Mandela: The Authorised Biography

In 1940 the ANC had elected a more effective President, Alfred Xuma, a small, busy doctor with a black American wife, who like Sisulu had begun as a herd-boy in Engcobo. He now lived in a comfortable house on the edge of Sophiatown, a multi-racial suburb of Johannesburg. Dr Xuma quickly pumped life into the moribund body. ‘There was no membership to boast about, no records, and the treasury was empty,’ as he described it.50 He toured the country, reviving the branches, and took personal control over the Transvaal, whose overflowing black population provided many new recruits. He brought a new unity to the Congress, breaking down its tribal divisions and abolishing the House of Chiefs.51 But it remained mainly middle-class and middle-aged, and while only Africans were admitted it had no popular following. Xuma was fussy about his dignity and proud of his respectable white friends, including government officials; and he dreaded the demagogy and militancy of the younger leaders who were now making themselves felt.

It was at Sisulu’s house in Orlando in 1943 that Mandela first met the fiery young Zulu activist Anton Lembede, then only twenty-nine, who had just given up teaching to work in the law firm of Dr Seme, the co-founder of the ANC. Lembede, the son of a farm labourer, was a devout Catholic who, appalled by the moral degradation of the townships, had resolved that blacks must mobilise themselves without relying on whites or Indians. He believed the British were systematically working ‘to discourage and eradicate all nationalistic tendencies among their alien subjects’ and to co-opt the young black elite, making them their instruments. It was a charge to which Mandela felt himself vulnerable.52

Lembede had a strong populist touch: ‘A pair of boots,’ he said, ‘is worth all the works of Shakespeare.’53 But he was also an intellectual, steeped in English literature (including Shakespeare) and inspired by such black American leaders as Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. du Bois. ‘My soul yearns for the glory of an Africa that is gone,’ Lembede said, ‘but I shall labour for the birth of a new Africa, free and great among the nations of the world.’54 Mandela realised that Lembede was unscientific, verbose and sometimes irrelevant, but he admired the vigour of his rhetoric and his vision, which evoked past Xhosa heroes.55

Lembede became the leader of a small group of young blacks, including Sisulu and Mandela, who wanted to form a Youth League within the ANC. Their aim was to press the organisation towards mass action of the kind which had been so successful in the Alexandra bus boycott. While they supported the ANC, they resented Xuma’s ‘heavy hand’. They also felt challenged by the new African Democratic Party under Paul Mosaka which had just broken away from the Congress and, as they saw it, could ‘prance around the country’.56 They were encouraged by the Anglo-American idealism of the war against Hitler, particularly by the apparent radicalism of the Atlantic Charter, which Churchill and Roosevelt had signed in August 1941; this committed the signatories to ‘respect the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’. Churchill soon afterwards began backtracking from the anti-colonial implications of the Charter, explaining to Leo Amery, the Secretary of State for India, that he did not mean the ‘peoples’ to include the natives of Nigeria or East Africa, let alone Arabs who might expel Jews from Palestine.57 But Mandela and his friends took the Charter at its face value and admired Churchill for it; while Smuts appeared to support its application to Africa, particularly after the Japanese victories in the Pacific at the end of 1941, when he feared that Japan might invade Africa with support from blacks. (There was some reason for Smuts’s fear: Walter Sisulu, among others, admired the Japanese as a successful coloured people, and declared himself ‘happy when South Africa was threatened by the Japanese’.58) The ANC set up a committee under Professor Z.K. Matthews to interpret the Atlantic Charter. It produced a document called Africans’ Claims in South Africa, which reasserted the right of all peoples to choose their government: the acid test of the Charter, it said, was its application to the African continent.59

Mandela was now, at twenty-five, committed to ANC politics, and in 1943 he joined a delegation led by Lembede to put the idea of the Youth League to Dr Xuma in the library of his Sophiatown house. It was a historic but spiky encounter. Mandela admired Xuma for having revived the ANC, and was impressed by his international friends like Tshekedi Khama of Bechuanaland, Hastings Banda of Nyasaland and King Sobhuza of Swaziland.60 But he disliked Xuma’s pompous English style, and his obsession with delegations and telegrams. Xuma, for his part, craved the support of young intellectuals, and was quite flattered by the visit of ‘my Kindergarten boys’, as he called them; but he warned them that the ANC was not ready for mass action.61 Mandela, Sisulu and others nevertheless pressed ahead with a provisional committee, working away on a manifesto in the dingy Congress office in the Rosenberg Arcade in downtown Johannesburg.62

In April 1944 the Youth League was formally launched at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre in Johannesburg, with Lembede as President and Sisulu, Tambo and Mandela on the executive committee. The stirring manifesto opened with Lembede’s description of the difference between white and black perceptions:

The white man regards the Universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction; individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths …

The African, on his side, regards the Universe as one composite whole; an organic entity, progressively driving towards greater harmony and unity whose individual parts exist merely as independent aspects of one whole …

The manifesto went on to reject any claim that the white man was helping to civilise the African, and to insist that the African ‘now elects to determine his future by his own efforts’. It endorsed the ANC, with some reservations, and promised the support of the new Youth League as ‘the brains-trust and power-house of the spirit of African nationalism’. ‘The hour of youth has struck,’ said a flyer issued by the provisional committee in September, which ended with the lines from Julius Caesar:

The fault … is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.63

This was the first time, Mandela reckoned, that the idea of African nationalism had been set out in a clear fashion. But the policies were still uncertain. Did they really aim to drive the white man into the sea, as the radicals claimed? Eventually a more moderate view prevailed, shared by Mandela: that other racial groups were in South Africa to stay, but white supremacy must be abandoned.64

Another political organisation had also gained support from the convulsions of wartime. The Communist Party of South Africa, which Mandela first encountered at Wits, was now quite rapidly gaining popularity among Africans after twenty turbulent years. It had been formed in 1921, led by a small group of Jewish immigrants and British non-conformists, and operated under the strict rules of the Comintern in Moscow. South Africa, with its highly concentrated mining finance, interested many Marxist theorists, including Lenin, as a case-history of economic imperialism and monopoly capitalism; but on the ground many communist leaders became confused between class and race conflicts. At first the communists showed little interest in attracting black members or leaders: in 1922 they actually supported the all-white Labour Party in the mine strike, under the slogan ‘Unite for a white South Africa’. The communists broke with the white Labour Party when it joined a cynical coalition with the Afrikaner nationalist government two years later; but in 1926 the Party alienated many white members when it accepted the new Comintern doctrine of a ‘black republic’.

By the 1930s the communists were recruiting more black members, including two able young activists, J.B. Marks and Moses Kotane, who were trained at the Lenin Institute in Moscow and returned to help organise black unions. The communists had little appeal to the ANC, still influenced by traditional chiefs. In 1939, loyal to the pact between Hitler and Stalin, the Communist Party opposed the war. But after Russia was invaded by Hitler in June 1941 and became Britain’s ally, the communists were more acceptable, and also more concerned with championing black rights. By 1945, helped by extra newsprint allocations, the circulation of the two South African communist-influenced papers the Guardian and Inkululeko had gone up to 67,000.65

Mandela had been impressed, through white friends like Nat Bregman and Michael Harmel, by the multi-racialism of the communists, who brought blacks into contact with whites on an equal footing. It was only the communists, Mandela wrote later, who ‘were prepared to treat Africans as human beings and their equals; who were prepared to eat with us, talk with us, live with us and work with us. They were the only political group which was prepared to work with the Africans for the attainment of political rights and a stake in society.’66 The ANC included many African communists in its ranks, and most members did not regard them as a threat. The ANC’s Secretary-General from 1936 to 1949, the Reverend James Calata, believed that ‘Communism had no influence worth worrying about.’ He saw African national life as still built on a binding system, linking the individual to the family, to the clan, to the tribe: ‘Communism, which is a purely materialistic system, cannot change the heart of the African towards it until that particular African feels that it is the only way out of oppression.’67

But the young nationalists of the ANC Youth League were very hostile to the communists, whom they saw as alien influences corrupting African nationalism, the ‘vendors of the foreign method’.68 Lembede fiercely attacked them, and broke up one communist meeting in Orlando with such a menacing tirade that Inkululeko commented: ‘Hitler may lose the war in Europe but he has found a convert in S. Africa.’69 Mandela (in spite of his communist friends) and Tambo shared Lembede’s distrust, and the three put forward a motion that ‘members of political organisations’ should resign from the ANC. It was rejected by the national conference, but the Youth League’s crusade against communists continued.

The conflict was part of a broader rivalry between nationalism and communism within liberation movements across Africa and Asia that would flare up after the Second World War. The nationalists could appeal to the historical pride of their people and offer them a new self-esteem; while the communists, backed by the victorious Soviet Union, could provide organisation and funds, and an intellectual critique of imperialism. But South Africa was a special ideological battlefield. The Africans had suffered domination and humiliations, which gave impetus to their nationalism; but the country’s white minority was too large simply to be sent home, as was being urged elsewhere in Africa. ‘They talked of independence,’ said Govan Mbeki. ‘We talked of freedom. There’s a great difference.’70 The Communist Party of South Africa was the only party which embraced all the races, and it was becoming more genuinely multi-racial than any other Communist Party.71 It was between these magnetic poles of nationalism and communism that Mandela was now pulled.

4

Afrikaners v. Africans

1946–1949

THE HOPES OF MANDELA and his friends for a more benign post-war world were soon dashed: not by an apartheid regime, but by the United Party government of Jan Smuts, who had been Churchill’s loyal ally in the war, and who was supported by South Africa’s English-speaking businessmen. In 1946, only months after the final Allied victory over Japan, Smuts made two ruthless moves which pushed both Africans and Indians into greater militancy, and into working together.

The first was against a strike by the newly-formed African Mineworkers’ Union, whose prime mover and first President was Mandela’s friend Gaur Radebe. Radebe had been succeeded in 1942 by J.B. Marks, a robust African communist who had studied in Moscow and who led the strike of 70,000 black miners in August 1946, demanding more pay and better food and conditions. The mining companies, supported by the government, forced the workers back down the mines with bayonets, killing nine and wounding hundreds. Ten days later, fifty of the leaders were charged with fomenting a strike. Several were found guilty, and were fined or imprisoned.1

Most whites saw the crackdown as a necessary response to the communist menace, which was now re-emerging after the wartime truce. Smuts flew off to London, ‘not unduly concerned’, while the Rand Daily Mail attacked the ‘wild speeches and absurd demands’ of the union leaders, including ‘J.B. Marx’.2 The conservatives within the ANC, including Dr Xuma, blamed the communists for provoking a premature test of strength, but the Youth Leaguers criticised Xuma for not calling a general strike in sympathy.3 The brutal suppression seemed to vindicate Lembede’s warning that blacks could expect no mercy from the whites. Mandela was moved by the bravery and solidarity of the strikers – some of whom he knew – and he visited them with J.B. Marks. He discussed communism with Marks, and was struck by his humour and humility. Marks saw Mandela as a rabid nationalist, but thought he would outgrow that phase.4

The crushing of the mine strike made fools of the patient delegations of the ANC ‘Old Guard’, who had put their faith in Smuts. While the black miners were being bayoneted, the Natives’ Representative Council was quietly debating black grievances with the government in Pretoria. Its members adjourned in protest, but did not actually boycott the Council. Smuts, however, realised that he had alienated ‘moderate intellectuals of the Prof. Matthews type’, and the next year he tried to placate a delegation of Council members headed by Matthews.5 Smuts spoke in his usual paternal mode: ‘This young child, South Africa, is growing up, and the old clothes do not fit the growing boy.’ He deplored their ‘sulking’ attitude, and offered them ‘a bone to chew’ in the form of a bigger Council, all black and all elected, and legalised black unions, though not in the mines. Matthews was sceptical, and explained that the black people had lost confidence in the Council. Afterwards he told the press that the mountain had given birth to a mouse, and that the hungry masses needed more than a bone to chew.6 But the Natives’ Representative Council remained passive and ineffective (it would be abolished by the first Nationalist government).

Nelson Mandela was more lastingly influenced by Smuts’s second harsh move, against the Indians in South Africa. The 300,000 Indians who had arrived in Natal since the 1860s, first as contract labourers, then as traders, had their own history of discrimination and protest. They had first learnt about peaceful protest in 1911 from Mohandas Gandhi, who devised his kind of passive resistance while he was working as a lawyer in South Africa, and had led thousands of Indians illegally from Natal into the Transvaal. Africans and Coloureds tried similar protests in 1919 and 1939, but without success. The Indians, some of whom had become prosperous merchants, kept themselves aloof from blacks, and hoped for better treatment after the war. But in 1946 the Smuts government introduced the Asiatic Land Tenure Bill, the ‘Indian Ghetto Act’, which banned the sale of any more land to Indians, while offering them the sop of white representatives in Parliament and an advisory board. It shook the Indians out of their complacency. For two years they sustained a passive-resistance campaign echoing Gandhi’s of thirty-five years before, occupying land reserved for whites: two thousand protesters went to jail, including the campaign’s two leaders, Dr ‘Monty’ Naicker and Dr Yusuf Dadoo.7

Mandela was coming closer to the Indians. He was impressed by their progress from speech-making and resolutions to mass action, in contrast to the inertia of the ANC. He was struck by the solidarity and sacrifice of the protesters, who included both militant and conservative Indians, and he admired both Naicker and Dadoo.8 In Johannesburg he was now meeting many Indians, and found himself personally at ease with them. A flat in downtown Johannesburg, 13 Kholvad House, in Market Street, had become a crucial meeting-place between the races. There Mandela would meet Ismail Meer, Ruth First, Yusuf Cachalia and many other Indian and white communists in a relaxed atmosphere. He also spent much time at the home of Amina Pahad (whose two sons Aziz and Essop were later to join the Mandela government), where they would all eat curry and rice with their fingers. It reminded him of his childhood at Jongintaba’s Great Place.9 And after some early arguments he worked closely with Ahmed Kathrada, a young Indian communist who was to spend twenty-five years with him in prison.

Through his Indian friends Mandela became more interested in India itself, which was then on the verge of independence, and in the achievements of Gandhi and his disciple Jawaharlal Nehru. ‘When we were starting the struggle we really had very little to go by from the leadership in our country,’ he recalled, ‘because their experiences were not reduced to writing, whereas people like Gandhi and Nehru had recorded their experiences. So we had to look up to them, and their influence was tremendous.’ He was more influenced by Nehru, who was not a pacifist, than by Gandhi: ‘When a Maharajah tried to stop him he would push him aside. He was that type of man, and we liked him because his conduct indicated how we should treat our own oppressors. Whereas Gandhi had a spirit of steel, but nevertheless it was shown in a very gentle and smooth way, and he would rather suffer in humility than retaliate.’10

The Indian passive resisters in South Africa in 1946 and 1947 taught Mandela and other African politicians an important lesson. Only a few non-Indians joined them (including the radical British monk Michael Scott), but they soon attracted support from the ANC. In 1947 the ANC president Dr Xuma joined with Naicker and Dadoo in the so-called ‘Doctors’ Pact’, which promised co-operation between the ANC and the two Indian Congresses. Xuma reinforced the alliance by appearing at the first session of the United Nations in New York in company with an Indian representative, H.A. Naidoo, to protest against the ‘Ghetto Act’, thus initiating the UN’s campaigns against racism. Mandela would come to see this pact as the origin of all the later collaborations between the races, and many young Indians were inspired by the prospect of racial co-operation.11 ‘It was this pact which gave me and my generation a sense of what it is to be South African,’ said Kader Asmal, later Minister of Water Affairs in Mandela’s government.12

But at the time, Mandela opposed closer political co-operation with Indians. He was convinced that only separate Congresses could effectively mobilise their masses, and was worried that the Indians or the Communist Party would take over or dominate the ANC for their own purposes, watering down the concept of African nationalism.13 He still had a burning sense of the Africans’ special suffering and identity, and he felt defensive, both personally and politically, in face of the more qualified and sophisticated Indians.

The two showdowns of 1946 both ended in defeat. The African Mineworkers’ Union was effectively destroyed, not to be resurrected until the 1980s, and the Indians were increasingly restricted to their ghettos.14 The setbacks left a deep mark on Mandela and other young black politicians. The Old Guard of delegations and petitions, epitomised by the Native Representative Council, was now discredited, and there were signs of a more courageous leadership emerging among the Indians and the communists.

The independence of India in August 1947 provided a powerful precedent for the struggle in South Africa, as in the rest of the continent, by showing how an established ruling power could be defeated by a unified and organised mass-movement. India’s first Prime Minister, Nehru, had been urging Indians to co-operate with Africans in South Africa ever since 1927, and he would soon show himself a determined ally of both Congresses, making India the first country to impose sanctions against South Africa.15 Mandela would always be grateful to Nehru for this. The influence of Indian communists would become an obsession for both the South African and the British governments, but Nehru, without being a communist, could provide a broader message for Mandela and others, to see beyond racial and local nationalism. ‘Nationalism is good in its place,’ Mandela would quote Nehru, ‘but it is an unreliable friend and an unsafe historian. It blinds us to many happenings and sometimes distorts the truth, especially when it concerns us and our country.’16

The ANC Youth League in the meantime was moderating some of its nationalism. In July 1947 its firebrand founder Anton Lembede suddenly died, aged thirty-three, only a few hours after Mandela had been talking to him.17 Mandela was appalled; but Lembede’s successor Peter Mda proved a clearer political thinker and a greater influence (though Mandela would later find him too cautious).18 Mda was a spellbinding talker, with a rich vocabulary, a small head and a huge laugh. The son of a Xhosa shoemaker, he had been educated by Catholics, and as a former teacher and lawyer he had both practical and intellectual training.19

Mandela himself became Secretary of the Youth League, responsible for political organisation and setting up branches.20 With Mda he recruited more members beyond the Transvaal, in Natal and the Cape. He tried to infiltrate African schools, visiting St Peter’s in Johannesburg, where Oliver Tambo had taught, in an attempt to address the students. But the headmaster, D.H. Darling (as he told Tambo afterwards) felt he could not allow the school to be used as a platform.21 Mda had more success at Fort Hare, where he persuaded a young lecturer in anthropology, Godfrey Pitje, to start a branch of the Youth League, to ‘soak them in our nationalistic outlook’ and to work hand-in-hand with the executive in Johannesburg, ‘of which the general secretary is N.R.D. Mandela Esq, BA, a law student’.22 Pitje’s professor, Z.K. Matthews, was sceptical of the ‘armchair intellectualism’ of the Youth League but did not prevent it from operating in Fort Hare. The university became the Youth League’s most valuable seedbed, attracting a militant new generation of students that included Robert Sobukwe, Joe Matthews and T.T. Letlaka, into the ANC.23

Mda insisted that he was not against white men as such, only against white domination: but he warned that Africans could not expect whites to side with them ‘at the time when the horizontal colour bar gave them a privileged way of life’.24 He wrote a new manifesto for the Youth League, less rhetorical and more analytical than Lembede’s, which Mandela approved. It defined African nationalism as ‘the militant outlook of an oppressed people seeking a solid basis for waging a long, bitter and unrelenting struggle for its national freedom’. It warned Africans not to ‘look up to Europeans either for inspiration or for help in their political struggle’. But it was more conciliatory about Indians, recognising that they were an oppressed group who ‘had not come to South Africa as conquerors and exploiters, but as the exploited’.25

Mandela, in spite of his Indian friendships, was still worried that Indians would dominate the ANC in the Transvaal.26 The tension came to a head after a ‘Votes for All’ campaign was launched in May 1948 at a ‘People’s Assembly’ in Johannesburg, opened by Michael Scott, demanding universal suffrage. The Transvaal branch of the ANC was divided: Mandela complained that the People’s Assembly had bypassed existing organisations, while Walter Sisulu insisted that Africans must find allies where they could.27 Mandela and Tambo went to a meeting of the Indian Congress with Sisulu, and were so angry when he supported the Indians’ arguments that they did not talk to him after the meeting, and departed in different directions.28 But they were gradually becoming less suspicious of communist friends like J.B. Marks and Moses Kotane. ‘If Moses represents the Party,’ said Tambo, ‘I don’t think I will quarrel with it.’29