The Africanists saw Mandela’s group being seduced by the charms of white communists like the Slovos in their comfortable suburbs, while they were men of the people who drank at the shebeens in the townships. Peter Raboroko, who had been at school with Tambo, described later how Mandela and his friends were ‘catapulted from the atmosphere of African society into this … To be on a first-name basis with white women, and this type of thing, it just became so very glittering for them.’ When Mandela denounced Raboroko as a ‘shebeen intellectual’, he took it as a compliment: ‘My political reputation is going to be in rags and tatters,’ he retorted, ‘when people learn I was seen walking with you.’ When Raboroko talked about the masses, Mandela said, ‘You mean the shebeens?’ ‘Oh yes,’ replied Raboroko. ‘By the way, I’m not as fortunate as you – you have your drinks in posh houses in Lower Houghton and Parktown. I have to be content to be drinking with the people in shebeens!’7 In fact Mandela spent most of his evenings working, and still avoided liquor. ‘Now and again I went to a shebeen out of curiosity,’ he said later, ‘but even now I don’t know what happens in a nightclub.’8
The Africanists were simmering with resentment against the ANC leadership in Mandela’s own neighbourhood of Orlando, and the tension came to a head at a special conference of the Transvaal ANC in Orlando in February 1958. Leballo led the attack against the provincial executive, which was weakened by the absence of banned leaders like Mandela and Sisulu. The meeting broke up in disorder, and the ANC National Executive had to use emergency powers to take over the Transvaal branch. Two months later the national ANC faced humiliation when it tried to mount a stay-at-home protest against the whites-only general election in April 1958. The move, opposed by the Africanists, was a fiasco: Duma Nokwe, the Assistant Secretary of the ANC, called it ‘bitterly disappointing, humiliating and exceedingly depressing’.9 The ANC leaders could not tolerate the Africanists’ open defiance, and at a secret meeting they expelled Leballo from the organisation.
The final break came in November 1958, when the Transvaal ANC summoned a crisis conference. It was opened by Luthuli, who again warned against reacting to the Afrikaners with ‘a dangerously narrow African nationalism’. The Africanists regarded Mandela and Tambo as among their prime enemies. Tambo, still Secretary of the ANC, tried to calm the rival factions as they wrangled over credentials and delegates, with Africanist thugs confronting loyalist thugs. To avoid defeat in a vote the Africanists retreated from the hall, sending a letter to the leadership proclaiming that they had broken away to become ‘the custodians of the ANC policy as it was formulated in 1912’.10
Could the split have been avoided? A potential mediator had been Ntatho Motlana, Mandela’s family doctor, an impish, fast-talking man who had worked with him in the Youth League and the Defiance Campaign. Motlana was a rare phenomenon in Orlando: an entrepreneur who believed in capitalism: ‘A sharp businessman,’ Mandela recalled. ‘Right from the beginning he was very shrewd.’11 Motlana was suspicious of white communists, and was friendly with the Africanist Robert Sobukwe, who was his patient and who held meetings in his surgery; but he was against a split, and thought breakaways were setting back liberation struggles all over Africa: ‘I told them not to run away from the whites – to stay in the ANC and fight them from there.’12
Motlana warned Mandela that the Youth Leaguers were complaining about communist influences, and threatening to leave the ANC, but Mandela reassured him: ‘Don’t worry, Ntatho. The ANC is going to rule the country.’13 Looking back later, Mandela felt the ANC had been too quick to reject the Africanists: ‘There were cases where I think we could have exercised more tolerance and patience … We expelled too many people.’ But he saw the split as probably inevitable in the wake of the Freedom Charter: ‘I don’t think we could have avoided it.’14
Mandela now parted ways with some of his oldest political friends, including his early mentor Gaur Radebe, now fiercely anti-communist. Peter Mda, his inspiration in the Youth League, remained an Africanist, and was convinced that Mandela was a secret Communist Party member, but still felt for him ‘a friendship of the heart if not of the head’.15 Mandela was less warm in remembering Mda: ‘I never had any meaningful contact with him whatsoever as a public figure,’ he wrote from jail. ‘I have formed the picture of a man who has stuffed his bones with a lot of marrow, a thinker with a tongue that can both bite and soothe.’ He saw Mda as being as different from himself as war from peace: ‘Mda was a young man concentrating on the former and I drawing attention respectfully to the latter.’16
In April 1959 the Africanists formed their own party, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), at a national conference in Orlando. The conference was held on the national holiday celebrating the first permanent white settlement in South Africa by Jan van Riebeck of the Dutch East India Company in 1652 – which gave the PAC a cue to protest against ‘the Act of Aggression against the Sons and Daughters of Afrika, by which the African people were dispossessed of their land, and subjected to white domination’.17 The PAC liked to compare themselves to African nationalists in other parts of the continent, who were now confidently moving towards independence, and the new ‘African Personality’ proclaimed by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana was certainly more in tune with the PAC’s rhetoric than with the multi-racialism of the ANC.
As their President the PAC delegates did not choose a fiery demagogue like Madzunya or Leballo, but the much more reflective Robert Sobukwe, a lecturer in African languages at Witwatersrand University. At thirty-five, Sobukwe was six years younger than Mandela, and like him tall, handsome and physically strong; but he was from a humbler origin, and combined his intellectual grasp with a peasant’s simplicity. Sobukwe was brought up in the Karoo, the half-desert region of the Cape, the son of a shop-worker. He was taken up by the Methodists and went to Healdtown school and Fort Hare, where he was much more academically successful than Mandela. He became a militant Youth Leaguer, fiercely attacking the missionaries and invoking the growing power of Africa: ‘Even as the dying so-called Roman civilisation received new life from the barbarians, so also will the decaying so-called Western civilisation find a new and purer life from Africa.’
In 1949 Sobukwe became Secretary of the Youth League, enthusiastically supporting the Programme of Action of Mandela and his friends. For a few years he was preoccupied with teaching and cultural interests (including translating Macbeth into Zulu), but just before the Congress of the People, shocked by what he saw as the growing influence of communists and non-Africans, he was drawn back into ANC politics.18 Whites, he believed, could never fully identify with the black cause because ‘a group in a privileged position never voluntarily relinquishes that position.’19 Like other Africanists he complained about the multi-racial activities of the ANC leaders, whom he accused of ‘dancing with white women in the Johannesburg interracial parties instead of getting down to the job of freeing Africa from white domination’.20
The emergence of the PAC, headed by an eloquent, intellectual anti-communist, was welcomed by conservatives in Europe and America as providing a promising alternative to the ANC. Mandela thought the US State Department ‘hailed its birth as a dagger in the heart of the African left’.21 British diplomats were unsure which was the greater danger to the West, communism or racialism; the British High Commission had praised Luthuli’s ‘staunch and comparatively moderate stance’ on racial tolerance.22 But the