The Indian influence was evident in the idea of passive resistance, but there was much argument about its nature. Manilal Gandhi protested that Congress leaders did not have ‘the spirit of true sacrifice’, and insisted that passive resistance was more a process of moral purification than a political weapon.5 His worry was shared by older South African Indians who had been influenced by the Mahatma. The saintly veteran Nana Sita, who had helped to instigate the Durban campaign in 1946, had met Gandhi as a child in Pretoria. Yusuf Cachalia and his brother Maulvi had been attracted to Gandhi’s methods while living in India. But most communist leaders were critical of the Mahatma’s lack of concern for the African cause while he was in South Africa. Gandhi had shown little evidence, wrote Joe Slovo, of having ‘absorbed the ancient lesson that freedom is indivisible’.6 The communists saw passive resistance purely as a means of mobilising the masses rather than as a ‘soul-force’.7 And some Youth Leaguers regarded the campaign as altogether too non-violent: ‘The Defiance Campaign was anti-revolutionary,’ Peter Mda said later, ‘in the sense that it was “passive” resistance: you couldn’t hit back.’8
Mandela was more pragmatic. He certainly lacked Gandhi’s asceticism: ‘Some Indians said he was like Gandhi,’ said his friend Fatima Meer. ‘I told them, “Gandhi took off his clothes. Nelson loves his clothes.”’9 Mandela admired Gandhi as ‘one of the pioneers of South Africa’s liberation movement’, and had been deeply shocked when he was assassinated in February 1948; but he did not share his purist view of the struggle: ‘I saw non-violence on the Gandhian model not as an inviolable principle,’ he said later, ‘but as a tactic to be used as the situation demanded.’10
His expectations for the Defiance Campaign were certainly high: he believed it would be so effective that it would lead to the ANC being ‘in a position of either getting the government to capitulate or to get them thrown out by the voters’.11 But he also, like the communists, saw the action as a means of educating the masses, and the beginning of a much harsher confrontation. He did not harbour any illusions, Joe Slovo reckoned, about ‘converting the ruling class without a tough revolutionary struggle’.12
The plans went rapidly ahead in January 1952, in a spurt of activity very different from the ANC’s usual leisurely style. Mandela joined a committee of four, with Z.K. Matthews, Ismail Meer and J.N. Singh, which drafted a letter to the Prime Minister, Dr Malan, demanding the repeal of the six unjust laws.13 Mandela drove down to the Orange Free State with the document for Dr Moroka to sign. When the Prime Minister’s Secretary received the letter he replied that the differences between the races were ‘permanent, not man-made’, and that the new laws were not oppressive and degrading, but protective.14 Moroka and Sisulu reiterated their demands, while promising ‘to conduct the campaign in a peaceful manner’.15
Mandela was soon looking more like a future leader of his people. On 31 May 1952 the ANC executive met in Port Elizabeth and announced that the campaign would begin on 26 June. A banquet was held to say goodbye to Professor Matthews, who was leaving to spend a year in America, and Matthews’s son Joe recalls Mandela saying that he (Mandela) would be the first black President of South Africa.16 He was clearly putting himself in the forefront of the ANC’s organisation, offering to take the key position of Volunteer-in-Chief for the campaign, responsible for national recruitment, which would give him high visibility, in a quasi-military role, across the country.
On the ‘Day of the Volunteers’, four days before the campaign began, Mandela drove down to Durban to be the main speaker to a crowd of 10,000, by far the biggest audience he had ever addressed. It was not a populist speech – he would never develop the emotional rhetoric of some of his contemporaries like Robert Sobukwe or Gaur Radebe – but he found it an exhilarating experience, and received prolonged applause. He told his listeners they were making history; this would be the most powerful action ever undertaken by the oppressed masses, and with the races working together: ‘We can now say unity between the non-European people in this country has become a living reality.’17
On 26 June, when the Defiance Campaign was launched, Mandela set out for Boksburg, a mining town near Johannesburg, with Yusuf Cachalia and Walter Sisulu, after being delayed by a long conversation with the local white magistrate, whom he knew. The man spoke to him courteously, which Mandela suspected was ‘not unrelated to the fact that we were acting from a position of strength’.18 In Boksburg fifty-two volunteers gathered outside the big gates of the African township, then walked in without the permits required for entry, led by Nana Sita in his white Gandhi cap and surrounded by hundreds of supporters. They wore the ANC colours on their arms – black for the people, green for the land, yellow for the country’s gold – and held up their thumbs in the Congress salute, singing the hopeful song ‘Open the door, Malan, we are knocking’. Mandela looked on calmly, aloof but highly visible, with a military dignity. His manner seemed to symbolise his relationship to the struggle: the proud loner who was at the same time totally committed. The police, who had been waiting, arrested the volunteers, bundled them into a troop carrier and drove them to the cells.
Mandela would soon have his own first taste of jail. On the same evening the ANC held a meeting at the Garment Workers’ Hall in Johannesburg. An 11 p.m. curfew was in force, and when a procession of Africans marched out into the street the police were waiting for them, standing shoulder to shoulder, peering beneath their helmets at the meek-looking blacks and ready to pack them into police trucks. Mandela and Yusuf Cachalia were there as observers, but the police insisted on arresting them, too. So Mandela spent two nights in the jail at Marshall Square, squashed in with his fellow-protesters. He was appalled by the conditions, and would never forget how one of the prisoners was pushed down the steps, broke his ankle, and spent the night writhing in pain.19 He also soon realised that two of his fellow-prisoners were informers planted by the police.
The first day set the pattern for the Defiance Campaign. Over the next five months 8,000 people all over the country went to jail for one to three weeks for marching into townships, whites-only railway entrances or carriages, or for being out after curfew, always peacefully. The national organisation was Mandela’s achievement: before and during the campaign he travelled through the Transvaal, Natal and the Cape, recruiting and explaining, sometimes from house to house, with little publicity from the white-owned newspapers and radio. He learnt at first hand about the problems of reconciling hot-headed local activists to centralised discipline: ‘It is no use to take an action to which the masses are opposed,’ he realised, ‘for it will then be impossible to enforce.’20 Significantly, the campaign’s most striking success was not in the Johannesburg area, where the communists had been strongest, but in the Eastern Cape, which provided half the volunteers: the conditions in factories in Port Elizabeth had generated a surge of discontent.21
Mandela seemed full of optimism, as he showed in an article for the August 1952 issue of Drum magazine:
Though it takes us years, we are prepared to continue the Campaign until the six unjust laws we have chosen for the present phase are done away with. Even then we shall not stop. The struggle for the freedom and national independence of the non-European people shall continue as the National Planning Council sees fit.22