The Long Walk to Freedom (44 page)

The shootings at Sharpeville provoked national turmoil and a government crisis. Outraged protests came in from across the globe, including one from the American State Department. For the first time, the U.N. Security Council intervened in South African affairs, blaming the government for the shootings and urging it to initiate measures to bring about racial equality. The Johannesburg stock exchange plunged and capital started to flow out of the country. South African whites began making plans to emigrate. Liberals urged Verwoerd to offer concessions to Africans. The government insisted Sharpeville was the result of a Communist conspiracy.

The massacre at Sharpeville created a new situation in the country. In spite of the amateurishness and opportunism of their leaders, the PAC rank and file displayed great courage and fortitude in their demonstrations at Sharpeville and Langa. In just one day, they had moved to the front lines of the struggle, and Robert Sobukwe was being hailed inside and outside the country as the savior of the liberation movement. We in the ANC had to make rapid adjustments to this new situation, and we did so.

A small group of us — Walter, Duma Nokwe, Joe Slovo, and myself — held an all-night meeting in Johannesburg to plan a response. We knew we had to acknowledge the events in some way and give the people an outlet for their anger and grief. We conveyed our plans to Chief Luthuli, and he readily accepted them. On March 26, in Pretoria, the chief publicly burned his pass, calling on others to do the same. He announced a nationwide stay-at-home on March 28, a national Day of Mourning and protest for the atrocities at Sharpeville. In Orlando, Duma Nokwe and I then burned our passes before hundreds of people and dozens of press photographers.

Two days later, on the twenty-eighth, the country responded magnificently as several hundred thousand Africans observed the chief’s call. Only a truly mass organization could coordinate such activities, and the ANC did so. In Cape Town a crowd of fifty thousand met in Langa township to protest the shootings. Rioting broke out in many areas. The government declared a State of Emergency, suspending habeas corpus and assuming sweeping powers to act against all forms of subversion. South Africa was now under martial law.

AT 1:30 IN THE MORNING, on March 30, I was awakened by sharp, unfriendly knocks at my door, the unmistakable signature of the police. “The time has come,” I said to myself as I opened the door to find half-a-dozen armed security policemen. They turned the house upside down, taking virtually every piece of paper they could find, including the transcripts I had recently been making of my mother’s recollections of family history and tribal fables. I was never to see them again. I was then arrested without a warrant, and given no opportunity to call my lawyer. They refused to inform my wife as to where I was to be taken. I simply nodded at Winnie; it was no time for words of comfort.

Thirty minutes later we arrived at Newlands police station, which was familiar to me from the many occasions when I had visited clients there. The station was located in Sophiatown, or rather, what was left of it, for the once bustling township was now a ruin of bulldozed buildings and vacant lots. Inside I found a number of my colleagues who had been similarly rousted out of bed, and over the course of the night, more arrived; by morning we totaled forty in all. We were put in a cramped yard with only the sky as a roof and a dim bulb for light, a space so small and dank that we remained standing all night.

At 7:15, we were taken into a tiny cell with a single drainage hole in the floor which could be flushed only from the outside. We were given no blankets, no food, no mats, and no toilet paper. The hole regularly became blocked and the stench in the room was insufferable. We issued numerous protests, among them the demand to be fed. These were met with surly rejoinders, and we resolved that the next time the door opened, we would surge out into the adjacent courtyard and refuse to return to the cell until we had been fed. The young policeman on duty took fright and left as we stampeded through the door. A few minutes later, a burly no-nonsense sergeant entered the courtyard and commanded us to return to the cell. “Go inside!” he yelled. “If you don’t, I’ll bring in fifty men with batons and we’ll break your skulls!” After the horrors of Sharpeville, the threat did not seem empty.

The station commander approached the gate of the courtyard to observe us, and then came over and berated me for standing with my hands in my pockets. “Is that the way you act around an officer?” he yelled. “Take your bloody hands out of your pockets!” I kept my hands firmly rooted in my pockets as if I were taking a walk on a chilly day. I told him that I might condescend to remove my hands if we were fed.

At 3
P
.
M
., more than twelve hours after most of us had arrived, we were delivered a container of thin mealie pap and no utensils. Normally, I would have considered this unfit for consumption, but we reached in with our unwashed hands and ate as though we had been provided with the most delicious delicacies under the sun. After our meal, we elected a committee to represent us, which included Duma Nokwe and Z. B. Molete, the publicity secretary of the Pan Africanist Congress, and me. I was elected spokesman. We immediately drew up a petition protesting the unfit conditions and demanding our immediate release on the grounds that our detention was illegal.

At six o’clock we received sleeping mats and blankets. I do not think words can do justice to a description of the foulness and filthiness of this bedding. The blankets were encrusted with dried blood and vomit, ridden with lice, vermin, and cockroaches, and reeked with a stench that actually competed with the odiousness of the drain.

Near midnight, we were told we were to be called out, but for what we did not know. Some of the men smiled at the expectation of release. Others knew better. I was the first to be called and I was ushered over to the front gate of the prison where I was briefly released in front of a group of police officers. But before I could move, an officer shouted.

“Name!”

“Mandela,” I said.

“Nelson Mandela,” the officer said, “I arrest you under the powers vested in me by the Emergency Regulations.” We were not to be released at all, but rearrested under the terms of what we only then discovered was a State of Emergency. Each of us in turn was released for mere seconds, and then rearrested. We had been arrested illegally before the State of Emergency; now we were being properly arrested under the State of Emergency that came into force at midnight. We drafted a memorandum to the commander asking to know our rights.

The next morning, I was called to the commander’s office, where I found my colleague Robert Resha, who had been arrested and was being interrogated by the station commander. When I walked into the room, Resha asked the commander why he had erupted at me the previous night. His answer was that of the typical white
baas:
“Mandela was cheeky.” I responded, “I’m not bound to take my hands out of my pockets for the likes of you, then or now.” The commander jumped out of his chair, but was restrained by other officers. At this moment, Special Branch Detective Sergeant Helberg entered the office and said, “Hello, Nelson!” in a pleasant way. To which I shot back, “I am not Nelson to you, I am Mr. Mandela.” The room was on the brink of becoming a full-scale battle when we were informed that we had to leave to attend the Treason Trial in Pretoria. I did not know whether to laugh or despair, but in the midst of this thirty-six hours of mistreatment and the declaration of a State of Emergency, the government still saw fit to bring us back to Pretoria to continue their desperate and now seemingly outdated case against us. We were taken straight to Pretoria Local Prison, where we were detained.

IN THE MEANTIME, court resumed, in our absence, on March 31, but the witness box was conspicuously empty. Those who did attend were the accused whom the police had failed to pick up under the State of Emergency. Chief Luthuli had been in the middle of his evidence, and Judge Rumpff asked for an explanation for his absence. He was informed that the chief had been taken into custody the night before. Judge Rumpff expressed irritation with the explanation and said he did not see why the State of Emergency should stand in the way of his trial. He demanded that the police bring the chief to court so that he could resume his testimony, and court was adjourned.

Later we discovered that after the chief’s arrest, he had been assaulted. He had been walking up some stairs when he was jostled by a warder, causing his hat to fall to the floor. As he bent to pick it up, he was smacked across the head and face. This was hard for us to take. A man of immense dignity and achievement, a lifelong devout Christian, and a man with a dangerous heart condition, was treated like a barnyard animal by men who were not fit to tie his shoes.

When we were called back into session that morning, Judge Rumpff was informed that the police refused to bring the chief to court. The judge then adjourned court for the day, and we expected to go home. But as they were leaving the court grounds to find transportation, we were all once again rearrested.

But the police, with their usual disorganized overzealousness, made a comical mistake. Wilton Mkwayi, one of the accused and a longtime union leader and ANC man, had traveled to Pretoria for the trial from Port Elizabeth. Somehow he had gotten separated from his colleagues and when he approached the gate and saw the commotion of his fellow accused being arrested, he asked a policeman what was going on. The policeman ordered him to leave. Wilton stood there. The policeman again ordered him to leave, whereupon Wilton informed the officer he was one of the accused. The officer called him a liar, and threatened to arrest him for obstruction of justice. The officer then angrily ordered him to leave the area. Wilton shrugged his shoulders, walked out of the gate, and that was the last anyone saw of Wilton in court. He went underground for the next two months, successfully evading arrest, and then was smuggled out of the country, soon emerging as a foreign representative for the Congress of Trade Unions and later going for military training in China.

That night, we were joined by detainees from other parts of the Transvaal. The countrywide police raid had led to the detention without trial of more than two thousand people. These men and women belonged to all races and all anti-apartheid parties. A call-up of soldiers had been announced, and units of the army had been mobilized and stationed in strategic areas around the country. On April 8, both the ANC and the PAC were declared illegal organizations, under the Suppression of Communism Act. Overnight, being a member of the ANC had become a felony punishable by a term in jail and a fine. The penalty for furthering the aims of the ANC was imprisonment for up to ten years. Now even nonviolent law-abiding protests under the auspices of the ANC were illegal. The struggle had entered a new phase. We were now, all of us, outlaws.

For the duration of the State of Emergency we stayed at Pretoria Local, where the conditions were as bad as those at Newlands. Groups of five prisoners were pressed into cells measuring nine feet by seven feet; the cells were filthy, with poor lighting and worse ventilation. We had a single sanitary pail with a loose lid and vermin-infested blankets. We were allowed outside for an hour a day.

On our second day in Pretoria, we sent a deputation to complain about the conditions to the prison’s commanding officer, Colonel Snyman. The colonel’s response was rude and abrupt. He demanded that we produce evidence, calling our complaints lies. “You have brought the vermin into my prison from your filthy homes,” he sneered.

I said we also required a room that was quiet and well lit so that we could prepare for our case. The colonel was again contemptuous: “Government regulations do not require prisoners to read books, if you can read at all.” Despite the colonel’s disdainful attitude, the cells were soon painted and fumigated and we were supplied with fresh blankets and sanitary pails. We were permitted to stay out in the yard for much of the day, while those of us involved in the Treason Trial were provided with a large cell for consultations, in which we were also permitted to keep legal books.

Pretoria Local would be our home for the foreseeable future. We would leave for the trial in the morning and return to the prison in the afternoon. The prison, according to apartheid dictates, separated detainees by color. We were of course already separated from our white colleagues, but the separation from our Indian and Coloured comrades within the same non-White facility seemed like madness. We demanded to be accommodated together, and were given all sorts of absurd explanations why this was impossible. When the proverbial inflexibility of red tape is combined with the petty small-mindedness of racism, the result can be mind-boggling. But the authorities eventually yielded, allowing the Treason Trialists to be kept together.

Although we were kept together, our diet was fixed according to race. For breakfast, Africans, Indians, and Coloureds received the same quantities, except that Indians and Coloureds received a half-teaspoonful of sugar, which we did not. For supper, the diets were the same, except that Indians and Coloureds received four ounces of bread while we received none. This latter distinction was made on the curious premise that Africans did not naturally like bread, which was a more sophisticated or “Western” taste. The diet for white detainees was far superior to that for Africans. So color-conscious were the authorities that even the type of sugar and bread supplied to whites and nonwhites differed: white prisoners received white sugar and white bread, while Coloured and Indian prisoners were given brown sugar and brown bread.

We complained vociferously about the inferior quality of the food, and as a result, our advocate Sydney Kentridge made a formal complaint in court. I stated that the food was unfit for human consumption. Judge Rumpff agreed to sample the food himself and that day went out to do so. Samp and beans was the best meal that the prison prepared, and in this case, the authorities put in more beans and gravy than usual. Judge Rumpff ate a few spoonfuls and pronounced the food well cooked and tasty. He did allow that it should be served warm. We laughed among ourselves at the idea of “warm” jail food; it was a contradiction in terms. Eventually, the authorities supplied the detainees with what they called an Improved Diet: Africans received bread, while Indians and Coloureds received the same food provided to white prisoners.