Mandela: The Authorised Biography. Anthony Sampson

      Nationalists v. Communists

      1950–1951

      THE AFRICAN TOWNSHIPS of Johannesburg were the key to political action. They were the magnet for most black South Africans, their opening to a new-found Westernised world of films, jazz, jiving and sport. Rural blacks, steeped in the Bible or Shakespeare by their mission teachers, were exposed here to wider influences and incentives which provoked an explosion of creative talent in music, writing and drama. Educated Africans took much more readily to city life than Afrikaners, whose culture was still rooted in the countryside. The cultural renaissance of this ‘new African’ would be compared to the Harlem renaissance in New York in the 1920s, displaying the same kind of passionate expression on the frontier between two cultures. But Johannesburg had the broader confidence of a black majority and a whole continent behind it.¹

      For the few whites who crossed the line, black Johannesburg in the fifties, with its all-night parties, shebeens (speakeasies) and jazz sessions, offered a total contrast to the formal social life of the smart northern suburbs, where white-gloved African servants served at elaborate dinner parties. Soweto had a bubbling vitality and originality which shines through the autobiographies of young black writers of the time like Can Themba, Nat Nakasa, Es’kia Mphahlele, Bloke Modisane, Casey Motsisi and Peter Abrahams, or the short stories of the young white novelist Nadine Gordimer.² Politicians and intellectuals were pressed together with factory workers, teachers and gangsters, all feeling themselves part of the Western post-war world which they knew through magazines, movies and advertisements. They were fascinated by the exploits of black American sporting heroes, pop stars or political campaigners, and inspired by the international idealism of the new United Nations and the ‘Family of Man’. The Johannesburg jazz, fashions, dancing and quick-fire talk reflected the mix of Western and African idioms and rhythms with their own original style; musical compositions like the penny-whistle ‘kwelakwela’ or the song ‘Wimoweh’ would become recurring hits in America and Britain.³

      But this vibrant culture was almost totally ignored by white Johannesburg. The two races converged in the city centre every day as masters and servants, and separated every evening: the whites in their cars to the north, the blacks in their buses to the south, beyond the mine-dumps. The whites saw blacks only as domestics, labourers or tribal villagers, barely literate and dependent on white patronage; to allow them to assert their political power appeared irresponsible, if not dangerous. But behind the colour bar the squalid and overflowing townships beyond South Africa’s city centres were bursting with energy and ambition. ‘The truest optimism in South Africa is in the crowded, disease-ridden and crime-infested urban locations,’ wrote the great South African historian C.W. de Kiewiet in 1956. ‘They represent the black man’s acceptance of the new life of the Western world, his willingness to endure a harsh schooling and an equal apprenticeship in its ways.’⁴

      Urban Africans were predominantly conservative, fascinated by the West, much influenced by Christian Churches, and full of optimism for the future. ‘It was a time of infinite hope and possibility,’ wrote the young Zulu writer Lewis Nkosi, describing what he called ‘the Fabulous Decade’ of the fifties. ‘It seemed not extravagant in the least to predict then that the Nationalist government would soon collapse.’⁵ ‘It was the best of times, the worst of times,’ the writer Can Themba liked to quote from Dickens.⁶

      It was only slowly that the blacks realised that they were being squeezed in a vice; that this would soon become simply the worst of times. Over the next few years the apartheid governments, backed by Western Cold Warriors, would pursue policies which seemed designed to press them towards revolutionary politics, and to look for friends among communists and in the East.

      In black Johannesburg Nelson Mandela was both typical and exceptional. He moved with growing confidence among his contemporaries in Orlando West, the enclave of more prosperous blacks. He loved the world of music and dancing, and was close to township musical heroes like the Manhattan Brothers, Peter Rezant of the Merry Blackbirds, and the composer and writer Todd Matshikiza. He was beginning to earn money as a practising lawyer, and adopted the style of the township big-shot, driving his Oldsmobile and eating at the few downtown restaurants which admitted Africans – the Blue Lagoon, Moretsele’s and later Kapitan’s, the Oriental restaurant which still remains in Kort Street, and bought his provisions from a nearby delicatessen. Joe Matthews, the sophisticated son of the Fort Hare professor, was surprised to find a country boy from the Transkei with such exotic tastes.⁷ Above all Mandela took great trouble with his clothes – like Chief Jongintaba, whose trousers he had pressed as a child. Mandela’s friend George Bizos, who later defended him when he came to trial, once met him near the Rand Club in downtown Johannesburg, having a final fitting with the fashionable tailor Alfred Kahn (who also made suits for the millionaire tycoon Harry Oppenheimer). Bizos was amazed to see Kahn going down on one knee to take the black man’s inside leg measurement. Ahmed Kathrada was so impressed by a blazer with a special African badge which Kahn had made for Mandela that he ordered one for himself, only to be appalled by the bill.⁸

      Mandela had the confidence of a man-about-town, great presence and charm and a wide smile. But he kept his distance, as befitted an aristocrat rather than a commoner. Even Nthato Motlana, who became his doctor, found Mandela’s style kingly, and felt he had to choose his words with care when he was with him.⁹ Mandela sounded very different from the fast-talking ‘city slickers’ brought up in Johannesburg, and retained his formal style in both Xhosa and English. He often ate lunch at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, the teetotal meeting-place for respectable middle-class blacks; it had tennis courts, table tennis, concerts and dances, and American connections through Ray Phillips, the Congregationalist who ran the Jan Hofmeyr Social Centre upstairs.¹⁰

      Mandela avoided the drinking sessions which distracted many of his contemporaries, and did not venture into rowdy shebeens like the Thirty-Nine Steps or Back o’ the Moon. But I met him in 1951 at a favourite ANC drinking place – a printing shop in Commissioner Street in downtown Johannesburg. Its Falstaffian Coloured proprietor Andy Anderson would produce beer and brandy bottles from behind the presses after hours, and pick up scrawny fried chicken from a Chinese take-away, while ANC leaders discussed forthcoming leaflets and campaigns. Mandela remained sedate and dignified compared to his more expansive colleagues: he did not really approve, he explained later, of hard liquor.¹¹

      At six-foot-two Mandela was physically imposing, with a physique which he took care to maintain. He was a keen heavyweight boxer, sparring for ninety minutes on weekdays at the makeshift gym in Orlando where he trained from 1950 onwards. He lacked the speed and power to be a champion, but he relished the skills of boxing – dodging, retreating, dancing, circling – and saw the sport as a means of developing leadership and confidence. Boxers had become role-models of black achievement