The ANC continued to agitate against the destruction of Sophiatown with slogans like ‘We Won’t Move’ and ‘Over Our Dead Bodies’. Mandela soon realised that this was a serious mistake. ‘A slogan is like a bullet,’ he wrote later in jail: its effectiveness ‘depends on matching the bore of the gun’.39 But these bullets could not penetrate. The world’s press had converged on the slum township with high expectations of a bloodbath, even a revolution. ‘It was coming for sure, so we all believed,’ wrote Don Mattera, a gang-leader and poet who lived in Sophiatown.40 Mandela and Tambo came to the township every day to co-ordinate the leadership and to represent the dispossessed owners. But Mandela could offer no peaceful means to prevent the removals. ‘At no time during the course of this campaign did we think we could beat the government,’ he wrote later.41
The mood was still expectant when I visited Sophiatown on 9 February 1954, the day on which the removals were to take place. At dawn the township was echoing with the sound of the tsotsis hitting the telegraph poles – the battle-cry of Sophiatown. But the government had imposed a total ban on meetings, and 2,000 police were patrolling the streets in cars and heavy trucks; the trucks soon began loading up furniture and those tenants who were glad to leave. The ANC leaders looked on disconsolately; the crowds just stared. By the evening the police were looking bored and confident.42
Mandela had learnt a grim lesson – not to raise premature hopes of revolt: ‘Sophiatown died not to the sound of gunfire but to the sound of rumbling trucks and sledgehammers.’ He was convinced that in the future ‘we had no alternative to armed and violent resistance’, and he sometimes seemed to be impatient for a confrontation in which he could prove himself.43 He was restrained by Sisulu, who was more exposed to the militant youth: ‘They were coming to our meetings with only one idea,’ he recalled: ‘For me to utter revolution.’
Sisulu did not utter it, and he was further advised against violence from an unexpected quarter. In 1953 he was invited with the young ANC activist Duma Nokwe to a communist youth festival in Bucharest, Romania, on the initiative of Ahmed Kathrada. They bribed their way onto an Israeli El Al plane, and made their first contacts with European communists. Mandela had persuaded Sisulu that he ought to secretly visit China, in order to discuss whether it might supply the ANC with arms. Sisulu’s Chinese hosts surprised him by warning against an armed struggle: ‘Look, this is a dangerous route,’ they told him. ‘Don’t come to this solution till you are ready for it. Once you are beaten you have no chance.’44 Sisulu returned convinced by the advice, which Mandela accepted; but his unauthorised visit to China shocked conservative ANC leaders like Luthuli and Matthews, who demanded an apology. Mandela was still convinced that ‘an armed struggle would be absolutely necessary’, but he was to realise later that he had been precipitate, thinking like ‘a hotheaded revolutionary.’45
Mandela was still something of a maverick, a loose cannon within the ANC, and his speeches had inflammatory touches which were to bring trouble from the government. In 1953 he wrote his first major speech as President of the Transvaal ANC. It was read out for him at the annual conference in September, since he was banned from attending. The speech proclaimed: ‘Today the people speak the language of action; there is a mighty awakening among the men and women of our country.’ He looked back on the glories of the Defiance Campaign, when ‘the entire country was transformed into battle zones where the forces of liberation were locked up in immortal conflict against those of reaction and evil … our flag flew in every battlefield.’ (He later had to explain to judges that he was writing metaphorically.)46
The speech went on to link the South African struggle to others in Africa, where anti-imperialists were gathering momentum: ‘The entire continent is seething with discontent and already there are powerful revolutionary eruptions in the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Tunisia, Kenya, the Rhodesias and South Africa.’ He described how ‘the massacre of the Kenyan people by Britain has aroused worldwide protest. Children are being burnt alive, women are raped, tortured, whipped and boiling water poured on their breasts to force confessions from them.’ He ended with a quotation lifted from Nehru, which gave the speech its title, ‘No Easy Walk to Freedom’: ‘You can see that there is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintops of our desires.’47
Mandela was more influenced by Nehru than he liked to admit: ‘I used a lot of the writings of Nehru without acknowledging it, which was a silly thing to do,’ he said forty-four years later. ‘But when there is a paucity of views in you, you are inclined to do that.’48 He was also becoming more attached to the rhetoric of Marxist anti-colonialism. A few months later, when his ban was again briefly lifted, he addressed the left-wing Peace Council with a blood-curdling attack on imperialist greed. ‘In their mad lust for markets and profits these imperial powers will not hesitate to cut one another’s throats, to break the peace, to drench millions of innocent people in blood and to bring misery and untold suffering to humanity.’ He did not share, he explained, the bourgeois belief in continuous development: he foresaw a break in continuity, a ‘leap from one stage to another’.
On 13 December 1953 Mandela spoke for an hour and a half at a big meeting in Soweto. His speech was recorded (luckily inaccurately) by a policeman, Detective-Sergeant Helberg, and was later used as evidence of treason. Mandela warned the huge crowd: ‘We have to employ new methods in our struggle. It is no longer sufficient to speak from platforms. More work must be done behind the scenes, even underground.’ He went on to tell them: ‘You will not shed blood in vain. We will erect a monument for you next to Shaka.’49
His speeches were undoubtedly becoming more warlike, and Mandela the revolutionary was now openly competing with Mandela the lawyer.
But behind his showmanship, in the courts and on the platforms, there were still doubts about his seriousness as a leader. Like other combative politicians out of office, such as Theodore Roosevelt in the 1890s and Winston Churchill in the 1930s, he often seemed to be spoiling for a fight, without a real organisation or plan behind him.
8
The Meaning of Freedom
1953–1956
DESPITE MANDELA’S political evolution, he still retained his basic African nationalism: his pride in his people and their history, and his determination to regain their rights. But he sought allies wherever he could find them: from among white liberals, Indian Gandhi-ists and Christian priests. And his most effective and committed friends were the communists, who in 1953 had reformed themselves as the South African Communist Party – a name which stressed their home-grown, patriotic basis. Uniquely multi-racial, the SACP remained very different from other white parties, and from Communist Parties elsewhere, and it included some very unrevolutionary members. But because of Pretoria’s special definition of ‘statutory communism’, devised