Was the ban a blessing in disguise for the communists? ‘In the hour of dissolution,’ wrote the Party’s historians Jack and Ray Simons, ‘the class struggle had merged with the struggle for national liberation.’31 The Act, Brian Bunting claimed forty-five years later, ‘did more than anything to bring the ANC closer to the communists: it transformed it from a hole-in-corner body to a national organisation’.32 Certainly the communists had to rethink their attitudes to the ANC, which they had previously tended to regard as irrelevant and petit-bourgeois. The Youth League, said Rusty Bernstein, endowed the Party with ‘an understanding of race and nationalism which communists did not have in other countries … The unique gift the Party brought to the struggle was its multi-racialism and internationalism.’33
In 1950 Mandela, who still had his doubts about Indians and communists, had been elected President of the Youth League in succession to Peter Mda, who had resigned after suffering from heart trouble and gastric ulcers.34 He still maintained in discussions with Sisulu that Africans would resent co-operating with Indian shopkeepers and merchants, whom they saw as their exploiters. When the ANC’s Executive Committee met in June 1951 he argued again for Africans going it alone, against the majority of the committee.
But privately he was changing his views. In June 1951 he drove down to Natal in a battered Volkswagen with two other Youth Leaguers, Joe Matthews and Diliza Mji. On the way they argued against collaborating with banned communists. To their amazement Mandela tore into what he called their emotional, nationalist attitudes, and told them to look at the real achievements of the South African communists, many of whom had identified with blacks and had sacrificed everything for their cause. ‘I think that conversation altered the whole outlook within the Youth League towards the South African Communist Party,’ said Matthews much later.35
Mandela had been attracted to the communists more by their personal commitment and practical planning than their ideology. ‘When I met communists like Ismail Meer and J.N. Singh at university they never talked about ideas, but about political programmes,’ he told me later. ‘You relate to people as they relate to you. I was impressed that a man like Dadoo, a doctor from Edinburgh, was living simply, wearing a khaki shirt, big boots and an army overcoat.’36
But Mandela was also beginning to think more seriously about political theory. He did not see himself as an intellectual like Tambo, or even Sisulu, but he was reading voraciously, with a concentration which amazed his friends, marking passages, taking notes, making comparisons. For his BA degree he had majored in Politics and Native Administration, and he read many Western philosophers including Harold Laski, Bertrand Russell and Bernard Shaw, as well as South African liberals like Edgar Brookes and Julius Lewin and the publications of the Institute of Race Relations, in Johannesburg, which he found indispensable. He also looked for more practical accounts of liberation struggles, reading the works of black nationalists like Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and George Padmore of Jamaica; and after the Indian passive resistance campaign he had read Gandhi and Nehru.
Mandela found that Marxist writings gave him a wider perspective. He did not get far with Das Kapital or The Selected Works of Marx and Engels, but he was impressed by The Communist Manifesto and by the biographies of South African Marxists like Sidney Bunting and Bill Andrews. He was struck by the Soviet Union’s support for liberation movements throughout the world, and by the relentless logic of dialectical materialism, which he felt sweeping away the superstitions and inherited beliefs of his childhood, like ‘a powerful searchlight on a dark night, which enables the traveller to see all round, to detect danger spots and the way forward’. He experienced some pangs at abandoning the Christian beliefs that had fortified his childhood, such as the story of St Peter three times denying Christ. But, he was later to reflect in jail, the true saints in the fight against cruelty and war were not necessarily those who had mastered the scriptures, or who wore clerical robes.37
Mandela was certainly no saint himself, and he would never have a strong religious faith. But he was beginning to show himself a more far-sighted politician than most of his contemporaries. He had already learnt to restrain his cruder nationalist instincts, to be guided more by his head than his heart, and to widen his view of the struggle. He accepted that the ANC needed allies, and the Indians and communists were the only allies available. He now seized the opportunity to join them in the first major passive resistance campaign in the ANC’s history.
6
Defiance
1952
IN DECEMBER 1951 the ANC held its thirty-fifth annual congress in the black township outside the hot, sleepy Afrikaner stronghold of
Bloemfontein. The event would prove to be a historic turning point, but it was hardly noticed by the whites or the world at the time.
The conference began two hours late, with three hundred delegates trooping into the baking-hot hall. A press table was improvised for the five journalists present, who included Ruth First from the left-wing New Age, two local reporters from the Bloemfontein Friend, and Henry Nxumalo and myself from Drum magazine. Many of the delegates resisted having their photographs taken. On the platform was the courteous, conservative ANC President Dr Moroka, and close by him was a small, ascetic figure with a wizened face. This was Manilal Gandhi, the son of the Mahatma, who lived in his father’s old settlement in Natal and saw himself as the keeper of the pure spirit of passive resistance. Both Moroka and Gandhi seemed a world away from the firebrands of the Youth League, including the proud thirty-three-year-old Nelson Mandela.
The three-day meeting seemed long-winded and inconsequential. Then, on the last day, the General Secretary Walter Sisulu produced his report on a joint programme of passive resistance, or ‘civil disobedience’, aimed at deliberately defying the Nationalist government’s racial laws and inviting imprisonment. The plan was partly based on the Indian campaign in Durban in 1946. The ANC would ask the government to repeal ‘six unjust laws’: those imposing passes and limiting stock, the Group Areas Act, the Voters’ Representation Act, the Suppression of Communism Act and the Bantu Authorities Act. If it refused, they would embark on their ‘Defiance Campaign’.1 Dr Moroka supported the plan with a surprisingly eloquent speech, multiplied by interpreters, affirming that the ANC was prepared to work with Europeans, Indians and Coloureds, provided they were on equal terms.2
Mandela had now finally committed himself to co-operation with decisive pragmatism. At the conference he had begun by insisting again that the ANC should go it alone, without the Indians, but he soon sensed that the majority was in favour of co-operation, and in his speech as President of the Youth League he turned right round with apparent conviction, as if he had never believed otherwise.3 He called for a non-European front against fascism, which, he explained, was being smuggled into South Africa behind a screen of fear of communism. Africans must be the spearhead of the organised struggle, but with