The Defiance Campaign gave the government an excuse to impose much fiercer laws; and it had fewer inhibitions than the British did when faced by Gandhi’s passive resistance in India. Mandela and his colleagues were taken by surprise. One young black politician, Naboth Mokgatle, warned a meeting of Youth Leaguers, including Mandela, that ‘Their actions were like throwing things into a machine, then allowing the owner to dismantle it, clean it, sharpen it and put it together again before throwing in another thing. My advice was in vain.’26
In July the police had raided the homes and offices of African and Indian leaders, collecting piles of documents. They were still relatively amateurish, and even quite friendly: when they searched the offices of the Transvaal Indian Congress, Amina Cachalia, the wife of Yusuf, brought them tea and sandwiches and led them to unimportant documents while Ahmed Kathrada was removing crucial evidence from other shelves.27 Mandela would reminisce with some warmth about the police chatting with him in Xhosa over tea. But the raids were the prelude to more serious moves. On 30 July Mandela was handed a warrant for his arrest on a charge of violating the Suppression of Communism Act, and another twenty Defiance Campaign leaders were arrested throughout the country.28
The twenty-one leaders were freed on bail, and went on trial in September in a Johannesburg magistrates’ court, before Judge Frans Rumpff. A loud multi-racial crowd converged on the courtroom. But the defendants’ solidarity was spectacularly undermined by Dr Moroka, who had taken fright at the charges levelled against him and hired a separate attorney to plead his innocence. Mandela had attempted to dissuade him the day before the trial began, but Moroka complained about not having been consulted and about the association with communists – though he had not objected to this in the past. When he came before Judge Rumpff he stated that he did not believe in equality between black and white. He then began pointing out the communists among the other defendants – including Sisulu and Dadoo – until the judge stopped him.29
To Mandela, Moroka’s defection was a ‘severe blow’, and was hard to forgive: ‘He had committed the cardinal sin of putting his own interests ahead of those of the organisation and the people.’ But he was also aware of Moroka’s past courage, and that as a rich man he had much more to lose than poorer campaigners, and had many Afrikaner friends. Mandela forgave him later, as he was to forgive so many who betrayed him; he wrote warmly about Moroka in the autobiography written in jail, and later asked him to be godfather of his daughter Zeni’s first child.30 But others were less forgiving.
Judge Rumpff impressed Mandela with his fair-mindedness. Predictably, he found the leaders guilty, but the sentence – nine months’ imprisonment with hard labour, suspended for two years – was relatively lenient. And he stressed that they were guilty of ‘statutory communism’, which, he admitted, had ‘nothing to do with communism as it is commonly known’.31
The government’s definition of communism was palpably perverse, but it helped gain support from anti-communists elsewhere, particularly in America, where the Cold War was hotting up. In 1952 Mandela had a glimpse of the ardour of the Cold Warriors when he encountered the black American political figure Dr Max Yergan, who visited South Africa in the midst of the Defiance Campaign. Yergan had earlier spent many years in the Eastern Cape, converting a number of young blacks, including Govan Mbeki, to communism.32 But after returning to America he had become fiercely anti-communist, as he now revealed. In Johannesburg he addressed a meeting at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, attended by black politicians and luminaries including Mandela. Yergan concluded, Mandela later recalled, with ‘a concentrated attack on communism, and drew prolonged ovation from that elitist audience’. But then Barney Ngakane, Mandela’s friend and neighbour in Orlando, counter-attacked, pointing out Yergan’s deafening silence about the Defiance Campaign and about the pernicious influence of American business interests. As Mandela described it: ‘He challenged the guest speaker to speak about the giant American cartels, trusts and multi-national corporations that were causing so much misery and hardship throughout the world, and he foiled Yergan’s attempt to drag us into the Cold War.’33
By the time of Mandela and the other leaders’ arrests at the end of July, the government was determined to stamp out the Defiance Campaign, which had reached a stage, Mandela thought, ‘where it had to be suppressed by the government or it would impose its own policies on the country’.34 The government’s chief weapon was to ban the campaign’s leaders from holding positions in the ANC or from attending meetings. In May the communist J.B. Marks had been banned as President of the Transvaal ANC, and had recommended Mandela as his successor. Mandela was opposed by a nationalist demagogue named Seperepere Marupeng, a leader of a militant group called Bafabegiya (‘those who die dancing’). Mandela, with his reputation as a ladies’ man, was taken aback when one of the militants, a beautiful young woman, asked: ‘How can I criticise Mandela when he has left his hat in my house?’35 But in October he was overwhelmingly elected to the key position. His triumph was short-lived: in December, along with fifty-one other ANC leaders, he was banned for six months from attending any meeting or from talking to more than one person at a time, and was forbidden to leave Johannesburg without permission. His public position in the ANC hierarchy was now illegal; but his status was reinforced as an individual leader and man of action.
The Defiance Campaign was now petering out. In October it faced another setback when an outbreak of riots in Port Elizabeth and East London (and later in Kimberley) led to the deaths of several innocent people, including a nun. The ANC hastened to offer sympathy to the families, both black and white, who had suffered from ‘this unfortunate, reckless, ill-considered return to jungle law’, and charged the government with deliberately sending out agents provocateurs (which could never be proved). But the riots damaged the protesters’ non-violent image, and gave the government new justification for bannings.36
By December the Public Safety Act and the Criminal Laws Amendment Act provided fiercer penalties against deliberate law-breaking, punishable by up to three years in jail and flogging. Again the ANC was taken by surprise. ‘We had never visualised such drastic penalties,’ Mandela admitted later.37 ‘The tide of defiance was bound to recede,’ as he reported the next year, ‘and we were forced to pause and take stock of the new situation.’38