would combine with the pleasures of seeing the countryside and old friends and comrades. I had been isolated from developments in other parts of the country and was eager to see for myself what was transpiring in the hinterlands. Although I read a variety of newspapers from around the country, newspapers are only a poor shadow of reality; their information is important to a freedom fighter not because it reveals the truth, but because it discloses the biases and perceptions of both those who produce the paper and those who read it. On this trip I wanted to talk firsthand with our people in the field.

I left shortly after midnight and within an hour I was on the highway to Durban. The roads were empty and I was accompanied only by the stars and gentle Transvaal breezes. Though I had not slept, I felt lighthearted and fresh. At daybreak I crossed from Volksrust to Natal, the country of Cetywayo, the last independent king of the Zulus, whose troops had defeated a British column at Isandhlwana in 1879. But the king was unable to withstand the firepower of the British and eventually surrendered his kingdom. Shortly after crossing the river on the Natal border I saw the Majuba Hills, the steep escarpment where a small Boer commando ambushed and defeated a garrison of British redcoats less than two years after the defeat of Cetywayo. At Majuba Hill the Afrikaner had stoutly defended his independence against British imperialism and struck a blow for nationalism. Now the descendants of those same freedom fighters were persecuting my people who were struggling for precisely the same thing the Afrikaners had once fought and died for. I drove through those historic hills thinking less of the ironies of history by which the oppressed becomes the oppressor, than of how the ruthless Afrikaners deserved their own Majuba Hill at the hands of my people.

This harsh reverie was interrupted by the happy music of Radio Bantu on my car radio. While I despised the conservative politics of Radio Bantu served up by the government-run South African Broadcasting Corporation, I reveled in its music. (In South Africa, African artists made the music, but white record companies made the money.) I was listening to a popular program called “Rediffusion Service,” which featured most of the country’s leading African singers: Miriam Makeba, Dolly Rathebe, Dorothy Masuku, Thoko Shukuma, and the smooth sound of the Manhattan Brothers. I enjoy all types of music, but the music of my own flesh and blood goes right to my heart. The curious beauty of African music is that it uplifts even as it tells a sad tale. You may be poor, you may have only a ramshackle house, you may have lost your job, but that song gives you hope. African music is often about the aspirations of the African people, and it can ignite the political resolve of those who might otherwise be indifferent to politics. One merely has to witness the infectious singing at African rallies. Politics can be strengthened by music, but music has a potency that defies politics.

I made a number of stops in Natal, meeting secretly with ANC leaders. Nearing Durban, I took the opportunity of stopping in Pietermaritzburg, where I spent the entire night with Dr. Chota Motala, Moses Mabhida, and others, reviewing the political situation in the country. I then traveled on to Groutville, spending the day with Chief Luthuli. Although he had been confined by banning orders for more than a year, the chief was well-informed about ANC activities. He was uneasy about what he saw as the increasing centralization of the ANC in Johannesburg and the declining power of the regions. I reassured him that we wanted the regions to remain strong.

My next stop was a meeting in Durban with Dr. Naicker and the Executive Committee of the Natal Indian Congress, where I raised the sensitive issue that the National Executive Committee believed that the Indian Congress had become inactive of late. I was reluctant to do this as Dr. Naicker was my senior and a man who had suffered far more than I, but we discussed ways to overcome government restrictions.

From Durban I drove south along the coast past Port Shepstone and Port St. Johns, small and lovely colonial towns that dotted the shimmering beaches fronting the Indian Ocean. While mesmerized by the beauty of the area, I was constantly rebuked by the buildings and streets that bear the names of white imperialists who suppressed the very people whose names belonged there. At this point, I turned inland and drove to Umzimkulu to meet with Dr. Conco, the treasurer-general of the ANC, for further discussions and consultations.

With excitement mounting, I then set off for Umtata. When I turned into York Road, the main street of Umtata, I felt the rush of familiarity and fond memories one gets from coming home after a long exile. I had been away for thirteen years, and while there were no banners and fatted calves to greet this prodigal son upon his return, I was tremendously excited to see my mother, my humble home, and the friends of my youth. But my trip to the Transkei had a second motive: my arrival coincided with the meeting of a special committee appointed to oversee the transition of the Transkeian Bunga system to that of the Bantu Authorities.

The role of the Bunga, which consisted of 108 members, one-quarter of whom were white and three-quarters African, was to advise the government on legislation affecting Africans in the area and to regulate local matters like taxes and roads. While the Bunga was the most influential political body in the Transkei, its resolutions were advisory and its decisions subject to review by white magistrates. The Bunga was only as powerful as whites permitted it to be. Yet, the Bantu Authorities Act would replace it with an even more repressive system: a feudalistic order resting on hereditary and tribal distinctions as decided by the state. The government suggested that Bantu Authorities would free the people from the control of white magistrates, but this was a smoke screen for the state’s undermining of democracy and promotion of tribal rivalries. The ANC regarded any acceptance of Bantu Authorities as a capitulation to the government.

On the night of my arrival, I met briefly with a number of Transkeian councillors and my nephew, K. D. Matanzima, whom I called Daliwonga. Daliwonga was playing a leading part in persuading the Bunga to accept Bantu Authorities, for the new order would reinforce and even increase his power as the chief of Emigrant Thembuland. Daliwonga and I were on separate sides of this difficult issue. We had grown apart: he had opted for a traditional leadership role and was cooperating with the system. But it was late, and rather than begin a lengthy discussion, we resolved to meet the following day.

I spent that night in a boardinghouse in town, rose early, and was joined for coffee in my room by two local chiefs to discuss their role in the new Bantu Authorities. In the middle of our conversation the mistress of the boardinghouse nervously ushered a white man into my room. “Are you Nelson Mandela?” he demanded.

“And who is asking?” I said.

He gave his name and rank as a detective sergeant in the security police.

“May I see your warrant, please?” I asked. It was obvious the sergeant resented my audacity, but he grudgingly produced an official document. Yes, I was Nelson Mandela, I told him. He informed me that the commanding officer wanted to see me. I replied that if he wanted to see me he knew where I was. He then ordered me to accompany him to the police station. I asked him whether I was under arrest, and he replied that I was not.

“In that case,” I said, “I am not going.” He was taken aback by my refusal but knew I was on firm legal ground. He proceeded to fire a succession of questions at me: when had I left Johannesburg? where had I visited? whom had I spoken with? did I have a permit to enter the Transkei and how long would I be staying? I informed him that the Transkei was my home and that I did not need a permit to enter it. The sergeant stomped out of the room.

The chiefs were taken aback by my behavior and upbraided me for my rudeness. I explained that I had merely treated him in the manner that he had treated me. The chiefs were unconvinced, and clearly thought I was a hotheaded young man who would get himself in trouble. These were men I was trying to persuade to reject Bantu Authorities, and it was apparent that I had not made a very good impression. The incident reminded me that I had returned to my homeland a different man from the one who had left thirteen years before.

The police were unsophisticated in the Transkei, and from the moment I left the boardinghouse, they followed me everywhere I went. After I talked to anyone, the police would confront the person and say, “If you talk with Mandela, we will come and arrest you.”

I met briefly with a local ANC leader and was dismayed to learn of the organization’s lack of funds, but at that moment, I was thinking less about the organization than my next stop: Qunu, the village where I was raised and where my mother still lived.

I roused my mother, who at first looked as though she was seeing a ghost. But she was overjoyed. I had brought some food — fruit, meat, sugar, salt, and a chicken — and my mother lit the stove to make tea. We did not hug or kiss; that was not our custom. Although I was happy to be back, I felt a sense of guilt at the sight of my mother living all alone in such poor circumstances. I tried to persuade her to come live with me in Johannesburg, but she swore that she would not leave the countryside she loved. I wondered — not for the first time — whether one was ever justified in neglecting the welfare of one’s own family in order to fight for the welfare of others. Can there be anything more important than looking after one’s aging mother? Is politics merely a pretext for shirking one’s responsibilities, an excuse for not being able to provide in the way one wanted?

After an hour or so with my mother, I left to spend the night at Mqhekezweni. It was night when I arrived, and in my enthusiasm I started to blow the horn of my car. I had not considered how this noise might be interpreted and people emerged fearfully from their huts, thinking it might be the police. But when I was recognized, I was met with surprise and joy by a number of villagers.

But instead of sleeping like a child in my old bed, I tossed and turned that night wondering whether or not I had taken the right path. But I did not doubt that I had chosen correctly. I do not mean to suggest that the freedom struggle is of a higher moral order than taking care of one’s family. It is not; they are merely different.

Returning to Qunu the next morning, I spent the day reminiscing with people, and walking the fields around the village. I also visited with my sister Mabel, the most practical and easygoing of my sisters and of whom I was very fond. Mabel was married, but her union involved an interesting tale. My sister Baliwe, who was older than Mabel, had been engaged to be married, and lobola had already been paid. But two weeks before the wedding, Baliwe, who was a spirited girl, ran away. We could not return the cattle, as they had already been accepted, so the family decided that Mabel would take Baliwe’s place, and she did so.

I left late that afternoon to drive to Mqhekezweni. Again I arrived at night and announced my presence with loud hooting, only this time people emerged from their homes with the idea that Justice, their chief, had returned. Justice had been deposed from his chieftaincy by the government and was then living in Durban. Though the government had appointed someone in his stead, a chief is a chief by virtue of his birth and wields authority because of his blood. They were happy to see me, but they would have been happier still welcoming home Justice.

My second mother, No-England, the widow of the regent, had been fast asleep when I arrived, but when she appeared in her nightdress and saw me, she became so excited she demanded I drive her immediately to a nearby relative to celebrate. She hopped into my car and we set off on a wild ride through the untamed veld, to get to the remote rondavel of her relative. There we woke up another family, and I finally went to sleep, tired and happy, just before dawn.

Over the next fortnight I moved back and forth between Qunu and Mqhekezweni, staying by turns with my mother and No-England, visiting and receiving friends and relatives. I ate the same foods I had eaten as a boy, I walked the same fields, and gazed at the same sky during the day, the same stars at night. It is important for a freedom fighter to remain in touch with his own roots, and the hurly-burly of city life has a way of erasing the past. The visit restored me and revived my feelings for the place in which I grew up. I was once again my mother’s son in her house; I was once again the regent’s charge in the Great Place.

The visit was also a way of measuring the distance I had come. I saw how my own people had remained in one place, while I had moved on and seen new worlds and gained new ideas. If I had not realized it before, I knew that I was right not to have returned to the Transkei after Fort Hare. If I had returned, my political evolution would have been stunted.

When the Special Committee considering the introduction of the Bantu Authorities had adjourned, Daliwonga and I went to visit Sabata in hospital in Umtata. I had hoped to talk with Sabata about the Bantu Authorities, but his health made it impossible. I wanted Sabata and his brother, Daliwonga, to begin talks on this issue as soon as Sabata was well enough to do so, and made this clear. I felt proud to be organizing a meeting between the descendants of Ngubengcuka, and mused for a moment on the irony that I was finally fulfilling the role of counselor to Sabata for which I’d been groomed so many years before.

From Umtata, Daliwonga and I drove to Qamata, where we met his younger brother George, who was then a practicing attorney. His two articled clerks were well known to me and I was pleased to see them both: A. P. Mda and Tsepo Letlaka. Both were still firm supporters of the organization who had given up teaching and decided to become lawyers. In Qamata, we all sat down to examine the issue of the proposed Bantu Authorities.

My mission was to persuade Daliwonga — a man destined to play a leading role in the politics of the Transkei — to oppose the imposition of the Bantu Authorities. I did not want our meeting to be a showdown, or even a debate; I did not want any grandstanding or faultfinding, but a serious discussion among men who all had the best interests of their people and their nation at heart.

In many ways, Daliwonga still regarded me as his junior, both in terms of my rank in the Thembu hierarchy and in my own political development. While I was his junior in the former realm, I believed I had advanced beyond my onetime mentor in my political views. Whereas his concerns focused on his own tribe, I had become involved with those who thought in terms of the entire nation. I did not want to complicate the discussion by introducing grand political theories; I would rely on common sense and the facts of our history. Before we began, Daliwonga invited Mda and Letlaka and his brother, George, to participate, but they demurred, preferring to listen to the two of us. “Let the nephew and the uncle conduct the debate,” Mda said as a sign of respect. Etiquette dictated that I would make my case first and he would not interrupt; then he would answer while I listened.

In the first place, I said, the Bantu Authorities was impractical, because more and more Africans were moving out of the rural homelands to the cities. The government’s policy was to try to put Africans into ethnic enclaves because they feared the power of African unity. The people, I said, wanted democracy, and political leadership based on merit not birth. The Bantu Authorities was a retreat from democracy.

Daliwonga’s response was that he was trying to restore the status of his royal house that had been crushed by the British. He stressed the importance and vitality of the tribal system and traditional leadership, and did not want to reject a system that enshrined those things. He, too, wanted a free South Africa but he thought that goal could be achieved faster and more peacefully through the government’s policy of separate development. The ANC, he said, would bring about bloodshed and bitterness. He ended by saying that he was startled and disturbed to learn that in spite of my own position in the Thembu royal house I did not support the principle of traditional leadership.

When Daliwonga finished, I replied that while I understood his personal position as a chief quite well, I believed that his own interests were in conflict with those of the community. I said that if I were in a similar position to his, I would try to subordinate my own interests to those of the people. I immediately regretted that last point because I have discovered that in discussions it never helps to take a morally superior tone to one’s opponent. I noticed that Daliwonga stiffened when I made this point and I quickly shifted the discussion to more general issues.

We spoke the whole night, but came no closer to each other’s position. As the sun was rising, we parted. We had embarked on different roads that put us in conflict with one another. This grieved me because few men had inspired me as Daliwonga had, and nothing would have given me greater joy than to fight beside him. But it was not to be. On family issues, we remained friends; politically, we were in opposite and antagonistic camps.

I returned to Qunu that morning and spent another few days there. I tramped across the veld to visit friends and relatives, but the magic world of my childhood had fled. One evening I bade my mother and sister farewell. I visited Sabata in hospital to wish him a speedy recovery, and by 3 A.M. I was on my way to Cape Town. The bright moonlight and crisp breeze kept me fresh all the way across the Kei River. The road winds up the rugged mountains, and as the sun rose my mood lifted. I had last been on that road eighteen years before, when Jongintaba had driven me to Healdtown.

I was driving slowly when I noticed a limping man at the side of the road raising his hand to me. I instinctively pulled over and offered him a ride. He was about my own age, of small stature, and rather unkempt; he had not bathed in quite a while. He told me that his car had broken down on the other side of Umtata and he had been walking for several days toward Port Elizabeth. I noticed a number of inconsistencies in his story, and I asked him the make of his car. A Buick, he replied. And the registration? I said. He told me a number. A few minutes later, I said, “What did you say that registration number was?” He told me a slightly different figure. I suspected he was a policeman, and I decided to say very little.

My reserve went unnoticed by my companion as he talked the entire way to Port Elizabeth. He pointed out various curiosities and was well versed in the history of the region. He never asked who I was and I did not tell him. But he was entertaining, and I found his conversation useful and interesting.

I made a stop in East London and spoke to a few ANC people. Before leaving I had a conversation with some other people in the township, one of whom struck me as an undercover policeman. My companion had learned my identity, and a few minutes after we were back in the car, he said to me, “You know, Mandela, I suspected that one chap at the end was a policeman.” This raised my own suspicions, and I said to my companion, “Look here, how do I know you’re not a policeman yourself? You must tell me who you are — otherwise I will dump you back on the road again.”

He protested and said, “No, I will introduce myself properly.” He confessed that he was a smuggler and had been carrying dagga (marijuana) from the Pondoland coast when he ran into a police roadblock. When he saw the roadblock, he jumped out of the car and tried to make a break for it. The police fired, wounding him in the leg. That explained his limp and his lack of transportation. He waved me down because he assumed the police were hunting for him.

I asked him why he had chosen such a dangerous livelihood. He had originally wanted to be a teacher, he told me, but his parents were too poor to send him to college. After school he had worked in a factory, but the wages were too meager for him to live on his own. He started to supplement them by smuggling dagga, and soon found it so profitable that he left the factory altogether. He said in any other country in the world he would have found an opportunity for his talents. “I saw white men who were my inferiors in ability and brains earning fifty times what I was.” After a long pause, he announced in a solemn tone, “I am also a member of the ANC.” He told me that he had defied during the 1952 Defiance Campaign and had served on various local committees in Port Elizabeth. I quizzed him on various personalities, all of whom he seemed to know, and later in Port Elizabeth I confirmed that he was telling me the truth. In fact, he had been one of the most reliable of those who went to jail during the Defiance Campaign. The doors of the liberation struggle are open to all who choose to walk through them.

As an attorney with a fairly large criminal practice, I was conversant with such tales. Over and over again, I saw men as bright and talented as my companion resort to crime in order to make ends meet. While I do think certain individuals are disposed to crime because of their genetic inheritance or an abusive upbringing, I am convinced that apartheid turned many otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals. It stands to reason that an immoral and unjust legal system would breed contempt for its laws and regulations.

We reached Port Elizabeth at sunset, and Joe Matthews, Z. K. Matthews’s son, arranged accommodation. The next morning I met with Raymond Mhlaba, Frances Baard, and Govan Mbeki, whom I was meeting for the first time. I knew his work, for as a student I had read his booklet “The Transkei in the Making.” He had been running a cooperative store in the Transkei which he was soon to give up to become an editor of the weekly New Age. Govan was serious, thoughtful, and soft-spoken, equally at home in the world of scholarship and the world of political activism. He had been deeply involved in the planning of the Congress of the People and was destined for the highest levels of leadership in the organization.

I departed in the late morning for Cape Town, with only my radio for company. I had never before driven on roads between Port Elizabeth and Cape Town, and I was looking forward to many miles of entrancing scenery. It was hot, and the road was bordered by dense vegetation on either side. I had hardly left the city when I ran over a large snake slithering across the road. I am not superstitious and do not believe in omens, but the death of the snake did not please me. I do not like killing any living thing, even those creatures that fill some people with dread.

Once I passed Humansdorp, the forests became denser and for the first time in my life I saw wild elephants and baboons. A large baboon crossed the road in front of me, and I stopped the car. He stood and stared at me as intently as if he were a Special Branch detective. It was ironic that I, an African, was seeing the Africa of storybooks and legend for the first time. Such beautiful land, I thought, and all of it out of reach, owned by whites and untouchable for a black man. I could no more choose to live in such beauty than run for Parliament.

Seditious thoughts accompany a freedom fighter wherever he goes. At the town of Knysna, more than a hundred miles west of Port Elizabeth, I stopped to survey the surroundings. The road above the town affords a panoramic view as far as the eye can see. In every direction, I saw sprawling, dense forests and I dwelt not on the greenery but the fact that there were many places a guerrilla army could live and train undetected.

I arrived in Cape Town at midnight for what turned out to be a two-week stay. I stayed at the home of Reverend Walter Teka, a leader in the Methodist Church, but I spent most of my days with Johnson Ngwevela and Greenwood Ngotyana. Ngwevela was the chairman of the Cape western region of the ANC and Ngotyana a member of its executive. Both were Communists as well as leading members of the Wesleyan Church. I traveled every day to meet ANC officials in places like Worcester, Paarl, Stellenbosch, Simonstown, and Hermanus. I planned to work each day of my stay and when I asked what had been arranged for Sunday — a working day for me in the Transvaal — they informed me that the sabbath was reserved for churchgoing. I protested, but to no avail. Communism and Christianity, at least in Africa, were not mutually exclusive.

While I was walking in the city one day, I noticed a white woman in the gutter gnawing on some fish bones. She was poor and apparently homeless, but she was young and not unattractive. I knew of course that there were poor whites, whites who were every bit as poor as Africans, but one rarely saw them. I was used to seeing black beggars on the street, and it startled me to see a white one. While I normally did not give to African beggars, I felt the urge to give this woman money. In that moment I realized the tricks that apartheid plays on one, for the everyday travails that afflict Africans are accepted as a matter of course, while my heart immediately went out to this bedraggled white woman. In South Africa, to be poor and black was normal, to be poor and white was a tragedy.

* * *

As I was preparing to leave Cape Town, I went to the offices of New Age to see some old friends and discuss their editorial policy. New Age, the successor to earlier banned left-wing publications, was a friend of the ANC. It was early in the morning of the twenty-seventh of September, and as I walked up the steps I could hear angry voices inside the office and furniture being moved. I recognized the voice of Fred Carneson, the manager of the newspaper and its guiding spirit. I also heard the gruff voices of the security police who were in the process of searching the offices. I quietly left, and later discovered that this had not been an isolated incident but part of the largest nationwide raid undertaken in South African history. Armed with warrants authorizing the seizure of anything regarded as evidence of high treason, sedition, or violations of the Suppression of Communism Act, the police searched more than five hundred people in their homes and offices around the country. My office in Johannesburg was searched, as well as the homes of Dr. Moroka, Father Huddleston, and Professor Matthews.

The raid cast a shadow over my last day in Cape Town, for it signaled the first move in the state’s new and even more repressive strategy. At the very least, a new round of bannings would take place, and I was certain to be among them. That evening, Reverend Teka and his wife had a number of people over to the house to bid me farewell, and led by the reverend, we knelt in prayer for the well-being of those whose homes had been raided. I left the house at my favored departure time of 3 A.M., and within half an hour I was on the road to Kimberley, the rough-and-ready mining town where the South African diamond business had begun in the last century.

I was to stay at the home of Dr. Arthur Letele for one night. Later to become the treasurer-general of the ANC, Arthur was a scrupulous medical practitioner. I had a cold, and when he greeted me on my arrival, he confined me to bed. He was a brave and dedicated man, and had led a small group of defiers to jail during the Defiance Campaign. This was a risky action for a doctor in a town where political action by blacks was rare. In Johannesburg, one has the support of hundreds and even thousands of others who are engaging in the same dangerous activities, but in a conservative place like Kimberley, with no liberal press or judiciary to oversee the police, such an action requires true valor. It was in Kimberley during the Defiance Campaign that one of the ANC’s leading members was sentenced to lashes by the local magistrate.

Despite my cold, Arthur allowed me to address an ANC meeting in his house the following evening. I was preparing to leave the next morning at three o’clock, but Arthur and his wife insisted I remain for breakfast, which I did. I made good time on the way back to Johannesburg and arrived home just before supper, where I was met with excited cries from my children, who well knew that I was a father bearing gifts. One by one, I handed out the presents I had purchased in Cape Town and patiently answered their questions about the trip. Though not a true holiday, it had the same effect: I felt rejuvenated and ready to take up the fight once more.

22

IMMEDIATELY upon my return I reported on my trip to the Working Committee of the ANC. Their principal concern was whether or not the Congress Alliance was strong enough to halt the government’s plans. I did not give them good news. I said the Transkei was not a well-organized ANC area and the power of the security police would soon immobilize what little influence the ANC had.

I put forth an alternative that I knew would be unpopular. Why shouldn’t the ANC participate in the new Bantu Authorities structures as a means of remaining in touch with the masses of people? In time, such participation would become a platform for our own ideas and policies.

Any suggestion of participating in apartheid structures in any way was automatically met with angry opposition. In my early days, I, too, would have strenuously objected. But my sense of the country was that relatively few people were ready to make the sacrifices to join the struggle. We should meet the people on their own terms, even if that meant appearing to collaborate. My idea was that our movement should be a great tent that included as many people as possible.

* * *

At the time, however, my report was given short shrift because of another related report with greater ramifications. The publication of the report of the Tomlinson Commission for the Socio-Economic Development of the Bantu Areas had set off a nationwide debate. The government-created commission proposed a plan for the development of the so-called Bantu Areas or bantustans. The result was in fact a blueprint for “separate development” or grand apartheid.

The bantustan system had been conceived by Dr. H. F. Verwoerd, the minister of native affairs, as a way of muting international criticism of South African racial policies but at the same time institutionalizing apartheid. The bantustans, or reserves as they were also known, would be separate ethnic enclaves or homelands for all African citizens. Africans, Verwoerd said, “should stand with both feet in the reserves” where they were to “develop along their own lines.” The idea was to preserve the status quo where three million whites owned 87 percent of the land, and relegate the eight million Africans to the remaining 13 percent.

The central theme of the report was the rejection of the idea of integration between the races in favor of a policy of separate development of black and white. To that end, the report recommended the industrialization of the African areas, noting that any program of development that did not aim at providing opportunities for Africans in their own regions was doomed to failure. The commission pointed out that the present geographical configuration of the African areas was too fragmentary, and recommended instead a consolidation of African areas into what it termed seven “historical-logical” homelands of the principal ethnic groups.

But the creation of individual, self-contained bantustans, as proposed by the commission, was farcical. Transkei, the showpiece of the proposed homeland system, would be broken into three geographically separate blocks. The Swazi bantustan, Lebowa, and Venda were composed of three pieces each; Gazankule, four; the Ciskei, seventeen; Bophuthatswana, nineteen; and KwaZulu, twenty-nine. The Nationalists were creating a cruel jigsaw puzzle out of people’s lives.

The government’s intention in creating the homeland system was to keep the Transkei — and other African areas — as reservoirs of cheap labor for white industry. At the same time, the covert goal of the government was to create an African middle class to blunt the appeal of the ANC and the liberation struggle.

The ANC denounced the report of the Tomlinson Commission, despite some of its more liberal recommendations. As I told Daliwonga, separate development was a spurious solution to a problem that whites had no idea how to control. In the end, the government approved the report, but rejected a number of its recommendations as being too progressive.

Despite the encroaching darkness and my pessimism about the government’s policies, I was thinking about the future. In February 1956, I returned to the Transkei to purchase a plot of land in Umtata. I have always thought a man should own a house near the place he was born, where he might find a restfulness that eludes him elsewhere.

With Walter, I journeyed down to the Transkei. Walter and I met with various ANC people in both Umtata and Durban, where we went first. Once again, we were clumsily shadowed by Special Branch police. In Durban, we paid a call on our colleagues at the Natal Indian Congress in an effort to boost activism in the area.

In Umtata, with Walter’s help, I made a down payment to C. K. Sakwe for a plot of land he owned in town. Sakwe was a member of the Bunga and had served on the Natives Representative Council. While we were there he told us of an incident that had occurred the previous Saturday at Bumbhane, the Great Place of Sabata, at a meeting of government officials and chiefs about the introduction of the bantustans. A number of the chiefs objected to the government’s policy and verbally attacked the magistrate. The meeting broke up in anger; this gave us some sense of the grassroots objections to the Bantu Authorities Act.

In March 1956, after several months of relative freedom, I received my third ban, which restricted me to Johannesburg for five years and prohibited me from attending meetings for that same period. For the next sixty months I would be quarantined in the same district, seeing the same streets, the same mine dumps on the horizon, the same sky. I would have to depend on newspapers and other people for reports on what was occurring outside of Johannesburg, another prospect I did not relish.

But this time my attitude toward my bans had changed radically. When I was first banned I abided by the rules and regulations of my persecutors. I had now developed contempt for these restrictions. I was not going to let my involvement in the struggle and the scope of my political activities be determined by the enemy I was fighting against. To allow my activities to be circumscribed by my opponent was a form of defeat, and I resolved not to become my own jailer.

I soon became involved in mediating a bitter political dispute right in Johannesburg. It pitted two sides against each other, both of which were seeking my support. Each side within this particular organization had legitimate grievances and each side was implacably opposed to the other. The altercation threatened to descend into an acrimonious civil war, and I did my best to prevent a rupture. I am speaking, of course, of the struggle at the boxing and weight lifting club at the Donaldson Orlando Community Center where I trained almost every evening.

I had joined the club in 1950, and on almost every free night I worked out at the Community Center. For the previous few years I had taken my son, Thembi, with me, and by 1956, when he was ten years old, he was a keen if spindly paperweight boxer. The club was managed by Johannes (Skipper Adonis) Molotsi, and its membership consisted of both professional and amateur boxers, as well as a variety of dedicated weight lifters. Our star boxer, Jerry (Uyinja) Moloi, later became the Transvaal lightweight champion and number one contender for the national title.

The gym was poorly equipped. We could not afford a ring and trained on a cement floor, which was particularly dangerous when a boxer was knocked down. We boasted a single punching bag and a few pairs of boxing gloves. We had no medicine or speed balls, no proper boxing trunks or shoes, and no mouth guards. Almost no one owned head guards. Despite the lack of equipment, the gym produced such champions as Eric (Black Material) Ntsele, bantamweight champion of South Africa, and Freddie (Tomahawk) Ngidi, the Transvaal flyweight champion, who spent his days working for me as an assistant at Mandela and Tambo. Altogether, we had perhaps twenty or thirty members.

Although I had boxed a bit at Fort Hare, it was not until I had lived in Johannesburg that I took up the sport in earnest. I was never an outstanding boxer. I was in the heavyweight division, and I had neither enough power to compensate for my lack of speed nor enough speed to make up for my lack of power. I did not enjoy the violence of boxing so much as the science of it. I was intrigued by how one moved one’s body to protect oneself, how one used a strategy both to attack and retreat, how one paced oneself over a match. Boxing is egalitarian. In the ring, rank, age, color, and wealth are irrelevant. When you are circling your opponent, probing his strengths and weaknesses, you are not thinking about his color or social status. I never did any real fighting after I entered politics. My main interest was in training; I found the rigorous exercise to be an excellent outlet for tension and stress. After a strenuous workout, I felt both mentally and physically lighter. It was a way of losing myself in something that was not the struggle. After an evening’s workout I would wake up the next morning feeling strong and refreshed, ready to take up the fight again.

I attended the gym for one and a half hours each evening from Monday through Thursday. I would go home directly after work, pick up Thembi, then drive to the Community Center. We did an hour of exercise, some combination of roadwork, skipping rope, calisthenics, or shadow boxing, followed by fifteen minutes of body work, some weight lifting and then sparring. If we were training for a fight or a tournament, we would extend the training time to two and a half hours.

We each took turns leading the training sessions in order to develop leadership, initiative, and self-confidence. Thembi particularly enjoyed leading these sessions. Things would get a bit rough for me on the nights that my son was in charge, for he would single me out for criticism. He was quick to chastise me whenever I got lazy. Everybody in the gym called me “Chief,” an honorific he avoided, calling me “Mister Mandela,” and occasionally, when he felt sympathy for his old man, “My bra,” township slang meaning “My brother.” When he saw me loafing, he would say in a stern voice, “Mister Mandela, you are wasting our time this evening. If you cannot keep up, why not go home and sit with the old women.” Everyone enjoyed these jibes immensely, and it gave me pleasure to see my son so happy and confident.

The camaraderie of the club was shattered that year because of a spat between Skipper Molotsi and Jerry Moloi. Jerry and the other boxers felt that Skipper was not paying enough attention to the club. Skipper was a skillful coach, but was rarely present to impart his knowledge. He was a historian of boxing lore and could narrate all twenty-six rounds of Jack Johnson’s famous bout in Havana in 1915 when the first black heavyweight champion of the world lost his title. But Skipper tended to appear only before a match or a tournament to collect the small fee that was his due. I myself was sympathetic to Jerry’s point of view but did my best to patch up the quarrel in the interest of keeping harmony. In the end, even my son agreed with Jerry’s criticism of Skipper and there was nothing I could do to prevent a rupture.

The boxers, under Jerry’s leadership, threatened to secede from the club and start their own. I called a meeting for all the members and it was a lively session — conducted in Sesotho, Zulu, Xhosa, and English. Shakespeare was even cited by Skipper in his attack against the rebellious boxers, accusing Jerry of double-crossing him as Brutus had betrayed Caesar. “Who are Caesar and Brutus?” my son asked. Before I could answer, someone said, “Aren’t they dead?” To which Skipper replied, “Yes, but the truth about the betrayal is very much alive!”

The meeting resolved nothing and the boxers left for another venue while the weight lifters remained at the Community Center. I joined the boxers and for the first few weeks of the separation we trained at an uncomfortable place for a freedom fighter, the police gymnasium. Thereafter, the Anglican Church gave us premises at a reasonable rental in Orlando East, and we trained under Simon (Mshengu) Tshabalala, who later became one of the ANC’s leading underground freedom fighters.

Our new facilities were no better than the old, and the club was never reconstituted. African boxers, like all black athletes and artists, were shackled by the twin handicaps of poverty and racism. What money an African boxer earned was typically used on food, rent, clothing, and whatever was left went to boxing equipment and training. He was denied the opportunity of belonging to the white boxing clubs that had the equipment and trainers necessary to produce a first-rate, world-class boxer. Unlike white professional boxers, African professional boxers had full-time day jobs. Sparring partners were few and poorly paid; without proper drilling and practice, the performance greatly suffered. Yet a number of African fighters were able to triumph over these difficulties and achieve great success. Boxers like Elijah (Maestro) Mokone, Enoch (Schoolboy) Nhlapo, Kangaroo Maoto, one of the greatest stylists of the ring, Levi (Golden Boy) Madi, Nkosana Mgxaji, Mackeed Mofokeng, and Norman Sekgapane, all won great victories, while Jake Tuli, our greatest hero, won the British and Empire flyweight title. He was the most eloquent example of what African boxers could achieve if given the opportunity.

Part Five

TREASON

23

JUST AFTER DAWN, on the morning of December 5, 1956, I was awakened by a loud knocking on my door. No neighbor or friend ever knocks in such a peremptory way, and I knew immediately that it was the security police. I dressed quickly and found Head Constable Rousseau, a security officer who was a familiar figure in our area, and two policemen. He produced a search warrant, at which point the three of them immediately began to comb through the entire house looking for incriminating papers or documents. By this time the children were awake, and with a stern look I bade them to be calm. The children looked to me for reassurance. The police searched drawers and cabinets and closets, any place where contraband might have been hidden. After forty-five minutes, Rousseau matter-of-factly said, “Mandela, we have a warrant for your arrest. Come with me.” I looked at the warrant, and the words leapt out at me: “HOOGVERRAAD — HIGH TREASON.”

I walked with them to the car. It is not pleasant to be arrested in front of one’s children, even though one knows that what one is doing is right. But children do not comprehend the complexity of the situation; they simply see their father being taken away by the white authorities without an explanation.

Rousseau drove and I sat next to him — without handcuffs — in the front seat. He had a search warrant for my office in town, where we were now headed after dropping off the two other policemen in a nearby area. To get to downtown Johannesburg, one had to travel along a desolate highway that cut through an unpopulated area. While we were motoring along this stretch, I remarked to Rousseau that he must be very confident to drive with me alone and unhandcuffed. He was silent.

“What would happen if I seized you and overpowered you?” I said.

Rousseau shifted uncomfortably. “You are playing with fire, Mandela,” he said.

“Playing with fire is my game,” I replied.

“If you continue speaking like this I will have to handcuff you,” Rousseau said threateningly.

“And if I refuse?”

We continued this tense debate for a few more minutes, but as we passed into a populated area near the Langlaagte police station, Rousseau said to me: “Mandela, I have treated you well and I expect you to do the same to me. I don’t like your jokes.”

After a brief stop at the police station, we were joined by another officer and went to my office, which they searched for another forty-five minutes. From there, I was taken to Marshall Square, the rambling red-brick Johannesburg prison where I had spent a few nights in 1952 during the Defiance Campaign. A number of my colleagues were already there, having been arrested and booked earlier that morning. Over the next few hours, more friends and comrades began to trickle in. This was the swoop the government had long been planning. Someone smuggled in a copy of the afternoon edition of The Star, and we learned from its banner headlines that the raid had been countrywide and that the premier leaders of the Congress Alliance were all being arrested on charges of high treason and an alleged conspiracy to overthrow the state. Those who had been arrested in different parts of the country — Chief Luthuli, Monty Naicker, Reggie September, Lilian Ngoyi, Piet Beyleveld — were flown by military planes to Johannesburg, where they were to be arraigned. One hundred forty-four people had been arrested. The next day we appeared in court and we were formally charged. A week later, Walter Sisulu and eleven others were arrested, bringing the total to one hundred fifty-six. All told, there were one hundred five Africans, twenty-one Indians, twenty-three whites, and seven Coloureds. Almost the entire executive leadership of the ANC, both banned and unbanned, had been arrested. The government, at long last, had made its move.

We were soon transferred to the Johannesburg Prison, popularly known as the Fort, a bleak, castle-like structure located on a hill in the heart of the city. Upon admission we were taken to an outdoor quadrangle and ordered to strip completely and line up against the wall. We were forced to stand there for more than an hour, shivering in the breeze and feeling awkward — priests, professors, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, men of middle or old age, who were normally treated with deference and respect. Despite my anger, I could not suppress a laugh as I scrutinized the men around me. For the first time, the truth of the aphorism “clothes make the man” came home to me. If fine bodies and impressive physiques were essential to being a leader I saw that few among us would have qualified.

A white doctor finally appeared and asked whether any of us was ill. No one complained of any ailment. We were ordered to dress, and then escorted to two large cells with cement floors and no furniture. The cells had recently been painted and reeked of paint fumes. We were each given three thin blankets plus a sisal mat. Each cell had only one floor-level latrine, which was completely exposed. It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones — and South Africa treated its imprisoned African citizens like animals.

We stayed in the Fort for two weeks, and despite the hardships, our spirits remained extremely high. We were permitted newspapers and read with gratification of the waves of indignation aroused by our arrests. Protest meetings and demonstrations were being held throughout South Africa; people carried signs declaring “We Stand by Our Leaders.” We read of protests around the world over our incarceration.

Our communal cell became a kind of convention for far-flung freedom fighters. Many of us had been living under severe restrictions, making it illegal for us to meet and talk. Now, our enemy had gathered us all together under one roof for what became the largest and longest unbanned meeting of the Congress Alliance in years. Younger leaders met older leaders they had only read about. Men from Natal mingled with leaders from the Transvaal. We reveled in the opportunity to exchange ideas and experiences for two weeks while we awaited trial.

Each day, we put together a program of activities. Patrick Molaoa and Peter Nthite, both prominent Youth Leaguers, organized physical training. Talks on a variety of subjects were scheduled, and we heard Professor Matthews discourse on both the history of the ANC and the American Negro, Debi Singh lectured on the history of the SAIC, Arthur Letele discussed the African medicine man, while Reverend James Calata spoke on African music — and sang in his beautiful tenor voice. Every day, Vuyisile Mini, who years later was hanged by the government for political crimes, led the group in singing freedom songs. One of the most popular was: “Nans’ indod’ emnyama Strijdom, Bhasobha nans’ indod’ emnyama Strijdom” (Here’s the black man, Strijdom, beware the black man, Strijdom). We sang at the top of our lungs, and it kept our spirits high.

One time, Masabalala Yengwa (better known as M. B. Yengwa), the son of a Zulu laborer and the provincial secretary of the Natal ANC, contributed to a lecture on music by reciting a praise song in honor of Shaka, the legendary Zulu warrior and king. Yengwa draped himself with a blanket, rolled up a newspaper to imitate an assegai, and began to stride back and forth reciting the lines from the praise song. All of us, even those who did not understand Zulu, were entranced. Then he paused dramatically and called out the lines “Inyon’ edl’ ezinye! Yath’ isadl’ ezinye, yadl’ ezinye!” The lines liken Shaka to a great bird of prey that relentlessly slays its enemies. At the conclusion of these words, pandemonium broke out. Chief Luthuli, who until then had remained quiet, sprang to his feet, and bellowed, “Ngu Shaka lowo!” (That is Shaka!), and then began to dance and chant. His movements electrified us, and we all took to our feet. Accomplished ballroom dancers, sluggards who knew neither traditional nor Western dancing, all joined in the indlamu, the traditional Zulu war dance. Some moved gracefully, others resembled frozen mountaineers trying to shake off the cold, but all danced with enthusiasm and emotion. Suddenly there were no Xhosas or Zulus, no Indians or Africans, no rightists or leftists, no religious or political leaders; we were all nationalists and patriots bound together by a love of our common history, our culture, our country, and our people. In that moment, something stirred deep inside all of us, something strong and intimate, that bound us to one another. In that moment we felt the hand of the great past that made us what we were and the power of the great cause that linked us all together.

After the two weeks, we appeared for our preparatory examination on December 19 at the Drill Hall in Johannesburg, a military structure not normally used as a court of justice. It was a great bare barn of a building with a corrugated iron roof and was considered the only public building large enough to support a trial of so many accused.

We were taken in sealed police vans escorted by a half-dozen troop carriers filled with armed soldiers. One would have thought a full-scale civil war was under way from the precautions the state was taking with us. A massive crowd of our supporters was blocking traffic in Twist Street; we could hear them cheering and singing, and they could hear us answering from inside the van. The trip became a triumphal procession as the slow-moving van was rocked by the crowd. The entire perimeter of the hall was surrounded by gun-toting policemen and soldiers. The vans were brought to an area behind the hall and parked so that we alighted straight from the van into the courtroom.

Inside, we were met by another crowd of supporters, so that the hall seemed more like a raucous protest meeting than a staid court of law. We walked in with our thumbs raised in the ANC salute and nodded to our supporters sitting in the non-Whites Only section. The mood inside was more celebratory than punitive, as the accused mingled with reporters and friends.

The government was charging all one hundred fifty-six of us with high treason and a countrywide conspiracy to use violence to overthrow the present government and replace it with a Communist state. The period covered by the indictment was October 1, 1952, through December 13, 1956: it included the Defiance Campaign, the Sophiatown removal, and the Congress of the People. The South African law of high treason was based not on English law, but on Roman Dutch antecedents, and defined high treason as a hostile intention to disturb, impair, or endanger the independence or safety of the state. The punishment was death.

The purpose of a preparatory examination was to determine whether the government’s charges were sufficient to put us on trial in the Supreme Court. There were two stages of giving evidence. The first stage took place in a magistrate’s court. If the magistrate determined that there was sufficient evidence against the accused, the case would move to the Supreme Court and be tried before a judge. If the magistrate decided there was insufficient evidence, the defendants were discharged.

The magistrate was Mr. F. C. Wessel, the chief magistrate from Bloemfontein. That first day, when Wessel began to speak in his quiet voice it was impossible to hear him. The state had neglected to provide microphones and loudspeakers, and the court was adjourned for two hours while amplification was sought. We assembled in a courtyard and had what was very much like a picnic, with food sent in from the outside. The atmosphere was almost festive. Two hours later, court was recessed for the day because proper loudspeakers had not been found. To the cheers of the crowd, we were once again escorted back to the Fort.

The next day, the crowds outside were even larger, the police more tense. Five hundred armed police surrounded the Drill Hall. When we arrived, we discovered that the state had erected an enormous wire cage for us to sit in. It was made of diamond-mesh wire, attached to poles and scaffolding with a grille at the front and top. We were led inside and sat on benches, surrounded by sixteen armed guards.

In addition to its symbolic effect, the cage cut us off from communication with our lawyers, who were not permitted to enter. One of my colleagues scribbled on a piece of paper, which he then posted on the side of the cage: “Dangerous. Please Do Not Feed.”

Our supporters and organization had assembled a formidable defense team, including Bram Fischer, Norman Rosenberg, Israel Maisels, Maurice Franks, and Vernon Berrangé. None of them had ever seen such a structure in court before. Franks lodged a powerful protest in open court against the state’s humiliating his clients in such a “fantastic” fashion and treating them, he said, “like wild beasts.” Unless the cage was removed forthwith, he announced, the entire defense team would walk out of court. After a brief adjournment, the magistrate decided that the cage would be pulled down; in the meantime, the front of it was removed.

Only then did the state begin its case. The chief prosecutor, Mr. Van Niekerk, began reading part of an 18,000-word address outlining the Crown case against us. Even with amplification he was barely audible against the shouting and singing outside, and at one point a group of policemen rushed out. We heard a revolver shot, followed by shouts and more gunfire. The court was adjourned while the magistrate held a meeting with counsel. Twenty people had been injured.

The reading of the charges continued for the next two days. Van Niekerk said that he would prove to the court that the accused, with help from other countries, were plotting to overthrow the existing government by violence and impose a Communist government on South Africa. This was the charge of high treason. The state cited the Freedom Charter as both proof of our Communist intentions and evidence of our plot to overthrow the existing authorities. By the third day, much of the cage had been dismantled. Finally, on the fourth day, we were released on bail. Bail was another example of the sliding scale of apartheid: £250 for whites; £100 for Indians; and £25 for Africans and Coloureds. Even treason was not colorblind. Well-wishers from diverse walks of life came forward to guarantee bail for each of the accused, gestures of support that later became the foundation for the Treason Trial Defense Fund started by Bishop Reeves, Alan Paton, and Alex Hepple. The fund was ably administered during the trial by Mary Benson and then Freda Levson. We were released provided we reported once a week to the police, and were forbidden from attending public gatherings. Court was to resume in early January.

The following day I was at my office bright and early. Oliver and I had both been in prison, and our caseload had mounted in the meantime. While trying to work that morning, I was visited by an old friend named Jabavu, a professional interpreter whom I had not seen for several months. Before the arrests I had deliberately cut down my weight, in anticipation of prison, where one should be lean and able to survive on little. In jail, I had continued my exercises, and was pleased to be so trim. But Jabavu eyed me suspiciously. “Madiba,” he said, “why must you look so thin?” In African cultures, portliness is often associated with wealth and well-being. He burst out: “Man, you were scared of jail, that is all. You have disgraced us, we Xhosas!”

24

EVEN BEFORE THE TRIAL, my marriage to Evelyn had begun to unravel. In 1953, Evelyn had become set on upgrading her four-year certificate in general nursing. She enrolled in a midwifery course at King Edward VII Hospital in Durban that would keep her away from home for several months. This was possible because my mother and sister were staying with us and could look after the children. During her stay in Durban, I visited her on at least one occasion.

Evelyn returned, having passed her examinations. She was pregnant again and later that year, gave birth to Makaziwe, named after the daughter we had lost six years before. In our culture, to give a new child the name of a deceased child is considered a way of honoring the earlier child’s memory and retaining a mystical attachment to the child who left too soon.

Over the course of the next year Evelyn became involved with the Watch Tower organization, part of the church of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Whether this was due to some dissatisfaction with her life at the time, I do not know. The Jehovah’s Witnesses took the Bible as the sole rule of faith and believed in a coming Armageddon between good and evil. Evelyn zealously began distributing their publication The Watchtower, and began to proselytize me as well, urging me to convert my commitment to the struggle to a commitment to God. Although I found some aspects of the Watch Tower’s system to be interesting and worthwhile, I could not and did not share her devotion. There was an obsessional element to it that put me off. From what I could discern, her faith taught passivity and submissiveness in the face of oppression, something I could not accept.

My devotion to the ANC and the struggle was unremitting. This disturbed Evelyn. She had always assumed that politics was a youthful diversion, that I would someday return to the Transkei and practice there as a lawyer. Even as that possibility became remote, she never resigned herself to the fact that Johannesburg would be our home, or let go of the idea that we might move back to Umtata. She believed that once I was back in the Transkei, in the bosom of my family, acting as counselor to Sabata, I would no longer miss politics. She encouraged Daliwonga’s efforts to persuade me to come back to Umtata. We had many arguments about this, and I patiently explained to her that politics was not a distraction but my lifework, that it was an essential and fundamental part of my being. She could not accept this. A man and a woman who hold such different views of their respective roles in life cannot remain close.

I tried to persuade her of the necessity of the struggle, while she attempted to persuade me of the value of religious faith. When I would tell her that I was serving the nation, she would reply that serving God was above serving the nation. We were finding no common ground, and I was becoming convinced that the marriage was no longer tenable.

We also waged a battle for the minds and hearts of the children. She wanted them to be religious, and I thought they should be political. She would take them to church at every opportunity and read them Watch Tower literature. She even gave the boys Watchtower pamphlets to distribute in the township. I used to talk politics to the boys. Thembi was a member of the Pioneers, the juvenile section of the ANC, so he was already politically cognizant. I would explain to Makgatho in the simplest terms how the black man was persecuted by the white man.

Hanging on the walls of the house, I had pictures of Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Gandhi, and the storming of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in 1917. I explained to the boys who each of the men was, and what he stood for. They knew that the white leaders of South Africa stood for something very different. One day, Makgatho came running into the house, and said, “Daddy, Daddy, there is Malan on the hill!” Malan had been the first Nationalist prime minister and the boy had confused him with a Bantu Education official, Willie Maree, who had announced that he would that day address a public meeting in the township. I went outside to see what Makgatho was talking about, for the ANC had organized a demonstration to ensure that the meeting did not succeed. As I went out, I saw a couple of police vans escorting Maree to the place he was meant to speak, but there was trouble from the start and Maree had fled without delivering his speech. I told Makgatho that it was not Malan but might as well have been.

My schedule in those days was relentless. I would leave the house very early in the morning and return late at night. After a day at the office, I would usually have meetings of one kind or another. Evelyn could not understand my meetings in the evening, and when I returned home late suspected I was seeing other women. Time after time, I would explain what meeting I was at, why I was there, and what was discussed. But she was not convinced. In 1955, she gave me an ultimatum: I had to choose between her and the ANC.

Walter and Albertina were very close to Evelyn, and their fondest wish was for us to stay together. Evelyn confided in Albertina. At one point, Walter intervened in the matter and I was very short with him, telling him it was none of his business. I regretted the tone I took, became Walter had always been a brother to me and his friendship and support had never faltered.

One day, Walter told me he wanted to bring someone over to the office for me to meet. He did not tell me that it was my brother-in-law, and I was surprised but not displeased to see him. I was pessimistic about the marriage and I thought it only fair to inform him of my feelings.

We were discussing this issue cordially among the three of us, when either Walter or I used a phrase like “Men such as ourselves,” or something of that ilk. Evelyn’s brother-in-law was a businessman, opposed to politics and politicians. He became very huffy and said, “If you chaps think you are in the same position as myself, that is ridiculous. Do not compare yourselves to me.” When he left, Walter and I looked at each other and started laughing.

After we were arrested in December and kept in prison for two weeks, I had one visit from Evelyn. But when I came out of prison, I found that she had moved out and taken the children. I returned to an empty, silent house. She had even removed the curtains, and for some reason I found this small detail shattering. Evelyn had moved in with her brother, who told me, “Perhaps it is for the best; maybe when things will have cooled down you will come back together.” It was reasonable advice, but it was not to be.

Evelyn and I had irreconcilable differences. I could not give up my life in the struggle, and she could not live with my devotion to something other than herself and the family. She was a very good woman, charming, strong, and faithful, and a fine mother. I never lost my respect and admiration for her, but in the end, we could not make our marriage work.

The breakup of any marriage is traumatic, especially for the children. Our family was no exception, and all of the children were wounded by our separation. Makgatho took to sleeping in my bed. He was a gentle child, a natural peacemaker and he tried to bring about some sort of reconciliation between me and his mother. Makaziwe was still very small, and I remember one day, when I was not in prison or in court, I visited her crèche (nursery school) unannounced. She had always been a very affectionate child, but that day, when she saw me, she froze. She did not know whether to run to me or retreat, to smile or frown. She had some conflict in her small heart, which she did not know how to resolve. It was very painful.

Thembi, who was ten at the time, was the most deeply affected. He stopped studying and became withdrawn. He had once been keen on English and Shakespeare, but after the separation he seemed to become apathetic about learning. The principal of his school spoke to me on one occasion, but there was little that I was able to do. I would take him to the gym whenever I could, and occasionally he would brighten a bit. There were many times when I could not be there and later, when I was underground, Walter would take Thembi with him along with his own son. One time, Walter took him to an event, and afterward Walter said to me, “Man, that chap is quiet.” Following the breakup, Thembi would frequently wear my clothes, even though they were far too large for him; they gave him some kind of attachment to his too-often-distant father.

25

ON JANUARY 9, 1957, we once again assembled in the Drill Hall. It was the defense’s turn to refute the state’s charges. After summarizing the Crown’s case against us, Vernon Berrangé, our lead counsel, announced our argument. “The defense,” he said, “will strenuously repudiate that the terms of the Freedom Charter are treasonable or criminal. On the contrary, the defense will contend that the ideas and beliefs which are expressed in this charter, although repugnant to the policy of the present government, are such as are shared by the overwhelming majority of mankind of all races and colors, and also by the overwhelming majority of the citizens of this country.” In consultation with our attorneys, we had decided that we were not merely going to prove that we were innocent of treason, but that this was a political trial in which the government was persecuting us for taking actions that were morally justified.

But the drama of the opening arguments was succeeded by the tedium of court logistics. The first month of the trial was taken up by the state’s submission of evidence. One by one, every paper, pamphlet, document, book, notebook, letter, magazine, and clipping that the police had accumulated in the last three years of searches was produced and numbered; twelve thousand in all. The submissions ranged from the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights to a Russian cookbook. They even submitted the two signs from the Congress of the People: “SOUP WITH MEAT” and “SOUP WITHOUT MEAT.”

During the preparatory examination, which was to last for months, we listened day after day as African and Afrikaner detectives read out their notes of ANC meetings, or transcripts of speeches. These recountings were always garbled, and often either nonsensical or downright false. Berrangé later revealed in his deft cross-examination that many of the African detectives were unable to understand or write English, the language in which the speeches were given.

To support the state’s extraordinary allegation that we intended to replace the existing government with a Soviet-style state, the Crown relied on the evidence of Professor Andrew Murray, head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Cape Town. Murray labeled many of the documents seized from us, including the Freedom Charter itself, as communistic.

Professor Murray seemed, at the outset, relatively knowledgeable, but that was until Berrangé began his cross-examination. Berrangé said that he wanted to read Murray a number of passages from various documents and then have Murray label them communistic or not. Berrangé read him the first passage, which concerned the need for ordinary workers to cooperate with each other and not exploit one another. Communistic, Murray said. Berrangé then noted that the statement had been made by the former premier of South Africa, Dr. Malan. Berrangé proceeded to read him two other statements, both of which Professor Murray described as communistic. These passages had in fact been uttered by the American presidents Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson. The highlight came when Berrangé read Murray a passage that the professor unhesitatingly described as “communism straight from the shoulder.” Berrangé then revealed that it was a statement that Professor Murray himself had written in the 1930s.

In the seventh month of the trial, the state said it would produce evidence of planned violence that occurred during the Defiance Campaign. The state called the first of their star witnesses, Solomon Ngubase, who offered sensational evidence that seemed to implicate the ANC. Ngubase was a soft-spoken fellow in his late thirties, with a shaky command of English, who was currently serving a sentence for fraud. In his opening testimony, Ngubase told the court he had obtained a bachelor of arts degree from Fort Hare, and that he was a practicing attorney. He said he became secretary of the Port Elizabeth branch of the ANC as well as a member of the National Executive Committee. He claimed to have been present at a meeting of the National Executive when a decision was made to send Walter Sisulu and David Bopape to the Soviet Union to procure arms for a violent revolution in South Africa. He said he was present at a meeting that planned the 1952 Port Elizabeth riot and that he had witnessed an ANC decision to murder all whites in the Transkei in the same manner as the Mau Mau in Kenya. Ngubase’s dramatic testimony caused a stir in and out of court. Here at long last was evidence of a conspiracy.

But when Ngubase was cross-examined by Vernon Berrangé, it was revealed that he was equal parts madman and liar. Berrangé, whose cross-examination skills earned him the nickname Isangoma (a diviner or healer who exorcises an illness) among the accused, quickly established that Ngubase was neither a university graduate nor a member of the ANC, much less a member of the National Executive Committee. Berrangé showed that Ngubase had forged certificates for a university degree, had practiced law illegally for several years, and had a further case of fraud pending against him. At the time of the meeting he claimed to have attended to plan the Port Elizabeth riot, he was serving a sentence for fraud in a Durban jail. Almost none of Ngubase’s testimony bore even a remote resemblance to the truth. At the end of his cross-examination, Berrangé asked the witness, “Do you know what a rogue is?” Ngubase said he did not. “You, sir, are a rogue!” Berrangé exclaimed.

Joe Slovo, one of the accused and a superb advocate, conducted his own defense. He was an irritant to the state because of his sharp questions and attempts to show that the state was the violator of laws, not the Congress. Slovo’s cross-examination was often as devastating as Berrangè’s. Detective Jeremiah Mollson, one of the few African members of the Special Branch, claimed to recall lines verbatim from ANC speeches that he attended. But what he reported was usually gibberish or outright fabrication.

Slovo: “Do you understand English?”

Mollson: “Not so well.”

Slovo: “Do you mean to say that you reported these speeches in English but you don’t understand English well?”

Mollson: “Yes, Your Worship.”

Slovo: “Do you agree that your notes are a lot of rubbish?”

Mollson: “I don’t know.”

This last response caused an outbreak of laughter from the defendants. The magistrate scolded us for laughing, and said, “The proceedings are not as funny as they may seem.”

At one point, Wessel told Slovo that he was impugning the integrity of the court and fined him for contempt. This provoked the fury of most of the accused, and it was only Chief Luthuli’s restraining hand that kept a number of the defendants from being cited for contempt as well.

As the testimony continued, much of it tedious legal maneuvering, we began to occupy ourselves with other matters. I often brought a book to read or a legal brief to work on. Others read newspapers, did crossword puzzles, or played chess or Scrabble. Occasionally, the bench would reprimand us for not paying attention, and the books and puzzles would disappear. But, slowly, as the testimony resumed its snail’s pace, the games and reading material reemerged.

As the preparatory examination continued, the state became increasingly desperate. It became more and more apparent that the state was gathering — often fabricating — evidence as it went along, to help in what seemed to be a lost cause.

Finally, on September 11, ten months after we had first assembled in the Drill Hall, the prosecutor announced that the state’s case in the preparatory examination was completed. The magistrate gave the defense four months to sift through the eight thousand pages of typed evidence and twelve thousand documents to prepare its case.

The preparatory examination had lasted for the whole of 1957. Court adjourned in September, and the defense began reviewing the evidence. Three months later, without warning and without explanation, the Crown announced that charges against sixty-one of the accused were to be dropped. Most of these defendants were relatively minor figures in the ANC, but also among them were Chief Luthuli and Oliver Tambo. The Crown’s release of Luthuli and Tambo pleased but bewildered us.

In January, when the government was scheduled to sum up its charges, the Crown brought in a new prosecutor, the formidable Oswald Pirow, Q.C. Pirow was a former minister of justice and of defense and a pillar of National Party politics. He was a longtime Afrikaner nationalist, and an outspoken supporter of the Nazi cause; he once described Hitler as the “greatest man of his age.” He was a virulent anti-Communist. The appointment of Pirow was new evidence that the state was worried about the outcome and attached tremendous importance to a victory.

Before Pirow’s summing-up, Berrangé announced he would apply for our discharge on the grounds that the state had not offered sufficient evidence against us. Pirow opposed this application for dismissal, and quoted from several inflammatory speeches by the accused, informing the court that the police had unearthed more evidence of a highly dangerous conspiracy. The country, he said portentously, was sitting on top of a volcano. It was an effective and highly dramatic performance. Pirow changed the atmosphere of the trial. We had become overconfident, and were reminded that we were facing a serious charge. Don’t fool yourselves, counsel told us, you people might go to jail. Their warnings sobered us.

After thirteen months of the preparatory examination, the magistrate ruled that he had found “sufficient reason” for putting us on trial in the Transvaal Supreme Court for high treason. Court adjourned in January with the ninety-five remaining defendants committed to stand trial. When the actual trial would begin, we did not know.

26

ONE AFTERNOON, during a recess in the preparatory examination, I drove a friend of mine from Orlando to the medical school at the University of the Witwatersrand and went past Baragwanath Hospital, the premier black hospital in Johannesburg. As I passed a nearby bus stop, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a lovely young woman waiting for the bus. I was struck by her beauty, and I turned my head to get a better look at her, but my car had gone by too fast. This woman’s face stayed with me — I even considered turning around to drive by her in the other direction — but I went on.

Some weeks thereafter, a curious coincidence occurred. I was at the office, and when I popped in to see Oliver, there was this same young woman with her brother, sitting in front of Oliver’s desk. I was taken aback, and did my best not to show my surprise — or my delight — at this striking coincidence. Oliver introduced me to them and explained that they were visiting him on a legal matter.

Her name was Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela, but she was known as Winnie. She had recently completed her studies at the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work in Johannesburg and was working as the first black female social worker at Baragwanath Hospital. At the time I paid little attention to her background or legal problem, for something in me was deeply stirred by her presence. I was thinking more of how I could ask her out than how our firm would handle her case. I cannot say for certain if there is such a thing as love at first sight, but I do know that the moment I first glimpsed Winnie Nomzamo, I knew that I wanted to have her as my wife.

Winnie was the sixth of eleven children of C. K. Madikizela, a school principal turned businessman. Her given name was Nomzamo, which means one who strives or undergoes trials, a name as prophetic as my own. She came from Bizana in Pondoland, an area adjacent to the part of the Transkei where I grew up. She is from the Phondo clan of amaNgutyana, and her great-grandfather was Madikizela, a powerful chief from nineteenth-century Natal who settled in the Transkei at the time of the iMfecane.

I telephoned Winnie the next day at the hospital and asked her for help in raising money for the Treason Trial Defense Fund from the Jan Hofmeyr School. It was merely a pretext to invite her to lunch, which I did. I picked her up where she was staying in town, and took her to an Indian restaurant near my office, one of the few places that served Africans and where I frequently ate. Winnie was dazzling, and even the fact that she had never before tasted curry and drank glass after glass of water to cool her palate only added to her charm.

After lunch I took her for a drive to an area between Johannesburg and Evaton, an open veld just past Eldorado Park. We walked on the long grass, grass so similar to that of the Transkei where we both had been raised. I told her of my hopes and of the difficulties of the Treason Trial. I knew right there that I wanted to marry her — and I told her so. Her spirit, her passion, her youth, her courage, her willfulness — I felt all of these things the moment I first saw her.

Over the next weeks and months we saw each other whenever we could. She visited me at the Drill Hall and at my office. She came to see me work out in the gym; she met Thembi, Makgatho, and Makaziwe. She came to meetings and political discussions; I was both courting her and politicizing her. As a student, Winnie had been attracted to the Non-European Unity Movement, for she had a brother who was involved with that party. In later years, I would tease her about this early allegiance, telling her that had she not met me, she would have married a leader of the NEUM.

Shortly after I filed for divorce from Evelyn, I told Winnie she should visit Ray Harmel, the wife of Michael Harmel, for a fitting for a wedding dress. In addition to being an activist, Ray was an excellent dressmaker. I asked Winnie how many bridesmaids she intended to have, and suggested she go to Bizana to inform her parents that we were to be married. Winnie has laughingly told people that I never proposed to her, but I always told her that I asked her on our very first date and that I simply took it for granted from that day forward.

The Treason Trial was in its second year and it put a suffocating weight on our law practice. Mandela and Tambo was falling apart as we could not be there, and both Oliver and I were experiencing grave financial difficulties. Since the charges against Oliver had been dropped, he was able to do some remedial work; but the damage had already been done. We had gone from a bustling practice that turned people away to one that was practically begging for clients. I could not even afford to pay the fifty-pound balance still owing on the plot of land that I had purchased in Umtata, and had to give it up.

I explained all this to Winnie. I told her it was more than likely that we would have to live on her small salary as a social worker. Winnie understood and said she was prepared to take the risk and throw in her lot with me. I never promised her gold and diamonds, and I was never able to give her them.

The wedding took place on June 14, 1958. I applied for a relaxation of my banning orders and was given six days’ leave of absence from Johannesburg. I also arranged for lobola, the traditional brideprice, to be paid to Winnie’s father.

The wedding party left Johannesburg very early on the morning of June 12, and we arrived in Bizana late that afternoon. My first stop, as always when one was banned, was the police station to report that I had arrived. At dusk, we then went to the bride’s place, Mbongweni, as was customary. We were met by a great chorus of local women ululating with happiness, and Winnie and I were separated; she went to the bride’s house, while I went with the groom’s party to the house of one of Winnie’s relations.

The ceremony itself was at a local church, after which we celebrated at the home of Winnie’s eldest brother, which was the ancestral home of the Madikizela clan. The bridal car was swathed in ANC colors. There was dancing and singing, and Winnie’s exuberant grandmother did a special dance for all of us. The entire executive of the ANC had been invited, but bans limited their attendance. Among those who came were Duma Nokwe, Lilian Ngoyi, Dr. James Njongwe, Dr. Wilson Conco, and Victor Tyamzashe.

The final reception was at the Bizana Town Hall. The speech I recall best was given by Winnie’s father. He took note, as did everyone, that among the uninvited guests at the wedding were a number of security police. He spoke of his love for his daughter, my commitment to the country, and my dangerous career as a politician. When Winnie had first told him of the marriage, he had exclaimed, “But you are marrying a jailbird!” At the wedding, he said he was not optimistic about the future, and that such a marriage, in such difficult times, would be unremittingly tested. He told Winnie she was marrying a man who was already married to the struggle. He bade his daughter good luck, and ended his speech by saying, “If your man is a wizard, you must become a witch!” It was a way of saying that you must follow your man on whatever path he takes. After that, Constance Mbekeni, my sister, spoke on my behalf at the ceremony.

After the ceremony, a piece of the wedding cake was wrapped up for the bride to bring to the groom’s ancestral home for the second part of the wedding. But it was never to be, for my leave of absence was up and we had to return to Johannesburg. Winnie carefully stored the cake in anticipation of that day. At our house, number 8115 Orlando West, a large party of friends and family were there to welcome us back. A sheep had been slaughtered and there was a feast in our honor.

There was no time or money for a honeymoon, and life quickly settled into a routine dominated by the trial. We woke very early in the morning, usually at about four. Winnie prepared breakfast before I left. I would then take the bus to the trial, or make an early morning visit to my office. As much as possible, afternoons and evenings were spent at my office attempting to keep our practice going and to earn some money. Evenings were often taken up with political work and meetings. The wife of a freedom fighter is often like a widow, even when her husband is not in prison. Though I was on trial for treason, Winnie gave me cause for hope. I felt as though I had a new and second chance at life. My love for her gave me added strength for the struggles that lay ahead.