After the formation of the PAC in April 1959 the ANC was forced to take a more militant stance. It placed much hope in economic boycotts, which it saw as a major political weapon, with unlimited possibilities.38 To boycott products from pro-apartheid companies or shops seemed the answer to the bans on other protests: ‘Don’t say anything, just don’t buy.’39 Luthuli wanted to put pressure on vulnerable companies, to ‘hit them in the stomach’, as Mandela put it.40 In May 1959, encouraged by a partial boycott of Rembrandt cigarettes, which was controlled by the Afrikaner nationalist tobacco-king Anton Rupert, the ANC announced a boycott of potatoes in protest against the inhuman treatment of farm workers. At first this had some success, and Mandela saw it as the start of a new mood of resistance.41
Mandela was warning about the ruthlessness of the new government of Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, who had become Prime Minister in September 1958, following Strijdom’s death. But he was confident that Verwoerd’s regime, with its ‘grim programme of mass evictions, political persecution and police terror’, would not last long: ‘It is the last desperate gamble of a hated and doomed fascist autocracy – which, fortunately, is soon due to make its exit from the stage of history.’42
The ANC was under growing pressure to take mass action to defy the pass laws by making a bonfire of the hated pass-books, which were seen as the main instrument of black oppression. In theory this could have made the whole system unworkable, but the ANC was very conscious of the failure of past campaigns. At the annual conference in December 1958 the National Executive reported that resistance to passes was mounting, but they were still cautious: ‘To hope that by striking one blow we would defeat the system would result in disillusionment. On the other hand we cannot sit until everybody is ready to enter the battlefield … the struggle for the repeal of pass laws has begun; there is no going back but “forward ever”.’43
Duma Nokwe, the new ANC Secretary-General, was a compact, lively graduate of Wits who had become the first black barrister in South Africa. He was a protégé of Tambo, who had taught him at St Peter’s school, and a boxer, with a pugilist’s aggression which Tambo often had to restrain.44 He was forged by the Defiance Campaign and the Treason Trials, and he became a committed communist while enjoying good living and drink. As Secretary-General he was determined to reorganise the ANC, and working closely with Sisulu, Mandela and Tambo, he prepared a detailed plan for approval at the ANC’s annual conference in December 1959. It proposed first an extension of the economic boycott, and then the launch of an anti-pass campaign, planned to begin on 31 March 1960 – the anniversary of the first serious demonstration against the pass laws in 1919 – and culminating in a bonfire of passes on 26 June.
But the ANC’s thunder was being stolen by the PAC, who were impatient for immediate action. A week after the ANC’s 1959 conference, the PAC executive reported to their first national conference. Their main proposal was oddly moderate: a ‘status campaign’ to insist on Africans receiving courteous treatment in shops or workplaces, so that they could assert their own personalities and ‘exorcise this slave mentality’.45 This was quickly overtaken by Sobukwe, who put forward his own campaign to defy the pass laws. It was a half-baked proposal, with no realistic assessment of the risks involved, but it was rapidly and unanimously approved. The PAC, said Sobukwe, would now ‘cross its historical Rubicon’.46
The ANC leaders believed the PAC were playing the role of spoilers, trying to undermine and outbid their own initiatives. ‘What the PAC had embarked upon,’ wrote Joe Slovo, ‘was an ill-organised, second-class version of the 1952 Defiance Campaign.’47 Mandela was frustrated to watch his rival Sobukwe, the ‘dazzling orator and incisive thinker’, playing the demagogue and ignoring the historical warnings of failure. But the ANC could not afford to ignore the popular excitement Sobukwe had released. Four months later his rash plan was to prove the catalyst which transformed the whole South African scene, and impelled Mandela into a far more militant revolutionary role.
11
The Revolution that Wasn’t
1960
THE PROMISE of independence in other African countries had brought new optimism to the ANC as well as to the PAC. ‘The people of Africa are astir,’ wrote Mandela in Liberation in March 1958, in a fierce attack on ‘American imperialism’. ‘The future of this continent lies not in the hands of the discredited regimes that have allied themselves with American imperialism. It is in the hands of the common people functioning in their mass movements.’1
‘During the past year there has been an unprecedented upsurge in Africa,’ said the ANC report in December 1959. ‘Self-government has become the cry of the peoples throughout the length and breadth of the continent.’2 ‘Afrika!’ had become a rallying cry, and babies were being christened Kwame or Jomo, after Nkrumah and Kenyatta. White domination in South Africa was now looking still more out of step with the rest of the continent, and more vulnerable. 1960 was proclaimed beforehand by journalists and diplomats as the ‘Year of Africa’. A succession of British and French colonies were due to become independent, and the ex-imperial powers were now wooing their new leaders to maintain their trade links and join the Cold War against communism.
In Britain, the Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was becoming aware of the importance of black Africa – which he compared to a lazy hippo which had been suddenly prodded into action.3 He was concerned about the intransigent white settlers in Central Africa and the political costs of British links with the apartheid government in South Africa. After his election triumph in October 1959 he planned a tour of Africa, culminating in Cape Town.
South African black leaders and liberals feared that Macmillan would be condoning apartheid, and four of them – Albert Luthuli, Alan Paton, Monty Naicker and Jordan Ngubane – signed an open letter to Macmillan before he set off. Published in the London Observer, then known as ‘the black man’s friend’, it warned Macmillan that apartheid was evil and unjust, and pleaded with him not to say ‘one single word that could be construed to be in praise of it’.4 Macmillan privately agreed with every word of the letter, and took it seriously enough to ask his officials whether they thought its signatories would be satisfied with the speech he was already preparing for South Africa.5
Macmillan began his tour in Ghana, where he praised the Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, and first mentioned the ‘wind of change’ (though no journalist noticed). He continued via Nigeria, the Rhodesias and Nyasaland to South Africa. In Cape Town he stayed with Dr Verwoerd, and soon realised