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,