Anthony Sampson - Mandela - The Authorised Biography

Some of Mandela’s friends were already active in politics: Paul Mahabane, who spent holidays with him, was the son of a former president of the ANC; Ntsu Mokhehle, a brilliant scientist, would become head of the Basutoland Congress Party; Nyathi Khongisa stirred up the students by attacking Prime Minister Smuts as a racialist and publicly hoping that Nazi Germany would defeat Britain, so that Africans could overthrow European domination; Lincoln Mkentane, from another prominent Transkei family, joined the ANC and was imprisoned; Oliver Tambo, an outstanding scholar in both science and the arts, was already a keen political debater. 57But Mandela himself was not then politically aware. He was not close to Tambo, and was embarrassed by the rebelliousness of friends like Mahabane. His immediate ambition was to be a court interpreter, a much esteemed profession in the rural areas, which promised both influence and status: ‘I could not resist the glitter of a civil service career.’ 58He studied interpreting at Fort Hare, together with law, native administration, politics and English. He saw a degree as his passport not to political leadership, but to a position in the community which would enable him to support his family.

Most of the other students were not very political either, and expected to become civil servants or, most often, teachers, which worried the university’s Governing Council: ‘It cannot be expected that the teaching profession will continue to absorb all grades,’ the council reported in 1940. 59There had been a time when Fort Hare was more revolutionary. In the early 1930s the young communist Eddie Roux had pitched a tent on the hill near the university, and given courses in Marxism-Leninism which fascinated African students including the young Govan Mbeki, while the black American Max Yergan taught Mbeki about dialectical materialism. 60But by Mandela’s time most students were preoccupied by their careers, and the Red Star had waned after Stalin made his pact with Hitler in August 1939. Soon after Mandela arrived at Fort Hare, Britain declared war on Germany, and Prime Minister Jan Smuts immediately announced that South Africa was entering the war on Britain’s side. When Smuts came to talk to the students at Fort Hare they nearly all applauded him – including Mandela, who was relieved that Smuts’s English accent was almost as poor as his own. 61Mandela eagerly supported Britain’s stand against Hitler, and would remain fascinated by Winston Churchill. Over fifty years later he would tell Churchill’s daughter Mary Soames how he listened to his wartime broadcasts at Fort Hare, and recalled how Churchill had escaped from the Afrikaners during the Boer War. 62But at twenty-two, Mandela remembered, ‘Neither war nor politics were my concern.’ 63

Mandela seemed to have golden prospects as a future civil servant, but they were to be smashed by his rebelliousness. This did not concern politics, but a more immediate cause – the terrible food. The meals at Fort Hare were Spartan, and the African students felt all the more hard-done-by after they discovered that the white students at Rhodes University, which they visited for sporting contests and debates, were much better fed. 64In his second year Mandela had been elected to the Students’ Representative Council, but only a quarter of the eligible students had voted, the majority having boycotted the elections and demanded improvements in the college diet and more powers for the council. Mandela and the other five elected representatives resigned, and the shrewd principal Dr Kerr ordered new elections, to be held at dinner, when all the students would be present. But again only a quarter voted, electing the same six representatives. The other five agreed to stay on the council, but Mandela felt he could not ignore the views of the majority, and resigned again. He was encouraged in his stand by Kaiser Matanzima, who had previously been on the council.

Dr Kerr summoned Mandela, and warned him sympathetically but firmly that if he continued to resist he would be expelled. Mandela spent a sleepless night, torn between his ambition and his duty to his fellow-students: ‘I was frightened,’ he said later. ‘I feared K.D. more than Dr Kerr.’ 65The next day he confirmed that he would not serve. Kerr gave him one last chance to think again, and told him to return to his studies. Believing that Kerr was infringing students’ rights, Mandela refused, and was expelled. He went home to the Great Place, where the Regent, angry with him for throwing away his career, told him to apologise and go back to Fort Hare. But Mandela’s stubbornness came to the fore. ‘He was very obstinate,’ said his cousin Ntombizodwa. ‘He would never go back.’ 66

Soon the Regent dropped a bombshell which brought their relationship to a head. He believed he would not live much longer, and had arranged for both his son Justice and Mandela to marry and to settle down with their own families. Mandela was horrified: the girl chosen for him was rather fat and did not attract him, and he also knew she was in love with Justice: ‘She was probably no more anxious to be burdened with me than I with her.’ 67It was the breaking point. Mandela knew he owed a great deal to the Regent, who had adopted him as his own child and had paid for his education, and who was now ill and in need of support. But he was determined to have his own freedom: he would secretly run away with Justice, to try his fortunes in Johannesburg.

‘Life has its own way of forcing decisions on those who hesitate,’ he wrote afterwards. This was his own choice, which put an abrupt end both to his tribal expectations and, it seemed, to his university career: ‘Suddenly all my beautiful dreams crumbled and the prize that was so near my grasp vanished like snow in the summer sun.’ But the decision had even greater repercussions than he realised at the time. If he had not defied Fort Hare’s principal, he reflected four decades later from jail, ‘perhaps I would have been safe from all the storms that have blown me from pillar to post over the last thirty years’. As it was, he was plunged into a much more dangerous sea; but it rapidly opened up much wider horizons, through which ‘I could see the history and culture of my own people as part and parcel of the history and culture of the entire human race.’ 68

1941–1945

IN APRIL 1941, aged twenty-two, Mandela left the Great Place for Johannesburg with Justice. He was one of the thousands of rural blacks who arrived every year in the ‘City of Gold’, most of them in blankets or tattered clothes, hoping to find jobs as mineworkers, servants or labourers. They were a familiar sight to white Johannesburgers, commemorated in contemporary films and novels, from Jim Comes to Jo-burg to Cry, the Beloved Country. 1Their arrival seemed an extreme example of the transition from rural poverty to metropolitan sophistication, typified by the recurring image of a bewildered tribesman gazing in wonder at the skyscrapers, fast cars and bright lights of the white man’s city. But it was a misleading image: rural Africans from rooted homes could have a deeper sense of security and a clearer ambition in the city jungle than rootless urbanites who took its confusion for granted. And few whites realised that the country bumpkins included highly-educated, ambitious young people with proud traditions, who were to prove capable of overturning white supremacy within their lifetime.

Johannesburg was only fifty-five years old, but was already one of the major cities of Africa, with a confident centre including grand hotels and a stone cathedral, wealthy suburbs spreading to the north and sprawling black townships in the south-west. The Second World War was now creating a boom economy in South Africa, as in other industrial centres across the world: the cutback of imports stimulated local production, and created an urgent need for black labour to replace white workers, many of whom were fighting overseas. Between the censuses of 1936 and 1946 the black population in South Africa’s cities increased by almost 50 per cent, from 1,142,000 to 1,689,000. When the rural tribal areas were devastated by droughts the flow into Johannesburg turned into a flood, and for two years the government abandoned influx control and its enforcement by pass laws. The inrush created chaotic new shanty-towns around the fringes of the city, but also new opportunities and hopes for ambitious young blacks – and new political aspirations encouraged by the war.