LITMIR.BIZ

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between Zulus and British, then between Afrikaners and British. ‘Was it the same Afrikaner who fought so tenaciously for his own freedom,’ he wondered, ‘who had now become such a tyrant, and was persecuting us?’⁴⁷ In Durban he stayed with his Indian friends Ismail and Fatima Meer, and visited the banned Luthuli in Groutville. Arriving home in the Transkei he saw his mother again, with a mixture of nostalgia and guilt. He had invited her to come and stay with him in Johannesburg, but she had chosen to continue living alone, twenty miles from a doctor, still a simple peasant woman ploughing the fields and surviving in the rugged conditions.⁴⁸ In jail he would always have an uneasy conscience about her: but she had encouraged him to fight for his beliefs, and he reassured himself that his struggle was giving his people a new meaning to life.⁴⁹

      His main purpose in visiting the Transkei was political. The government was now determined to extend apartheid by means of the new Bantu Authorities Act, which would promote the chiefs locally while subordinating them to their white rulers in Pretoria. The Transkei was to be the showpiece. The Bunga, the council of Transkei chiefs, had rejected the new Act in 1952, but the government had lured them with greater juridical and financial powers, and in 1955 the Bunga voted to accept it. Mandela was upset, but realistic: with his own chiefly background he clearly understood the temptation to collaborate. In July 1955 he wrote a well-argued article for Fighting Talk called ‘Bluffing the Bunga into Apartheid’. He pointed out how every chief and headman would now be paid by the government, and fired if they defied it, as Chief Luthuli had been fired in 1952. It was ‘part of a deliberate bluff’ to deceive the credulous tribal leaders into believing that they had a voice in their own government. But he recognised the weakness of ANC propaganda in the face of the chiefs’ influence over their people, and urged the ANC to reconsider its decision to boycott the forthcoming Transkei elections: ‘Should these bodies not be used as platforms to expose the policies of the Nationalist government, and to win the people over to the liberation movement?’⁵⁰

      Mandela saw the conflict in very personal terms. Kaiser Matanzima, his nephew and one-time hero at Fort Hare, was now an influential chief in the territory of Western Tembuland, and he had helped to persuade the Bunga to accept the new Act. The two men, both born to rule, both confident lawyers, had much in common, and they would always maintain a family intimacy. But they now had very different loyalties, and found themselves on opposite sides in the classic debate between collaborator and resister. Mandela no longer believed in the hereditary principle which had benefited Matanzima, while Matanzima saw Mandela as now being a Johannesburger, ‘far away from his home people’.

      During his visit to the Transkei Mandela argued with Matanzima through the night, carefully avoiding theoretical ‘isms’. He warned him that the government aimed to divide and rule the black people, and claimed that resistance would avoid future massacres. Matanzima replied that the chiefs would be strengthened by the apartheid system, and that multi-racial policies would increase racial friction, leading to bloodshed and bitterness. He saw himself as being in the thick of battle. ‘My attitude was one of reconciliation with the Afrikaners,’ Matanzima recalled forty years later. ‘Black and white must meet together in the Transkei.’⁵¹ Mandela was distressed by the deadlock. ‘I would have loved to fight side by side with him,’ he wrote later in jail, ‘and share with him the laurels of victory.’ But by then Matanzima was firmly allied with the ANC’s enemies.

      Mandela continued his tour of the country. He drove on to Port Elizabeth, where he first met Govan Mbeki, the Marxist activist who was organising the ANC in the Eastern Cape. Then he visited the campaigning Englishman Christopher Gell, who lived in an iron lung – from which he dictated shrewd advice to the ANC and sharp critiques of apartheid for the newsletter Africa X-Ray Report. Mandela never forgot this unusual ally: when Gell died the ANC organised his funeral, with more blacks than whites among the mourners.

      Mandela went on to Cape Town, enchanted by the famous Garden Route, stopping near Clarkson to appreciate both the glorious view and the opportunities for guerrilla fighters to hide in the forests: ‘My head was full of dangerous ideas.’ In Cape Town he did not see the Trotskyists with whom he had argued seven years earlier, but moved between communists and clergy. He visited the offices of New Age to find the police searching them and seizing papers: an omen of trouble to come. He stayed for two weeks in the black township of Langa with Methodist ANC activists, driving round the Cape to organise branches (though resting on Sundays). Before he left the Methodists knelt and prayed for his safe journey home.

      Mandela returned to his family in Orlando feeling refreshed and reactivated, and much better informed about rural realities. He warned his colleagues that the ANC was very weak in the Transkei, faced by conservative chiefs and strong security police, and urged a ‘boycott from within’. The argument was urgent, as the government pressed ahead with ‘grand apartheid’. A government commission, headed by Professor F.R. Tomlinson and including no blacks, had outlined an ambitious scheme to invest in separate homelands, or ‘Bantustans’, in which Africans would ‘develop along their own lines’, with their own administration and industries. The government accepted much of it, while rejecting its more liberal proposals, and prepared to cut up South Africa into separate Bantustans: the Transkei would be the first. Mandela warned that the Bantustans would have no real scope for developing their own policies, while providing reserves of cheap labour for white employers.⁵²

      Apartheid plans were stretching out everywhere, and the government was also determined to enforce complete segregation in schools. The Bantu Education Act of April 1953 gave Pretoria control over all the mission schools, in order to enforce the principle (in Verwoerd’s famous words) that: ‘There is no place for the Bantu in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour.’ As Verwoerd told Parliament: ‘Racial relations cannot improve if the wrong type of education is given to Natives. They cannot improve if the result of Native education is the creation of frustrated people who, as a result of the education they received, have expectations in life which circumstances in South Africa do not allow to be fulfilled immediately.’⁵³

      Mandela was just such a frustrated native. For all his past complaints about the missionaries’ imperialism, he was always appreciative of his teachers – and he would become more grateful to them later. He was saddened when the Methodists agreed to hand over their schools to the government: ‘Verwoerd must have danced.’⁵⁴ Most Anglican schools were likewise handed over, but the Roman Catholics kept their schools going without the help of the state.⁵⁵ Mandela feared that the new tribal education system, on top of the territorial segregation, would further undermine the national unity of the ANC: ‘The African people are being broken up into small tribal units, isolated one from the other, in order to prevent the rise of national consciousness amongst them and to foster a narrow and insulated tribal outlook.’⁵⁶

      The Bantu Education Act brought to a head the thorny question of apartheid schools. Mandela was more realistic than most of the National Executive of the ANC, who wanted a permanent boycott. He warned that they would not be able to sustain it, and could not provide an effective alternative: they should not promise what they could not deliver. He was overruled, and the ANC called for children to stay away, and tried to create schools of its own. But the ANC schools were harassed by the police, and parents became desperate for some kind of education. The ANC was compelled to give up the boycott. Historians would judge its mistake harshly: ‘Of all campaigns conducted by the ANC,’ wrote Frank Welsh in 1998, ‘that against Bantu education was the most poorly-planned, the most confused and, for Africans generally, the most confusing.’⁵⁷ Mandela’s warning had been vindicated. ‘It was a heavy responsibility,’ he wrote, ‘to choose between two evils: fighting

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