The Long Walk to Freedom (21 page)

In politics, no matter how much one plans, circumstances often dictate events. In July of 1947, during an informal discussion with Lembede about Youth League business, he complained to me of a sudden pain in his stomach and an accompanying chill. When the pain worsened, we drove him to Coronation Hospital, and that same night, he was dead at the age of thirty-three. Many were deeply affected by his death. Walter Sisulu seemed almost prostrate with grief. His passing was a setback to the movement, for Lembede was a fount of ideas and attracted others to the organization.

Lembede was succeeded by Peter Mda, whose analytical approach, ability to express himself clearly and simply, and tactical experience made him an excellent politician and an outstanding leader of the Youth League. Mda was a lean fellow; he had no excess weight, just as he used no excess words. In his broad-minded tolerance of different views, his own thinking was more mature than that of Lembede. It took Mda’s leadership to advance Lembede’s cause.

Mda believed the Youth League should function as an internal pressure group, a militant nationalistic wing within the ANC as a whole that would propel the organization into a new era. At the time, the ANC did not have a single full-time employee, and was generally poorly organized, operating in a haphazard way. (Later, Walter became the first and only full-time ANC staff member at an extremely meager salary.)

Mda quickly established a branch of the Youth League at Fort Hare under the guidance of Z. K. Matthews and Godfrey Pitje, a lecturer in anthropology. They recruited outstanding students, bringing in fresh blood and new ideas. Among the most outstanding were Professor Matthews’s brilliant son Joe, and Robert Sobukwe, a dazzling orator and incisive thinker.

Mda was more moderate in his nationalism than Lembede, and his thinking was without the racial tinge that characterized Lembede’s. He hated white oppression and white domination, not white people themselves. He was also less extreme in his opposition to the Communist Party than Lembede — or myself. I was among the Youth Leaguers who were suspicious of the white left. Even though I had befriended many white Communists, I was wary of white influence in the ANC, and I opposed joint campaigns with the party. I was concerned that the Communists were intent on taking over our movement in the guise of joint action. I believed that it was an undiluted African nationalism, not Marxism or multiracialism, that would liberate us. With a few of my colleagues in the league, I even went so far as breaking up CP meetings by storming the stage, tearing up signs, and capturing the microphone. At the national conference of the ANC in December, the Youth League introduced a motion demanding the expulsion of all members of the Communist Party, but we were soundly defeated. Despite the influence the Indian passive resistance campaign of 1946 had on me, I felt about the Indians the same way I did about the Communists: that they would tend to dominate the ANC, in part because of their superior education, experience, and training.

In 1947, I was elected to the Executive Committee of the Transvaal ANC and served under C. S. Ramohanoe, president of the Transvaal region. This was my first position in the ANC proper, and represented a milestone in my commitment to the organization. Until that time, the sacrifices I had made had not gone much further than being absent from my wife and family during weekends and returning home late in the evening. I had not been directly involved in any major campaign, and I did not yet understand the hazards and unending difficulties of the life of a freedom fighter. I had coasted along without having to pay a price for my commitment. From the time I was elected to the Executive Committee of the Transvaal region, I came to identify myself with the congress as a whole, with its hopes and despairs, its successes and failures; I was now bound heart and soul.

Ramohanoe was another one of those from whom I learned. He was a staunch nationalist and a skillful organizer who was able to balance divergent views and come forward with a suitable compromise. While Ramohanoe was unsympathetic to the Communists, he worked well with them. He believed that the ANC was a national organization that should welcome all those who supported our cause.

In 1947, in the wake of the Indian passive resistance campaign, Drs. Xuma, Dadoo, and Naicker, presidents, respectively, of the ANC, the Transvaal Indian Congress, and the Natal Indian Congress, signed the Doctors’ Pact agreeing to join forces against a common enemy. This was a significant step toward the unity of the African and Indian movements. Rather than create a central political body to direct all the various movements, they agreed to cooperate on matters of common interest. Later, they were joined by the APO, the African People’s Organization, a Coloured organization.

But such an agreement was at best tentative, for each national group faced problems peculiar to itself. The pass system, for example, barely affected Indians or Coloureds. The Ghetto Act, which had prompted the Indian protests, barely affected Africans. Coloured groups at the time were more concerned about the race classification and job reservation, issues that did not affect Africans and Indians to the same degree.

The Doctors’ Pact laid a foundation for the future cooperation of Africans, Indians, and Coloureds, since it respected the independence of each individual group, but acknowledged the achievements that could be realized from acting in concert. The Doctors’ Pact precipitated a series of nonracial, antigovernment campaigns around the country, which sought to bring together Africans and Indians in the freedom struggle. The first of these campaigns was the First Transvaal and Orange Free State Peoples Assembly for Votes for All, a campaign for the extension of the franchise to all black South Africans. Dr. Xuma announced ANC participation at a press conference over which I presided. At the time, we believed the campaign would be run by the ANC, but when we learned that the ANC would not be leading the campaign, the Transvaal Executive Committee decided that the ANC should withdraw. My idea at the time was that the ANC should be involved only in campaigns that the ANC itself led. I was more concerned with who got the credit than whether the campaign would be successful.

Even after the withdrawal, Ramohanoe, the president of the Transvaal region of the ANC, issued a press statement calling on Africans in the province to take part in the campaign of Votes for All in clear contravention of the decision of the Transvaal Executive Committee. This was an act of disobedience the committee could not tolerate. At a conference called to resolve this dispute, I was asked to move a no-confidence motion against Ramohanoe for his disobedience. I felt an acute conflict between duty and personal loyalty, between my obligations to my organization and to my friend. I well knew that I would be condemning the action of a man whose integrity and devotion to the struggle I never questioned, a man whose sacrifice in the liberation struggle was far greater than my own. I knew that the action that he had called for was in fact a noble one; he believed that Africans should help their Indian brothers.

But the seriousness of Ramohanoe’s disobedience was too strong. While an organization like the ANC is made up of individuals, it is greater than any of its individual parts, and loyalty to the organization takes precedence over loyalty to an individual. I agreed to lead the attack and offered the motion condemning him, which was seconded by Oliver Tambo. This caused an uproar in the house, with verbal battles between those in the region who supported their president and those who were on the side of the executive. The meeting broke up in disorder.

AFRICANS could not vote, but that did not mean that we did not care who won elections. The white general election of 1948 matched the ruling United Party, led by General Smuts, then at the height of his international regard, against the revived National Party. While Smuts had enlisted South Africa on the side of the Allies in World War II, the National Party refused to support Great Britain and publicly sympathized with Nazi Germany. The National Party’s campaign centered around the
swart gevaar
(the black danger), and they fought the election on the twin slogans of
Die kaffer op sy plek
(The nigger in his place) and
Die koelies uit die land
(The coolies out of the country) —
coolies
being the Afrikaner’s derogatory term for Indians.

The Nationalists, led by Dr. Daniel Malan, a former minister of the Dutch Reform Church and a newspaper editor, were a party animated by bitterness — bitterness toward the English, who had treated them as inferiors for decades, and bitterness toward the African, who the Nationalists believed was threatening the prosperity and purity of Afrikaner culture. Africans had no loyalty to General Smuts, but we had even less for the National Party.

Malan’s platform was known as apartheid.
Apartheid
was a new term but an old idea. It literally means “apartness” and it represented the codification in one oppressive system of all the laws and regulations that had kept Africans in an inferior position to whites for centuries. What had been more or less de facto was to become relentlessly de jure. The often haphazard segregation of the past three hundred years was to be consolidated into a monolithic system that was diabolical in its detail, inescapable in its reach, and overwhelming in its power. The premise of apartheid was that whites were superior to Africans, Coloureds, and Indians, and the function of it was to entrench white supremacy forever. As the Nationalists put it,
“Die wit man moet altyd baas wees”
(The white man must always remain boss). Their platform rested on the term
baasskap,
literally boss-ship, a freighted word that stood for white supremacy in all its harshness. The policy was supported by the Dutch Reform Church, which furnished apartheid with its religious underpinnings by suggesting that Afrikaners were God’s chosen people and that blacks were a subservient species. In the Afrikaner’s worldview, apartheid and the church went hand in hand.

The Nationalists’ victory was the beginning of the end of the domination of the Afrikaner by the Englishman. English would now take second place to Afrikaans as an official language. The Nationalist slogan encapsulated their mission:
“Eie volk, eie taal, eie land”
— Our own people, our own language, our own land. In the distorted cosmology of the Afrikaner, the Nationalist victory was like the Israelites’ journey to the Promised Land. This was the fulfillment of God’s promise, and the justification for their view that South Africa should be a white man’s country forever.

The victory was a shock. The United Party and General Smuts had beaten the Nazis, and surely they would defeat the National Party. On election day, I attended a meeting in Johannesburg with Oliver Tambo and several others. We barely discussed the question of a Nationalist government because we did not expect one. The meeting went on all night and we emerged at dawn and found a newspaper vendor selling the
Rand Daily Mail:
the Nationalists had triumphed. I was stunned and dismayed, but Oliver took a more considered line. “I like this,” he said. “I like this.” I could not imagine why. He explained, “Now we will know exactly who our enemies are and where we stand.”