LITMIR.BIZ

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had mustered a guerrilla army of 10,000 in eighteen months, and had marched on Havana in January 1959.⁷⁶ Mandela was especially interested in the account by Blas Roca, the Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, which described how it was Castro, not the Party, who had realised that the moment of revolution had come. He would never lose his admiration for Castro.

      Mandela found it hard to adjust to his solitary life in Wolfie Kodesh’s flat. ‘I suddenly found that I had too much privacy,’ he recalled from jail, ‘and really missed the family, company and the gym where I could completely relax. It required a lot of discipline to keep the routine demanded by my new style of life.’⁷⁷ Particularly he missed Winnie, and Kodesh noticed that when Mandela talked about her and the children he dropped his military style, and had tears in his eyes. Kodesh helped to arrange several visits by Winnie, which were always tricky, as her house in Soweto was under constant watch from a nearby hill. She had to be driven by circuitous routes, changing cars on the way, exactly timed: if the car was late, the visit would be aborted. Sometimes she and Mandela would meet in a safe house elsewhere. They could always find friends of the movement who would take the risk, but they agreed never to cause them anxiety. Once they met at a house in Parktown owned by a sympathetic but nervous white editor. When he came into the room nervously rattling the drink-glasses on their tray, Kodesh quickly mentioned another appointment, and took Mandela away.

      Kodesh worried more about Mandela’s safety as the newspapers began publicising his disappearance, dubbing him ‘the Black Pimpernel’. ‘All the police have photos of the Black Pimpernel,’ he warned him. ‘Aren’t you afraid of being caught?’ Mandela replied: ‘I don’t think about it, I concentrate on my work.’⁷⁸ But two things happened to alarm them. Once Mandela overheard some domestic workers talking about the sour milk which he had left on the windowsill. This was an African delicacy, which they realised meant that there was a black man living in the white building.⁷⁹ Finally, Kodesh went one day to see the Zulu cleaner living at the top of the building, who had been told that the black stranger was a student who was waiting for a bursary to go overseas. On the man’s bed he spotted a newspaper clipping. It was an ‘article about the Black Pimpernel, with pictures of Nelson – though without a beard. I thought, “This is bad, he knows who I’m looking after.” I said to Nelson: “Pack up, you’re off, he’s seen all the pictures.”’ Kodesh took Mandela to a house in the Johannesburg suburb of Norwood owned by a friendly doctor, where he stayed in the servants’ quarters, pretending to be the gardener.⁸⁰

      Mandela had been recruiting a small group of experts to embark on MK’s campaign of sabotage. The Communist Party already had its own group of specialists for its sabotage plans, but it was clear that the two groups needed each other, and they eventually merged. Mandela would always rightly insist that MK was founded by Africans, but it needed expertise and tactical skills which the ANC alone could not provide.⁸¹ He recruited Joe Slovo, whom he trusted and admired, to serve on the High Command. ‘The word “surrender” was not in his vocabulary,’ Mandela said later. ‘He was daring through and through.’⁸² Slovo in turn praised Mandela in his own terms: ‘My affection and admiration for him grew. There was nothing flabby or condescending about Nelson. Ideologically he had taken giant strides since we confronted one another in the corridors of the university during the early 1950s on the role of the Party in the struggle. His keen intelligence taught him to grasp the class basis of national oppression. But the hurt of a life whose every waking moment was dominated by white arrogance left scars.’

      Slovo brought in a small group of communist experts, including Jack Hodgson and Wolfie Kodesh, who knew about explosives from their experience in North Africa during the Second World War, and Arthur Goldreich, who had fought the British in Palestine in the late 1940s. Their expertise, it turned out, was amazingly amateurish. ‘Among the lot of us we did not have a single pistol,’ wrote Slovo afterwards. ‘Our knowledge of the techniques for this early stage of the struggle was extremely rudimentary.’⁸³ They practised their skills very rashly. One morning, when Kodesh went out to a brickworks outside Johannesburg to experiment with bombs with Jack Hodgson, Mandela insisted on coming along. At the brickworks Kodesh saw a black man who clearly recognised him, and wanted to abort the exercise. But Mandela went to talk to the man, then came back and told them to carry on. The bomb duly exploded, producing a cloud of topsoil, like a miniature atom bomb. As they drove away Mandela was ecstatic, said Kodesh, congratulating them all.⁸⁴

      It was in October 1961 that Mandela found a new hiding place at Lilliesleaf Farm, an isolated house with some huts in Rivonia, then a semi-rural suburb of market gardens and bungalows outside the municipal limits of Johannesburg. The farm had been secretly bought by the Communist Party, which disguised its ownership through Arthur Goldreich, who settled there with his family to establish a respectable front with a lifestyle that included horse-riding on Saturdays. It appeared in safe hands for Mandela when his friend Michael Harmel drove him out there, and was, he later testified in court, ‘an ideal place for the man who lived the life of an outlaw. Up to that time I had been compelled to live indoors during the daytime and could only venture out under cover of darkness. But at Lilliesleaf I could live differently, and work far more efficiently.’⁸⁵ He felt happy at Lilliesleaf, he wrote later from jail, because ‘the whole place reminded me of the happiest days of my life, my days of childhood.’⁸⁶ Lilliesleaf served as a safe house for members of the Communist Party as well as for Mandela, although only he and the Goldreich family were actually living there: he took over a small room in the outbuildings, and was known as David Motsamayi. The farm was not, he told the court later, the actual headquarters of either MK or the ANC; but Rusty Bernstein, who often visited, worried that it appeared to be turning into MK’s semi-permanent headquarters.⁸⁷

      From Lilliesleaf, Mandela frequently left in the evenings in disguise to meet ANC leaders and others. Sometimes he would be in mechanics’ overalls, sometimes as a nightwatchman in a long grey overcoat and big earrings, once even as a priest leading a fake funeral procession of disguised activists. He enjoyed the sense of theatre: in October a group of Indian activists assembled in a house in Fordsburg, and a man in dirty Caltex service station overalls walked in. It was not until he said, ‘Sit down, comrades,’ that they recognised Mandela.⁸⁸ Ahmed Kathrada was one of a small group deputed to make sure Mandela appeared as a ‘new man’. They persuaded him to abandon his stylish clothes, but he still had his vanity: they could not get him to shave off his beard, which had become part of his revolutionary style.⁸⁹

      Many of Mandela’s friends were worried about his lack of precautions. ‘He was probably the most wanted man in the country at the time, and was taking great risks,’ wrote Bernstein. ‘But that was his style. He was one who led from the front. He never asked anyone to take a risk which he was not prepared to take first for himself.’ Bernstein worried that there was an expanding circle of aides, drivers and visitors who knew about Mandela’s hiding place at Lilliesleaf, and that the responsibility for security was dangerously divided between the Communist Party and Mandela himself: ‘We were slow to realise the dangers in what was happening,’ Bernstein recalled.⁹⁰

      Winnie visited Mandela several times at Lillisleaf, bringing him vegetables, and would then go on to see their Indian friends Paul and Adelaide Joseph. ‘I used to see the car was full of mud, clearly from a farming area,’ said Paul. ‘We knew that our house was under constant observation. They were all terribly careless. But it was the early days of the underground

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