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Delius that he’d never met a more impressive man than Mandela.²³ He also told the British High Commission about his remarkable visitor: few white South Africans, he said to the British diplomat Peter Foster, ‘had any idea of the calibre of the Africans with whom they would have to deal’. Norton virtually despaired of the whites’ keeping the initiative in their hands for much longer, but nothing about Mandela or his planned strike appeared in the Cape Times.²⁴

      In Johannesburg Mandela saw his old ally from the Defiance Campaign Patrick Duncan, now editor of the fortnightly magazine Contact, who was fiercely criticising the banned ANC leaders for their communist influence and projected stay-at-homes. Finally Mandela said, ‘Do you think I’m so stupid that I can’t run an organisation without being influenced by people we’ve associated with?’²⁵ But at a second meeting in Cape Town, according to Randolph Vigne, who was present, the two men talked like old friends who never had any rows. This time Duncan admitted that the Treason Trial had clearly shown that the ANC was not communist, and promised to correct his past reports and to support the National Convention – which he did with a bold turnabout in the next issue of Contact.²⁶ He later told Peter Foster that he was impressed by Mandela’s intelligence and confidence – though he ‘made little secret of his left-wing sympathies’.²⁷

      The communist influence was still perplexing foreign diplomats. ‘I must confess that we have very little idea of what the South African communists are up to,’ Foster wrote to London in January 1961, adding that the government ‘do not pass on much detailed information to us (if they possess it)’.²⁸ Later he blamed the government for banning moderates like Luthuli, thus putting a premium on the conspiratorial activities of militant ‘neo-communists’. He reported that ‘Mandela, though less certainly a communist than Nokwe, belongs to the group of highly intelligent younger leaders of the ANC who now appear to be in effective control.’²⁹

      The British government was now rethinking its relations with South Africa, which left the Commonwealth in March 1961. After the vote for a republic, Verwoerd had applied to remain within the Commonwealth, and Macmillan had tried hard to persuade the new black members and Canada – whose Prime Minister John Diefenbaker was especially hostile to apartheid – to allow South Africa to stay. But Verwoerd still refused to accept a black High Commissioner in Pretoria, which proved the last straw, and in the end he withdrew his application. Macmillan was devastated and depressed. ‘The wind of change has blown us away, for the time,’ he wrote to Sir John Maud, ‘but peace will come one day, although perhaps after much sorrow and tribulation.’³⁰ But Oliver Tambo in London regarded white South Africa’s exclusion as a victory; and he would later maintain that black South Africans had never left the Commonwealth.³¹

      Mandela continued to place hope in pressure from the Commonwealth, influenced by its new Asian and African members; and he had been encouraged by the opposition to apartheid, particularly by Diefenbaker. The British Embassy, as it now became, felt somewhat less obliged to placate the apartheid government now that South Africa was outside the family atmosphere of the Commonwealth. By June the Ambassador Sir John Maud was proposing that the Embassy should ‘reinsure’ against the possibility of a future black government by making discreet contacts with black politicians – though these contacts did not amount to much.³² The British government also decided to use its intelligence services to make every effort to penetrate the white citadel in Pretoria, which they knew would be difficult and delicate. So it proved: four years later a senior agent of MI6, acting as an Embassy official, was ‘severely interrogated’ about his contacts with the white opposition, and was soon afterwards ‘PNG’d’ – declared persona non grata. But MI6 decided that making links with black opposition leaders would be too risky, and could get them tortured or killed.³³

      Mandela was now concentrating on the three-day stay-at-home strike scheduled to begin on 31 May. His Action Committee wrote to Dr Verwoerd explaining the call for a National Convention. Verwoerd later told Parliament: ‘A letter has been received, signed by N.R. Mandela, in arrogant terms, to which no reply has been given.’³⁴ Mandela also wrote to Sir de Villiers Graaff, the leader of the United Party, who had voted for the ANC to be banned in 1960. He warned Graaff that South Africans must choose between ‘talk it out or shoot it out’, and asked him: ‘But where, sir, does the United Party stand?… If the country’s leading statesmen fail to lead at this moment, then the worst is inevitable.’ Graaff evidently took no notice: he made no mention of Mandela in his memoirs, published thirty years later.³⁵

      A month before Republic Day, Mandela went to Durban to discuss the protest with the banned ANC executive and their allies. Some delegates argued strongly that a stay-at-home was now quite inadequate in the face of the people’s anger and the state’s violence, and favoured a general strike. The run-up to Republic Day would clearly be a testing time for ANC discipline. Luthuli warned the New York Times that violence could easily be provoked: ‘The police sometimes act in a manner that gives the impression they want to shoot the people.’³⁶ Mandela, who had been touring the country, was very conscious of the people’s impatience, particularly since they had been provoked by the PAC. He had heard many complaints within the ANC that it was not politically correct to stress non-violence when the enemy was ‘relying on naked force’.³⁷ The far left was much more critical: ‘We thought this was an impossible demand to make on the workers,’ said the Marxist historian Baruch Hirson, who was later to be sentenced to nine years in jail for sabotage.³⁸

      But Mandela kept emphasising the importance of non-violence in dramatic messages from hiding. Ten days before Republic Day he rang up the Johannesburg Sunday Express from a coin box: ‘We emphatically deny reports that violence will take place or that the three-day stay-away will be extended.’³⁹ His campaign was gaining him brief support from English-speaking editors who were themselves opposed to an Afrikaner republic.⁴⁰ On 12 May the Johannesburg Star profiled Mandela for the first time, alongside a bright, smiling photograph: he had ‘assumed the mantle of official spokesman for the Native people’, though he stressed that ‘native leadership is a collective leadership’.⁴¹ He was also beginning to feature in British papers: as ‘a large lawyer, untravelled but enormously well read, slow speaking, nattily dressed’, in the Manchester Guardian of 27 May; and as a ‘big handsome bearded man with a deep resonant voice’ two days later.⁴²

      Meanwhile, the government was preparing an alarming show of strength, mustering its defence forces, cancelling leave and making mass arrests. On the morning of the strike Saracen tanks patrolled the townships, helicopters hovered overhead, and troops were posted at crossroads. It was, Mandela reckoned, ‘the greatest peacetime force in South Africa’s history’. The PAC, to the fury of the ANC, was helping the government by calling on everyone to go to work.⁴³ And the English-language press were now more anxious. Two days before the strike the Star reported: ‘Next Monday promises to be as nearly normal in Johannesburg as any other Monday.’⁴⁴ Mandela thought the press and radio ‘played a thoroughly shameful role’, publicising every warning

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