The Long Walk to Freedom (31 page)

The drive to Villiers cheered me considerably, and I was laboring under a false sense of security when I entered the small courthouse on the morning of the third of September. I found a group of policemen waiting for me. With nary a word, they served me with an order under the Suppression of Communism Act requiring me to resign from the ANC, restricting me to the Johannesburg district, and prohibiting me from attending any meetings or gatherings for two years. I knew such measures would come, but I had not expected to receive my bans in the remote town of Villiers.

I was thirty-five years old and these new and more severe bans ended a period of nearly a decade of involvement with the ANC, years that had been the time of my political awakening and growth, and my gradual commitment to the struggle that had become my life. Henceforth, all of my actions and plans on behalf of the ANC and the liberation struggle would become secret and illegal. Once served, I had to return to Johannesburg immediately.

My bans drove me from the center of the struggle to the sidelines, from a role that was primary to one that was peripheral. Though I was often consulted and was able to influence the direction of events, I did so at a distance and only when expressly asked. I no longer felt like a vital organ of the body — the heart, lungs, or backbone — but a severed limb. Even freedom fighters, at least then, had to obey the laws, and at that point, imprisonment for violating my bans would have been useless to the ANC and to myself. We were not yet at the point where we were open revolutionaries, overtly fighting the system no matter what the cost. We believed then that it was better to organize underground than to go to prison. When I was forced to resign from the ANC, the organization had to replace me, and no matter what I might have liked, I could no longer wield the authority I once possessed. While I was driving back to Johannesburg, the Free State scenery did not have quite the same elevating effect on me as before.

WHEN I RECEIVED my banning, the Transvaal conference of the ANC was due to be held the following month, and I had already completed the draft of my presidential address. It was read to the conference by Andrew Kunene, a member of the executive. In that speech, which subsequently became known as “The No Easy Walk to Freedom” speech, a line taken from Jawaharlal Nehru, I said that the masses now had to be prepared for new forms of political struggle. The new laws and tactics of the government had made the old forms of mass protest — public meetings, press statements, stay-aways — extremely dangerous and self-destructive. Newspapers would not publish our statements; printing presses refused to print our leaflets, all for fear of prosecution under the Suppression of Communism Act. “These developments,” I wrote, “require the evolution of new forms of political struggle. The old methods,” I said, were now “suicidal.”

“The oppressed people and the oppressors are at loggerheads. The day of reckoning between the forces of freedom and those of reaction is not very far off. I have not the slightest doubt that when that day comes truth and justice will prevail. . . . The feelings of the oppressed people have never been more bitter. The grave plight of the people compels them to resist to the death the stinking policies of the gangsters that rule our country. . . . To overthrow oppression has been sanctioned by humanity and is the highest aspiration of every free man.”

In April of 1954, the Law Society of the Transvaal applied to the Supreme Court for my name to be struck off the roll of accredited attorneys on the ground that the political activities for which I was convicted in the Defiance case amounted to unprofessional and dishonorable conduct. This occurred at a time when Mandela and Tambo was flourishing and I was in court dozens of times a week.

The documents were served at my office, and as soon as the application against me had been made and publicized, I began to receive offers of support and help. I even received offers of help from a number of well-known Afrikaner lawyers. Many of these men were supporters of the National Party, but they believed that the application was biased and unfair. Their response suggested to me that even in racist South Africa professional solidarity can sometimes transcend color, and that there were still attorneys and judges who refused to be the rubber stamps of an immoral regime.

My case was ably defended by advocate Walter Pollak, Q.C., chairman of the Johannesburg Bar Council. At the time that I retained Walter Pollak, I was advised that I should also retain someone who was not connected with the struggle, as that would positively influence the Transvaal bar. To that end, we retained William Aronsohn, as instructing attorney or barrister, who was head of one of the oldest law firms in Johannesburg. Both men acted for me without charge. We argued that the application was an affront to the idea of justice and that I had an inherent right to fight for my political beliefs, which was the right of all men in a state where the rule of law applied.

But the argument that had great weight was Pollak’s use of the case of a man called Strijdom, who was detained during the Second World War together with B. J. Vorster (who later became prime minister). Both were interned for their pro-Nazi stance. Following a failed escape attempt, Strijdom had been found guilty of car theft. Later, after he was released, he applied to the bar for admission as an advocate. Despite his crimes and strong objections from the Bar Council, the court decided to admit him on the ground that his offense was political and that a man cannot be barred from practicing as an advocate for his political beliefs. Pollak said, “There are of course differences between Strijdom and Mandela. Mandela is not a Nationalist and Mandela is not a white.”

Judge Ramsbottom, who heard the case, was an example of a judge who refused to be a mouthpiece for the Nationalists and upheld the independence of the judiciary. His judgment in the case completely upheld our claim that I had a right to campaign for my political beliefs even though they were opposed to the government, and he dismissed the Law Society’s application. And in a rare instance the Law Society was ordered to pay its own costs.

THE ANTIREMOVAL CAMPAIGN in Sophiatown was a long-running battle. We held our ground, as did the state. Through 1954 and into 1955, rallies were held twice a week, on Wednesday and Sunday evenings. Speaker after speaker continued to decry the government’s plans. The ANC and the Ratepayers Association, under the direction of Dr. Xuma, protested to the government in letters and petitions. We ran the antiremoval campaign on the slogan “Over Our Dead Bodies,” a motto often shouted from the platforms and echoed by the audience. One night, it even roused the otherwise cautious Dr. Xuma to utter the electrifying slogan used to rally African warriors to battle in the previous century:
“Zemk’ inkomo magwalandini!”
(The enemy has captured the cattle, you cowards!)

The government had scheduled the removal for February 9, 1955. As the day approached, Oliver and I were in the township daily, meeting local leaders, discussing plans, and acting in our professional capacity for those being forced out of the area or prosecuted. We sought to prove to the court that the government’s documentation was often incorrect and that many orders to leave were therefore illegal. But this was only a temporary measure; the government would not let a few illegalities stand in their way.

Shortly before the scheduled removal, a special mass meeting was planned for Freedom Square. Ten thousand people gathered to hear Chief Luthuli speak. But upon his arrival in Johannesburg, he was served with a banning order forcing him to return to Natal.

The night before the removal, Joe Modise, one of the most dedicated of the local ANC leaders, addressed a tense meeting of more than five hundred youthful activists. They expected the ANC to give them an order to battle the police and the army. They were prepared to erect barricades overnight and engage the police with weapons and whatever came to hand the next day. They assumed our slogan meant what it said: that Sophiatown would be removed only over our dead bodies.

But after discussions with the ANC leadership, including myself, Joe told the youth to stand down. They were angry and felt betrayed. But we believed that violence would have been a disaster. We pointed out that an insurrection required careful planning or it would become an act of suicide. We were not yet ready to engage the enemy on its own terms.

In the hazy dawn hours of February 9, four thousand police and army troops cordoned off the township while workers razed empty houses and government trucks began moving families from Sophiatown to Meadowlands. The night before, the ANC had evacuated several families to prearranged accommodation with pro-ANC families in the interior of Sophiatown. But our efforts were too little and too late, and could only be a stopgap measure. The army and the police were relentlessly efficient. After a few weeks, our resistance collapsed. Most of our local leaders had been banned or arrested, and in the end, Sophiatown died not to the sound of gunfire but to the sound of rumbling trucks and sledgehammers.

One can always be correct about a political action one is reading about in the next day’s newspaper, but when you are in the center of a heated political fight, you are given little time for reflection. We made a variety of mistakes in the Western Areas antiremoval campaign and learned a number of lessons. “Over Our Dead Bodies” was a dynamic slogan, but it proved as much a hindrance as a help. A slogan is a vital link between the organization and the masses it seeks to lead. It should synthesize a particular grievance into a succinct and pithy phrase, while mobilizing the people to combat it. Our slogan caught the imagination of the people, but it led them to believe that we would fight to the death to resist the removal. In fact, the ANC was not prepared to do that at all.

We never provided the people with an alternative to moving to Meadowlands. When the people in Sophiatown realized we could neither stop the government nor provide them with housing elsewhere, their own resistance waned and the flow of people to Meadowlands increased. Many tenants moved willingly, for they found they would have more space and cleaner housing in Meadowlands. We did not take into account the different situations of landlords and tenants. While the landlords had reasons to stay, many tenants had an incentive to leave. The ANC was criticized by a number of Africanist members who accused the leadership of protecting the interests of the landlords at the expense of the tenants.

The lesson I took away from the campaign was that in the end, we had no alternative to armed and violent resistance. Over and over again, we had used all the nonviolent weapons in our arsenal — speeches, deputations, threats, marches, strikes, stay-aways, voluntary imprisonment — all to no avail, for whatever we did was met by an iron hand. A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire.