Mandela and his secret Action Committee were in hiding and unable to watch the strike for themselves, which made them all the more sensitive to the press headlines they saw. They made the agonising judgement to call off the strike after the first day. ‘It was a courageous decision,’ wrote Rusty Bernstein, ‘but left a deep depression in the movement.’47
In fact the strike, and the boycott of trains and buses, had been more successful than the ANC realised, and state evidence at the Rivonia trial three years later would reveal its effectiveness. The political scientist Tom Lodge reckoned afterwards that ‘there was a surprisingly widespread degree of participation.’48 But at the time Dr Verwoerd could convincingly proclaim the calling off of the strike as a victory, which made Mandela deeply aware of the power of the media. It was a lesson he would never forget.
Some liberal whites welcomed the defeat of the strike as providing an opportunity for conciliation. ‘The best use which opposition forces can make of this breathing space,’ wrote Allister Sparks in the Rand Daily Mail, ‘is to start organising a multi-racial National Convention without delay.’49 But most whites now felt able to ignore the black threat.
Mandela was now convinced that peaceful protest policies had reached a dead end, and recognised that he must move into a new stage of his struggle. On the day of the strike Ruth First had arranged for a British reporter, Brian Widlake of Independent Television News, to interview him on television for the first time – and, as it turned out, the last time for nearly thirty years. Widlake was taken to the house near Zoo Lake of Professor Julius Lewin of Witwatersrand University. Mandela was filmed – with a brick wall behind him, which was thought an appropriate symbol – for twenty minutes, of which three were transmitted.50 The atmosphere was tense, and Mandela’s television debut was not inspiring – ‘He appeared glum, weary and patently depressed,’ Rusty Bernstein reckoned.51 It did not cause much of a stir in Britain, but what Mandela said was to be crucial to South Africa’s future. ‘If the government reaction is to crush by naked force our non-violent demonstrations,’ he declared, ‘we will have to seriously reconsider our tactics. In my mind, we are closing a chapter on this question of non-violent policy.’52 The ANC executive later criticised Mandela for defying their policy on non-violence, but he believed that ‘sometimes one must go public with an idea to push a reluctant organisation in the direction you want to go.’53
Over the next few days Mandela kept popping up from hiding to act as the ANC’s chief spokesman. But journalists were not excited by his stiff style. Ruth First – his usual go-between – took Stanley Uys of the Johannesburg Sunday Times to see Mandela in Hillbrow for a half-hour interview. Uys found him very tense, and when they met again thirty years later Mandela reminded him: ‘You weren’t impressed.’54 Ruth First also took Patrick O’Donovan from the Observer and Robert Oakeshott from the Financial Times, together with Mary Benson, to a flat in the white suburb of Yeoville, where they found Mandela wearing a striped sports shirt and grey trousers. Benson was struck by his relaxed air and his laughter, but Oakeshott thought his formal rhetoric fell short of the occasion. Mandela claimed that the strike had been a tremendous success, and that non-violence was the only realistic policy against a highly industrialised state, while denying that it was a policy of moderation: ‘Our feeling against imperialism is intense. I detest it!’ But as they left he again said that he thought ‘we are closing a chapter on this question of a non-violent policy.’55 O’Donovan wrote in the Observer on 4 June that the ANC’s recent tactics had ‘served only to hand the government a well-publicised triumph’.56 It was only at this time – on 7 June – that the Foreign Office in London at last opened a file on Mandela.57
In fact Mandela had been discussing abandoning non-violence with his colleagues since early 1960, when the government had ruthlessly suppressed the pass-burning campaigns. So long as the Treason Trial was continuing all the accused had to insist publicly that they supported non-violence as a principle, but many of them, including Mandela, had begun to see it as a tactic which might have to be abandoned.58 Mandela was always more impatient of non-violence than Sisulu or Tambo, as he had shown in Sophiatown in 1953. But now ordinary people were overtaking him with an impatience that, as a politician responding to public opinion, he could not ignore.
Across much of the political spectrum there was a clamour for violent action, often wild and desperate, like the attacks of anarchists and assassins in Russia in the late nineteenth century. In Pondoland, Tambo’s home area in the Eastern Cape, a peasant movement called Intaba (‘the mountain’) had taken over whole areas through guerrilla tactics before they were crushed by the government: Govan Mbeki, who met their leaders in the forests, now insisted that ANC must have a strategy ‘that would mobilise both city and country dwellers’.59 The PAC was soon to produce a terrorist offshoot in the Cape called Poqo (‘alone’), which assassinated whites in reprisal for brutal oppression. A few liberals and leftists organised the African Resistance Movement (ARM), which aimed to blow up buildings. The Communist Party was forming its own semi-military units to cut power lines. Even members of the Unity Movement in the Cape were preparing their own sabotage movement, called the Yu Chi Chan Club after Mao’s term for guerrilla warfare. As one of them, Neville Alexander, later wrote: ‘All of us, regardless of political organisations or tendency, we were all pushed, willy-nilly, across this great divide, towards the armed struggle, from a non-violent background, totally unprepared.’60
Mandela and the ANC would often be criticised for the rashness and amateurishness of their armed struggle, but they felt compelled to move quickly, both to catch up with the mood of the people and to forestall the alternative of uncontrollable atrocities. ‘Violence would begin whether we initiated it or not,’ Mandela wrote afterwards. ‘If we did not take the lead now, we would soon be latecomers and followers in a movement we did not control.’61
The ANC and the Communist Party were already talking about violence, as Rusty Bernstein recalls, in an unstructured way, without formal meetings.62 ‘At the moment when you’re considering a new road,’ said Joe Slovo, ‘it doesn’t come in one flash with everyone simultaneously realising it. It’s a process – with Mandela playing a very important part in the process.’63 The communists were more ready to advocate violence than the ANC, which under its President Albert Luthuli had been committed to non-violence; and the government liked to equate violence with communism. But the arguments crossed party lines, and many of the communist leaders were concerned to restrain black militancy.64
A month after Republic Day, Mandela put forward to the ANC working committee his historic proposal: that the ANC must abandon non-violence and form its own military wing. He argued persuasively, quoting the African proverb, ‘The attacks of the wild beast cannot