Late Nelson Mandela Some of his Old Good and Ugly Days

J.S. Moroka, Nelson Mandela and Yusuf Dadoo outside a Johannesburg courtroom in 1952

Shortly after meeting and marrying a young social worker, Winnie Madikizela, Mandela is imprisoned briefly and the ANC banned. Aquitted three years later, Mandela organises a bombing campaign and leaves South Africa for the first time 

In 1957, at a low ebb in Mandela’s political career, when the trial was diverting his attention from the split in the ANC, he met Winnie Madikizela, a 23-year-old social worker at Baragwanath hospital. Winnie was ambitious, strong-willed, pugnacious (as a girl she had manufactured a vicious knuckle duster for use on her sister), smartly turned out and very attractive. Mandela married her on June 14 1958.  

They had no more than four months together before Mandela was imprisoned. Winnie Mandela joined the political struggle with gusto. Late in 1958, heavily pregnant, she was arrested for her part in protests against the pass laws, and held in prison for some weeks. The Mandelas’ daughter Zenani was born on February 4 1959, soon after Winnie had been freed.

Nelson and Winnie Mandela show off their firstborn daughter, Zindzi in 1961

By the time that Mandela was acquitted of treason in March 1961, he was already involved in the next stage of the struggle. By then, the Sharpeville massacre and the formal banning of the ANC in 1960 had robbed peaceful resistance of all credibility. After a series of new mass demonstrations was launched, Mandela was a marked man. He was on the run for 17 months, earning the nickname “The Black Pimpernel” for his use of disguise, whether as a garage mechanic, caretaker, priest, window-cleaner or messenger. In these circumstances, he created Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the armed wing of the ANC, which carried out acts of sabotage. 

Nelson Mandela and friends sing 'Nikosi Sikelel I Afrika' at the end of the treason trial in 1961

Mandela organised a bombing campaign in December 1961. There was no plan to kill anyone – the targets were power stations, electricity pylons and empty government buildings. But the bombings were a fiasco, ineptly organised and carried out with almost absurd amateurism. The only casualty was one of Mandela’s youthful guerrillas, one Petrus Molife, who mistakenly killed himself with his own bomb. Under Mandela’s leadership, Umkhonto we Sizwe was peculiarly ineffective. 

In January 1962 Mandela left South Africa for the first time, escaping across the border into Bechuanaland, now Botswana. His ostensible purpose was to attend a conference of the Pan-African Freedom Movement in Addis Ababa, but he also seized the occasion to make a tour of African states in order to raise funds, and to look for sources of weapons and training. 

He met Julius Nyerere in Tanganyika; flew on to Nigeria; and then traversed the continent from Lagos to Addis Ababa, where his speech was warmly received and where he found an enthusiastic supporter in the Emperor Haile Selassie. 

Afterwards, Mandela went on to Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Mali, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana and Senegal. From Dakar he took a plane to London, where he met Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour Party, and Jo Grimond of the Liberals. There is a photograph of him standing outside Westminster Abbey, a reminder that he always considered the British Parliament as the original fountain of democracy.

 

Mandela slipped back into South Africa in July 1962, and lived for a while at Lilliesleaf, a sprawling farm in Rivonia, a northern suburb of Johannesburg. His wife risked visiting him there and was undetected; nevertheless, the net was closing in. 

^{Nelson Mandela outside Westminster Abbey, 1962}

Early in August, Mandela went to Durban, disguised as the chauffeur of a white man, the theatre director Cecil Williams. On August 5 1962 the police arrested Mandela — one-and-a-half hours after the car had left Durban. Almost certainly he had been betrayed, though it did not help his cause that the “boss” was driving and the “chauffeur” relaxing beside him in the passenger seat. 

Mandela was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for inciting workers to strike, and two years for leaving the country without a passport. But in July 1963 a raid on the Rivonia house yielded the vital evidence about his leadership of the ANC’s armed wing and the bombing campaign of December 1961. 

Along with other ANC members, Mandela was charged with attempting to cause a violent revolution. Two lengthy documents in Mandela’s handwriting were submitted in proof that the accused had been promised military and financial aid from other African states. 

Mandela, in defence, hardly deigned to deny the charges; rather, in a long and eloquent address, he outlined the stages by which resistance had become an imperative moral duty. 

“I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination,” he told the court. “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for, and to see realised. But, my Lord, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” 

Mandela spoke those words in the full knowledge that he risked the gallows. In the event, Mr Justice Quartus De Wet sentenced him to life imprisonment with hard labour.