LITMIR.BIZ

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broader support. In early December a young ex-colonial officer, Patrick Duncan, the son of a former Governor-General of South Africa, entered the fray. Duncan was a courageous idealist, with the boyish zeal of a John Buchan hero, passionately anti-communist but also an admirer of Gandhi. Mandela and Yusuf Cachalia persuaded him to join the campaign, to show other whites the way. ‘Pat’s offer came as a gift from heaven,’ Cachalia said. ‘It stopped the campaign becoming racial.’³⁹ Duncan, together with Manilal Gandhi (whom he had persuaded to join him) and a few other whites entered Germiston township near Johannesburg without permits, and were arrested. In the blaze of publicity that followed many blacks were moved by Duncan’s courage, and when he was eventually sent to jail, Mandela, Cachalia and Dadoo came to wish him good luck. But Duncan was not joined by other whites, as they had hoped, and he proved an awkward ally. In the courtroom he pleaded not guilty, then unsuccessfully appealed against his guilty verdict, but never served his full six-week sentence. After his release he became worried about communist influence within the ANC. He later joined the new Liberal Party, and then the Pan Africanist Congress, which became the ANC’s most serious rival.⁴⁰ But Mandela would always remember his bravery with respect.

      By the end of 1952 the Defiance Campaign was over. It had been a six-months’ wonder. Politicians and historians continue to argue over its success or failure. Mandela admitted it never spread much beyond the cities and larger towns, except in the Eastern Cape.⁴¹ But he claimed it as an ‘outstanding success’ which had boosted the ANC’s membership – from 4,000 to 16,000 in the Transvaal, while in the Cape it reached 60,000.⁴² The ANC had shown an ability for national organisation which few observers had suspected, and for which Mandela could take much credit. This gave him an important psychological boost, freeing him, as he wrote later, ‘from any lingering doubt or inferiority I might still have felt … I could walk upright like a man, and look everyone in the eye with the dignity that comes from not having succumbed to oppression and fear.’⁴³

      The Defiance Campaign also drastically changed the character of the ANC, scaring off the more timid, conservative leaders like Dr Moroka, who was ousted. The young ‘kingmakers’, who included Mandela, looked for a more steadfast President, and found one in Albert Luthuli, a Zulu chief of fifty-three. Luthuli was a large, avuncular figure with slow speech and a generous smile. A former teacher and Methodist preacher based at the mission station of Groutville in Natal, he appeared to be thoroughly conservative. But he had progressed, as he said, ‘along the line of softness to hardness’.⁴⁴ Luthuli became President of the Natal ANC in 1951, and had supported the Defiance Campaign despite pressure from the government, which sacked him from his chieftaincy. He responded with a moving Christian statement called ‘The Road to Freedom is via the Cross’.⁴⁵

      Luthuli deeply respected Gandhi, and admired the moderation of the British Labour Party, but he was not afraid to work with communists. ‘Extreme nationalism is a greater danger than communism, and a more real one,’ he told me when he was elected as ANC President in December 1952.⁴⁶ Over the next fifteen years – the longest presidency in the ANC’s history – he was often banned and confined to the area of his home in Natal, and was sometimes seen as a mere figurehead. But Mandela would always regard him as his leader, and a hero of the struggle.

      The Defiance Campaign came and went without making much dent on white South African attitudes or on opinion abroad, beyond some left-wing protests. The British diplomats in Pretoria watched events with scepticism, and depicted the Africans as the pawns of Indians and communists. ‘The natives have only a rudimentary political organisation and no effective leaders,’ said one despatch to London in May 1952. The diplomats’ main fear was of ‘civil war between the two white races’, in which the natives might intervene.⁴⁷ The High Commissioner, Sir John Le Rougetel, was upset by the ‘extravagance and scurrility’ of American criticism of the apartheid government, and by a resolution of the Labour Party, then in opposition, which condemned it. He insisted that the British should ‘leave the South Africans to fight their own battles’ – particularly since the more liberal United Party was ‘stiffening up’. Sir John accepted the views of the head of the South African Special Branch, Colonel du Plooy, that the ANC was being financed by the Indian Congress and that ‘its leadership comes entirely from the communist leaders’; he passed on this ‘intelligence’ in a remarkably ill-informed despatch to London in November. The riots in Port Elizabeth he blamed partly on Indian communists who needed a spectacular event to revive the United Nations’ interest in South Africa.⁴⁸

      Winston Churchill, who had recently returned to power in Britain as Conservative Prime Minister, had his own confident view, minuted on 16 October: ‘Nothing could be more helpful to Dr Malan in his approaching elections than the Indians and Kaffirs forcing their way into compartments and waiting rooms reserved for whites. The overwhelming mass of the white population of South Africa would be opposed to this intrusion. So what the communists and Indian intriguers are doing is really to help Malan. They must be very stupid not to see this.’⁴⁹

      A few Western diplomats were more perceptive. The Canadian High Commissioner, T.W.L. MacDermot, reported to Ottawa in February 1953: ‘The ANC is a great deal more than a political party. Representing as it does the great majority of articulate Africans in the Union, it is almost the parliament of a nation. A nation without a state, perhaps, but it is as a nation that the Africans increasingly think of themselves.’⁵⁰

      7

      Lawyer and Revolutionary

      1952–1954

      TO OUTWARD APPEARANCES, in his early thirties Nelson Mandela was leading a settled home life in the matchbox-house in Orlando. His wife Evelyn ran the home with a dedication that impressed many of their friends. ‘Without Evelyn’s encouragement and assurance that she would always be there to keep the home fires burning,’ wrote Phyllis Ntantala later, ‘he would not have made it.’¹ Always in the background, she cooked and cared for the spotless house, maintaining a simple lifestyle: when Mandela’s English supporter Canon John Collins visited it in 1954, Mandela brought him a bowl of water to wash his hands in, and led him to the outside lavatory, a tumbledown shed containing a bucket. Collins was struck that Evelyn did not join them for lunch.²

      But it was not a happy home, and was much less stable than the Sisulus’ or the Tambos’. Evelyn disapproved of Mandela’s political career, and he realised that her religion ‘would not support political activity’.³ When she had married him, she explained, she had thought he was a student, not a politician. Though she sometimes put on an ANC uniform, she said: ‘I was just trying to please him.’⁴ She was becoming more religious as her husband became more political: a dedicated Jehovah’s Witness, she spent much of her time reading the Bible. Their friend the writer Es’kia Mphahlele believed Evelyn’s religion was partly an escape from the political pressure, and felt that the Mandelas were incompatible: ‘It could never work.’⁵ Certainly the household was showing strain. Mandela’s younger sister Leabie, who sometimes stayed in the house and saw him almost as a father, was very aware of the tension. Evelyn, she

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