LITMIR.BIZ

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wife Frieda. ‘How wrong they are!’ He watched the semi-literate police presenting their incoherent evidence in muddled English and producing supposedly incriminating documents like a 1956 calendar or a notice saying ‘Soup with Meat’. He saw how the Afrikaner hatred of blacks was linked to their resentment of English disdain: ‘It is amazing how deeply the Afrikaners resent the superior attitude of the English. They are making us suffer too because they think we have sold our souls to the English.’ But he worried that in ten years’ time ‘the hatred of the African for the European will be worse than the hatred of the white man for the black’.¹⁸

      The long Treason Trial brought the various racial groups inside the courtroom much closer together. ‘I doubt whether we could have devised so effective a method of ensuring cohesion in resistance and of enlarging its embrace,’ said Luthuli.¹⁹ ‘We didn’t realise we had so much in common,’ said Paul Joseph, an Indian ex-factory worker from a humble background who became a friend of Mandela. ‘The trial created a cohesion which didn’t exist before.’²⁰ The Africans found themselves pressed together with whites, Indians and Coloureds in roughly the same proportion as the population of the country. It was just the kind of multi-racial partnership many of them had been advocating. Whatever propaganda motives had led the government to bring the accused to trial, they could now spread their own counter-propaganda that this was a united, genuinely non-racial movement.

      During the daily lunch-hour the accused shared their sandwiches and devised recreations, including the ‘Drill Hall Choir’, and discussed their arguments and problems. When they went home in the evenings they were made to feel like heroes rather than traitors, with free drinks in shebeens and parties given by white and Indian well-wishers, which extended their contacts and friendships among the other races. Bram Fischer and his wife gave dinners for black leaders, including Luthuli and Mandela, where they met his lawyer friends; Joe Slovo and Ruth First held parties at which Africans, Indians and whites drank, jived and embraced, apparently oblivious of colour. They joked about being hanged for treason, and seemed unconcerned about spies, even welcoming the local CIA agent Millard Shirley, an engaging and gregarious American who was ostensibly writing a book (‘My Mother was a Missionary’) but was always turning up at ANC functions.²¹ But the courage of the ‘traitors’ was real enough. Some of the accused may have been careless or histrionic – ‘peacocking’, as Africans called it – but the courage and the danger were real enough. In jail later, Mandela remembered one of the defendants’ white liberal benefactors, Ellen Hellman, the Chairman of the Institute of Race Relations, arriving in the courtroom to discuss fund-raising. He began to compliment her on her elegant outfit, but she cut him short: ‘Mr Mandela, just tell me in simple terms, what do you want, what do you want?’²²

      There was also some interest from liberal South African businessmen. Luthuli and a few others, not including Mandela, were invited to meet Harry Oppenheimer of the Anglo-American Corporation. He politely told them that their demands for universal suffrage were too extreme, and that boycotts put off white support. They replied that they could not conceal their real demands, however unpleasant they might seem to whites.²³ Oppenheimer discreetly gave £40,000 to the Treason Trial Defence Fund.²⁴

      Practical help from abroad was received from British and other well-wishers through the Defence Fund, which was launched by Canon Collins in London and Bishop Reeves in Johannesburg to cover legal and other costs. It was administered first by Hilary Flegg, then by Mary Benson, then by Freda Levson, with all of whom Mandela became friends.²⁵ Mandela was also heartened by the appearance as observers of many Western jurists, including Gerald Gardiner, the British barrister who later became Lord Chancellor, and by American solidarity, including a visit from George Houser of the American Committee for Africa, and gifts from Sammy Davis Junior.²⁶

      But British and American diplomats in Pretoria continued to avoid meetings with the black opposition, lest they offend the Afrikaner government. Ambassador Byroade invited only whites to the US Embassy’s Independence Day party in July 1957, in contrast to the Soviet Consul-General’s open hospitality.²⁷ Successive British Ambassadors invited no blacks to their Queen’s Birthday parties, and made no direct contact with any ANC leaders: their diplomats relied on quoting journalists in their despatches, which made no reference to Mandela.²⁸ In London, South Africa had been under the Dominions Office, which had a cosy family relationship with the white Commonwealth who had been allies in the Second World War, and was more concerned with keeping lines open to Afrikaner nationalists than with African troublemakers; while the Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was not yet grappling with the problems of Africa.²⁹

      All through the Treason Trial Mandela had been existing in a strange limbo, between normality and danger; but his life had been further disrupted by a thrilling romance. When the trial began he had been leading a bachelor existence. His marriage with Evelyn had fallen apart, with recriminations on both sides. Evelyn would recall with some bitterness how Mandela would spend nights away without explanation, and claimed that he once nearly throttled her – a charge which Mandela emphatically denies.³⁰ She was more alienated as her husband became more political. After he was first arrested for treason, he returned home from prison on bail to find Evelyn departed and the house emptied, even of its curtains. Mandela had to try to reassure his two children, Makgatho and Makaziwe (Maki), who were deeply upset.³¹

      Mandela’s friends speculated whether he would remarry, and he was often seen with eligible women. One of his female companions was Ruth Mompati, the resourceful secretary in his law office. Another was Lilian Ngoyi, the vivacious and forceful leader of the ANC Women’s League, who was one of his fellow-accused in the Treason Trial. Helen Joseph, who was close to both of them, thought how effective they would be as man and wife.³²

      But it was not an experienced politician who was to capture Mandela, nor any of the other women he and Evelyn had quarrelled over, but a newcomer, a beautiful young social worker of twenty-two, sixteen years younger than Mandela.³³ Winnie Nomzamo Madikizela came from Bizana in Pondoland, part of the Transkei, where her father Columbus Madikizela was a headmaster. (It was also the home area of her hero, Tambo: ‘I was actually made by Oliver Tambo,’ she says now.³⁴) Winnie’s clan, the Ngutyana, was one of the most powerful in Pondoland. Her great-grandfather Madikizela had been a fierce chieftain in Natal until he fled from Shaka’s Zulu army to settle near Bizana. Her grandfather Chief Mazingi, a prosperous trader with twenty-nine wives, was converted to Methodism. Her mother, who was thought to have white blood, was passionately religious, and had nine children before she died when Winnie was aged nine, after which her father raised her strictly as a Methodist. He remained awesomely aloof, leaving Winnie’s two strong grandmothers to influence her most. Her father’s mother Makhulu taught her the ways of her ancestors, while her mother’s mother, ‘Granny’, was a staunch Methodist who made her own Western-style dresses. ‘She derived from Makhulu her imperious authority,’ said Winnie’s lifelong friend Fatima Meer, ‘and from Granny her love for smart clothes and an obsession with cleanliness.’³⁵

      Winnie as a child had been strong-willed, rebellious and sometimes violent. Once she made a knuckleduster with a tin and a nail with which she hit her sister in the mouth: the wound had to be sewn up by the doctor. Winnie never forgot

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