Outside the home, Mandela was being pulled in different directions, with contradictory careers. On the one hand he was practising as a lawyer, involved every day with all the ordered legal machinery of the state. On the other he was caught up in revolutionary politics, and was beginning to see violence as the inevitable outcome of the confrontation. His respect for the law proved the key to his survival, but it was severely tested. ‘Little did he think,’ said Mandela’s white barrister friend George Bizos, ‘that he would spend more time in the courts accused of capital and other crimes than representing others.’7
Mandela’s legal career had progressed while he was carrying out all his political activities. After leaving Witkin, Sidelsky & Eidelman, he had worked for three white partnerships: first for Terblanche & Briggish, then for Helman & Michel, and then for H.M. Basner, a left-wing former Senator under whom he finally became a fully qualified attorney. In 1952 he established the first African law firm in the country together with Oliver Tambo, the Youth League colleague whom he had known since they were fellow students at Fort Hare.
It was to prove a historic partnership, more surprising than Mandela’s political relationship with Sisulu. Tambo was also from the rural Transkei, and had tribal markings on his cheeks. Like Mandela he had had a polygamous father, and had been expelled from Fort Hare. In other ways he was Mandela’s opposite: he was quiet, academic and religious, from a peasant family who did not expect others to do things for them. But Tambo had a clarity of mind which impressed both his teachers and his fellow students. He came to Johannesburg to teach mathematics at St Peter’s School, where he politicised many boys, until Walter Sisulu persuaded him to become a lawyer. Mandela respected Tambo’s maturity and reflective mind, and always listened to his advice.
The firm of Mandela & Tambo opened in August 1952 in a picturesque old building called Chancellor House, opposite the magistrates’ courts in downtown Johannesburg and only a few blocks from the grand fortress of the Anglo-American Corporation, the centre of South African capitalism. ‘MANDELA AND TAMBO’ was painted in big letters on the windows – which offended conservative white lawyers. The offices were in the same building as the ANC headquarters run by Sisulu, and it was part of a dissidents’ enclave of Indian-owned buildings, including Kapitan’s restaurant and Kholvad House, the radical Indian meeting-place. The black occupants of Chancellor House were soon under threat from the Group Areas Act, which designated South Africa’s city centres for whites only; but Mandela & Tambo stayed there illegally until 1961 – by which time they were under constant surveillance.8
The firm became the official attorneys for the ANC, and were much in demand from other black clients with a host of claims and complaints. ‘We depended on Mandela & Tambo,’ recalled Joe Mogotsi, who sang with the Manhattan Brothers, ‘if we were arrested after giving a concert in town, without our passes.’9 They had many rural clients. ‘To reach our desks each morning,’ Tambo recalled, ‘Nelson and I ran the gauntlet of patient queues of people overflowing from the chairs in the waiting room into the corridors … Weekly we interviewed the delegations of grizzled, weather-worn peasants from the countryside who came to tell us how many generations their families had worked a little piece of land from which they were now being ejected … Every case in court, every visit to the prisons to interview clients, reminded us of the humiliation and suffering burning into our people.’10
They were soon assisted by Mendi Msimang, a young Zulu activist who had been helping Sisulu, and by Godfrey Pitje, a Youth Leaguer who had been best man at Tambo’s wedding.11 As a humble country boy, Pitje felt himself a commoner beside Mandela: ‘It wasn’t difficult to defer,’ he said later. ‘It was the natural thing, to the son of a chief.’12 Mandela liked to show himself to be in command, but he could also listen to his staff. When he dictated letters to his efficient secretary Ruth Mompati – who became a close friend, and later Ambassador to Switzerland – she would sometimes suggest a correction which he would first ignore, but accept soon afterwards.13
The two partners’ talents were complementary. Mandela spent much of his time in court, arguing in flamboyant style, or writing political speeches long into the evening. The quietly reflective Tambo stayed in the office doing much of the paperwork, sucking at a small unlit pipe. In the courtroom Tambo behaved calmly and unobtrusively, relying on his knowledge of the law. But Mandela cultivated an assertive, theatrical style with sweeping gestures. He made his presence felt as soon as he entered the court, which made magistrates and prosecutors complain that he was uppity.14 Godfrey Pitje was amazed: ‘All he needed was to turn around and look up and there was almost a flare-up round him.’ But Pitje was thrilled to hear Mandela treating racist magistrates with contempt, and to see him defying apartheid restrictions. Once when Mandela walked boldly through the ‘whites only’ entrance to a courtroom he was told by a young white clerk with a dark complexion: ‘This is for whites.’ Mandela replied: ‘Then what are you doing here?’15
Mandela often defended clients in the rural Transvaal, where crowds would gather to see this legendary black lawyer, without necessarily understanding the law. When he achieved the acquittal of one client who had been charged with witchcraft, some spectators, he suspected, ascribed the outcome to the power of magic, rather than to the law.16 He often briefed liberal white barristers like George Bizos to plead important cases; they would bewilder the local Judicial Officer by calling black witnesses ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’, rather than ‘Jim’ or ‘Martha’.
Mandela and Tambo often found themselves fighting a losing battle against the new ‘tribal authorities’, who were gradually extending the powers of government and imposing prosecutions and fines. But as the rural blacks became more politicised and met more workers in the cities, they were becoming more aware of their legal rights. The government banned meetings of more than ten people, and when the police dispersed or arrested the spectators, they would shout to their relatives: ‘Phone Mandela & Tambo!’17
Mandela became suspect among many white lawyers after receiving his suspended sentence for helping to organise the Defiance Campaign, and in 1954 the Law Society demanded his removal from the roll of attorneys. In a historic case he was defended by two respected white lawyers, Walter Pollak QC and Blen Franklin, who argued that Mandela had a right to fight for his political beliefs under the rule of law. The presiding Judge Ramsbottom upheld their argument and ordered the Law Society to pay costs. Mandela was heartened by the number of barristers, including Afrikaner nationalists, who came to his support: ‘Even in racist South Africa professional solidarity can sometimes transcend colour.’18 Forty years later, when he addressed the Law Society, he reminded them: ‘Here I am with my name still on the roll.’19 But his professional scope was soon restricted by the bans placed on him as a political activist. When he applied for permission to appear in a case in Pretoria in 1955, the Police Commissioner informed the Minister of Justice: ‘Mandela cannot be trusted, and visits by him to Pretoria and Vereeniging must be treated with suspicion.’20
As Mandela became more prominent politically, he attracted still more resentment. In November 1955 he was defending a black client before a testy Afrikaner magistrate named Willem Dormehl, who immediately asked Mandela to produce his attorney’s certificate; he could not, and Dormehl adjourned the case. When Mandela later brought the certificate