Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries

By Paul S. Landau

Spanning the years just before (and just after) Nelson Mandela’s 1962 arrest, this entirely fresh history of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), or Spear of the Nation, and its revolutionary milieu brings to life the period in which Mandela and his comrades fought South Africa’s apartheid regime not only with words and protests, but also with bombs and fire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9780821447697

Book preview

Spear

Spear

Mandela and the Revolutionaries

Paul S. Landau

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

ATHENS, OHIO

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

ohioswallow.com

© 2022 by Ohio University Press

All rights reserved

First published in South Africa by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2022

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Landau, Paul Stuart, 1962– author.

Title: Spear : Mandela and the revolutionaries / Paul S. Landau.

Other titles: New African histories series.

Description: Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press ; Auckland Park, South Africa : Jacana, 2022. | Series: New African histories | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021050781 (print) | LCCN 2021050782 (ebook) | ISBN 9780821424797 (paperback) | ISBN 9780821424704 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780821447697 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Mandela, Nelson, 1918–2013. | Umkhonto we Sizwe (South Africa)—History. | National liberation movements—South Africa. | South Africa—Politics and government—1948–1994.

Classification: LCC DT1953 .L36 2022 (print) | LCC DT1953 (ebook) | DDC 968.061—dc23/eng/20211014

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050781

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050782

South Africa and Africa, 1960

Zoe and Penelope, in the Time of the Plague

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Crisis (March 1960)

Chapter 2: The Making of the Crisis (The Postwar Era)

Chapter 3: Emergency Mobilization (April 1960 to Early 1961)

Chapter 4: Persuasion (June 1961 to August 1961)

Chapter 5: Mandela’s Bookcase (1961)

Chapter 6: Spear (Late 1961)

Chapter 7: Dingane’s Day (December 1961 to Early July 1962)

Chapter 8: Interruption (Mid-1962)

Chapter 9: Big Country (Later 1962)

Chapter 10: Operation Mayibuye (November 1962 to June 1963)

Chapter 11: In Pieces (Mid-1963 to Mid-1964)

Chapter 12: Revolution Displaced (1963/4 Onward)

Appendix A: Missing Documents Mentioned in This Book

Appendix B: Mandela, Communist (Nationalist)

Notes

Sources

Index

Preface

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT the citizens who battled the evil, racist system extending over their lives, apartheid. In a very short period, at the very start of the 1960s, Nelson Mandela’s group, Umkhonto we Sizwe, Spear of the Nation, assailed the South African state. Umkhonto, mostly called MK, and other radicals allied to its cause derailed freight trains, downed telephone lines, blew up post offices and pressured less enthusiastic citizens to cooperate with them. Under an onslaught of the racist state’s retributive policing, MK and other groups recruited daring young people, training them and culling state informants from their number, and prepared them for urban guerrilla warfare, for attacking human targets.

Apartheid denied Black people basic legal protections and rights every day. It proceeded from their dispossession from their historic land, and placed them under the purview of special laws and regulations justified because Whites were allegedly more advanced. Apartheid’s logic betrays its shared heritage with German Naziism, something its leaders recognized. Daniel F. Malan, then leader of the white Afrikaner National Party (NP), even briefly considered adopting a swastika in the NP flag in 1936.¹ Apartheid served to guard South Africa as a white man’s country and prevented democratic reforms. Racist legislation suppressed Black mobility, wages, residence rights, healthcare, and education, and prevented Blacks from participating meaningfully in their own governance.

A wind of change was, however, blowing through the imperial world, setting India and a slew of other countries a-sail apart from the French and British mainlands. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan used the phrase to remind South African members of parliament of the African part of the trend in 1960. Black nationalists and Black Marxists, in Africa as in the United States and the Caribbean, were jettisoning European colonialism and White liberal guidance in seeking their independence. They published, rallied, petitioned, downed tools and walked on picket lines, and gathered and agitated, and sometimes went to war. Mandela’s group, MK, was part of this transnational, titanic midcentury contest to reshape the modern world. The apartheid government would thwart the transformation, and renormalize its racist rule, undermining the struggle for equality everywhere, from Australia to Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia), and even in the United States. South African revolutionaries, on their side, would mobilize relentlessly, uttering warnings, arming themselves, preparing to fight in the streets to free the future for another sort of country, a different world, with room for everyone regardless of race.

The principal focus of this book is that confrontation, and so the story of the radical pursuit of good, and justice, behind an attempted push to mass insurgency from 1960 through 1963, inside South Africa. Nelson Mandela, and other revolutionaries, some allied to him and some not, created an offensive counterthrust to the government’s police regime of terror and extrajudicial brutality. More than a reaction, it was a positive revolutionary nationalist claim. Mandela’s MK as a group composed itself as a civilian force, nonprofessional, using wire cutters, hacksaws, and homemade chemical bombs rather than AK-47s and grenades, to beat back fascism and make room for a nonracialist, open, fair, and cosmopolitan society. The NP government encouraged the formation of White civilian militias in response, and the government mechanized its military and retrained its police.

Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries is about how MK and its allies raced against the growing power of the apartheid state. Revolutionaries debated among themselves as to how best create a movement of the people behind them in sugarcane farms, cities, and small segregated locations. MK made global connections, detailed below, and liaised directly with contacts in Moscow. Yet MK was a domestic movement. It received substantial foreign Communist funding only as its health deteriorated. MK was to be the vanguard for a mass struggle. Under state assault MK accelerated its plans in 1963, a last home effort, but the state caught up with its leaders and destroyed it. Spear is about the entwining of the personal and the political across MK’s diverse operations up to that point. It is about vigor even as strategic success became a waking dream.

Looking back, in fact, it may seem unreasonable that revolutionaries thought they could prevail in South Africa in the early 1960s. At that time, however, the apartheid status quo appeared to rest on rotten foundations. Mass civil disobedience had brought down other regimes, notably the Raj, Britain’s jewel in the crown, and in 1957, Ghana’s positive action campaigns ushered Kwame Nkrumah’s nationalist party to power. In Algeria, strikes and marches had given way to mutually terroristic warfare before a settlement was achieved. Surely South African fighters might organize the mass of Black people to achieve victory. Mandela, and his mostly Communist allies, and Pan-Africanists in parallel with him, undertook campaigns based on the logic of attracting the majority of the people to their methods and leadership.

Mandela affiliated before 1960 with the Communist Party, which proved critical to his aims. Yet he emerged first as an activist and a leader in the African National Congress, the oldest mass political organization in Africa. He began as an African nationalist, in favor of majority enfranchisement and empowerment in South Africa, and (it will become clear) he ended as one. As Aimé Césaire said in 1956, speaking in essence for Mandela, What I demand of Marxism and Communism is that they serve the black peoples, not that the black peoples serve Marxism and Communism.² The effective mobilization of Black people was in fact, however, the revolutionaries’ highest goal. Striving to find a path toward mass mobilization, Mandela and his fellow revolutionaries borrowed ideas from the Americas, West Africa, the Middle East, Algeria, and Communist strategists, but Mandela understood that South Africa, with its unique profile, required its own paradigm. The population included heterogeneities that apartheid both encouraged and trampled. The Black public varied from region to region, and from city to countryside, in history and experience. That is why educating rural people to contest their situations in a common focus was a revolutionary occupation.

There is no natural correlation of human behavior with race, although it is also true that no identity has ultimate grounds, pace Wittgenstein, outside of what human interactions offer.³ As Frantz Fanon perceived, however, the colonial settler is correct in claiming to know the native insofar as the settler’s dominance makes the native a position: it lacks a relative meaning until its confinement, and its resistance.⁴ During the years that Mandela organized in the Communist Party, and in the African National Congress (ANC), as he built and led MK, Black leaders and intellectuals everywhere were elaborating a working vocabulary for their expected Black liberation, for reversing the Native-Settler position and then if possible erasing its meaning. They mobilized in Trinidad and Jamaica, Detroit, Accra, Harlem, and a few years later, in Rio and Nordestino Brazil, inhabiting the subjected status in order to reverse its position and draw strength from one another. They understood that freedom for individuals had no meaning in their countries until Black people first got theirs.⁵ Alongside world Marxism, centered on Moscow and Beijing, Black and native nationalism shaped the South African revolutionaries, making fresh possibilities thinkable for everyone.

In much of the world, the focus of Black revolt, as Robin D. G. Kelley quotes Cedric Robinson to remind us, was always on the structures of the mind, . . . [the] metaphysics not the material.⁶ Mandela encountered this reservoir of experience indirectly, in his reading and conversation in South Africa, about events and movements, but also directly, in engaging abroad with foreign leaders and colleagues who had cosmopolitan experience. His reason for immersing himself in historical and contemporary reports from all over the world was to be a better leader. In this book, Mandela and his fellow radicals are understood not so much from their writings, as from their actions—as people making themselves who they were. Below, as we watch them lead an insurrection, however, we also note how they thought, acted, and spoke in the global domain of other people’s ideas, not just South African ones.

In this book, intellectual and emotional forces interweave. Relatedly, unlike in some histories of the broader period and even biographies of Nelson Mandela, close attention is paid to the people around Mandela, especially to his Black comrades, colleagues, and competitors.⁷ There is a vein of writing about South Africa which adopts the perspective of world Whiteness, and which purports to be interested in everyone, but seen through the eyes of educated White people fighting apartheid. This makes Mandela and Black leaders with him, among them Walter Sisulu, Oliver O.R. Tambo, and Moses Kotane, almost into figureheads.⁸ In trying to redress this distortion, Spear highlights Mandela’s genuine leadership at the center of this group in MK. We see the man and his decisions in the weave of the relationships around him, as we see his mettle in the hurricane of events that eventually overtakes him.

Much seemed possible in 1960. School hallways, factory floors, marital bedrooms, and adolescents’ soccer clubs bound revolutionaries together in political and personal webs. MK drew on people in these channels, from different walks of life and from every apartheid category, Bantu (Black African), Coloured (mixed), Indian (South Asian descended) (both Black), and so-called European (White). Many other South African movements of the past had threatened the state by putting oppressed farmers and workers together without regard to tribe, refusing any salience to the Coloured or European label. MK was a multiracial force in this tradition.⁹ We will see how particularly the Communist Party (herein mostly called the Party for short) provided a kind of surrogate family in which urban activists in Johannesburg could midwife MK. The Party was a family accustomed to argument and dissent, cross-cut by muted racial divisions. As we will see, however, Mandela’s senior, Black, Party colleagues, especially Walter Sisulu and Moses Kotane, successfully brokered Mandela’s leadership.

Behind the debate and decision-making at the leadership level, we will see how men and women created the forms of association in which Nelson Mandela emerged as peerless, and then modes over which no central leader could maintain control. Most surprisingly, perhaps, Mandela rose in tandem with the expansion of the deployment of violence. The fact is the state was the first, and most consistent, purveyor of brute force in the epic contest described below. The state attacked the majority of the population with force. Settler control in South Africa’s history, in fencing and repurposing private land and demanding taxes and laborers, was always based on violence, but the apartheid state police shot and killed increasing numbers of people, even unarmed, protesting civilians in several incidents in the 1950s. And 1960 brought a further, critical change in the use of force, as we will see in the following chapter. The state episodically massacred scores of protesters and methodically criminalized its most committed opponents. They responded not just with a defense, but with a strategic offense.

The government’s declarations of states of emergency, and the passing of extraordinary regulations and laws, framed the revolutionaries’ options, as we will see. Still, policing, investigations, and trials are not the main concern of this book, while the revolutionaries’ actions and motives are. State enforcement, when it arrived, spelled the end of activists’ instrumental political power.¹⁰ The state’s use of violence in destroying MK appears toward the end of the book, but most accounts correctly note that apartheid violence got worse after the start of MK, from the winter of 1962, when the South African police force began to professionalize its enforcement, and the parliament passed laws giving it fresh military powers. After defeating MK in 1963–64, the state continued to develop extrajudicial means of oppression which it deployed for several decades more. Meanwhile the ANC’s coercive military camps outside South Africa would normalize force and the language of violence, a common part of the lingua franca in South African political discourse. The state rhetorically attacked terrorists, and exiled antiapartheid leaders spoke of the impossibility of compromise. Pain and loss were carried forward by the revolutionaries in their persons, in deprivation and torture, in psychic and physical wounds; violence was borne further downstream in the generations in the alienation of spouses and in the uncomprehending ache of children, bereft of their parents, jailed, exiled, or dead: children who would grow up with a personal version of the unhealing pain the country would collectively suffer.

TO REVISE THE TALE OF AN icon, Mandela, a hero enmeshed in deep, mythic metanarratives, a great man if there are any in the world, is guaranteed to provoke criticism. That is how it must be. Nelson Mandela’s espousal of violence and revolt may shock some readers. The figure in these pages was a recent divorcé, emotionally and materially unsettled, but increasingly connected to his fellow radicals, combative, wholly devoted to the cause, pragmatic, sometimes even cruelly so in his relationships, as some fellow prisoners later reported. Helen Joseph, a lifelong friend, recalled that Mandela overtly threatened their memories of closeness when one particular matter to hand required her immediate action: It reduced me to tears.¹¹ He prized his ability to make quick adjustments, but he led by arguing his point coldly, followed by a seeking of consensus with his views. He did not attack his seniors, but was prepared to move forcibly past critics if he felt it necessary. He emerges here as heroic, deeply principled, but also distinctly fallible, and his actions, and the actions of others following the path he traced before his capture, are justly subject to further scrutiny.

The aim of the book above all is to stay at the front edge of revolutionary organization in South Africa, over the years 1960–64, to see and hear what history’s subjects could, and no more; to eschew, in the narrative, knowledge from after the event, or outside that time. We may feel we know Mandela better than he did at early moments; we may feel we can better judge what Mandela and his fellow revolutionaries were doing, than they themselves—what was really possible and what not. But the better task for us, which will divulge rewards, is to imagine what it was like to face the future without knowing its shape. There is no foreshadowing of events; there is no juxtaposition of later trajectories with narrated vectors in this story.¹² Irony is also therefore avoided. Even within each chapter, thematic discussion is reserved for moments when the theme intruded in one or more person’s consciousness, and the temporal interval of the story is only briefly suspended in most cases. And so signal events arrive, as they do in life, as a surprise, not according to prophecy.

Every effort revolutionaries undertook against apartheid, as the state concurrently moved against them, risked disaster, capture, immobilization, physical harm. The worst was imagined and assiduously avoided. The state was powerful. International networks of capital investments, connected to racial prerogatives often re-represented as the defensible habits of class, underpinned apartheid. Its bureaus were a massive warren, staffed by an increasingly large proportion of Afrikaner men. Parastatals and organized trade, the receipts from the sale of gold from the country’s central gold mines, underwrote White landlord-organized production in the countryside; labor monopsonies, banking cabals, Boer farmers’ organizations, all massed profits at the top and fed apartheid’s coffers. The National Party (NP) government withdrew South Africa from the Commonwealth, after Macmillan’s speech, and accepted their exile from the United Nations, it is true, but South African Whites traveled freely everywhere, sat at international banquets, seminars, and tournaments, bought chemicals and military hardware from the West, cooperated with Western military intelligence. South African universities engaged with some of the world’s leading economists and social scientists. The state’s experts gleaned policies from colonial friends, from segregationist policing in the USA, and adopted techniques of torture from regimes east and west. The United States’ Central Intelligence Agency as we will see supported the apartheid government. Against these forces stood only the potential of absolute, mass intransigence.

Let us briefly define social revolution beyond the Fanonist move of reversing the position of Settler and Native, and itemize the evidentiary base for describing it. We will take revolution to mean a thoroughgoing and rapid reversal or preferably destruction of those hierarchies determining unequal access to life’s opportunities.¹³ The South African state was, like all modern states, an elevation of ascendant social groups, linked together in a symbiosis. The state supplied a structure for rotating governments, here representing variants of White interests, binding its mechanisms tightly to the National Party apartheid government from 1948 on. The revolutionaries tried to weaken and hobble the NP’s ability to govern, to compel it to dissolve and pull the state down with it, to permit a new constitution. They also fought to upend the hierarchies which held racism in place, relationships based in different rights in property, as a necessary completion of their actions. The National Party also made itself much more like the state. Fighting the state was not a straight path, nor a single decision, as will become apparent, even so, but rather a kind of navigation.

A lot happened in a short period of time. The men and women active in the early 1960s lived through a zone of hyperaction and redefinition, acceleration and terminal decision-making. Their autobiographies and biographies in this vein are best handled as retrospective compositions making sense of a compressed part of their individual lives in a longer span, and not eyewitness accounts reliably illuminating particular situations for later use. Nor, to sharpen the point, do Mandela’s own self-writings, including his two autobiographies, provide a simple aperture into the early 1960s. The Mandela who argues in favor of Castro’s approach with ANC president Chief Albert Lutuli (as we will see) is not precisely the same man who composes a speech facing life in prison, nor the man who speaks at his inauguration as president of a postapartheid South Africa in 1994. Mandela agreed with such caution: he wrote to Fatima Meer in 1971, What a sweet euphemism for self praise the English language has evolved. Autobiography they chose to call it . . .¹⁴

And yet his self-understanding, in writings and interviews (which created his published autobiography), and that of others around him, collectively, make up the book’s evidentiary core. That is as it should be, proceeding with due caution. More than any other source, oral interviews—hundreds of them, with participants in the actions of the period—inform this book, and they are often autobiographical in tone. In the pages that follow, about 250 interviews, some of them in turn consisting of several sessions and many cassette tapes, are cited or quoted. Some persons appear as interviewees several times over the years, in different recordings. Interviewees include leaders from the ANC breakaway association, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), and participants in the PAC’s military affiliate, Poqo, as well as MK, ANC, and Communist Party members; but also, some ordinary citizens, and other activists unattached to other organizations, are represented. Lastly, state-cooperating witnesses, most of whom spoke only under duress, drawn from the middle (or the edges) of the insurgencies, are a major source for reconstructing events. These police-deposed accounts have especially been weighed and cross-checked, as they entail compelled information, or motivated testimony, or a combination of the two—in which telling a lie was an act of heroism.¹⁵

Most interviews by far were done by other researchers, for various past historical projects, not by your author, who consulted those interviews in their many archives. To switch to the first person is to exit the storyline, but in any case, I accessed this oral material in five countries (South Africa, Britain, Botswana, Germany, USA), and also, I examined national and local archives of letters, reports, and court transcripts relevant to the ANC, PAC, Party, and MK, apart from oral interviews or testimonies. There were by my count forty-nine collections of papers, in nineteen locations, I consulted in person; and seven other depots of archives, including in Moscow, Jerusalem, Gaborone, Atlanta, Maseru, London, and Accra, accessed with the assistance of helpful colleagues listed in notes and in Sources. In addition, insofar as I could, I perused everything that Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela had, in the early ’60s, ever written and, insofar as possible, ever read.

All activists’ writings, memoirs, and commentaries, not just Mandela’s, are approached not as statements to posterity, but as messages functional to the simultaneous material political efforts they conjoined, and in which others were also involved. The narrative (to repeat the point) stays with the timeline of actions, rather than deviating to accommodate a wider argumentative structure. This treatment of deliberate expression as something best understood alongside and in light of behavior is designed not to close down further interpretations of expression, but in truth, there have been many interpretations of words already. The unruly syntagmatic parts bearing contrary messages were often subsumed. Here, against the appearance of totality or completeness, it is accepted that documents and spoken memories of self and other can never fairly capture a person’s humanity, and nor can this book. What we are, and what we intend, push past all narrative efforts, because there is an entire world in each one of us. Following from that simple insight, secondly, I invite readers to break open the book’s structure, to contest, challenge, and disassemble it, using their superior knowledge and experience aided by the apparatus of citations to the listed Sources. But it is not much regretted that I missed some things, and even less that I deliberately blurred and excluded others, as there would be no book otherwise. Forgetting is essential to action of any kind, Nietzsche tells us in his essay on the uses of history.¹⁶ But it may also be, no doubt will be, that there is a missed coherence in what is left out, what is yet to be described.

Some basic chronological road-signs for seeing up ahead may be useful at the outset. The first chapter launches the story from the particular crisis of 1960. A second chapter provides the necessary background for fathoming who Mandela was, and why many of his past colleagues operated together, or at odds. The core of the backstory concerns the ANC Youth League, a greenhouse of African liberatory nationalism, in conversation with anticolonialism and antiracism worldwide. After that, events and trends arrive in rough chronological sequence for ten chapters. The middle of the book amounts to a month-by-month ethnography of Mandela’s and his colleagues’ interactions, as they agitated to build support and formed relationships with external sources of knowledge. The chapters are chronological, but because each stage of the conflict changed the future nature of the beast, the chapters each feature a unique thematic emphasis. Chapter 3 proceeds from the apartheid-declared state of emergency, in mid-1960, and the state’s criminalizing of the African National Congress (ANC). Chapter 4 recounts Mandela’s unsuccessful effort to take command of the illegal ANC, and in that situation locates the formation of MK, relating the story up through August 1961.

The reader will see how, with MK, Mandela initiated actions that he supposed might lead to guerrilla war, and widespread disorder, and how, eventually, he pursued irregular warfare as a necessary response to the state’s militarized repression. Unaffiliated revolutionaries around him trod the same road. Mandela traced his historical knowledge to the experiences not just of Africans and Caribbeans but of past and contemporaneous revolutionaries worldwide, European, American, and Asian. He closely studied Mao’s peasant model, looking also at renegade anti-empire Zionist fighters, the Irgun. Chapter 5 is about this process, and about Mandela’s and fellow revolutionaries’ transnational ideas, drawing on Mandela’s handwritten notes and inventories of his and others’ bookshelves. Chapter 6 is about the end of the state’s massive Treason Trial, and about Mandela and his lieutenants as they leapt into action, many of them underground. It is about how he and his recruits organized MK in different parts of the country.

Chapter 7 is about MK’s essential action: destruction, in its operations and immediate effects, its targets and logistical modes. In the same span of time, Commander Mandela departed South Africa, traveled for over half a year, and received personal military training in Ethiopia by presidential guard officers. He traveled through Africa to forge pan-Africanist solidarity and ultimately a new at-home unity in a wider front. Interspersed in these middle chapters is an account of the PAC’s violent group, Poqo, and of other Liberal and Marxist saboteurs, desired for a unified front, whose actions mutually impacted MK’s.

Chapter 8 features an abrupt double caesura, the crisis occasioned by the Sabotage Act, which imposed severe penalties for political actions, including worker strikes, and the trauma of Mandela’s capture. British official intelligence services, working with the ANC and the SACP, facilitating them despite their international Communist affiliation, played all sides of the game. An agent of the American government in regular contact with South African White mercenaries reminds us of the nature of the international forces arrayed against the radicals.

The three subsequent chapters are about how MK and the ANC survived into 1962, meeting obstacles which ultimately stopped their revolutionary effort. Inevitably our readerly perspective shifts to police office, jail, and barracks and apartments abroad. The stuff of human relationships forms the matrix for tracing the revolutionaries’ thinking and actions in these chapters, just as in the previous ones. Chapter 9 concerns the fragmentation of MK’s operational unity over the vast expanse of South Africa, the divergence of regional human relational patterns as components of MK, followed by MK’s penetration by secret agents of the state. Chapter 10 is about the dual heirs to the ANC Youth League, having split into ANC and PAC in 1959, and their two mass nationalist insurgencies in 1963, which resembled each other, but which have most often been recollected as if unrelated (and unserious). Chapter 11 is about the mass arrests of members of MK, the ANC, and PAC, and about torture and damage, and escape, and disaster. The revolutionaries were put on trial for sedition, with Mandela, who was taken out of a penitentiary cell to join them in court under guard. Chapter 12 is about the price paid for the repression of his vision, by the radicals in exile, in prisons and in military camps abroad, and by South Africa’s political culture.

A jumble of human connections were quickly braided together in the effort to bring down the aggressive racist state. Apartheid survived, and was maintained for an additional thirty years, and the structures built under apartheid have in some ways lasted longer, even today mapping social disparities countrywide.¹⁷ The gap between rich and poor yawns wider in South Africa than anywhere else, as 2021’s politically tinged urban uprisings and riots painfully reminded us all. For a short period, a lifetime ago, in the early ’60s, Nelson Mandela and other revolutionaries tried to make another world. They mobilized against unprecedented state misrule, the epitome of the world’s racists’ denial of common humanity, to meet it with an attack creating an unpredictable escalation, in which the Black majority would prevail and initiate a genuine social revolution. The effort was deadly serious. It is time to look back at what Mandela and his comrades were trying to do, what they did, and how they met defeat.

Acknowledgments

TWELVE YEARS OF RESEARCH, thinking, reappraisal, rereading, writing, new reading, and revising have entailed several thousands of hours alone, because real writing, as Philip Roth somewhere said, is done as if at the bottom of a swimming pool. Coming up for air, one remembers there are debts.

I thank the University of Maryland for a Research and Scholarship Award (RASA) in 2013, and the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia for support in 2011–12, and for my sabbatical leaves. The book was helped by an assignment for a student, Grace Stubee, in an independent study in 2008. Thank you, Grace. In addition, I twice asked students in my South African History class to track Nelson Mandela’s every location from March 1961 to August 1962, and their projects were illuminating. I thank them.

I thank the late Terence O. Ranger, for encouraging me when he scarcely had to. It is good to think he and Mrs. Ranger saw another Oxford springtime together. The late Professor Philip Bonner, once the director of the History Workshop at the University of Witwatersrand, I thank for his express permission to use his and any History Workshop material as I saw fit, and for his friendship and encouragement. Phil, I raise a glass to you and your leadership for South Africa’s modern social history. Speaking of comradeship, Hylton White was there for me when I needed it. David Coplan, Six Lights, brother. Clifton Crais, thank you for help and support, and Thula Simpson, yours, and your read, and Tochi Eni-Kalu, and Saverio Giovacchini, and Neil Roos, your reads, and Timothy Burke, especially, your read, thank you. Thank you to the two peer reviewers, especially the second—at some point, this American is coming to convey his thanks in person.

Various archives are mentioned here briefly. But the speakers and testifiers and self-explainers and bruised witnesses are the people I owe everything to. I pulled blocks of their remarks from their original context, and subjected their memories to the criticism of other sources—and other people’s memories. I list every interview I quote from, but it is not enough. By this work I attempt to thank you for your words.

I wish also to thank the Historical Papers staff at the Cullen Library, at the University of the Witwatersrand, under Michele Pickover, and, at the time, Zofia Sulej and Gabriele Mohale, and to thank the current director, Isaac Nkadimeng. The Historical Papers’ husbandry in digitizing and indexing material is greatly appreciated. The archives house many collections, including interviews—when I began, few were online, but much more is online now, because of its work.

At Wits, Professor Peter Delius granted this author permission to copy, and closely listen to, and then make use of, interviews he conducted (1989–93), some of which fall under the rubric of the South African Development and Education Trust, or SADET, and some of which do not (including an interview transcript held by SAHA). Thank you, Professor Delius. Professor Gail Gerhart granted me permission to copy and so listen closely to her and her colleagues’ interviews with activists of various kinds (1969–80s). Thank you. Julie Frederikse granted me permission to read, use, and quote from, in this book, her voluminous transcribed interviews (mainly done 1988–90), mostly herself doing the interviewing; her papers are held at SAHA and SAHA.org.za. Thank you. Also to the officers and staff of the South African Historical Archive (SAHA) at the Old Women’s Prison, in Johannesburg, and the staff and director at the South African National Archives in Pretoria, I thank you: stay warm. The Arcadia Hotel’s breakfast staff near the Pretoria (Tshwane) National Archives were also critical to me in surviving winter days at SANA.

Albie Sachs, the students introduced to you by Shula Marks (now Dame Shula) long ago (1990) included me. I remember you, and your request for advice (!) in writing the provisional Constitution of your new country. Thank you. The supervisors of the University of the Western Cape’s Mayibuye Centre’s archival collection, some of which is now subsumed by the Robben Island Museum rubric, snail-mailed (airmail) this historian over a dozen CDs filled with Wolfie Kodesh’s (MCA series) interviews in audio form, for a very nominal fee. Stan Mabizela, especially, thank you.

Thank you, Ciraj Rassool and Patricia Hayes, for hospitality and a tour, and Patricia, several key seminars at the University of the Western Cape Center for Humanities Research, and thank you, director Premesh Lalu: you and your staff were all kind to me and my family during a critical 2016 month-long funded visit. Leslie Witz, thanks for your trust in your classroom, and to you and Josie for hospitality, and Nicky Rousseau, for your excellent commentary. In innumerable conversations, Art Eckstein listened to me and I to him about revolutionaries and their foibles as I organized my material: thank you, Art. His book on the Weather Underground, Bad Moon Rising, came out some years ago.

The professionals at the Bodleian Library and at the Rhodes House Library, thank you, and the Senate House Library, at the University of London, where are housed the Ruth First Papers and other sets of papers, thank you. The ANC archives at the University of Fort Hare, in Alice, South Africa, under the direction of Ike Maamoe assisted by Vuyo Feni-Fete, were critical to my research. Thank you, Ike, and thank you to the ANC in that, and to the University of Fort Hare. The staff of the Johannesburg Public Library was super helpful, facilitating my reading of newspapers and maps when they could have said, downstairs is closed.

Verne Harris and the staff of the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg, thank you. The helpful staff at the National Archives in the Cape Town depot, fully eleven years ago, at the very start of this project, I salute you. Nicholas Wolpe, of the Liliesleaf Museum, thank you. The United States’ National Archives (NARA) helped me access State and CIA material (such as has been released) on South African affairs in the period.

A few sets of interviews with witnesses, and other interview material, and court records, come to me as other people’s papers and notes directly. Thanks to Clifton Crais, whose work helped illuminate the Eastern Cape’s prosecution of saboteurs and Poqo agents, and who gave of his own material. Thanks, F. Jeffress Ramsay, Fred Morton, and Barry Morton, Pula! to you. Jeff provided me with full access to his typed notes taken (with bewildering abbreviated citations) of private-access files controlled by the Office of the President in Botswana, notes on British intelligence cables and reports still kept closed to researchers.

Thank you, Jan-Bart Gewald, who shared material from the Accra-based Ghanaian National Archives pertinent to Mandela, with me. Caroline Jeannerat, an old friend, found material for me in Johannesburg. Thank you, Hilary Lynd, who looked for and found important data for me in Moscow’s archives, including the black-letter reference to Mandela’s Communist Party membership. Peter Lovenheim, Musie Tadesse, and Kiya Kassa assisted me, and David (Dovidi) Fachler, in his research in Jerusalem: thank you. Thank you for the use of your photograph given to Tadesse Biru by Mandela.

Being a Fellow at the University of Johannesburg is an association I have cherished and relied on. Wendell More assisted me for over a month; thank you, Wendell. Natasha Erlank by her friendship and wisdom and support has helped make this book possible. Thank you, Bob Edgar, for years of fellowship, information, and specific NAUK (UK) documents on Lesotho. Thank you, Shula Marks, for welcoming me long ago. Steve Feierman, I learned a lot from you. Xolela Mangcu, thank you for sharing insights.

Robert Thornton, who put me up and conversed with me, and enjoys life, thank you. And for other people whose work is in dialogue with mine in person and in print: Arianna Lissoni, Robert Vinson, Ben Carton, Scott Couper, Stephen Davis, Ray Suttner, Vladimir Shubin, Sifiso Ndlovu, Jon Soske. I thank Moosa Moolla and his family including Afsa, greetings. My comrades Nancy Rose Hunt and Julie Livingston, also my dear friends, thank you. Tom Lodge, thank you. And Carolyn Hamilton, in our longterm dialogue: thank you. Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, thank you. Thank you, Saverio Giovacchini, Neil Roos, for reading. Pier Larson: too soon.

Through Facebook, I have interacted with other South Africans, Americans, Africans, invaluably to me in this endeavor—some of you also in real life. Thank you, Ran Greenstein, Devan Pillay, Shireen Hassim, Moemedi Kepadisa, Stephen Lowe, Daryl Glaser, Dilip Menon, Wendy Urban-Mead, and Brooks Spector, my sometimes textual colleagues.

Thank you to the children of Baruteng and Kelapile Onamile, and Kay, Bosa, Mesh, and all boOnamile. You help me be a better father to my children.

Hugh Macmillan, thank you. From Arianna Lissoni, Mr. Wellington Bottoman, and further contacts; from Shireen Hassim, Barbara Harmel, and further contacts (rest in peace, Barbara); Denis Goldberg, you were a hero. Ahmed Kathy Kathrada, also: you both treated me like a comrade. Omar Badsha, devoted man, thank you.

Among those others who have given me forums to present my work are the African Studies Association, and WISER under Keith Breckenridge and Cathy Burns, who offered commentary: thank you. Fiona Vernal, thank you for a similar opportunity you supplied, at the University of Connecticut, and for your work; and Jon Soske, for inviting me to speak at McGill University in Canada; Jakob Zollman, for friendship; Wang Yanqing of the University of Lanzhou; Nancy Jacobs, especially at the South African Historical Association’s meeting in Johannesburg, and in her Awkward Biographies project; Colin Bundy, for his care in editing, and for the Reassessing Mandela meeting in Oxford and Journal of Southern African Studies special issue and now book. Bill Beinart, hospitable and friendly host, thank you. Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, thanks for enlightening conversation. Karl Dargel, a most able researcher. Ethan Weisbaum, a student with great promise, thank you.

To Jan Vansina, how fortunate we were to sit with you; rest in peace, and now Joseph C. Miller, also gone. Stephen Ellis, I got your message, in the last emails, and I understood it after you died.

Surviving MK veterans, met in March 2018, thank you. Mac Maharaj, Ebrahim Ebrahim, Mike Dingake, James April, and Ronald Kasrils: thank you. All those who condescended to speak with me, to be interviewed, or just to help, beyond an interview, thank you.

Thank you to Ohio University Press, to the New African Histories series editors, Allen Isaacman, Derek Peterson, and Carina Ray; Stephanie Williams; Ricky Huard; Nancy Basmajian; Ted Byfield; and Beth Pratt. Thank you, Jacana Media, and Maggie Davey. Thank you to Kate Blackmer for the wonderful map.

Thank you to the staff and directors of the KFG Multiple Secularities Program and especially Monika Wohlrab-Sahr at the Universität Leipzig.

Thank you to the people in Union Kitchen, on 3rd St., though I know you are not a real union, for your iced coffee the three summers I wrote and rewrote, Sally, Hannah, Anthony, Ronald, Lena. Thank you, Fouad, Jeff, Tena, Theresa, and Shirley from the Jewish Community Center, you kept me intact. Thank you, my Department, my city, Washington, D.C., and animals.

Thank you, my Emily, if thanks can be said for love.

1

Crisis

(March 1960)

JOLTED BY A SMALL STONE and a pistol shot, the cops in front of Sharpeville’s central police station fired automatic weapons. They emptied their clips into the fleeing crowd.

Ch-chu-chu-chuh.

Most of the victims were right in front of them, at the wire. But the townships in which Africans were permitted to live were built on flat ground, there is just horizon and sky, and some of the bullets traveled very far. A woman was shot drinking tea quietly in her garden almost a kilometer away. Another distant victim, a businessman, John Mailane, delivering invoices by bike, was decapitated by a fusillade, and his body pedaled into an elderly woman.¹ A child was killed taking Coca-Cola orders from the crowd to a spaza shop. Three visitors from the Basutoland Protectorate were killed. The police shot away a quarter of the police station’s total stock of ammunition, over one thousand rounds, in less than half a minute. They killed sixty-nine persons and wounded many, many more.² It was the 21st of March, 1960.

Nelson Mandela was a lawyer, forty-two years old, the Transvaal province’s regional African National Congress (ANC) leader and the deputy president of the entire organization nationally. The political action at Sharpeville, which had built up during the previous night before converging at the station house, bypassed him. Robert Sobukwe had planned the mass action with colleagues who had left the ANC the year before and had formed the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). The Pan Africanists believed in forefronting transborder African anticolonial unity; the protest was about pass-books, mandatory identity documents that proved one’s right to work and travel in a given area, required for all working African men on pain of arrest in South Africa—hence the participation of visitors from the Basutoland Protectorate. Mandela, like some other of the top Black leaders and professionals in the country, was permitted to travel outside his home without carrying his pass-book. Sobukwe, whom he knew only slightly, was a graduate student and a schoolteacher, but like Mandela a former member of the Youth League, a radical group within the ANC that launched both men. Their fellow Youth League colleague, the brilliant Communist lawyer Duma Nokwe, had just planned an ANC program of boycotts and publicity against pass-books. Another comrade, Tennyson X. Makiwane, was to orchestrate the international front of that campaign in conjunction with the Anglican Church.

Sobukwe’s PAC plan interrupted the ANC plan. But now people lay dead on the ground. Mandela conferred with Walter Sisulu, the ANC’s secretary general, and with Nokwe, to decide how to respond to the massacre. The government sent policemen to arrest Sobukwe and other PAC leaders. Mandela spoke with Oliver O.R. Tambo, his legal partner in their downtown Johannesburg law partnership, and with Joe Slovo, a university friend, also a lawyer, sitting on the Central Committee (CC) of the country’s Communist Party (SACP). Together they asked the ANC’s president, Albert Chief Lutuli, to burn his pass-book as a protest, in solidarity with the victims of police gunfire. In Pretoria, where Lutuli and Mandela were, in March 1960, among the last defendants in an ongoing national trial of ANC-allied leaders, Lutuli did so. Then Mandela burned his pass-book, and other ANC and Communist leaders including Nokwe destroyed theirs. Photos of their faces lit up by their small fires made the newspapers. Crowds of ordinary laboring people, who were required to keep pass-books on their person at all times, threw theirs into bonfires. In faraway Langa, near Cape Town, the PAC had organized another march of several thousand from the township’s tin shacks into town, and policemen again killed more people, at least seven and possibly more.³

While PAC leaders were hauled away to jail, and families collected the bodies of their dead kin, Black leaders conferred and sought to continue the momentum of the protest past the crime inflicted on them. For instance, Indian-descended South African activists Indres Naidoo and Babla Saloojee drove through the northeastern Transvaal. They stopped in Indian-owned shops to organize a pass-book burning with Gert Sibande, a Black African rural ANC organizer they knew. And in Cape Town, Denis Goldberg, a White Capetonian engineer and devoted Communist, worked a Gestetner duplicator to produce thousands of tiny leaflets, ten of them cut from each folio page, that asked people to burn their pass-books. They were mailed out from the regular Post Office.⁴

Those efforts against the pass-book faltered, and progressively fewer working people were willing to destroy theirs. Pass-books were how employers and the apartheid state collaborated in order to control them: where they lived, where they were allowed to work, where they could travel. If employers needed workers, they applied to the state labor bureau. White bosses would not jeopardize future company contracts by ignoring passbook laws and keeping pass-book-less African workers on their payrolls. Strikes and sporadic violence continued all week long, but most of the Black workforce refrained from imperiling their jobs for the protest. At the African employment bureaus, soon enough, long lines of men waited to apply for replacement pass-books.

The ANC, the senior leaders around Mandela in Johannesburg, decided to launch a general strike on the 28th, a week on from then, in response to the killings.⁵ Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd suspended the police’s command-inspections of Blacks’ pass-books. Around fifty thousand people attended the mass funeral held for the Sharpeville victims, anger and violence flashing around the edges of the processions, which were temporarily unhindered by pass-book searches.⁶ After the last spadefuls of earth were thrown and the crowds had dispersed, however, Prime Minister Verwoerd declared a national State of Emergency to be in force.

Under this decree, Verwoerd banned the PAC and the ANC. Anyone caught with any PAC or ANC material or texts was guilty of a crime, and would be jailed. Earlier restrictions of the Eastern Cape ANC dating from the 1950s were extended to the ANC across the country. The Communist Party had been criminalized nationally even earlier, in 1950, and many activists individually were banned, meaning, barred from participating in any group activities under threat of arrest. Now Verwoerd reimposed the pass-book inspection regime on African working people in the street, and indeed hardened enforcement. Hundreds of thousands would again be removed from their urban homes and sent to remote areas, on the basis of pass-book infractions.

While the state was arresting active PAC and ANC members, the Sharpeville murders catalyzed fresh political involvement among the people. Before Sharpeville, I enjoyed being a photographer, recalled state-designated non-European Eddie Daniels. I was my own boss and I worked in a pleasant environment, taking photographs of happy occasions.⁷ Those times were changing. Indres Naidoo and Marius Schoon were painting protest slogans on walls, forming a Picasso Club.⁸ Many young men who had been only occasionally involved were galvanized by the slaughter into participating in public actions.⁹

Mandela, Lutuli, Sisulu, and other leaders lived exposed lives, representing and organizing for the ANC as titled leaders. They were also defendants in the huge state trial under way, the so-called Treason Trial, of Chief Lutuli and, originally, 155 other defendants, a media-covered trial that had gone on for four years, albeit with several gaps. The judge had released most of the defendants, thinning the dock down to a score of men, including Mandela, Sisulu, Lutuli, and Communist Party chair Abram Bram Fischer. Their defense in court was that they continued to respect the legitimacy of the state. The judicial system maintained a semblance of credibility: many lawyers continued to support Fischer, a leading figure through his practice, in particular. At some point, all the remaining defendants grew more optimistic they might be found Not Guilty and let go.

Mandela and other leaders had slept at home since they had posted bail, but the state was to re-detain them behind bars after Sharpeville. A contact inside the South African police tipped Mandela off, and he decided to wait for his arrest at home. Someone else warned Bram Fischer, and both men told others to hide. On 29 March[,] our phone rang at about 11:00 p.m., remembered Rica Hodgson, who was Walter Sisulu’s sometime secretary. Jack was out attending an illegal gathering. [ . . . ] Nelson Mandela’s voice was unmistakable.¹⁰ Jack Hodgson, a military veteran, confirmed Mandela ordered him into hiding.¹¹ Not everyone got a call, or even had a phone, however. Comrade Jerry Mbuli was a weekend boxer who prided himself on his resourcefulness, but he was caught unawares with his family.¹²

Joe Slovo, like Bram Fischer, was secretly a top Party member. The well-known barrister Slovo, careful and genial, was suing a mining company that March on behalf of 434 miners (six of them White) who had been crushed to death underground.¹³ In the public courts’ offices where he worked, colleagues of the Jewish Slovo had assigned him tables across from John Vorster, the ex-Nazi and (later on) National Party apartheid minister of justice: there Slovo prepared his cases. He accepted his imminent arrest, but his wife, Ruth First, another top Party member, fled with their children into British-protected Swaziland. Mandela, when he was not at his Mandela & Tambo, Attys., office downtown or in court, worked out of his Orlando, Johannesburg, kitchen. Soon enough the police were at his door with their characteristic sharp, unfriendly knocks.

The police did not assault him, but they beat Chief Albert Lutuli, the president of the ANC, on the head as he was arrested, which deeply offended Mandela and the rest of Lutuli’s colleagues.¹⁴ Violence was always already part of South African authority, already part of state politics and praxis. The police, going