The Long Walk to Freedom (26 page)

During the six months of the campaign I traveled a great deal throughout the country. I generally went by car, leaving at night or very early in the morning. I toured the Cape, Natal, and the Transvaal, explaining the campaign to small groups, sometimes going from house to house in the townships. Often, my task was to iron out differences in areas that were about to launch actions or had recently done so. In those days, when mass communication for Africans was primitive or nonexistent, politics were parochial. We had to win people over one by one.

On one occasion I drove to the eastern Cape to resolve a dispute involving Alcott Gwentshe, who was running the campaign in East London. Gwentshe had been a successful shopkeeper and had played an important role in organizing East London for the stay-at-home of June 26, two years before. He had briefly gone to jail at the beginning of the Defiance Campaign. He was a strong and able man, but he was an individualist who ignored the advice of the executive and took decisions unilaterally. He was now at odds with his own executive, which was mainly populated with intellectuals.

Gwentshe knew how to exploit certain issues in order to discredit his opponents. He would speak before local members who were workers not intellectuals, and say — in Xhosa, never English, for English was the language of the intellectuals — “Comrades, I think you know that I have suffered for the struggle. I had a good job and then went to jail at the beginning of the Defiance Campaign and I lost that job. Now that I am out of prison, these intellectuals have come along and said, ‘Gwentshe, we are better educated than you, we are more capable than you, let us run this campaign.’ ”

When I investigated the situation I found that Gwentshe had indeed ignored the advice of the executive. But the people were behind him, and he had created a disciplined and well-organized group of volunteers who had defied in an orderly fashion even while Gwentshe was in prison. Although I thought Gwentshe was wrong for disregarding the executive, he was doing a good job and was so firmly entrenched that he could not easily be dislodged. When I saw the members of the executive, I explained that it was impractical to do anything about the situation now, but if they wanted to remedy it, they must defeat him at the next election. It was one of the first times that I saw that it was foolhardy to go against the masses of people. It is no use to take an action to which the masses are opposed, for it will then be impossible to enforce.

The government saw the campaign as a threat to its security and its policy of apartheid. They regarded civil disobedience not as a form of protest but as a crime, and were perturbed by the growing partnership between Africans and Indians. Apartheid was designed to divide racial groups, and we showed that different groups could work together. The prospect of a united front between Africans and Indians, between moderates and radicals, greatly worried them. The Nationalists insisted that the campaign was instigated and led by Communist agitators. The minister of justice announced that he would soon pass legislation to deal with our defiance, a threat he implemented during the 1953 parliamentary session with the passage of the Public Safety Act, which empowered the government to declare martial law and to detain people without trial, and the Criminal Laws Amendment Act, which authorized corporal punishment for defiers.

The government tried a number of underhanded means to interrupt the campaign. Government propagandists repeatedly claimed that the leaders of the campaign were living it up in comfort while the masses were languishing in jail. This allegation was far from the truth, but it achieved a certain currency. The government also infiltrated spies and agents provocateurs into the organization. The ANC welcomed virtually anyone who wanted to join. In spite of the fact that our volunteers were carefully screened before they were selected to defy, the police managed to penetrate not only our local branches but some of the batches of defiers. When I was arrested and sent to Marshall Square, I noticed two fellows among the defiers, one of whom I had never seen before. He wore unusual prison garb: a suit and tie with an overcoat and a silk scarf. What kind of fellow goes to jail dressed like that? His name was Ramaila, and on the third day when we were due to be released, he simply vanished.

The second fellow, whose name was Makhanda, stood out because of his military demeanor. We were out in the courtyard and we were all in high spirits. The defiers would march in front of Yusuf and myself and salute us. Makhanda, who was tall and slender, marched in a soldierly manner and then gave a crisp, graceful salute. A number of the fellows teased him that he must be a policeman to salute so well.

Makhanda had previously worked as a janitor at ANC headquarters. He was very industrious and was popular among the fellows because he would run out and get fish and chips whenever anyone was hungry. But at a later trial we discovered that both Makhanda and Ramaila were police spies. Ramaila testified that he had infiltrated the ranks of the defiers; the trusty Makhanda was actually Detective-Sergeant Motloung.

Africans who worked as spies against their own brothers generally did so for money. Many blacks in South Africa believed that any effort by the black man to challenge the white man was foolhardy and doomed to failure; the white man was too smart and too strong. These spies saw us as a threat not to the white power structure but to black interests, for whites would mistreat all blacks based on the conduct of a few agitators.

Yet, there were many black policemen who secretly aided us. They were decent fellows and found themselves in a moral quandary. They were loyal to their employer and needed to keep their jobs to support their families, but they were sympathetic to our cause. We had an understanding with a handful of African officers who were members of the security police that they would inform us when there was going to be a police raid. These men were patriots who risked their lives to help the struggle.

The government was not our only impediment. Others who might have helped us instead hindered us. At the height of the Defiance Campaign, the United Party sent two of its MPs to urge us to halt the campaign. They said that if we abandoned our campaign in response to a call made by J. G. N. Strauss, the United Party leader, it would help the party defeat the Nationalists in the next election. We rejected this and Strauss proceeded to attack us with the same scorn used by the Nationalists.

We also came under attack from a breakaway ANC group called the National Minded Bloc. Led by Selope Thema, a former member of the National Executive Committee, the group bolted from the ANC when J. B. Marks was elected president of the Transvaal ANC. Thema, who was editor of the newspaper the
Bantu World,
fiercely criticized the campaign in his paper, claiming that Communists had taken over the ANC and that Indians were exploiting the Africans. He asserted that the Communists were more dangerous now that they were working underground, and that Indian economic interests were in conflict with those of Africans. Although he was in a minority in the ANC, his views got a sympathetic hearing among certain radical Youth Leaguers.

In May, during the middle of the Defiance Campaign, J. B. Marks was banned under the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act for “furthering the aims of communism.” Banning was a legal order by the government, and generally entailed forced resignation from indicated organizations, and restriction from attending gatherings of any kind. It was a kind of walking imprisonment. To ban a person, the government required no proof, offered no charges; the minister of justice simply declared it so. It was a strategy designed to remove the individual from the struggle, allowing him to live a narrowly defined life outside of politics. To violate or ignore a banning order was to invite imprisonment.

At the Transvaal conference that year in October, my name was proposed to replace the banned J. B. Marks, who had recommended that I succeed him. I was the national president of the Youth League, and the favorite for Marks’s position, but my candidacy was opposed by a group from within the Transvaal ANC that called itself “Bafabegiya” (Those Who Die Dancing). The group consisted mainly of ex-Communists turned extreme African nationalists. They sought to cut all links with Indian activists and to move the ANC in the direction of a more confrontational strategy. They were led by MacDonald Maseko, a former Communist who had been chairman of the Orlando Branch of the ANC during the Defiance Campaign, and Seperepere Marupeng, who had been the chief volunteer for the Defiance Campaign in the Witwatersrand. Both Maseko and Marupeng intended to stand for the presidency of the Transvaal.

Marupeng was considered something of a demagogue. He used to wear a military-style khaki suit replete with epaulets and gold buttons, and carried a baton like that made famous by Field Marshal Montgomery. He would stand up in front of meetings, his baton clutched underneath his arm, and say: “I am tired of waiting for freedom. I want freedom now! I will meet Malan at the crossroads and I will show him what I want.” Then, banging his baton on the podium, he would cry, “I want freedom now!”

Because of speeches like these, Marupeng became extremely popular during the Defiance Campaign, but popularity is only one factor in an election. He thought that because of his newfound prominence he would win the presidency. Before the election, when it was known that I would be a candidate for the presidency, I approached him and said, “I would like you to stand for election to the executive so that you can serve with me when I am president.” He regarded this as a slight, that I was in effect demoting him, and he refused, choosing instead to run for the presidency himself. But he had miscalculated, for I won the election with an overwhelming majority.

On July 30, 1952, at the height of the Defiance Campaign, I was at work at my then law firm of H. M. Basner when the police arrived with a warrant for my arrest. The charge was violation of the Suppression of Communism Act. The state made a series of simultaneous arrests of campaign leaders in Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth, and Kimberley. Earlier in the month, the police had raided homes and offices of ANC and SAIC officials all over the country and confiscated papers and documents. This type of raid was something new and set a pattern for the pervasive and illegal searches that subsequently became a regular feature of the government’s behavior.

My arrest and those of the others culminated in a trial in September in Johannesburg of twenty-one accused, including the presidents and general-secretaries of the ANC, the SAIC, the ANC Youth League, and the Transvaal Indian Congress. Among the twenty-one on trial in Johannesburg were Dr. Moroka, Walter Sisulu, and J. B. Marks. A number of Indian leaders were arrested, including Dr. Dadoo, Yusuf Cachalia, and Ahmed Kathrada.

Our appearances in court became the occasion for exuberant political rallies. Massive crowds of demonstrators marched through the streets of Johannesburg and converged on the city’s Magistrate’s Court. There were white students from the University of the Witwatersrand; old ANC campaigners from Alexandra; Indian school-children from primary and secondary schools; people of all ages and colors. The court had never been deluged with such crowds before. The courtroom itself was packed with people, and shouts of
“Mayibuye Afrika!”
punctuated the proceedings.