The crucial argument was then taken up in Stanger, in Natal, at two dramatic meetings presided over by Luthuli, who immediately made clear his Christian concerns about the move to violence. He nevertheless reluctantly agreed that there should be a military campaign with its own autonomous leadership, which would be separate from the ANC, though ultimately responsible to it. The second meeting, at which the ANC met with its Indian, white and Coloured allies, went on through the night. Mandela’s plan for a military wing was opposed by many Indians, several of whom were still influenced by Gandhi. J.N. Singh, one of Mandela’s oldest friends, restated his belief that it was not non-violence that had failed them, but ‘we have failed non-violence’.65 Other friends, including Monty Naicker and Yusuf Cachalia, prophetically warned that violent tactics would undermine the more pressing task of political organisation. Mandela would admit later that the ANC did make precisely that mistake: they drained the political organisations of enthusiastic and experienced men, concentrated their attention on the new organisation, and neglected the ‘normal but vital task of pure political organisation’.66
Many younger Indians had rejected passive resistance, and Mandela and Sisulu were also supported by white communists, including Slovo and Bernstein. ‘They had a sober approach,’ Sisulu said later. ‘You could reason everything, and they did not have a mechanical Party approach: they relied on people.’67 The Party certainly played a major role in creating the military force, but the idea did not come from Moscow. ‘It was presented as a fact,’ said the Russian expert on Africa Apollon Davidson. ‘Moscow was sometimes more moderate than the groups it supported, in Palestine, Algeria or South Africa.’68 And the ANC had growing control over the military wing. After 1963, according to Slovo, it was almost exclusively directed by ANC exiles, while ‘the Party involvement was negligible’.
By early morning the Congresses had agreed that Mandela should form a new military organisation, which came to be called Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), or ‘Spear of the Nation’. He could recruit his own staff, and MK would be kept quite distinct from the ANC, to avoid threatening the ANC’s legal status (though within eighteen months the link between MK and the ANC became generally known when the ANC firebrand Robert Resha publicly proclaimed it).69 It was the historic dawn of the new phase of struggle.
Luthuli remained ambivalent. He was worried about a violent struggle, but he was not a pacifist. Mandela would always remember him saying at Stanger: ‘If anybody thinks I am a pacifist, let him go and take my chickens; he will know how wrong he is.’ Luthuli would later complain that he had not been properly consulted, but he had deliberately kept his distance.70 He never endorsed the decision, while he did not attack it. ‘Despite his deep Christian commitment to non-violence,’ wrote Slovo afterwards, ‘he never forbade or condemned the new path, blaming it on the regime’s intransigence rather than on those who created MK.’
But Mandela was now totally committed to the armed struggle as commander-in-chief of MK, and he threw himself into his new military role with enthusiasm. He was becoming a soldier overnight, like the Afrikaner guerrillas in the Boer War such as Jan Smuts or Deneys Reitz, about whom he had read much. It marked a complete break with ANC tradition: ‘The decision that Mandela should become a fugitive, and henceforth live the life of a professional revolutionary,’ as Slovo wrote later, ‘was a major watershed in our history. It pointed the way to a qualitatively different style of clandestine work and set the scene for the complete break with pacifism or “legalism” which was made soon afterwards.’71
‘We plan to make government impossible,’ said Mandela in a press statement issued from hiding on 26 June, now proclaimed as ‘Freedom Day’. He did not explain how this would be done, but warned that there would be ‘other forms of mass pressure to force the race maniacs who govern our beloved country to make way for a democratic government of the people, by the people and for the people’. There was a warrant out for his arrest but he would not surrender himself, because in the present conditions ‘to seek for cheap martyrdom by handing myself to the police is naïve and criminal’. ‘I have chosen this latter course,’ he continued, ‘which is more difficult and which entails more risk and hardship than sitting in jail. I have had to separate myself from my dear wife and children, from my mother and sisters, to live as an outlaw in my own land. I have had to close my business, to abandon my profession, and live in poverty and misery.’72 As he put it a year later, he had to ‘say goodbye to the good old days when, at the end of a strenuous day at an office, I could look forward to joining my family at the dinner-table, and instead to take up the life of a man hunted continuously by the police’.73
For the first few weeks he hid in the homes of several Indian families in Johannesburg, emerging for secret meetings with the ANC executive, including Kathrada, Duma Nokwe, Alfred Nzo and Harold Wolpe, most of whom were forbidden to meet with more than two people. A small group was responsible for finding safe houses, among them Kathrada, who found the Indian hosts, and Wolfie Kodesh, an ebullient white journalist on New Age.
It was a precarious existence. One night Kodesh found a flat near his home in Yeoville which was temporarily vacant. Ten members of the executive converged there, including Mandela, in his favourite disguise as a chauffeur. But when Sisulu arrived Kodesh noticed two old people in the corridor looking closely at him, and overheard one of them say, ‘Go phone up.’ Kodesh quickly warned them all to disperse, but as they did not know where to hide Mandela, Kodesh suggested his own flat at 52 Webb Street. ‘The police would never have thought that a black man would be in a white area like that,’ said Kodesh, ‘where he’d stick out like a sore thumb.’ Mandela stayed there for two months, the tall, athletic commander and the stocky journalist an odd duo. As Kodesh remembers Mandela’s first night: ‘He insisted on sleeping on the camp-bed, against my protests. I was woken up at 4.30 a.m. by the creaking camp-bed, to find him getting dressed in longjohns and a tracksuit. He explained he was going out for a run, but I refused to give him the key, so he ran on the spot for an hour. He repeated it every morning, and later I joined in, gradually improving until I was running with him for the whole hour.’
It was dangerous for Mandela to go out, so he began to read voraciously, from books Kodesh had on his shelves or which Kathrada brought him from the public library. Kodesh told him that Clausewitz was to war what Shakespeare was to literature, so Mandela devoured Clausewitz’s classic On War. ‘I never saw a chap concentrate as he did,’ said Kodesh; ‘underlining, taking notes, as if it was for a legal examination.’74 Mandela read widely, including the Afrikaner poet Ingrid Jonker (whom he was to quote in his inauguration speech forty years later). But his overriding interest was in books about liberation struggles: Mao Tse-tung and Edgar Snow on China, Menachem Begin on Israel, Louis Taruc’s Born of the People, about the guerrilla uprising in the Philippines, and Deneys Reitz’s classic about the Boer War, Commando.75 He read carefully and attentively, as Mac Maharaj, who had found some of the books for him in London, discovered when they were later imprisoned together on Robben Island.
It was a time when many revolutionaries around the world appeared to be triumphant – Mao in China, Ben Bella in Algeria, Castro in Cuba. Mandela studied the rebellions throughout Africa – in Ethiopia, Kenya, the Cameroons, and particularly in Algeria, which the ANC saw as a parallel to their own struggle. But it was the Cuban revolution which most inspired him and many of his colleagues. It was a dangerous model, a freak victory,