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with gusto. But his African journey, as is revealed in his private diary, proved much more difficult and full of setbacks than he and his colleagues had expected.

      It was a heady time to be travelling through the continent. Newly-independent states were rapidly emerging, full of ambitions for a pan-African role in the world. Their ex-imperial masters were offering them aid and friendship to keep them in the Western camp, while the Soviet Union and China were competing to lure them eastward. The Americans, under President Kennedy, were becoming more seriously interested. They worried that in Africa the Cold War would turn into a racial war, and that African states would rally against what they called the ‘White Redoubt’ – South Africa, Angola, Mozambique and the Central African Federation. In July 1962 a secret report was sent to Kennedy’s key policy-makers, including Richard Helms at the CIA, recommending that the President should pay an early visit to Africa. It warned that the White Redoubt was ‘antithetical to American history and political theory’, and that the ‘Communist Bloc will continue to fish in troubled African waters’. Black South Africans were seen as crucial but unpredictable players: ‘Their leaders are flirting with violence and, in some cases, with communism.’¹

      Mandela would find his own view of Africa suddenly opening up, before it was closed off to him. Before leaving he went down to Natal to see the ANC President Luthuli, whom he found in high spirits. Luthuli approved of Mandela’s trip, and asked to be consulted about the ANC’s new operations. Mandela then spent two days in Johannesburg, where he saw old friends including Walter Sisulu and Duma Nokwe. He was angered when an Indian colleague did not turn up for a meeting because he was ‘boozing’. Later in Bechuanaland he was angrier still when another colleague was arrested for drunken driving: ‘An act of amazing irresponsibility and a betrayal,’ he told his diary.² But he remained exhilarated about his trip.

      On 10 January 1962 he said goodbye to Winnie and was driven across the border to Bechuanaland (now Botswana), which was then still a British protectorate. He fell in love with the country at first sight, he wrote later: he saw a wilder Africa, including a lioness crossing the road.³ After the jungle of Johannesburg, he reflected, he was ‘in another cosmopolitan centre where the survival of the fittest was the supreme law and where the tangled vegetation concealed all kinds of danger’.⁴

      Bechuanaland was much used as an escape route for black activists, to whom the British authorities appeared tolerant; and they seemed happy to harbour Mandela, for whom (they noted) ‘South African police have been searching for some months’. But the High Commission was watching him closely. It reported to London that he arrived in the border town of Lobatse on 12 January, and that he was ‘known to possess funds estimated £600’.⁵

      Mandela had ‘the shock of his life’ in Lobatse when he discovered that the immigration officer was also the security chief. He was suspicious when the man recognised him and offered him a safe house to avoid being kidnapped by the South African police, but was reassured when he found that he had also helped Oliver Tambo two years before.⁶ There was good reason to be wary: British intelligence had reported several clandestine visits by the South African Special Branch since April 1960, including some ‘political refugees’ who were actually South African agents.⁷ The local police also recruited many Afrikaners and commonly shared information with the South Africans, according to John Longrigg of the British Embassy in Pretoria.⁸

      From Bechuanaland Mandela was flown with his friend Joe Matthews in a charter plane to Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania. British intelligence was closely following Matthews, who was now based in Basutoland, and who they thought was ‘probably a communist ideologist using the ANC as a front’; but they did not know who chartered the plane.⁹ On the way it narrowly missed hitting a mountain – an experience which tested Mandela’s self-control to the limit, and (he noted) stopped even Joe Matthews from talking.¹⁰

      In Dar-es-Salaam Mandela was highly visible. He was received by a surprised Frene Ginwala, the ANC representative who acted as travel agent for escaping comrades. She had been told by Tambo that Mandela would arrive in a suit, and that he should be ‘buried’ – or concealed – among the Tanzanians. Instead he was wearing a Basuto hat, a safari suit and high mosquito boots: ‘And I’m supposed to bury you!’ Ginwala exclaimed.¹¹

      Mandela flourished in Tanzania, which had become independent the previous month. He was delighted by President Julius Nyerere’s style as a man of the people, with his small car and modest house; and he inspected with some envy the three-storey headquarters of Nyerere’s Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) party, with its staff of full-time officials. But he was distressed when Nyerere advised him to postpone the armed struggle and to collaborate with Sobukwe and the PAC, and he argued against Nyerere’s belief that socialism was indigenous to Africa. Significantly, he did not share Nyerere’s view of Africans as a pastoral, nomadic people with no class divisions: long before the arrival of the white men, Mandela insisted, Africans had developed mining and metallurgy, which had provided a social surplus and financed monuments from the Nile to Zimbabwe.¹²

      From Tanzania Mandela flew briefly to West Africa, where he met up with Tambo, now bearded and with longer hair, who had been organising ANC offices in Ghana.¹³ He then flew to Ethiopia for the Pan-African Freedom Conference in Addis Ababa. It was organised by the Emperor Haile Selassie, the legendary ruler who had inspired Mandela as a boy of seventeen when he first heard how he stood firm against Mussolini’s invading forces. Selassie was neither a socialist nor a democrat, but he ruled over the one African nation that had always been independent, and was now shrewdly encouraging and advising the leaders of the other new nations. ‘This was the country ruled by Africans, even if it had no democratic institutions,’ wrote Mandela. ‘Every structure I saw round there was the result of African initiative and skills.’ Mandela was struck by the formal dignity of the tiny monarch in his uniform as he listened stiff as a log and bowed to the audience with a tilt of the head; and he was amazed to see American military advisers receiving medals and bowing like anyone else.¹⁴

      Mandela made a dramatic entry to the conference, where he abandoned his alias as ‘David’ and delivered a speech which he had carefully prepared with advice from Tambo and Robert Resha. Mandela described the brutal oppression of black South Africans in ‘a land ruled by the gun’. He thanked other African states for pressing for boycotts and sanctions, but insisted that his people should not look for their salvation beyond their borders: ‘The centre and cornerstone of the struggle for freedom and democracy in South Africa lies inside South Africa itself.’ He described the people’s growing militancy and the vulnerability of the government – ‘uneasy lies the head which wears the crown’ – and the future for the campaign of sabotage which had begun the previous month: ‘Hard and swift blows should be delivered with the full weight of the masses of the people.’ But he had not entirely abandoned non-violent protest: ‘The days of civil disobedience, of strikes, and mass demonstrations are not over, and we will resort to them over and over again.’¹⁵

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