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Fordsburg, near central Johannesburg. ‘We walked in to find Nelson there. He gave us hugs, talked about family matters, and after a while said, “I’m glad I’ve seen you.” That was that.’ Years later they learnt that Mandela had been upset by a false story that their marriage was breaking up, and wanted to help.⁹¹

      Underground life was a strain for many of the conspirators. ‘I truly believe that people underground come to believe themselves invulnerable,’ said Dennis Goldberg, who was working secretly in Cape Town. ‘Eventually the stress becomes so great that they make mistakes subconsciously to put an end to it … It’s like coming out of the cold.’ Goldberg saw Mandela’s ‘Pimpernel phase’ as inherently unstable: ‘There’s a downside to being the romantic leader: it makes you take more and more risks, because you must maintain that publicity, and when you’re underground you’re caught between disappearing into a hole in the ground and pulling in the lid, because you’re then safe; and emerging to do more and more daring operations.’⁹²

      While he was in hiding Mandela travelled throughout South Africa, without much concern. Once when he drove down to Durban to stay with the Meers, Fatima was shocked to receive a phone call from a friend who asked: ‘Has Nelson arrived?’ When he stayed for two weeks on a sugar farm at Tongaat, near Luthuli’s house, he pretended to be an agricultural demonstrator, until a farm worker asked him, ‘What does Luthuli want?’⁹³ But he was determined to keep in touch with ordinary people, and was buoyed up by their support. In mid-November Mary Benson was invited to meet him outside Johannesburg. He was wearing his chauffeur’s white coat, and had just toured Natal and the Cape. ‘You can’t comprehend,’ he told her, ‘unless you stay right there with the people.’ She recalled how he joked about a recent narrow escape, reminisced about old times, then gave her a lift back to her sister’s flat, driving an erratic old car which kept spluttering to a halt.⁹⁴

      While the MK command was plotting sabotage, white South Africans felt little sense of danger after the suppression of the stay-at-home strike. The ruling National Party had gained support from white voters by promising tougher measures against agitators. In October 1961 there had been a first shock of sabotage, when an electric pylon was cut and a government office burnt down; it turned out to be the work of the National Committee of Liberation (NCL), a group of liberals and leftists which later developed into the African Resistance Movement (ARM).⁹⁵ MK publicly dissociated itself from these saboteurs, whom they thought ‘temperamentally inclined towards deeds of derring-do’; but privately they agreed to co-ordinate their actions.⁹⁶ The sabotage only increased the solidarity of most whites, and in the election soon afterwards the Nationalists achieved their biggest victory, with the electorate for the first time giving them a clear majority.⁹⁷

      16 December was Dingane’s Day, which commemorated the Afrikaners’ massacre of Zulus in 1838 but which had now become a focus for African protests. And it was then that MK performed its first acts of sabotage, with explosions in Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and Durban. They caused a national furore, though the saboteurs had not been very efficient: one of them, Petrus Molife, was killed, and another had his arm blown off. Joe Slovo tried to blow up the Drill Hall in Johannesburg, but had to retreat after being discovered by an army sergeant.⁹⁸ But MK saboteurs succeeded in attacking government offices and an electrical transformer.

      On the previous night ANC volunteers had scattered leaflets and stuck up posters proclaiming the founding of MK and explaining the need for new methods alongside the traditional organisations: ‘The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight.’ MK, they said, hoped to bring the government to its senses ‘before matters reach the desperate stage of civil war’.⁹⁹ The police tore down most of the posters by morning, so few people got the message. ‘Contrary to our intentions,’ wrote one conspirator afterwards, ‘the sabotage created only a ripple of concern in the government or the country at large.’¹⁰⁰ But Mandela and his colleagues were at first buoyant, believing that white South Africans would now realise that they were sitting on top of a volcano, and that the ANC had a ‘powerful spear that would take the struggle to the heart of white power’.¹⁰¹ ‘We were elated by our initial successes,’ Mandela wrote later from jail, ‘and even those who had first doubted the wisdom of the new line were also swept away by the tide of excitement.’¹⁰²

      The timing of the explosions proved embarrassing to the ANC, as Mandela admitted; only six days before, its President Albert Luthuli had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. But they had made sure that Luthuli was safely back home before the sabotage took place, and the ANC was not publicly linked to MK. Luthuli continued to worry about the turn to violence. He had told a Canadian diplomat two months earlier that younger ANC members were thinking of violence, but that it would in his opinion be ‘suicidal folly’ to try to overthrow the government by force.¹⁰³

      Luthuli’s Nobel Prize gave a formidable international endorsement to the ANC’s struggle, and Mandela had been ‘enormously pleased’ when he heard the news of the award on the radio at Rivonia.¹⁰⁴ But the British Foreign Office remained wary of contact with Luthuli. When he stopped off in London on his way to Norway, an official advised that a meeting ‘would be taken greatly amiss by the South African government and it would do nothing to enhance Chief Luthuli’s cause in South Africa’.¹⁰⁵

      In fact there was no immediate contradiction between MK’s explosions and the peaceful pressures still being applied by the ANC. The high command of MK remained optimistic that successive acts of sabotage would serve as ‘a shot across the bows’ to bring white South Africa to its senses.¹⁰⁶ But soon after the first explosions MK was thinking less about sabotage and more about guerrilla warfare. ‘There was no formal decision,’ said Bernstein, who was involved. ‘It was something that seemed to develop spontaneously from the idea that sabotage would somehow lead to a “next phase”.’¹⁰⁷ The high command began arranging for key leaders to go abroad for training, followed by young volunteers.

      Mandela was now commander-in-chief of a burgeoning fighting force. He had the authority and prestige of a revolutionary leader taking on an unpopular military regime, in an age of revolutions when the forces of oppression seemed in retreat throughout Africa. All his previous roles – the boxer, the man-about-town, the lawyer, the family man – had been left behind by the new role of guerrilla leader underground. It was a surprising and unprepared translation, from many-sided politician to dedicated soldier. Mandela was to be a short-lived and amateurish soldier compared to Cuban or Chinese revolutionaries. He remained above all the politician who saw the need for symbolic gestures to lead his people to a new style of confrontation.

      13

      Last Fling

      1962

      BLACK AFRICA was now looming larger on the map, promising a new impact on the world, and powerful support for fellow-Africans in the south. In early 1962, after the first explosions of sabotage, the ANC executive decided that they must seek help from the rest of the continent to provide money and military training. They told

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