Mandela: The Authorised Biography. Anthony Sampson

who poured scorn on Mandela’s ‘rosy clichés born of the October Revolution’ – an attack which, as the Liberal Party’s historian Randolph Vigne lamented, ‘served only to draw the battle lines between the Liberals and the new Congressites, black and white’. The Liberals at first welcomed the chance to co-sponsor the Congress of the People; but they soon became convinced that they were being lured into a ‘popular front’ whose decisions were taken in advance by communist elements. They believed, moreover, that the Congress would be ‘a very minor affair’, and decided to withdraw before it was held – to the later regret of many of their members: the historian David Everatt concluded that the decision was ‘one of the most damaging the party ever took’.¹⁸

      Preparations continued without the Liberals, but with much input from the white communists in the Congress of Democrats. Groups across the country held hundreds of meetings, submitting their own drafts and proposals which would be incorporated in a grand Freedom Charter to be put forward at the Congress. The response was certainly vigorous, welcoming very different concepts of freedom – including the freedom to have ten wives. As Joe Slovo later described it: ‘Tens of thousands of scraps of paper came flooding in: a mixture of smooth writing-pad paper, torn pages from ink-blotched school exercise books, bits of cardboard, asymmetrical portions of brown and white paper bags, and even the unprinted margins of bits of newspaper.’¹⁹

      Some suspected that this democratic outpouring was not quite as spontaneous as it looked. Sydney Kentridge, who was later to be Mandela’s counsel, noticed that many of the demands were in the same handwriting, and suspected that a classic communist technique was secretly at work: to detach the masses from their previous leaders.²⁰ But the eventual Freedom Charter was very far from being a communist manifesto. Long after, Mandela remained convinced that ‘it was a document born of the people. It was not something that was imposed from the top. And that is why it is still relevant even today.’²¹ He was impressed by ‘how far ahead of the politicians the masses were, in several respects’. The people realised that political power was essential, but also that it would be meaningless without economic power. He was struck too by their lack of extreme nationalism, and their acceptance of the principle that South Africa belonged to all its people.²²

      Behind the scenes, Mandela worked very closely with Walter Sisulu, who was now being pursued by the police. Z.K. Matthews told the Cape ANC in June that Sisulu was operating behind the ‘iron curtain’ of the Transkei as a Scarlet Pimpernel (before Mandela inherited the title): ‘They sought him here, they sought him there, they sought him everywhere.’²³ The police soon caught up with him in his house in Orlando in July 1954. I happened to be with him. He was talking with his usual analytical detachment about bannings and detentions, when two Afrikaner detectives walked in. They were surprisingly friendly: ‘Ah, we’ve found you at last: two letters from the Minister of Justice for you!’ ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ Sisulu answered. ‘Only two? It won’t make any difference, you know. The struggle will go on!’ The detective smiled: ‘Cheerio then – Afrika!’²⁴

      The next day Sisulu was arrested, and was later sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for having attended a gathering of five people. But he remained the moving force behind the African National Congress. In August 1954 he recalled how five years earlier he had promised that, as Secretary of the ANC, ‘I shall be entirely at your disposal.’ He described how crippling bans had already removed most members of the National Executive, including Mandela, but insisted that the movement was growing in strength: ‘The government has already been shaken, the time has passed when they could rule the country as if we, the people, did not exist.’²⁵ In fact Sisulu was still regarded by his colleagues as Secretary of the ANC, with Mandela as his close partner.

      The first draft of the Freedom Charter was created by the communist architect Rusty Bernstein, who rather casually added a rhetorical beginning and ending – which he later thought overblown.²⁶ In early June it was passed on to a small planning group, including Mandela, who made a few changes. The Charter’s meaning was to become a battleground for the next thirty-five years while it remained pickled in history, its authors jailed or exiled. It was frequently condemned as a Marxist document, with its bold promise: ‘The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.’ But in fact it was carefully designed to be all things to all men: Mandela saw it as having been welded from the demands of the masses, arising out of their daily lives.²⁷ It proclaimed principles rather than policies, in a declamatory style like a political psalm. Michael Harmel, the Marxist historian of the SACP, claimed with some reason that it ‘stems from the tradition of the proclamation of rights of the French and American revolutions and echoed in the UN Declaration of Human Rights’.²⁸

      The Freedom Charter opened with the words:

      We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know:

      That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.²⁹

      The Congress of the People was fixed for 26 June 1955 (now established as the annual ‘Freedom Day’). It was held on a private sports field in Kliptown, near Soweto. Three thousand delegates converged from all over the country on the cheerful scene, which looked more like a Derby Day than a militant demonstration. They included wizened black countrymen and office-workers with bright American ties, smooth Indian lawyers with their wives in saris, and swaying black grandmothers in wide skirts in the ANC colours.³⁰ There was a clear communist influence, with stalls distributing left-wing pamphlets and a fraternal message from Chou En-lai in Beijing. But the meeting itself had the leisurely, casual character of traditional Congress meetings, with Christian elements including Father Huddleston, who was given a special ANC honour.

      Mandela, like most of the organisers, was banned from the meeting and could only watch it from afar. He had driven to Kliptown with Sisulu, and moved round the edge of the crowd in a thin disguise, standing for a time next to a bearded man from the Transkei, marvelling at the people’s dedication.³¹ It seemed surprising that the Kliptown meeting was not itself banned; the reason for this soon became clear.

      Mandela watched the Congress follow its slow course. On the first day the Freedom Charter was recited in three languages, and was approved with shouts of ‘Afrika!’ from the crowd. On the second day each section of the Charter was acclaimed in turn, until they reached the words ‘there shall be peace and friendship’. At that point the meeting was suddenly disrupted by detectives and policemen armed with sten guns bursting into the crowd. An Afrikaner officer took the microphone and announced that they were investigating high treason, and were searching for subversive documents. The police took down the name of every spectator before they were allowed to leave, trooping away peacefully while a band with a dented tuba and broken drums played African songs. Mandela was tempted to join them, but thought better of it, and drove back to Johannesburg for an emergency meeting of the ANC leadership. It was gratifying that the police had recognised the importance of the Congress, but Mandela knew that the raid ‘signalled a harsh new turn’.³²

      The Freedom Charter soon acquired an independent momentum. It had not been completely endorsed at the Congress of the People, so its status was uncertain: as Rusty Bernstein saw it, the Charter had ‘drifted out of the Congresses’