Mandela: The Authorised Biography

Mandela joined the Transvaal National Executive of the ANC in 1947, and became fiercely loyal to it. He was befriended by its President Constantine Ramohanoe, who taught him how to keep in touch with the grassroots.30 But Ramohanoe wanted to cooperate with Indians and communists, a move which was opposed by the majority, including Mandela. When he defied them by making his own statement Mandela, seconded by Oliver Tambo, moved to depose him, which led to a stormy meeting and Ramohanoe’s departure. ‘Loyalty to an organisation,’ Mandela would always maintain, ‘takes precedence over loyalty to an individual.’31 He maintained that stern rule over the next fifty years, as dissidents would learn to their cost. Having subjugated his own will to the movement, he was determined that others should do so too.

Mandela encountered many intellectuals who were fiercely critical of the ANC; particularly in Cape Town, where Trotskyists had formed the ‘Unity Movement’, which included many leading African and Coloured academics who insisted on total non-collaboration. In 1948 he visited Cape Town for the first time, staying for three months. He went up Table Mountain by the cable car, and gazed across at Robben Island.32 He was invited to visit A.C. Jordan, a university lecturer prominent in the Unity Movement, who had written a book much admired by his Tembu friends, Ingqumbo yemiNyanya (The Wrath of the Ancestral Spirits), and was impressed by his intellect. With Jordan was Isaac Tabata, a founder and propagandist for the Unity Movement who talked brilliantly about South African history, but criticised Mandela with venom for joining the ANC: ‘I am sure you did so simply because your father was a member.’33 (In fact Mandela’s father was only part of his tribe’s collective membership.) Mandela was in some awe of Tabata: ‘It was difficult for me to cope with his arguments … I didn’t want to continue arguing with the fellow because he was demolishing me just like that.’34 He was shocked that Tabata seemed more hostile to the ANC than to the government.35 Afterwards Tabata wrote him a very long letter, warning him against the ‘collaborators’ of the ANC and pressing him to base his actions on principles, to ‘swim against the stream’.36 But Mandela thought the Trotskyists’ insistence on non-collaboration was merely ‘their pet excuse for doing nothing’. Cape Town left him more than ever convinced that only the ANC could mobilise his people to provide effective mass action.37

However disillusioned he was by the Smuts government, Mandela – like many of his friends – still placed some hope in the liberalism of the post-war transatlantic alliance, of the UN and of the Labour government in Britain. In April 1947 King George VI, with his Queen and the two young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, made a spectacular two-month state visit to South Africa which was intended to bolster the links between the two countries. But the British High Commissioner in South Africa, Sir Evelyn Baring, correctly warned London that Afrikaner nationalists would attack the visit as a symbol of the ‘Empire bond which they had pledged themselves to break’.38 The royal party spent thirty-five days touring the whole country in a special white train. Smuts – more of a hero to the British than to the South Africans – made the most of it, declaring a public holiday to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of Princess Elizabeth, later Queen, who would always look back on the tour warmly as her first experience of the Commonwealth. The celebrations were officially boycotted by the ANC, including the Youth League, which met at Mandela’s house to discuss it.39

The King’s contacts with Africans during the tour were strictly limited by the Smuts government. He was not allowed to shake black hands at official ceremonies, but crowds of black spectators cheered the royal visitors, and Dr Xuma, the President of the ANC, could not resist travelling to Zululand to see the King.40 The left-wing Guardian in Cape Town was exasperated by the Africans’ celebrations: ‘If the pitch and tone of the people’s struggles for freedom can be lowered by these spectacular feudal devices,’ complained an editorial, ‘it will be extremely difficult to recover the ground that has been lost.’41 Mandela himself, with his own chiefly background, thought the British monarchy should be respected as a long-lasting institution, and noted the veneration which the Xhosa chiefs showed for George VI. One Xhosa poet described how the then Paramount Chief Velile Sandile ‘pierced the ground’ in front of the King. ‘He was grovelling really,’ Mandela recalled, ‘but I can’t blame him. I might have done the same.’42

Smuts was already losing much of his popularity with white South Africans, particularly Afrikaners, before the general election of May 1948. He had been careful not to alarm the white electorate by making concessions to blacks, but the Afrikaner National Party under Dr Daniel Malan, with its doctrine of apartheid and its warnings against the ‘black peril’ and the ‘red menace’, was gaining support as Africans became more visible in the cities. The ANC saw the white election as a choice between two evils, while Dr Xuma claimed that apartheid was nothing new, merely ‘a natural and logical growth of the Union Native policy’.43 Educated black Africans in Orlando despised the raw Afrikaners who made up most of Malan’s supporters. ‘We only knew Afrikaners as tram-drivers, ticket-collectors, policemen,’ said Mandela’s friend Esme Matshikiza. ‘We thought they couldn’t run the country. We didn’t know that their leaders had studied in Nazi Germany.’44

In the election Dr Malan’s National Party gained victory, in alliance with the smaller Afrikaner Party. Its majority was only eight, but this was enough for the country to be ruled for the first time by Afrikaner nationalists without more moderate English-speaking support. Smuts was humiliated, and when he died two years later he was venerated in the outside world as a statesman and war leader, but blamed in his own country for ignoring both Afrikaners and Africans – a warning to his successors that a statesman must not forget to remain a politician.

Malan’s new government soon changed the whole character and perspective of the South African state. The Afrikaners, descendants of Calvinist Dutch settlers in the seventeenth century, had retained a very separate culture from the English-speakers, little influenced by subsequent European liberalism. Their oppression by British imperialists, culminating in the Boer War at the turn of the century, had forged a powerful nationalism, with its own religion and epics, and they nursed their grievances against the British. When the Union of South Africa was created in 1910 the British had hoped to retain an English-speaking majority, gradually softening the Afrikaners’ resentment. But the numbers of Afrikaners had multiplied, while their relative poverty and continuing experience as underdogs fuelled their nationalism. The Afrikaners (as British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan would tell them in 1960) were really the first of the African nationalists, with their own need to prove themselves and defend their culture; and they would inevitably come into conflict with black African nationalists who threatened their jobs and their supremacy.45 As Mandela later looked back on forty years of rivalry: ‘Perhaps history ordained that the people of our country should pay this high price because it bequeathed to us two nationalisms that dominate the history of twentieth-century South Africa … Because both nationalisms laid claim to the same piece of earth – our common home, South Africa – the contest between the two was bound to be brutal.’46

The new Afrikaner government did not conceal its intention to further separate the races and to build an Afrikaner state. ‘For the first time since Union,’ said Dr Malan, ‘South Africa is our own.’ Sir Evelyn Baring had few illusions: his despatches to London would compare Afrikaner nationalism to Nazism, and he came to dislike the Afrikaner ministers so much (his wife complained) that he could hardly keep the venom out of his voice.47 But at first most British politicians and commentators were not seriously worried by the change in government. ‘Dr Malan’s majority is far too small,’ wrote the Economist, ‘to enable him to do anything drastic.’48 The Labour government in London, beset by economic crises, needed South African uranium and was anxious not to offend the Malan government lest it take over the three British protectorates – Swaziland, Basutoland and Bechuanaland – on its borders.

Many Africans, including Oliver Tambo, actually welcomed the victory of Malan’s party, an unambiguous enemy that would unite the blacks against it; but Mandela was ‘stunned and dismayed’.49 Twelve years later he would still explain the possibility that growing black pressure would gradually compel white governments to extend the vote, leading eventually to universal suffrage.50 But now that prospect seemed much less likely. And, like nearly all black politicians, he seriously underestimated the Afrikaner determination to impose total segregation and to suppress black resistance, against the trend elsewhere in Africa and in America. Hardly anyone foresaw that over the next forty years successive National Party governments would pass laws which would ban the black leadership, imprison them or force them into exile.

In the face of this new threat, the Africans proved slow to unite. In December 1948 the ANC held a joint meeting with its rival body the All-African Convention, which was dominated by Trotskyists, including Mandela’s opponent Isaac Tabata. Dr Xuma called for blacks to ‘speak with one voice’. J.B. Marks warned that ‘the people are being crushed while we complacently quibble about technical difficulties’. Peter Mda insisted that the basis of unity must be African nationalism. But Tabata called for unity among all non-Europeans on the basis of total non-collaboration, which ANC delegates could not accept.51 The meeting was inconclusive, and the arguments continued at another assembly four months later.

The need for unity emerged much more sharply with riots in Durban in January 1949, when enraged Zulus set on Indians and the police and military intervened, leaving 142 dead. Mandela heard from his Indian friends that whites had encouraged the riots by transporting Zulus to the scene.52 The bloodshed, Mandela thought, put the ‘Doctors’ Pact’ to the test, and he was impressed to see Dr Naicker playing a critical role in quickly restoring peace and promoting goodwill. ‘The year 1949,’ he wrote thirty years later, ‘was an unforgettable experience for those who have given their lives to the promotion of inter-racial harmony.’53 Dr Xuma blamed the riots on the government’s divisive policies, and warned against ‘the law of the jungle’. The black fury spread to the Johannesburg area, where some Indian and African leaders hoped the Congresses would jointly appeal for calm. Ahmed Kathrada went with a journalist, Henry Nxumalo, to Mandela’s house in Orlando to try to persuade him to support a joint statement, but Mandela, still wary of the ANC being influenced by Indians, insisted that the ANC should act on its own.54

By mid-1949 Dr Malan’s government was preparing to enforce apartheid with drastic laws: each person would be classified by race; the races would live in separate parts of the cities; and mixed marriages would be forbidden. The firebrands of the Youth League, including Mandela, felt challenged to respond. Their President Peter Mda advocated a ‘Programme of Action’ based on organising mass protests against the government. The Youth League was gaining more support in the ANC as a whole, and was losing patience with Xuma’s caution. In November 1949, a few weeks before the ANC’s annual conference, Mda went with Sisulu, Mandela and Tambo to see Xuma in Sophiatown. They argued that the ANC must adopt mass action and passive resistance like Gandhi’s in India, or the Indians’ in South Africa three years before. Xuma retorted that it was too early, that action would only provoke the government to crush the ANC. The Youth Leaguers warned him that if he did not support them they would vote against his presidency at the conference. Xuma replied angrily that they were young and arrogant, and showed them the door.55

Looking round for an alternative President, they first asked Professor Matthews, who thought they were naïve and immature, with their emotive rhetoric, and turned them down.56 Then they made a rash choice, turning to Dr James Moroka, a dignified and relatively wealthy African doctor who had inherited a small estate in the Orange Free State, where a century before his great-grandfather Chief Moroka had welcomed the Afrikaner Voortrekkers – who then betrayed him. Moroka, a courteous gentleman, had, like Dr Xuma, many white friends and patients. He had been courageous in opposing the ‘Hertzog Bills’ in 1936, but he had since been attracted by the Trotskyists, and had become President of the ANC’s rival the All-African Convention. Now, surprisingly, he told the Youth Leaguers that he supported their radical Programme of Action, and agreed to stand against Xuma even though he was not even a member of the ANC – which he kept calling the ‘African National Council’.57

The ANC Youth League opened its own conference on 15 December 1949, just before the main ANC conference at Bloemfontein, with a humble prayer:

Thou, Heavenly Father, art continuing to lift us up from the sinks of impurity and cesspools of ignorance. Thou art removing the veil of darkness from this race of the so-called ‘Dark Africa’.58

The inner group of Youth Leaguers – headed by Mda, Sisulu, Mandela and Tambo – clearly emerged at the conference as ‘the kingmakers’, though Mandela could not attend. They had some differences: Mda remained a firm African nationalist, with Mandela closest to him. Sisulu was much more open to other racial groups, while Tambo remained diplomatic.59 But they all demanded mass action.

The main ANC conference was eclipsed in the South African press by a much more melodramatic event: the opening by Prime Minister Malan of the vast Voortrekker Monument outside Pretoria, commemorating the sufferings of the Great Trek, before a crowd of 100,000 Afrikaners. ‘The hour has come,’ said Malan. ‘A sunbeam from the heavens is striking down on the sarcophagus.’

Dr Xuma did his best to challenge this ceremony, with a speech in the market square of the Bloemfontein township in which he warned prophetically that the Voortrekker Monument would remind future generations of the racial strife between Europeans and Africans. The white press took little notice.

In his presidential address to the ANC conference Xuma tried to rally support, and emphasised that Africans were united against apartheid.60 But he firmly rejected the Youth League’s policy of boycotting apartheid institutions. His speech received meagre applause, and Diliza Mji, an outspoken young medical student in the Youth League, then moved a vote of non-confidence. ‘A shock-wave went through the hall,’ as Mji described it. ‘Never in the history of the ANC had the President been criticised.’61 The kingmakers then turned to Moroka, who had already pledged his support, and the conference elected him as President. Xuma remained on the executive until he resigned on 13 March 1950, complaining that the Youth League had betrayed him. But Sisulu, Mandela and Tambo wrote a forceful rebuttal in the Bantu World: ‘We are as a nation entitled at any time to call upon any one of us to lead the struggle.’62

The ANC also elected a much more radical National Executive, including the Youth Leaguers Peter Mda, Oliver Tambo and Godfrey Pitje, the young activist from Fort Hare. Mandela himself was co-opted onto the National Executive two months later, to fill the place left by Xuma. More importantly, the Congress chose a new Secretary-General. The veteran clergyman James Calata stood down, finding the Programme of Action too radical, and in his place Walter Sisulu was elected by one vote.63 Sisulu was the right man at the right time. Unlike Moroka, he was totally dedicated to the ANC and its new policy. As he recalled: ‘Once they had decided to elect me my approach was: “I have nothing to live for except politics. So I cannot draw up a programme of action which I am not able to follow myself.” That required me to be confident of the future, otherwise I would weaken somewhere. That confidence kept me in.’

Mandela had a narrower view than Sisulu. ‘When I became Secretary-General my duty was to unite people,’ Sisulu said later, ‘whereas Nelson and Mda were still thinking in terms of projecting the Youth League.’64 But Mandela thought the Programme of Action would transform the attitudes and methods of the Congress. ‘The ANC was now going to rely not on a mere change of heart on the part of the authorities,’ he explained later. ‘It was going to exert pressure in order to compel the authorities to grant its demands.’65 He was now at the heart of a new movement towards confrontation with the Afrikaner nationalists. As Frieda Matthews, the wife of the staid professor at Fort Hare, described it: ‘People were excited, men and women, young and old. At last there was to be ACTION!’66

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