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href="#litres_trial_promo">³³ The white newspapers prominently reported the meeting and the police intervention, while not printing the Charter itself. But the text of the Charter soon reverberated within the ANC, and was challenged by formidable critics.³⁴

      In December 1955 the annual conference of the ANC debated the Charter in a stormy atmosphere, while most of its architects were banned from attending. The National Executive complained that many ANC branches ‘showed a complete lack of activity, as if some of them regretted the birth of this great and noble idea’.³⁵ Luthuli himself was uneasy, as he told his Congress colleague Arthur Letele, about ‘certain new trends or cliques in Congress’, but he commended the Charter, and advocated an ‘all-inclusive African nationalism’ which embraced all South Africans. Many nationalists, who now called themselves ‘Africanists’, resisted cooperation with other races. The former ANC President Alfred Xuma wrote a letter complaining about ‘certain tendencies’ within Congress, which he believed had ‘lost its identity as a National Liberation Movement with a policy of its own and distinct African leadership’. Mandela’s former mentor Peter Mda reasserted the original nationalism of the Youth League in an article in his journal the Africanist: ‘From our inception we saw the burning need of ridding the ANC of foreign domination.’ He proclaimed: ‘NO WHITE MAN HAS EVER IMPRESSED US.’³⁶

      The annual conference eventually put off endorsing the Freedom Charter until a special conference in Orlando in April 1956. There it provoked a new storm. The Africanists complained that the conference had been packed by the ‘Charterists’, and attacked the idea that the land belonged to everyone, implicit in the phrase ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’, which suggested public ownership. Luthuli and the Natal branch had their own concerns about the economic clauses of the Charter, but they gave way in the cause of unity, not wanting to strengthen the hand of the Africanists.³⁷ Luthuli was resisting pressure to dissociate himself from left-wing allies: that year his eccentric white Californian friend Mary-Louise Hooper, who had been raising funds for the ANC in America, suggested to him that the ANC should change its official lawyers, Mandela & Tambo, because their left-wing reputation was putting off potential donors. Luthuli replied that while he did not like communists, ‘it would not only be unwise but mean to forgo the services of any of our faithful and tried lawyers solely on the grounds of leftist leanings’.³⁸

      The Freedom Charter was eventually approved by the conference. It was a remarkable achievement, just when the Afrikaner government was imposing its exclusive racial power, for the ANC to adopt a manifesto which was above all anti-racial.³⁹ ‘For the first time in the history of our country,’ wrote Mandela a year later, ‘the democratic forces irrespective of race, ideological conviction, party affiliation or religious belief have renounced and discarded racialism in all its ramifications.’⁴⁰ But the Charter was approved at the cost of fierce dissension, which would split the ANC apart two years later.

      Nelson Mandela gave his own interpretation of the Freedom Charter, which would later become significant, in an important article in Liberation in June 1956, the first anniversary of the Congress of the People. It was not just his view: all the articles in Liberation were carefully edited by the magazine’s whole board, and Mandela had been asked to ‘correct the assumption that the Freedom Charter was the embryo of a socialist state’.⁴¹ The article largely conformed to the Marxist interpretation of the Charter, which Mandela argued was a ‘revolutionary document precisely because the changes it envisages cannot be won without breaking up the economic and political set-up of present South Africa’. And he underlined the need for public ownership: ‘The Charter strikes a fatal blow at the financial and gold-mining monopolies that have for centuries plundered the country and condemned its people to servitude.’⁴²

      But in a crucial passage he welcomed the opportunity that would be created for free enterprise to expand: ‘The breaking up and democratisation of these monopolies will open up fresh fields for the development of a prosperous non-European bourgeois class. For the first time in the history of this country the non-European bourgeoisie will have the opportunity to own in their own name and right mills and factories, and trade and private enterprise will boom and flourish as never before.’⁴³

      For decades these two sentences would reverberate through subsequent trials and angry debates on Robben Island. They were omitted – as Trotskyists noted with relish – from the Liberation article when it appeared in Mandela’s published speeches and writings, edited by Ruth First in London and several times reprinted.⁴⁴ But Mandela continued to state his belief that under the ANC private enterprise would ‘flourish as never before’ – which would have a very practical significance forty years later.

      The arguments about future economic systems were beginning to be overshadowed by the more immediate activities of the Afrikaner government. By the mid-fifties the Nationalists were extending their policy of apartheid much more rapidly and thoroughly than Mandela and his colleagues had first anticipated. In 1954, at the age of eighty, Dr Malan retired, to be succeeded as Prime Minister by Hans Strijdom, a cruder advocate of white domination, with little intellectual subtlety. But a much more ambitious concept of ‘grand apartheid’ was being prepared by Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, the Minister of Native Affairs, who would become Prime Minister in 1958.

      Verwoerd, with his innocent face and gentle voice, was a visionary who had no doubts about the moral rightness of his plan to completely separate blacks from whites, a plan which attracted Afrikaner intellectuals and others as the ultimate solution to the problem of race relations. But it could be achieved only by a programme of drastic social engineering and mass removals which was closer to the actions of communist governments in Eastern Europe than to any free-enterprise model in the West. While Afrikaner governments were representing themselves as champions of free enterprise, they were embarking on unprecedented state intervention which constantly impinged on the daily lives of Africans. The new black townships, with their thousands of identical houses unrelieved by shops or businesses, looked like caricatures of socialist housing for the lumpenproletariat.

      Mandela spent much time analysing and criticising ‘Verwoerd’s Grim Plot’, as he called it.⁴⁵ He regarded Verwoerd as following the broad ideas of Hitler’s national socialism and racial principles, through which he had planned to rule Germany’s African colonies. ‘Fascism has become a living reality in our country,’ Mandela wrote in June 1957, ‘and its defeat has become the principal task of the entire people of South Africa.’⁴⁶ But Verwoerd had reason to believe that he could gain support from tribal leaders, by encouraging their rivalries and differences. He had a special opportunity to do this in the rural areas, where the chiefs were jealous of their territorial influence and privileges. Only a few chiefs, like Albert Luthuli, were prepared to resign their chieftainship rather than serve an alien power. As in wartime Europe, it required great courage to resist the temptation to collaborate with an all-powerful regime.

      Mandela now saw himself as belonging firmly to Johannesburg, which had forged his mature attitudes and politics. But he still kept his links with the countryside, and his royal ancestry and upbringing had given him a deeper sense of involvement with his home territory than most of his colleagues. ‘Fourteen years of crammed life in South Africa’s largest city,’ he wrote later, ‘had not killed the peasant in me.’ In September 1955 his travel ban had again expired, and he decided to revisit the Transkei.

      Driving through Natal, he again enjoyed the wild, open landscape and his closeness to nature, with a relish which comes through in his

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