Mandela: The Authorised Biography - Anthony Sampson

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them in the classroom.’58

      Apartheid in schools was soon followed by apartheid in universities, as the government forced higher education into the same mould. The Extension of University Education Act of 1959 would remove the independence of Mandela’s old academies, Fort Hare and Wits, and impose strict segregation. It would kick away the ladder by which he and his friends had reached a wider world, and break black students’ contacts with other races, which threatened the government’s system. ‘The friendship and interracial harmony,’ Mandela wrote in Liberation in 1957, ‘constitute a direct threat to the entire policy of apartheid and baasskap [white domination].’59

      Mandela watched the avenues of his hopeful youth closing behind him. The schools and universities were being cut off from the wider influences of English liberal culture which had forged his own attitudes. The government was showing the full ruthlessness of its policies, while dividing his people to frustrate their opposition. Mandela still believed the new structures should be resisted from within; but he had to wait twenty years to be proved right, by the schoolchildren of Soweto. In the meantime his old schools had been first cut back, then devastated, by apartheid: when Jack Dugard, the former principal of the teacher-training school at Healdtown, returned there in 1976 he found that all but one of the staff were Afrikaners, obsessed by their own personal safety, while the classrooms had been wrecked by fires. He asked: ‘How could education progress in such an atmosphere?’60

      Keeping in touch with his rural roots gave Mandela a special perspective. In February 1956 he made another brief trip to the Transkei with Sisulu, to buy a plot of land in Umtata, following his principle that a man should own land near his birthplace.61 Soon after returning to Johannesburg he was banned for the third time, preventing him from leaving the city for another five years. He judged that ‘The police thought they had given me enough rope to run around.’ But he was now more defiant, and contemptuous of bans. ‘I was determined,’ he wrote in jail, ‘that my involvement in the struggle, and the scope of my political activities, would be determined by nobody else but myself.’62 His bans had compelled him to become more self-reliant, more detached from any party machine. But at the same time the government’s oppression was forcing the ANC and its allies closer together.

      Mandela was set on a clear collision course with the government, which was watching him carefully. After being served with his bans he wrote to the Minister of Justice on 13 April asking him for his reasons. Three months later he received a long reply (still retained in the Department’s archives) stating that he had vilified the whites and incited blacks to disobey laws and establish a black government, and reminding him of inflammatory speeches he had made over the previous six years. On 22 June 1950 he had said: ‘It is about three hundred years since the Europeans came to this country. Heroes and beauties of Africa died. Our country was taken away and slavery came up.’ ‘This is the organisation,’ he had said of the ANC on 22 March 1952, ‘which will be the future government of this country.’ ‘If everybody stood together and remained together,’ he said on 7 November 1952, ‘there would come a time when we would repay the blood of those killed.’ ‘We are in a better position against the Afrikaner people than they were when they fought the British imperialists,’ he said on 7 March 1954. ‘I know as sure as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow that a major clash will come and all forces of reaction will collapse against the forces of liberation.’63

      He was right about the clash, but wrong about the collapse.

      9

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      Treason and Winnie

      1956–1957

      EVER SINCE the Congress of the People in June 1955, and the subsequent raids, the government had threatened mass arrests and charges. In April 1956 the Minister of Justice, C.R. Swart, told Parliament that the police were investigating a serious case of high treason, and that about two hundred people would eventually be arrested. But ANC officials were inclined to dismiss the urgency. In November 1956 the President of the Transvaal ANC, E.P. Moretsele, told his conference: ‘The whole affair is an election stunt to win them votes. In all probability the Nationalists will carry out their threat, but they are in no hurry to do so, for the election takes place two years from now.’1

      There was some hurry. A month later, early in the morning of 5 December 1956, Mandela was awakened by loud knocking, and found three white policemen at the door with warrants to search the house and to arrest him on a charge of high treason. Over the next ten days another 155 leaders of all races within the Congress alliance were arrested on the same charge.

      Mandela was not altogether surprised, but he was not prepared for a marathon trial which would cripple his political activity and his law practice for five years. Most of the prominent participants of the Congress of the People were now in jail – with some important exceptions, including Dr Dadoo, Yusuf Cachalia, J.B. Marks and Govan Mbeki. Trevor Huddleston, the monk who had been honoured at the Congress and who would have given the accused a special Christian respectability, had been recalled to Britain by his superior. The Liberals, having stayed away from the Congress, were also not included in the arrests, and as a result nearly all the whites at the trial were communists, which gave credence to the government’s allegations of a Marxist conspiracy – and also gave the communists a new prestige among Africans as fellow martyrs who shared their sacrifices for the cause.

      The mass arrests marked the end of the ‘phoney war’. On the night before they took place, the black Johannesburg writer and journalist Can Themba was, as he put it, ‘doing my routine round-up of the shebeens with my news nose stuck out’. In one he came upon a drunken gathering which included three prominent ANC activists, Robert Resha, Tennyson Makiwane and Lionel Morrison, who were accusing a fellow boozer of leading a dissolute life. They decided to hold a mock-trial, with Resha as defence counsel and Makiwane as prosecutor. Themba joined in as the magistrate, and after lively pleadings found the accused guilty. The next morning all three of the activists were arrested for high treason. When Themba described the shebeen scene in the next issue of Drum, which appeared while the suspects were preparing their defence, Mandela was furious with him for showing his Congress colleagues in such a frivolous light.2

      There was nothing frivolous about the arrests. Mandela had joked with his arresting officer Detective-Constable Rousseau, but the policeman had warned him, ‘You are playing with fire;’ Mandela had replied, ‘Playing with fire is my game.’3 The police were determined to humiliate the prisoners, who were eventually all collected together in ‘The Fort’, the legendary prison on the hill looking over Johannesburg. All of them, including venerable dignitaries like Luthuli, Z.K. Matthews and James Calata, were ordered to strip naked in the outdoor quadrangle, where they waited for an hour for a white doctor to question them, shyly not looking at each other, revealing their bellies and trying to cover their private parts. Mandela, conscious of his own fine physique, remembered the proverb that ‘Clothes make the man’, and reflected that if a fine body was thought essential to leadership, few of the prisoners would qualify: ‘Only a handful had the symmetrical build of Shaka or Moshoeshoe in their younger days.’ His Natal colleague Masabalala (Martin) Yengwa draped himself in a blanket and recited a traditional Zulu praise-song honouring Shaka. The other prisoners listened in delight, and the staid Chief Luthuli exclaimed in Zulu, ‘That is Shaka!’ and began to chant and to join in the dance with the others – though most were in fact not Zulus. ‘We were all nationalists,’ Mandela reflected, ‘bound together by love of our history.’4

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