Mandela: The Authorised Biography

Johannesburg was only fifty-five years old, but was already one of the major cities of Africa, with a confident centre including grand hotels and a stone cathedral, wealthy suburbs spreading to the north and sprawling black townships in the south-west. The Second World War was now creating a boom economy in South Africa, as in other industrial centres across the world: the cutback of imports stimulated local production, and created an urgent need for black labour to replace white workers, many of whom were fighting overseas. Between the censuses of 1936 and 1946 the black population in South Africa’s cities increased by almost 50 per cent, from 1,142,000 to 1,689,000. When the rural tribal areas were devastated by droughts the flow into Johannesburg turned into a flood, and for two years the government abandoned influx control and its enforcement by pass laws. The inrush created chaotic new shanty-towns around the fringes of the city, but also new opportunities and hopes for ambitious young blacks – and new political aspirations encouraged by the war.

The South African government needed the support of blacks in wartime, and 120,000 Africans and Coloureds had been recruited by the armed forces as drivers, servants and guards. They were armed with spears, not guns, but felt themselves to be part of the fight against Nazism and racism. In the middle of the war the government even began to relax the traditional policy of segregation that confined blacks to their own townships, schools and buses. In a major speech in February 1942, Prime Minister Smuts described how the high white expectations of segregation had been sadly disappointed, as the rest of the world moved in the opposite direction: ‘Isolation has gone and segregation has fallen on evil days too.’ It was fruitless to attempt to resist the movement to the cities: ‘You might as well try to sweep the oceans back with a broom.’

But the African migration into the cities was provoking Afrikaner nationalists, who felt threatened by black competition. They campaigned all the more fiercely against the ‘black peril’, and demanded a more extreme segregation, which they called ‘apartheid’ – literally ‘separateness’. Smuts dared not make concessions to the blacks which would risk frightening white voters into the nationalists’ camp. ‘What will it profit this country,’ he wrote to a friend in June 1943, ‘if justice is done to the underdog and the whole caboodle then, including the underdog, is handed over to the Wreckers?’2

It was in the goldmines that Mandela and Justice first looked for work. The mines, which were at the centre of Johannesburg’s economy, were strictly segregated, with enclosed compounds and hostels for the black workers who made up the vast majority of their labour force cut off from the rest of the city. The mining companies maintained close links with chiefs in the rural areas, who helped provide their cheap labour, and reproduced the tribal hierarchies and divisions within the mines in order to bolster discipline and allegiance. The Regent had written some months earlier to arrange a job for Justice as a clerk with Crown Mines, one of the oldest and biggest; and Justice persuaded the headman to give Mandela a humbler job as a mine policeman, with the prospect of a clerical job in three months.3 For a short time Mandela worked as a nightwatchman, with a helmet, whistle and knobkerrie or club – the very picture of the loyal company employee – patrolling the entrance to the compound, which bore notices reading ‘Natives Cross Here’ (one was amended to ‘Natives Very Cross Here’).4 At the time the mineworkers were seething with discontent about their conditions and wages – anger which later erupted in the mine strike of 1946.5 Mandela kept aloof from the politics, but would always remain proud of having been a mineworker, as he would later tell the union.6

However important Mandela may have felt in Qunu, he was quite insignificant in Johannesburg, and he soon found himself in trouble for boasting that he had run away from home and deceived the Regent. He and Justice were ordered to return home, and fired from the mine. Mandela, who had no wish to return to the country, now had to find a job urgently. A cousin sent him to see a black estate agent, Walter Sisulu, who had an office – before Johannesburg was as strictly segregated as it later became – in the Berkeley Arcade in the city centre.

Sisulu was a short, energetic man of twenty-eight, with light skin, gap-teeth, spectacles and a habit of chewing his lip. He lacked great presence, but he had extraordinary inner confidence – ‘super-confidence’, he called it – and was to be the most important political influence in Mandela’s life.7 He had already shown unusual resilience. Like Mandela he came from a poor region of the Transkei – in his case the Engcobo district – but he lacked Mandela’s status. His father was a white magistrate called Victor Dickinson, who had fallen in love with his mother in Engcobo, but had left her with two children.8 Walter’s mother talked respectfully about his father, but Walter realised that he had failed in his duty to his family.9 Walter was brought up by his mother and his uncle, a headman, to be God-fearing and respectful towards whites. He enjoyed reading the Bible, and identified with underdogs like David and Moses, but he rebelled against the conservatism of his mission teachers and his family, who once warned him: ‘I doubt if you’ll be allowed to work for the white man.’

Sisulu left school at sixteen, became a cowherd and then tried his luck in Johannesburg. He worked for four months in a goldmine, hacking rock a mile underground, where he came to be enraged by the brutality of the system. After working in a kitchen in East London he returned to Johannesburg with a new interest in trade unionism. He stayed with his mother, who was now working as a washerwoman for white housewives, and was fired from a succession of factory jobs for insolence and disobedience. He took refuge from his humiliations by learning Xhosa history from a great-grandson of Hintsa, the great chieftain who had also inspired Mandela, but at the same time he broadened his outlook to embrace a wider African unity. After working for two years in a bank he had recently set up his estate agency with five black friends, which he hoped would make him independent of whites (it was to be taken over by a white firm two years later).10

Sisulu’s white father, Victor Dickinson, was now a judge at the Supreme Court in Johannesburg; Sisulu would sometimes watch him there, incognito. He was also chairman of a building society, and when Sisulu’s estate agency began experiencing difficulties he went to see him to ask for help. Sisulu did not reveal their relationship: he wanted to give his father a chance ‘to recollect that he had a son like that’, but he gave no sign of recognition. He was, Sisulu remembered, decent and warm, but did not offer him any help with money.11 It was a poignant encounter, about which Sisulu still remains reticent. Did Dickinson ever know that his son was to be one of South Africa’s greatest leaders?

Mandela was immediately impressed by Sisulu’s mastery of city ways and his fast-talking English, and assumed that he must have had a university education. Sisulu, in turn, was impressed by Mandela’s air of command. ‘When he came into my office,’ he recalled, ‘I marked him at once as a man with great qualities, who was destined to play an important part.’12 It was the beginning of a partnership which would be crucial to Mandela’s political career. Mandela recognised Sisulu as his intellectual superior, a mentor with an analytical mind. He would never be his rival. He would be the kingmaker, never the king; the trainer, not the boxer. And he provided, by a happy chance, the first crucial rung in Mandela’s city career. ‘It was the most difficult time in my life,’ Mandela wrote later.13

Mandela’s real ambition was to be a lawyer, so Sisulu took him to see Lazar Sidelsky, of the firm of Witkin, Sidelsky & Eidelman, which had black clients as well as white. Sidelsky was a lively, bright-eyed young Jewish attorney who disapproved of politics but believed in treating blacks fairly, and had been shocked to see big law firms ‘suck the blood out of their black clients’. He respected Sisulu, who brought him Africans who needed mortgages, remembering him as ‘a cunning bloke, a bit of a blighter, but astute’. Sidelsky agreed to employ Mandela as an articled clerk, without charging a fee. He soon saw his potential: ‘He was conscientious, never devious, tidy in person and in mind.’ He took an interest in the young man, lent him £50 – a generous sum – and gave him an old suit, which he was to wear for five years. He urged Mandela to keep out of politics: ‘You could serve your people better,’ he told him, ‘if you could prove that there’s one black attorney who’s honest and successful.’

Mandela never forgot that Sidelsky, as he has written, was ‘the first white man who treated me as a human being’, the man who ‘trained me to serve our country’. A few years later, when Mandela was briefly prosperous and was driving an Oldsmobile, he noticed Sidelsky, who had fallen on hard times, waiting at a bus stop, and gave him a lift home. Sidelsky was puzzled that Mandela would go no further than the kitchen; and the next day Mandela sent him a cheque repaying the £50. Forty years later Sidelsky and his daughter visited Mandela in prison, and joked about his advice to keep out of politics: ‘You didn’t listen, and look where you ended up!’14

But politics were all around him. He shared an office with a young white lawyer named Nat Bregman, a cousin of Sidelsky, a ‘light-hearted communist’, as he later called himself. Bregman, a part-time stage comedian, enjoyed Mandela’s company, finding him reserved but with a good sense of humour.15 He took Mandela to communist lectures and to multi-racial parties where he met friendly white left-wingers, including the young communist writer Michael Harmel. Mandela was amazed by Harmel’s combination of intelligence and simple living – he refused to wear a tie – and later he would become a close friend.

In the law office Sidelsky warned Mandela against a black communist, Gaur Radebe, who worked in the firm. A flamboyant, strongly-built man ten years older than Mandela, Radebe spoke five languages, and was helping to set up the new African Mineworkers’ Union.16 He did not conceal his militant views in the office. ‘Keep away from Gaur,’ said one colleague. ‘He will poison your mind. Every day he sits on that desk planning a world revolution.’ But Radebe befriended Mandela, and told his white bosses he was really a chief: ‘You people came all the way from Europe, took our land and enslaved us. Look now, there you sit like a lord while my chief runs around on errands. One day we will catch all of you and dump you into the sea!’ Mandela was dazzled by the coolness and confidence with which Radebe argued with whites.17 Radebe urged him to join the communists, but Mandela was working too hard in the evenings for his law examinations. Twenty years later the two men had almost reversed their positions: Radebe, after being expelled from the Communist Party in 1942 for money-lending activities, joined the anti-communist Pan Africanist Congress, while Mandela defended the communists within the ANC.18

Mandela was now living in the midst of a black slum, lodging with a minister, the Reverend Mabutho, at 46 Eighth Avenue, Alexandra, a chaotic township six miles north of the city with no electricity, called ‘the Dark City’. Alexandra was a jumble of brick houses and makeshift shacks overflowing with the wartime influx of workers from the countryside. It was insanitary and noisy with hungry dogs – a total contrast to the secluded white mansions beyond its fence. But Alexandra had a village vitality and a sense of community which they lacked. It was ‘a cauldron of black aspirations and talent, and a mirror of black frustrations’, wrote the activist Michael Dingake.19 Alexandra mixed up the tribal Xhosas, Zulus and Sothos in the scramble for urban survival, and Mandela was surprised to find himself pursuing a Swazi girl. He became more interested in other tribes, learning about the Zulus’ past glories from a property-owner called John Mngoma, who told him long stories about the heroism of the Zulu King Shaka and described events which never appeared in the whites’ history books.20

In Alexandra, Mandela was among the poorest, sometimes having to walk twelve miles a day to save the bus-fare to and from the office in the centre of town. He remembers feeling humiliated when girls noticed his shabby clothes, and was envious of the more glamorous young ‘Americans’, the dandies in sharp suits with wide hats and flashy watches, often stolen, who attracted women; but he maintained his more staid English style.21 He was helped by friends who lodged in the same house: later he felt guilty that ‘not once did I think of returning their kindness’.22

Mandela soon found his feet as an urban African, able to fend for himself. He no longer needed the support of his father-figure the Regent, who was now very frail. The Regent visited him in late 1941, and did not reprove Mandela for his past disobedience; six months later, when the old man died, Mandela went to his funeral in the Transkei, and regretted that he had not been more grateful for the Regent’s past kindness. He also wished he had taken the opportunity to ask him about white supremacy and the liberation movement.23 By now he had outgrown his purely Xhosa perspectives, but he was still torn between his tribal obligations and the opportunities offered by the big city.

Mandela completed his BA degree through a correspondence course, but soon realised it was not the key to success: ‘Hardly anything I had learned at university seemed relevant in my new environment.’ He returned to Fort Hare to receive his degree, wearing a new suit bought with a loan from Sisulu. His nephew Kaiser Matanzima, now preparing to be a chief, urged him to return as a lawyer to the Transkei, but Mandela was becoming more interested in the national stage.

He soon moved out of Alexandra. To save money he lived for a short spell in the mining compound of Wenela (Witwatersrand Native Labour Association), which provided special quarters for visiting chiefs; there he met tribal dignitaries, including the Queen Regent of Basutoland. Then he moved to Orlando (now part of Soweto), a municipal suburb twelve miles outside Johannesburg which had been planned in 1930 as a model township for ‘the better class of native’. Orlando stretched out across open farmland, overshadowed by the giant towers of a power station, a vista of two-roomed houses without floors or ceilings between bumpy dirt tracks. It was more hygienic but less intimate than Alexandra: Mandela liked to say that in Alexandra he had no house, but a home, while in Orlando he had a house without a home. But he was now close to Walter Sisulu, who lived with his mother in a house noisy with politics; and Orlando was destined to set the pace for all black South Africa.

Mandela still had to study – this time for a law degree. Early in 1943 he enrolled at the University of Witwatersrand, which stood, with its imposing columns, on a hill north of Johannesburg. ‘Wits’, unlike the Afrikaans universities, admitted a handful of black students to study alongside whites, though they could not use the sports fields, tennis courts or swimming pool. Some white lecturers strongly disapproved of black students, including Professor Hahlo, a German-Jewish lawyer who regarded law as a social science for which blacks and women lacked the mental discipline and experience.24 But other law lecturers, like Julius Lewin and Rex Welsh, were generous liberals, and many of the white students had returned from the war with a hatred of racism. Among them were several communists, including Joe Slovo and his wife Ruth First, Tony O’Dowd and Harold Wolpe. Ruth First, who was later to be a close friend and colleague, remembered Mandela as ‘good-looking, very proud, very dignified, very prickly, rather sensitive, perhaps even arrogant. But of course he was exposed to all the humiliations.’25 Joe Slovo had the impression of ‘a very proud, self-contained black man, who was very conscious of his blackness’ and very sensitive to the perception that ‘when you work with a white man, he dominates’.26 Ismail Meer, who was Ruth’s close friend, found Mandela ‘fairly unsure of himself’ and detached from student politics: ‘He was the best-dressed student, and he was not going to get involved readily in the political activities at the campus. He was very cautious.’27 Mandela ‘had a friendly dignity about him’, recalled another contemporary, Nathan Lochoff: ‘a little shy, not assertive in any way’.

Mandela was to spend six years at Wits, from 1943 to 1949, without any great distinction. He had an excellent memory, but his studies had to be squeezed in between his job as an articled clerk and his political commitments. Professor Hahlo could be scathing: ‘You call this an essay?’ ‘You know what I wish for him?’ Mandela told one of his white friends, Jules Browde: ‘That one day he has to write by paraffin light in Soweto.’28 When he failed at the end of his course he applied to Professor Hahlo for permission to resit some papers, explaining that he often arrived home in Orlando after 8 p.m., ‘feeling tired and hungry and unfit to concentrate on my studies … if I could have done my work under more suitable conditions, I would have produced better results.’29 But Hahlo, strictly following the rules, turned down his application, and Mandela was eventually to leave Wits without his LlB degree. Despite his justifications, he still felt a sense of failure.30

At Wits Mandela suffered many humiliations. When he sat at a table in the law library, a white student moved away. When he went to a café with some white students, they were kept out because there was a ‘kaffir’ among them; one of them, Julius Wulfsohn, protested, but Mandela put his hand on his shoulder and simply said, ‘Just leave it.’31 When he went on a whites-only tram with two Indians the conductor called him their ‘kaffir friend’, and had them charged in court.32 But he revealed no lasting grudges. Fifty years later, as President of the Republic, he invited the whole class of ’46 to a reunion at Wits. ‘I am what I am,’ he told them, ‘both as a result of people who respected me and helped me, and of those who did not respect me and treated me badly.’33

Back in Orlando, Mandela was seen as a man about town, and a ladies’ man. (‘I can’t help it if the ladies take note of me,’ he said later. ‘I’m not going to protest.’34) He spent much of his time with Walter Sisulu and his mother ‘Ma’ in their small Orlando house. In 1944 Walter married Albertina Thethiwe, a young nurse from the Transkei who had been educated by Catholics. She soon became ‘the backbone of the home’, as Sisulu described her, strong enough to be both mother and politician, while providing a fixed base.35 Albertina felt protective towards the handsome young country boy – ‘You could see from the way he dressed that he was from the country’ – and worried that gangsters in Alexandra, ‘the Spoilers’, would recruit him and exploit his aggression.36

But Mandela soon seemed to be settling down. In the warm atmosphere of the Sisulus’ house he met Walter’s young cousin Evelyn Mase, four years younger than him, who had also recently arrived from the Transkei, to become a nurse – the most respected profession for African women – and was working at the Johannesburg General Hospital with Albertina. Their neighbour Es’kia Mphahlele later described her as an unassuming girl, with lazy eyes and a subdued and coy smile.37 Mandela was quickly attracted to Evelyn: after a few days they were going steady, and within months he proposed to her. They were married simply in 1944 at the Native Commissioner’s Court, without church bells or a wedding feast. At first they lived in one room of the small Orlando house of Evelyn’s brother Sam Mase, and later moved in with her brother-in-law Mgudlwa, a clerk in a mine.

‘Everyone we knew said that we made a very good couple,’ recalled Evelyn.38 She was very house-proud, always busy polishing, gardening or cooking, and took good care of Mandela. ‘She was a well-behaved, quiet lady, devoted to her family and husband,’ Mandela said.39 She was religious, from a more devout mission background than his. She did not see him as a politician, she recalls, but as a student.40 Mandela’s young sister Leabie, who came to stay with them, noticed that Evelyn ‘didn’t want to hear a thing about politics’.41 But she was supportive of her ambitious husband. ‘It was during his years with Evelyn that he grew and blossomed politically into the national figure he is today,’ wrote Phyllis Ntantala, who was a friend of both.42

A year after the wedding Evelyn gave birth to their son Thembi. They moved briefly to 719 Orlando East, and soon afterwards to 8115 Orlando, one of hundreds of identical three-roomed ‘matchbox’ houses, with no electricity or inside lavatory. A stream of visitors, including Nelson’s nephew Matanzima, came to stay in the little house, often sleeping on the floor. The next year Evelyn produced a daughter, Makaziwe, who died after nine months.

Evelyn was often helped by Nelson’s mother, who came up from the Transkei; the two women got on well. Mandela also helped with the shopping, bathing the babies, and even sometimes took over the cooking. ‘Many wives envied Evelyn for her man who was dedicated to the family and bought food in town to take home,’ recalled Oliver Tambo’s wife Adelaide.43 He was ‘a highly organised person and very regular in his habits’, said Evelyn. ‘He was up at crack of dawn, jogged a few miles, had a light breakfast and was off for the day.’44

In four years in Johannesburg Mandela had come a long way from the quiet rural life of the Transkei. He had survived in the crowded townships, worked in a law office, studied at university and married. He had found his feet in a harsh and competitive environment. He still felt like a country boy confronting streetwise townsmen, fast-talking in English and Afrikaans. Yet his rural values and upbringing gave him an inner security, and he was conscious of being royal. ‘Whatever he did he was thinking more of becoming a chief and an important person of the royal house,’ said Sisulu. ‘When he was getting into big politics he still had that in mind.’45

But Mandela was being drawn into the political fray, which would give a wider context and a purpose to his urban life. As a proud aristocrat he had come up against all the frustrations and humiliations of a black man in the white man’s city, which had made him more aware of being one black man among millions. He was now having to see himself in a much harsher mirror; and soon he was to become an aspiring African nationalist, with an aggression and anger which it would take him a long time to control.

It was Mandela’s militant office friend Gaur Radebe who first brought him into politics in Alexandra township. In August 1943 Radebe helped organise a spectacular boycott of the buses to the city – the third in three years – after the fares went up from fivepence to sixpence. Mandela joined the boycott and a march of 10,000 blacks, which left the buses empty for nine days until the fare was put back to its former rate. It was an encouraging lesson in the power of boycott.46

It was also Mandela’s first close contact with the African National Congress, the main black political body, which was now reawakening from a long slumber. The ANC had been set up in 1912 by a Zulu lawyer, Dr Pixley ka Seme, in direct response to the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, which had brought together the Afrikaners and the British: a union, said Seme in his opening address, ‘in which we have no voice in the making of the laws and no part in the administration’. The ANC’s first President was Dr John Dube, a Zulu educationalist, and the Secretary was Sol Plaatje, an interpreter and writer from Kimberley, while Seme was made Treasurer.47 As the ANC leaders watched their worst fears about white supremacy being borne out they organised delegations, demonstrations and protests, but they dreaded mass action or confrontation. The ANC was a staid, formal body with many members from royal families, represented in their own House of Chiefs – like the House of Lords – and Mandela came to see it as ‘obsessed with imperialist forms of organisation’.48 It was easily bought off by ineffectual government bodies: when Africans in the Cape Province were deprived of their vote in 1936, Congress leaders agreed to join the ‘Natives’ Representative Council’, which was supposed to advise the government, though they soon discovered it was (as one of them, Paul Mosaka, called it) a ‘toy telephone’.49 By the late thirties the ANC had become dormant and disorganised, overshadowed in its protests by communists and Trotskyists, and discredited by putting its faith in easily-broken white promises.