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Oppenheimer, the Chairman of the Anglo-American Corporation. Oppenheimer was the first and only businessman Mandela would meet before he was jailed. Mandela had been influenced by labour movements, he explained later, ‘at a time of utmost hostility to businessmen’. Oppenheimer received him very politely, as he received nearly everyone: ‘When we came to his office,’ Mandela recalled, ‘he got up as if we were the president or the prime minister of a country.’ Mandela asked for a particular sum: ‘In terms of today it was peanuts.’ Oppenheimer said it was a lot of money, and asked how it would benefit him. He asked questions about the ANC, and appeared to underestimate its strength. ‘How do I know,’ he asked Mandela, ‘that after giving you assistance you will not be eliminated by the PAC?’⁶ ‘Mandela addressed me boldly like a meeting, with formal phrases,’ Oppenheimer recalled later. ‘I was ignorant about the ANC, but impressed by his sense of power.’⁷ Mandela did not get his money.

      On 22 March the Maritzburg Conference, as it was called, mustered a remarkable show of support for the ANC a year after it had been banned. There were 1,400 delegates from 145 different groups from all over South Africa, including the Southern Transvaal Football Association and the Apostolic Church in Zion. But the ANC clearly dominated, with their slogans, speakers and songs, including ‘Spread the Gospel of Chief Luthuli’. The New York Times called the event ‘the biggest political meeting of Africans ever held in South Africa’, and the Rand Daily Mail gave it a big headline: ‘AFRICANS INSIST ON A NATIONAL PARLEY’.⁸

      By an apparent coincidence, Mandela’s ban had expired just before the meeting – which the police seemed not to have noticed – and the Treason Trial had adjourned for a week. So Mandela was able to pop up like a jack-in-a-box, in his beard and a three-piece suit, to provide a dramatic climax to the conference and to make his first public speech since 1952.⁹ The audience was thrilled, their fists punching the air like pistons as they shouted the new slogan ‘Amandla! Ngawethu!’ (‘Power to the People’) – which was taking over from the less militant song ‘Mayibuye’ (‘Come Back Africa’).¹⁰ Mandela appealed again for African unity: ‘Africans must feel, act and speak in one voice … We should emerge from this conference with fullest preparations for a fully represented multi-racial national convention.’¹¹

      The journalists present gave widely varying assessments of Mandela’s impact. New Age wrote that ‘every sentence was either cheered or greeted with cries of “shame”.’ Andrew Wilson of the Observer reported ‘tumultuous applause’.¹² ‘I was aware,’ Wilson recalled later, ‘that he was the chap on whom everyone was focusing their hopes for the future.’¹³ Benjamin Pogrund in Contact described Mandela, ‘bearded in the new nationalist fashion’, as ‘the star of the show’.¹⁴ He nevertheless thought that the communists had exaggerated the impact of the speech, and that Mandela spoke dully, with poor delivery.¹⁵ But the panache of his emergence from hiding gave his image a new magic. It was at Maritzburg, reckoned his communist friend Dennis Goldberg, that ‘the sheer romanticism of the underground activity, appearing at a conference, made him a leader’.¹⁶

      Mandela himself was reassured by the fortitude of ordinary country people: he proudly watched one elderly man in an old jacket, khaki shirt and riding breeches speaking about his campaign against the Bantu Authorities and saying, ‘I will go away from here refreshed and full of confidence.’ And Mandela was sure that the delegates were prepared for ‘a stubborn and prolonged struggle, involving masses of the people from town and country’.¹⁷

      The conference called on the government to summon a National Convention: if they refused, the ANC would organise multi-racial stay-athome protests beginning on 31 May – the day on which South Africa was due to become a republic – for which Mandela would be the chief organiser (while strikes at the workplace were illegal, stay-at-homes were not). Mandela disappeared from the hall, which was riddled with security police, as suddenly as he had appeared. He was not to appear on a public platform in South Africa again for twenty-nine years.

      Mandela returned to Pretoria for the Treason Trial, which still had several weeks to go before the final judgement was delivered. But on 29 March Judge Rumpff interrupted the trial and announced that the three judges had reached a unanimous verdict of not guilty: ‘It is impossible for this court to come to the conclusion that the ANC had acquired or adopted a policy to overthrow the state by violence.’ The judges agreed that the prosecution had failed to prove that either the ANC or the Freedom Charter were communist, and they singled out Mandela’s June 1956 article for Liberation, which foresaw ‘a non-European bourgeois advance under the Freedom Charter’.¹⁸

      The thirty accused celebrated the verdict with a show of rapture. A cine-camera smuggled into the courtroom snatched blurred scenes of the accused lifting their defence lawyers onto their shoulders, and of a smiling Mandela in a smart checked suit edging his way through the crowd. Mandela was impressed, he said afterwards, that the judges had risen above their prejudices to produce a fair decision, and he was again struck that surprising people could reveal a streak of goodness. But it was a surreal rejoicing, in the midst of bans and oppression. Mandela knew that the government would not recognise the ANC’s legitimate grievances, and would soon become much more ruthless, devising new laws that would bypass the courts.¹⁹

      He had already decided that he must disappear underground. Winnie had noticed that he had been meditating silently for some weeks, not listening to her.²⁰ Walter Sisulu had been convinced that the ANC must have a single leader underground who could be much more active than Luthuli, now banned in Natal; and that it must be Mandela. Sisulu clearly foresaw the need for a martyr: ‘When we decided that he should go underground I knew that he was now stepping into a position of leadership … We had got the leadership outside but we must have a leader in jail.’²¹

      Just before the treason verdict, Mandela had arrived at the Orlando house with Sisulu, Nokwe and Joe Modise, and told Winnie: ‘Darling, just pack some of my clothes in a suitcase with my toiletries. I will be going away for a long time.’ She packed tearfully, asked the gods of Africa to take care of him, and appealed to him to sometimes spare some minutes for his family: ‘He scolded me for reminding him of his duties.’²²

      Mandela’s colleagues had decided that he should remain in hiding, to organise the protest planned for 31 May. But he still had to avoid arrest, while he simultaneously needed to publicise the strike as widely as possible. It was, paradoxically, from underground that he became chief spokesman for his people. He was to become more famous in the shadows than he had ever been in broad daylight.

      Mandela still needed to persuade white liberals and well-wishers to support the ANC, and to counter the PAC’s propaganda. For two months he kept popping up from hiding to talk to white editors, attempting to allay their worries, particularly about communist influence in the ANC. In Johannesburg he argued with Laurence Gandar, the sympathetic and self-effacing editor of the Rand Daily Mail. In Port Elizabeth he visited John Sutherland, the quiet, liberal editor of the Evening Post – who was concerned for Mandela’s safety, since the paper’s offices were opposite the police station. Mandela thanked Sutherland warmly for his past support before quickly rejoining Govan Mbeki, who was waiting outside; he was delighted when the Post splashed the stay-at-home campaign. In Cape Town he talked for two hours

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