The Long Walk to Freedom (48 page)
Judge Bekker’s wife was a person sensitive to the needs of others. During the State of Emergency, she collected goods which she brought to the accused.
But the consequence of the government’s humiliating defeat was that the state decided never to let it happen again. From that day forth they were not going to rely on judges whom they had not themselves appointed. They were not going to observe what they considered the legal niceties that protected terrorists or permitted convicted prisoners certain rights in jail. During the Treason Trial, there were no examples of individuals being isolated, beaten, and tortured in order to elicit information. All of those things became commonplace shortly thereafter.
THE BLACK PIMPERNEL
I DID NOT return home after the verdict. Although others were in a festive mood, and eager to celebrate, I knew the authorities could strike at any moment, and I did not want to give them the opportunity. I was anxious to be off before I was banned or arrested, and I spent the night in a safe house in Johannesburg. It was a restless night in a strange bed, and I started at the sound of every car, thinking it might be the police.
Walter and Duma saw me off on the first leg of my journey, which was to take me to Port Elizabeth. In P.E., I met with Govan Mbeki and Raymond Mhlaba to discuss the new underground structures of the organization. We met at the house of Dr. Masla Pather, who would later be sentenced to two years in prison for allowing us to meet at his home. At safe houses arranged by the organization, I met the editor of the liberal
Port Elizabeth Evening Post
to discuss the campaign for a national convention, a goal several newspapers subsequently endorsed. I later visited Patrick Duncan, the editor and publisher of the liberal weekly
Contact,
a founding member of the Liberal Party, and one of the first white defiers during the Defiance Campaign. His newspaper had repeatedly been decrying ANC policy as being dictated by Communists, but when he saw me the first thing he said was that a close reading of the Treason Trial record had disabused him of that notion and he would correct it in his paper.
That night I addressed a meeting of African township ministers in Cape Town. I mention this because the opening prayer of one of the ministers has stayed with me over these many years and was a source of strength at a difficult time. He thanked the Lord for His bounty and goodness, for His mercy and His concern for all men. But then he took the liberty of reminding the Lord that some of His subjects were more downtrodden than others, and that it sometimes seemed as though He was not paying attention. The minister then said that if the Lord did not show a little more initiative in leading the black man to salvation, the black man would have to take matters into his own two hands. Amen.
On my last morning in Cape Town, I was leaving my hotel in the company of George Peake, a founding member of the South African Coloured People’s Organization, and I stopped to thank the Coloured manager of the hotel for looking after me so well. He was grateful, but also curious. He had discovered my identity and told me that the Coloured community feared that under an African government they would be just as oppressed as under the present white government. He was a middle-class businessman who probably had little contact with Africans, and feared them in the same way as whites did. This was a frequent anxiety on the part of the Coloured community, especially in the Cape, and though I was running late, I explained the Freedom Charter to this fellow and stressed our commitment to nonracialism. A freedom fighter must take every opportunity to make his case to the people.
The following day I joined a secret meeting of the ANC National Executive Committee and the joint executives of the Congress movement in Durban to discuss whether the planned action should take the form of a stay-at-home or a full-fledged strike with organized pickets and demonstrations. Those who argued for the strike said that the stay-at-home strategy we had used since 1950 had outlasted its usefulness, that at a time when the PAC was appealing to the masses, more militant forms of the struggle were necessary. The alternative view, which I advocated, was that stay-at-homes allowed us to strike at the enemy while preventing him from striking back. I argued that the confidence of the people in our campaigns had grown precisely because they realized that we were not reckless with their lives. Sharpeville, I said, for all the heroism of the demonstrators, allowed the enemy to shoot down our people. I argued for stay-at-homes even though I was aware that our people around the country were becoming impatient with passive forms of struggle, but I did not think we should depart from our proven tactics without comprehensive planning, and we had neither the time not the resources to do so. The decision was for a stay-at-home.
Living underground requires a seismic psychological shift. One has to plan every action, however small and seemingly insignificant. Nothing is innocent. Everything is questioned. You cannot be yourself; you must fully inhabit whatever role you have assumed. In some ways, this is not much of an adaptation for a black man in South Africa. Under apartheid, a black man lived a shadowy life between legality and illegality, between openness and concealment. To be a black man in South Africa meant not to trust anything, which was not unlike living underground for one’s entire life.
I became a creature of the night. I would keep to my hideout during the day, and would emerge to do my work when it became dark. I operated mainly from Johannesburg, but I would travel as necessary. I stayed in empty flats, in people’s houses, wherever I could be alone and inconspicuous. Although I am a gregarious person, I love solitude even more. I welcomed the opportunity to be by myself, to plan, to think, to plot. But one can have too much of solitude. I was terribly lonesome for my wife and family.
The key to being underground is to be invisible. Just as there is a way to walk in a room in order to make yourself stand out, there is a way of walking and behaving that makes you inconspicuous. As a leader, one often seeks prominence; as an outlaw, the opposite is true. When underground I did not walk as tall or stand as straight. I spoke more softly, with less clarity and distinction. I was more passive, more unobtrusive; I did not ask for things, but instead let people tell me what to do. I did not shave or cut my hair. My most frequent disguise was as a chauffeur, a chef, or a “garden boy.” I would wear the blue overalls of the field-worker and often wore round, rimless glasses known as Mazzawati tea-glasses. I had a car and I wore a chauffeur’s cap with my overalls. The pose of chauffeur was convenient because I could travel under the pretext of driving my master’s car.
During those early months, when there was a warrant for my arrest and I was being pursued by the police, my outlaw existence caught the imagination of the press. Articles claiming that I had been here and there were on the front pages. Roadblocks were instituted all over the country, but the police repeatedly came up empty-handed. I was dubbed the Black Pimpernel, a somewhat derogatory adaptation of Baroness Orczy’s fictional character the Scarlet Pimpernel, who daringly evaded capture during the French Revolution.
I traveled secretly about the country; I was with Muslims in the Cape; with sugar-workers in Natal; with factory workers in Port Elizabeth; I moved through townships in different parts of the country attending secret meetings at night. I would even feed the mythology of the Black Pimpernel by taking a pocketful of “tickeys” 20 (threepenny pieces) and phoning individual newspaper reporters from telephone boxes and relaying to them stories of what we were planning or of the ineptitude of the police. I would pop up here and there to the annoyance of the police and to the delight of the people.
There were many wild and inaccurate stories about my experiences underground. People love to embellish tales of daring. I did have a number of narrow escapes, however, which no one knew about. On one occasion, I was driving in town and I stopped at a traffic light. I looked to my left and in an adjacent car saw Colonel Spengler, the chief of the Witwatersrand Security Branch. It would have been a great plum for him to catch the Black Pimpernel. I was wearing a workman’s cap, my blue overalls, and my glasses. He never looked my way, but even so the seconds I spent waiting for the light to change seemed like hours.
One afternoon, when I was in Johannesburg posing as a chauffeur and wearing my long duster and cap, I was waiting on a corner to be picked up and I saw an African policeman striding deliberately toward me. I looked around to see if I had a place to run, but before I did, he smiled at me and surreptitiously gave me the thumbs-up ANC salute and was gone. Incidents like this happened many times, and I was reassured when I saw that we had the loyalty of many African policemen. There was a black sergeant who used to tip off Winnie as to what the police were doing. He would whisper to her, “Make sure Madiba is not in Alexandra on Wednesday night because there is going to be a raid.” Black policemen have often been severely criticized during the struggle, but many have played covert roles that have been extremely valuable.
When I was underground, I remained as unkempt as possible. My overalls looked as if they had been through a lifetime of hard toil. The police had one picture of me with a beard, which they widely distributed, and my colleagues urged me to shave it off. But I had become attached to my beard, and I resisted all efforts to get me to shave.
Not only was I not recognized, I was sometimes snubbed. Once, I was planning to attend a meeting in a distant area of Johannesburg and a well-known priest arranged with friends of his to put me up for the night. I arrived at the door, and before I could announce who I was, the elderly lady who answered exclaimed, “No, we don’t want such a man as you here!” and shut the door.
MY TIME UNDERGROUND was mainly taken up in planning the May 29 stay-at-home. It was shaping up to be a virtual war between the state and the liberation movement. Late in May, the government staged countrywide raids on opposition leaders. Meetings were banned; printing presses were seized; and legislation was rushed through Parliament permitting the police to detain charged prisoners for twelve days without bail.
Verwoerd declared that those supporting the strike, including sympathetic newspapers, were “playing with fire,” an ominous declaration given the ruthlessness of the state. The government urged industries to provide sleeping accommodations for workers so that they would not have to return home during the strike. Two days before the stay-at-home, the government staged the greatest peace-time show of force in South African history. The military exercised its largest call-up since the war. Police holidays were canceled. Military units were stationed at the entrances and exits of townships. While Saracen tanks rumbled through the dirt streets of the townships, helicopters hovered above, swooping down to break up any gathering. At night, the helicopters trained searchlights on houses.
The English-language press had widely publicized the campaign until a few days before it was to begin. But on the eve of the stay-at-home the entire English-language press crumbled and urged people to go to work. The PAC played the role of saboteur and released thousands of flyers telling people to oppose the stay-at-home, and denouncing the ANC leaders as cowards. The PAC’s actions shocked us. It is one thing to criticize, and that we can accept, but to attempt to break a strike by calling upon the people to go to work directly serves the interests of the enemy.
The night before the stay-at-home, I was scheduled to meet the Johannesburg leadership of the ANC at a safe house in Soweto. To avoid police roadblocks, I entered Soweto through Kliptown, which was normally not patrolled. But as I went around a blind corner I drove straight into what I had been trying to avoid: a roadblock. A white policeman motioned for me to stop. I was dressed in my usual costume of overalls and chauffeur’s cap. He squinted through the window at me and then stepped forward and searched the car on his own. Normally, this was the duty of the African police. After he found nothing, he demanded my pass. I told him that I had left it at home by mistake, and casually recited a fictitious pass number. This seemed to satisfy him and he motioned for me to drive through.