For ten days after Sharpeville the iron structure of apartheid seemed to be crumbling. On 26 March Luthuli was photographed holding the charred remains of his pass-book; two days later the great majority of black workers obeyed the ANC’s call for a stay-at-home, while Mandela and Nokwe burnt their passes in front of cameras and journalists, and a few hundred others followed their example. ‘Only a truly mass organisation could co-ordinate such activities,’ Mandela reflected.26 Most remarkably, the government appeared paralysed; on 25 March the Commissioner of Police had announced that he was suspending arrests for not carrying passes.
The ANC now seemed to be calling the shots. When I talked to Mandela in Orlando on 29 March he was dismissive of the PAC’s reliance on spontaneous response: ‘You’ve got to have the machinery, the organisation.’ He was touchy about the PAC’s role in originating the protest, insisting that the ANC’s potato boycott had been a crucial prelude to the pass-burning, and sounded confident that the ANC initiative would succeed. With him was Duma Nokwe, his short body slumped in a huge armchair, who was jubilant that a thousand pass-books had already been burnt: ‘We never dreamt it would happen so soon. We’ll have them roasted. The country is now in a pre-rev …’ – he stopped himself from saying ‘revolutionary’ – ‘in the state before major changes take place.’27
Was it a revolution? It was certainly one of those brief interims in a nation’s history when it seemed that anything could happen. In the shebeens there was sudden exuberance: ‘There’s a crack in the white wall’; ‘The police are so polite, it hurts: one cop even called me meneer [mister]’; ‘They’ve thickened our skins so much, we can’t feel the pricks any longer.’ Even the state-owned broadcasting system played an old revolutionary signature tune, smuggled into the studio by a militant black employee: ‘Wake up, my people. Be united. The fault is with us. All nations keep us under their feet.’28
By 30 March the initiative was passing back to the PAC in Cape Town, their stronghold. A general strike had paralysed the city, and the police began brutally attacking the townships to break it. The black workers responded with an apparently spontaneous march of 30,000 people on the city centre, led by a twenty-three-year-old student in short trousers, Philip Kgosana, who had modelled himself on Sobukwe. When they reached the city he seemed for an hour to hold the country’s future in his hand: but he was tricked into dispersing the crowd by the promise of a meeting with the Minister of Justice. Instead he was arrested and detained for nine months.29 Historians continue to argue whether the march could have precipitated a revolution: certainly without the deception of the crowd the police might well have caused a far worse massacre than Sharpeville, which would have provoked a much more dangerous black explosion.30
As it was, the government quickly took advantage of the situation, declaring a state of emergency on the same day and detaining over 2,000 people. Mandela had been secretly tipped off beforehand by a friend in the security police, and had alerted colleagues including Ahmed Kathrada, who in turn told Bernstein, who warned his communist friends not to sleep at home.31 It was decided that a few activists – including Harmel, Kotane and Dadoo – should disappear underground, while Mandela and the rest would submit to arrest.32
Mandela was arrested and taken to Newlands jail, near Sophiatown, where he spent the night in appalling conditions, which he described the next day to Helen Joseph, who had been imprisoned separately: ‘Fifty detainees had been locked up for the rest of the night, after their arrest at one o’clock in the morning, in a yard open to the sky and lit by one electric bulb. It was so small they could only stand and were given neither food nor blankets. In the morning they were taken to a cell, about eighteen feet square, with sanitation only from a drainage hole in the floor, flushed at the whim of the policeman in charge. Food, even drinking water, came only at three o’clock in the afternoon, twelve hours after the men had been brought to the cells.’33
The government was now moving rapidly to prevent further protest. On 8 April, with the support of the opposition United Party, it pushed through a new Unlawful Organisations Bill by which, after forty-eight years, the ANC was finally made illegal, together with the PAC. They would remain so for the next thirty years. The black townships were in political confusion, as no one knew who was in prison and who had escaped. The crisis atmosphere was intensified on 9 April, when Dr Verwoerd was shot and wounded by a white farmer named David Pratt at an agricultural show in Johannesburg.
For a few days South Africa remained in a political limbo, with Verwoerd out of action and his cabinet bewildered. One Minister, Paul Sauer, made a speech on 19 April stating that Sharpeville had closed the old book of South African history, and that the country must reconsider its race relations ‘seriously and honestly’.34 But this conciliatory mood soon passed. Verwoerd recovered rapidly and took charge, more intransigent than ever. The police enforced their powers still more brutally. The heroic bonfire of pass-books petered out as people remembered that without a pass they could not draw a pension or post office savings, or apply for a house. They began queuing up to replace the passes they had burnt.
Already by the end of April, a month after Sharpeville, the talk of imminent revolution looked wildly premature. ‘This isn’t it,’ said the journalist Can Themba. ‘The guys have been talking about the wind of change becoming a hurricane: it never seemed to occur to them that it might be only a breeze.’35 The relaxation of the pass laws had proved purely tactical, intended to prepare for a much more systematic clamp-down. Pretoria showed no signs of yielding to pressure from Macmillan or any other Western leader; and the government was soon making plans to train the police, with help from abroad, in much more efficient and ruthless methods of surveillance and torture.
The aftermath of Sharpeville had revealed the lack of realism in both the ANC and the PAC. There were few parallels between South Africa and the rest of the continent, where the colonial governments were reluctant rulers and the liberation movements faced much easier rides to freedom. The struggle of black South Africans against the Afrikaners would clearly be much tougher than victories further north.
In this extraordinary atmosphere the three judges in Pretoria had resumed the Treason Trial, calmly listening to the evidence about events of five years before. Each day, the thirty accused were brought into the courtroom from prison. Mandela was eventually allowed out at weekends to visit the offices of Mandela & Tambo, whose practice had been undermined by the trials. He was escorted by a sympathetic Afrikaner policeman, Sergeant Kruger, who trusted him not to escape. But during the week he had to spend the nights in prison and the days in court, facing the most crucial stage of the Treason Trial.36 The government had now given the trial an added significance, as an alternative to an inquiry into the causes of the Sharpeville massacre, which the opposition was demanding. As Dr Verwoerd said on 20 May: ‘The trial itself has in part the character of an inquiry into the causes of disturbances.’37
The defence lawyers, headed by Bram Fischer, were indignant about the constraints imposed by the state of emergency, and maintained that justice could not be ensured in such abnormal conditions, with their clients in prison and often unavailable for consulting. They proposed a bold strategy, which Mandela approved: they would withdraw from the case until the emergency was over,