Mandela: The Authorised Biography. Anthony Sampson

Mandela’s boyhood hero, and Sowetans took intense pride in their local champions like Jerry Moloi and Jake Tuli, who became flyweight champion of the British Empire. Mandela would often reminisce later about the great matches. He loved to recall the last fight of the heavyweight champion ‘King Kong’, who began by mocking his opponent Simon ‘Greb’ Mtimkulu. Greb waited till the third round, then ‘hit with a left, an over-right and a bolo to the body. End of fight.’¹² Mandela saw boxing in political terms, as a contest which was essentially egalitarian and colour-blind, where Africans could triumph over discrimination. He sometimes depicted his political career in boxing terms: by 1955 he felt he was in ‘the light heavyweight division’.¹³ The showmanship and individualism of the fighter, together with his physical strength, contributed to Mandela’s political style as a militant loner who understood the importance of performance.

      But it was politics which was now his chief game. The Youth League was clamouring for action, and Mandela was preoccupied with how it could be achieved. He explained in the League’s journal African Lodestar that the organisation must maintain dynamic contact with ordinary blacks: ‘We have a powerful ideology capable of capturing the imaginations of the masses. Our duty is now to carry that ideology fully to them.’¹⁴ But the ANC was still ill-equipped for grassroots organisation, and slow to react: a year after the conference of December 1949, Sisulu as Secretary-General reported that ‘the masses are marching far ahead of the leadership.’ He complained of ‘general negligence of duty’ by the organisation’s officials, a lack of faith in the struggle and a lack of ‘propaganda organs such as the press’. He insisted that ‘if Congress is to be a force in the liberation of the African people in this country, then it must of necessity put its machinery in order.’¹⁵

      The ANC still had very inadequate resources, and as an exclusively African organisation it was wary of seeking help from other races; the Indian Congress was much more efficiently run, as were the communists. But the situation soon changed when the government determined to make the Communist Party illegal, with a bill which in 1950 became the Suppression of Communism Act. ‘Statutory communism’ was defined far more widely than as following Marxist policies: it effectively meant believing in equality between the races. The government was taking advantage of white fears of a worldwide communist conspiracy even before Senator Joseph McCarthy began his witch-hunt in America. The Act certainly succeeded in hampering the activities of some formidable enemies of the government, but it also soon brought many banned communists much closer to the ANC’s young activists, including Mandela, and pressed them both towards joint action.

      The ban was a clear threat to free speech, and in March 1950 the Johannesburg Communist Party collaborated with the Transvaal ANC and Indian Congress to organise a ‘Defend Free Speech Convention’ which attracted 10,000 people to Market Square. They also proposed a one-day strike on May Day, to protest against the banning of communist leaders. Sisulu had been quick to realise that a threat to the communists was a threat to all opposition forces, but Mandela and many other ANC members distrusted the communist initiative, which had overtaken their own planned demonstration. The African Lodestar attacked the exploitation of black workers by foreign ideologues, declaring: ‘the exotic plant of communism cannot flourish on African soil’.¹⁶ Joe Slovo, the young communist lawyer from Lithuania, spent hours arguing with Mandela about the party’s plan for a strike, and saw Mandela trying to resolve his internal conflict ‘between the emotional legacy left by the wounding experiences of racism, and the cold grey tactics of politics’.¹⁷

      Mandela was still militantly anti-communist, and he and other Youth Leaguers heckled communist meetings intended to prepare for May Day, which were sometimes broken up. In Newclare, a Johannesburg suburb, Mandela physically dragged the Indian leader Yusuf Cachalia from the platform.¹⁸ ‘You couldn’t miss him, because he was so tall,’ recalled Rusty Bernstein, a communist architect who first encountered Mandela there. He remembered that Mandela ‘appeared to be heckler and disrupter-in-chief … He stood out from the gaggle of jeering, heckling Youth Leaguers, partly by sheer physical presence but mainly by the calm authority he seemed to exercise over them.’¹⁹

      Mandela could be a rough agitator. At one meeting the African communist J.B. Marks delivered a clear and logical speech describing how white supremacy could be overthrown, to frequent applause. Mandela, who had been instructed by his Youth League bosses to break up the meeting, arrogantly went up to Marks and insisted on addressing the crowd. ‘There are two bulls in this kraal,’ he declaimed. ‘There is a black bull and a white bull. J.B. Marks says that the white bull must rule this kraal. I say that the black bull must rule. What do you say?’ The same people who had been screaming for Marks a moment earlier now turned round and said, ‘The black bull, the black bull!’ Mandela enjoyed telling the story forty years later.²⁰

      The May Day protest was effective, despite the Youth League’s opposition, with at least half the black workers in Johannesburg staying at home. That evening Mandela experienced a moment of truth. He was walking home in Orlando with Sisulu, watching a peaceful march of protesters under the full moon, when they spotted some policemen five hundred yards away. The police began firing towards them. Mounted officers galloped into the crowd, hitting out with batons. Mandela and Sisulu hid in a nurses’ dormitory, where they could hear bullets hitting the walls. By the end of the night eighteen blacks had been killed in Orlando and three other townships on the Reef.²¹ Mandela was outraged. ‘That day was a turning point in my life,’ he recalled, ‘both in understanding through first-hand experience the ruthlessness of the police, and in being deeply impressed by the support African workers had given to the May Day call.’²²

      Mandela was now revealing a basic pragmatism which would make him a master of politics. He warned in African Lodestar that the Suppression of Communism Act was not in fact aimed at the Communist Party (‘an insignificant party with no substantial following’), but at the ANC.²³ At a meeting of the Congresses he advocated joint action, and was supported by Tambo. A joint committee soon proposed a ‘Day of Mourning’ with a stay-at-home strike on 26 June, in protest against both the shootings and the new Act.²⁴ Sisulu asked Mandela to organise the small, hectic ANC office in Johannesburg, where African, Indian and white leaders were coming and going. Mandela was now in the big time, a key figure in a major national protest, working alongside activists of other races.

      The Day of Mourning proved an anti-climax, and the response was very poor in the Transvaal. The Rand Daily Mail called the event ‘95 percent a flop’.²⁵ Mandela, looking back, reflected that: ‘A political strike is always riskier than an economic one.’²⁶ And some colleagues criticised the unnecessary loss of life. The black writer Bloke Modisane, then in the Youth League, vividly described the horrors of the police reprisals in Sophiatown: ‘The rifles and the sten guns were crackling death, spitting at anything which moved – anything black.’ Modisane condemned the protest as ‘another of those political adventurisms … If a man is asked to die he deserves the decency of an explanation.’²⁷

      The Suppression of Communism Act was pushed through Parliament with the support of the English-speaking United Party opposition. But the Communist Party of South Africa was never the formidable organisation that the government had portrayed. The Central Committee of the Party in Cape Town voted to dissolve, with only two dissenters.²⁸