‘The law was used in South Africa,’ Mandela would explain as President forty years later, ‘not as an instrument to afford the citizen protection, but rather as the chief means of his subjection. As a young law student, it was one of my ambitions to try to use my professional training to help tilt the balance just a wee bit in favour of the citizen.’22 He could occasionally be surprised by the fairness of judges, but at the same time he was aware of the limitations of the courts as the guardians of civil liberties. As he later wrote in jail: ‘In our country where there are racial laws, and where all the judges and magistrates are white and reeking of the stale odour of racial prejudice, the operation of such principles is very limited.’ He saw the government packing the courts with its own supporters, but he recognised that South Africa was still producing great judges, who might also be Afrikaner nationalists, but who could take a brave stand against the government. In jail he would recall with pleasure how the respected Judge Blackwell told the Chief of Security Police on the Rand: ‘This country is not a police state yet!’23
Mandela would remain divided between his respect for the rule of law and his determination to overthrow a racist regime. Increasingly he was finding himself on the receiving end of the legal machinery, marked down as a dangerous politician and compelled to operate from the shadows. For most of the ten years from 1952 until he was jailed he was banned from holding any elected office and forbidden to make public speeches. He had no formal position with the ANC. He had to rely on his personality and his image; but it was an image which was beginning to shine brightly.
Mandela had a brief period of freedom when his six-month ban from attending meetings or leaving Johannesburg expired in June 1953, and he revelled in a journey through the Orange Free State to appear as a lawyer in court in the small dorp of Villiers. The open landscape gave him a sense of liberty: he even felt some affinity with the Afrikaner Boer War hero General de Wet, who had fought the British across that countryside.24 But it was a false dawn: in Villiers he was served with a new ban, restricting him to Johannesburg again and requiring him to resign from all organisations, including the ANC, for two years. It was the beginning of his hunted life, as he recalled nine years later: ‘I found myself restricted and isolated from my fellow-men, from people who think like me and believe like me. I found myself trailed by officers of the security branch of the police force wherever I went. In short, I found myself treated as a criminal, an unconvicted criminal.’25
Mandela knew that the bans could soon debilitate the ANC by restricting the leaders’ contacts and activities, and encouraging ‘the crippling evils of factionalism and regionalism’.26 Anticipating the ANC being banned altogether, he worked out a plan by which the leaders could communicate secretly and quickly with each other and subordinates by means of an underground network of cells.27 This was called the ‘M-Plan’ – rather than the Mandela Plan, which would have revealed that he was illegally participating in the ANC. The plan’s main object was to inform, mobilise and recruit members, but it could also be used to build up labour unions without public meetings.28 As Mandela urged the Transvaal Congress in September 1953: ‘If you are not allowed to have your meetings publicly, then you must hold them over your machines in the factories, on the trams and buses as you travel home. You must have them in your villages and shanty towns. You must make every home, every shack and every mud structure where our people live, a branch of the trade union movement, and you must never surrender.’29
The M-Plan was implemented in the Eastern Cape, where the mood of defiance was strongest. This gratified Mandela, since it was largely organised by Africans, with little help from Indians or whites.30 But there were many problems in other regions. Strong local leaders resented central control, lacked paid organisers to run the plan, and often did not believe the ANC would actually be banned. In December 1955 the National Executive reported that they had ‘not yet succeeded in moving out of the domain of mass meetings and this type of agitation’.31 It was not until 1961, after the ANC had been banned, that a modified version of the plan was implemented.32
Mandela’s next open political challenge came in 1953, in the multi-racial township of Sophiatown, close to the white centre of Johannesburg. It was a ‘black spot’ which the government was determined to move out to the edge of Soweto. Sophiatown was an overcrowded slum district, with filthy backyards reeking of stale beer; but it was one of South Africa’s most cosmopolitan areas, with an overwhelming vitality and its own harsh beauty, commemorated by poets, photographers and the black painter Gerard Sekoto. More importantly politically, it was the only part of Johannesburg where blacks could own freehold property – which the government could not tolerate. When black residents were forced to leave their homes in return for wretched compensation, Mandela denounced the compulsory removals as ‘a calculated and cold-blooded swindle’.33 The ANC had some strong supporters in Sophiatown, led by two firebrands, Robert Resha and Peter Nthite, and including part-time tsotsis, or gangsters, and the National Executive felt impelled to resist the removals, while maintaining their policy of non-violence. It was a difficult challenge.
Soon after Mandela’s ban expired in June 1953, he presided over a meeting in the Odin Cinema in Sophiatown, alongside the Indian leader Yusuf Cachalia – whom the police arrested on the platform. Mandela succeeded in calming the audience with the help of ANC songs, but he was becoming impatient with non-violent methods. Addressing an angry crowd in ‘Freedom Square’ soon afterwards, he was carried away by his own oratory, and told them to prepare before long to use violence. Pointing to the police who surrounded them, he sang an ANC song which included the words ‘There are our enemies!’ He was given a stern reprimand by the ANC’s National Executive, which he accepted; but he felt in his heart that ‘non-violence was not the answer’.34
The Sophiatown protests nevertheless continued peacefully, with hundreds of speeches by local leaders carefully avoiding violent rhetoric: ‘The throwing of one small stone at the police,’ an ANC report concluded afterwards, ‘would have made Sophiatown a bloodbath.’35 They were supported by a prominent and imposing English monk, Father Trevor Huddleston, who presided over the church of Christ the King, which dominated Sophiatown, and the nearby mission school of St Peter’s at Rosettenville. Huddleston was already the friend and mentor of Oliver Tambo, and had been moved by the Defiance Campaign to identify himself closely with the ANC’s struggle. ‘It has been the teaching of the Church through the centuries,’ he had told a spellbound black audience at the Trades Hall in February 1953, ‘that when government degenerates into tyranny … laws cease to be binding on its subjects.’ Huddleston was not worried by working alongside communists. ‘I’m convinced that communism is not a serious danger in South Africa,’ he told me.36 He saw it as his Christian duty to protect his parish in Sophiatown, with all its humanity, which he loved.