On his way through Africa Macmillan kept revising the speech he would deliver in Cape Town, and it was repeatedly redrafted by his officials, including two rarefied mandarins in his entourage: the polymath David Hunt from the Commonwealth Office, and the dapper High Commissioner Sir John Maud (‘With Maud,’ said a South African wit, ‘you have to take the smooth with the smooth’). Macmillan was so nervous just before he went into Parliament in Cape Town that he had to go to the lavatory to be sick. It was a masterly speech, with a style and historical sweep which at first disarmed the Afrikaner MPs. He praised their nationalism as the first of the African nationalisms, before spelling out that ‘there are some aspects of your policies which make it impossible’ for Britain to support South Africa in the Commonwealth.8 It was not until the British press had underlined the speech’s true meaning that the message struck home. As Die Burger, the leading Afrikaans paper, put it: ‘Britain could no longer afford to be seen in our company when certain of our affairs are broached.’9
Macmillan had asked to meet the leading black politicians, but his programme was tightly controlled by Verwoerd’s government, and the High Commission, as we have seen, knew little about African leaders like Mandela. At the whites-only garden party given by Sir John Maud, Patrick Duncan urged Macmillan to see the black leaders, but found him suddenly deaf.10
Eventually Macmillan decided that his Cape Town speech had made such an impact that he would be forgiven if the meeting with the ANC leadership never came off.11 Albert Luthuli would have told Macmillan, he said afterwards, that Africans would be better off if South Africa were outside the Commonwealth: ‘Britain would have more influence, and the Afrikaners would be more isolated.’ But he was pleasantly surprised by Macmillan’s speech: ‘It gave the African people some inspiration and hope.’12
Mandela too thought it was ‘a terrific speech’. Despite his distrust of British imperialism, he would never forget Macmillan’s courage in the lions’ den, warning a ‘stubborn and race-blinded white oligarchy’ about the wind of change. Thirty-six years later in Westminster Hall, Mandela would partly model his own speech on Macmillan’s, with the same historical sweep; and he would recall a cartoon in a South African paper showing Macmillan after the speech, with the caption from Julius Caesar:
O! pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers.13
Macmillan’s ‘wind of change’ soon proved an understatement: only six weeks later he had to explain that he had not meant ‘a howling tempest which would blow away the whole of the new developing civilisation. We must, at all costs, avoid that.’14 Even while he was touring Africa the Belgian government was deciding, with minimal preparation, to give independence four months later to the Congo – which would rapidly disintegrate into civil war and chaos, introducing the Cold War into the heart of the continent and spreading fear through white South Africa. The headlong pace of the imperial retreat encouraged the PAC to promise to overthrow white domination in South Africa by 1963. Mandela was exasperated by their assumption that the Afrikaners would give up power as easily as the colonial powers had. ‘The PAC did not appear to have any plans to prepare the people for that historic moment,’ he wrote later from jail. They assumed it would be achieved ‘merely by going to jail and waiting there for the Nats to fall on their own’.15
The two rival Congresses were now bitterly divided – like so many rival liberation movements in Africa – criticising each other as much as their common enemy. While the ANC was preparing for its demonstration against pass laws on 31 March 1960, Sobukwe and the PAC were pushing ahead with their own anti-pass campaign, with much less planning. Sobukwe believed that bold, spontaneous leadership would automatically mobilise the masses, and on 18 March he abruptly announced that in three days’ time – ten days before the ANC’s planned demonstration, ‘In every city, town and village, the men must leave their passes at home,’ and surrender themselves at police stations for arrest, pledging themselves to ‘No bail, no defence, no fine.’ He belatedly invited the ANC to join them, but Nokwe predictably declined, saying that the plan had ‘no reasonable prospects of success’.16 Mandela was equally sceptical: he thought that the PAC was merely a ‘leadership in search of followers’, and was pre-empting the ANC’s own plans with blatant opportunism.17
On 21 March Sobukwe and about 150 others surrendered themselves without passes at Orlando police station – where the PAC’s following was weak, as it was in most of South Africa. But it was much stronger in the black townships of Cape Town and in Sharpeville, outside Vereeniging in the Transvaal, where the ANC had long been poorly organised.18 In Cape Town 1,500 people offered themselves for arrest, while huge crowds gathered in protest until the police dispersed them, killing two. In Sharpeville a crowd of about 10,000 surrounded the police station, unnerving the police, who opened fire and shot sixty-seven people dead.
The Sharpeville massacre, like no previous South African confrontation, immediately reverberated round the world. In Washington, President Eisenhower, facing his own racial problems in election year, said he would not sit in judgement on ‘a difficult social and political problem 6,000 miles away’. But the State Department unprecedentedly criticised Pretoria, and hoped that black South Africans would be able to ‘obtain redress for legitimate grievances by peaceful means’.19 At the United Nations the Security Council blamed the government for the shootings, with Britain and France abstaining.20 In South Africa the stock market collapsed, and whites queued to buy guns or to apply to emigrate.
The black political scene was transformed overnight. Sobukwe and the PAC had received a huge boost. It was, Mandela thought later, ‘not so much because of what they were saying, which was quite immature. It was because of the massacre.’21 But the surge of mass anger seemed at first to vindicate Sobukwe’s belief in spontaneous action. The PAC’s nationalist rhetoric caught the black imagination more vividly than the ANC’s more cautious statements: ‘Sobukwe’s got a bang, man,’ as one African journalist put it. ‘He’s down to earth, down, down, down.’ Many blacks were openly singing the PAC anthem:
We the black people
Are crying out for our land
Which was taken by crooks.
They should leave it alone.22
Mandela accepted that the PAC leaders had shown courage, and he quickly realised that the ANC ‘had to make rapid adjustments’.23 After Sharpeville he spent the whole night secretly discussing how to respond with Sisulu, Nokwe and Slovo. They decided that the ANC leaders, beginning with their President Albert Luthuli, should publicly burn their pass-books. They would also call for a Day of Mourning, when workers would stay at home in protest against the massacre. They