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work out how to operate as a banned organisation. Mandela realised that the ban necessitated a drastic reorganisation of the ANC to trim down the whole structure, dissolving the Youth League and the Women’s League and concentrating on a small inner group. ‘Politics for any active member became highly dangerous,’ he wrote from jail, ‘and a form of activity reserved only for the hard core.’⁵⁰ Operating in a climate of illegality, he recognised the need for a quite new psychological approach.⁵¹ When the Communist Party had been banned in 1950, he had warned that the government was aiming at the ANC as much as the communists: now the enemy was using exactly the same weapon against both.⁵²

      For all the earlier warnings and Mandela’s proposals for the M-Plan, the ban took the ANC, like the PAC, by surprise. ‘Mere survival in the face of the police onslaughts,’ wrote the historians Tom Karis and Gwen Carter, ‘had become as much as either Congress could hope for.’ Immediately after the state of emergency was lifted the ANC set up an Emergency Committee, which would continue to operate until the organisation was legal again, and it published a statement refusing to submit to the ban.⁵³ But with 2,000 people detained, the ANC was severely restricted.

      The Communist Party, having already been banned for ten years, was more accustomed to underground work, and some key activists, including Mandela’s friends Moses Kotane and Michael Harmel, were now in hiding. In the midst of the emergency Kotane and a few others had let it be known that the Party was back in business; and they were still able to issue some propaganda through their clandestine journal, the African Communist, which was first published in October 1959. This ‘emergence’ of the Party was criticised by many members who had not been consulted, but in fact (according to Bernstein) it simplified relations with the ANC, and dispelled fears of hidden agendas.⁵⁴ The ANC was still poorly organised for underground existence, with only fragments of the M-Plan able to provide street-level organisation. They needed the communists to help them to work undercover.

      The ANC executive had taken one precaution which proved crucial: in June 1959 they had decided that in the event of a crisis Oliver Tambo should immediately leave the country through Bechuanaland, and set up an office in Ghana. Six days after Sharpeville, on 27 March 1960, Tambo left a Johannesburg suburb, seen off by friends including Ahmed Kathrada, to be driven across the border by Ronald Segal, editor of Africa South. He eventually made his way via Dar-es-Salaam to London.⁵⁵ Over the next thirty years Tambo’s statesmanship, and the mutual trust between him and Mandela in jail, was to be the basis of the ANC’s survival. At the time Mandela did not realise how vital the external wing of the organisation would become.⁵⁶

      Mandela was now much more on his own, separated from the partner whose judgement had always been so valuable to him. He was left with the bleak task of winding up the law practice of Mandela & Tambo. He continued to practise on his own, working from Kathrada’s flat, 13 Kholvad House, where clients kept arriving until the long-suffering Kathrada, confined to the kitchen, began to protest.⁵⁷ Soon afterwards Mandela went underground, and had to abandon his law practice for ever.

      1960 continued to be a year of crisis. In October the government held the all-white referendum Verwoerd had promised on the question of whether South Africa should become a republic. It was agreed by a surprisingly narrow majority – 850,000 votes to 775,000 – but it needed only a simple majority. Mandela did not feel strongly about the country becoming a republic. He thought it would not add ‘even a fraction of an ounce’ to South Africa’s sovereignty, and saw it as merely an emotional question for Afrikaner nationalists, who looked back nostalgically to their old ‘semi-feudal’ republics in the nineteenth century, before the British undermined them. And he hoped that a republic, by removing their grievance, would ‘loosen the rivets’ which held Afrikaner intellectuals together. But he could not accept a referendum in which only whites could vote.

      Despite the government’s show of strength after Sharpeville, Mandela was determined to go ahead with yet another peaceful protest, a strike or ‘stay-at-home’. He still, like most of the ANC leaders, retained a surprising optimism. He may have talked about South Africa moving towards fascism and becoming a police state, but he and his colleagues were almost totally unprepared for it when it came.⁵⁸ ‘It is difficult to appreciate,’ wrote Karis and Carter, ‘the extent to which African leaders and other radical opponents of the government felt that the trend of events was in their favour.’⁵⁹

      12

      Violence

      1961

      BY THE END OF 1960 Mandela’s wide-ranging life in Johannesburg was rapidly narrowing. His law practice had collapsed, many friends were in exile, and the social network of Orlando had virtually dissolved. His family, he reckoned, was financially ruined.¹ His home life with Winnie was constantly interrupted by political tasks: when she gave birth to their second daughter, Zindzi, at the end of the year, he arrived home too late to be with her. ‘I rarely sat down with him as a husband,’ Winnie claims now. ‘The honest truth of God is that I didn’t know him at all.’²

      Mandela’s political life was already moving half-underground, and he was presenting a more subterranean image: no longer the youthful, clean-shaven face and the hair parted in the middle, but a rough moustache and a short black beard, so that his narrow eyes seemed to be peering out of the undergrowth.

      He was nevertheless making another attempt at peaceful organisation with other parties. In December 1960 a group of thirty-six African leaders met at a Consultative Conference in Orlando and committed themselves to hold an ‘All-In African Conference’ which would in turn call for a National Convention of all races. It seemed oddly unrealistic in the light of the government’s ruthless response at Sharpeville. It showed, argued the political scientist Tom Lodge later, ‘just how intellectually unprepared the leadership of the Congress alliance was in 1961 to embark on a revolutionary struggle’.³ But the Marxist Michael Harmel argued that it was ‘essentially a demand for revolution’.⁴

      The police raided the meeting in Orlando and confiscated all the papers, but the plans went ahead through a committee with Mandela as Secretary. Mandela and Sisulu, in between the last stages of the Treason Trial, travelled around the country secretly to make preparations for the conference, even nipping over to Basutoland, where several ANC activists, including Joe Matthews, had gone into exile. At first they worked together with some Liberals, and also with the PAC, encouraged by the formation of a ‘United Front’ of the ANC and PAC abroad. But the collaboration soon broke up: the Liberals accused the ANC and communists of taking control, while the PAC decided they should crush the conference, partly because they suspected that ‘plans were afoot to build up Mandela as a hero in opposition to Sobukwe’.⁵ So Mandela and the ANC went ahead with support only from the communists. Their collaboration was becoming stronger, in a close-knit group who could trust each other.

      The government was watching closely, and five days before the conference the police arrested ten of the organisers and served a warrant on Duma Nokwe. But the committee still managed to distribute leaflets with a ‘Call to the African People of South Africa’ to prepare for the ‘All-In African Conference’, to be held near Pietermaritzburg in

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