Mandela: The Authorised Biography. Anthony Sampson
to the judges, and to address them directly. The prisoners’ long legal discussions in jail often surprised their warders: when Mandela visited Helen Joseph to discuss the proceedings he noticed that some of the female warders became fascinated by the arguments, and by the prisoners’ political commitment. The withdrawal of the defence team laid a special responsibility on Mandela and Duma Nokwe, the only two lawyers among the thirty. They now had to help the others prepare their cases, but some of them complained about the lack of proper representation. Mandela assured them that they were making a strong moral argument.38
In August 1960, after five months of restrictions, the state of emergency was lifted and the lawyers returned to the courtroom. It was now Mandela’s turn to give evidence – which he welcomed all the more since he had been banned from speaking anywhere else. The young barrister Sydney Kentridge was assigned to Mandela’s defence, to prepare him for the witness box and conduct his examination. Kentridge’s unassuming style concealed a relentless rationality; it would take him to the top of his profession in both South Africa and Britain, and he would become famous when he extracted the full horrors of Steve Biko’s torture and death from police witnesses at the inquest. In the Treason Trial courtroom, Kentridge was soon full of admiration for Mandela. ‘It was then that I first realised,’ he recalls, ‘that he was a natural leader of men. He was firm, courteous, always based on thought and reason. His real political intellect emerged from his answers to questions. He had no hidden agenda, which became clear in his evidence, under heavy cross-examination.’39
Certainly Mandela’s testimony revealed a more thoughtful politician than had emerged before. Under all the pressure of his examination and the stormy political crisis, he rose to the challenge with total control. In his own statement he carefully explained his political development and philosophy, while stressing that it was not necessarily the philosophy of Congress. It was, he thought, the strongest speech he had ever made.40 He described his earlier belief in African nationalism and his conversion to multi-racialism. He reasserted his emphasis on non-violence, and rejected the concept of revolution in the sense of ‘mighty leaps’. He explained how he had visualised the ANC achieving universal franchise through gradual concessions of qualified voting, leading eventually to a people’s democracy. He himself favoured, he said, a classless society, such as he believed existed in Hungary, China or Russia, but he conceded that for a long time Africans would have different classes – workers, peasants, shopkeepers and intellectuals. He was emphatically opposed to imperialism: ‘Insofar as I have had experiences of imperialism personally, there seems to be very, very little to say for it … It has gone all over the world, subjugating people and exploiting them, bringing death and destruction to millions of people.’ He was also opposed to capitalism, but claimed not to know whether it was linked to imperialism. He insisted that the ANC had taken no view on capitalism, and that the terms of the Freedom Charter, apart from breaking up the mining monopolies, would leave capitalism ‘absolutely intact’.
He believed that the South African government was moving towards fascism, which could be expressed in the Xhosa phrase ‘indlovu ayipatwa’ – ‘an elephant that cannot be touched’. The ANC could expect to come up against more ruthless responses: ‘The government will not hesitate to massacre hundreds of Africans.’ But Mandela still seemed optimistic – even after Sharpeville – that ‘The nationalist government is much weaker than when we began.’ He was hopeful that the government would be brought to realise that its policies were futile, by internal and external pressures: ‘Countries which used to support the racial policies of South Africa have turned against them.’41
Helen Joseph, who had already nervously testified, was inspired by Mandela’s calm confidence. He was only rarely moved to anger, she noticed, for example when Judge Rumpff suggested that giving votes to uneducated people was like giving them to children: ‘Isn’t it on much the same basis,’ asked Rumpff, ‘if you have children who know nothing and people who know nothing?’ Mandela was quietly furious, all the more so since his own father was illiterate, and two elderly men among the accused had never been to school.42 He also faced problems when confronted with some documents and speeches by more militant colleagues. What about Robert Resha’s statement to volunteers that if they were asked to murder, they should murder, murder? That was an ‘unhappy example’, said Mandela: ‘He was merely dealing purely with the question of discipline.’ What about his fellow-accused Thembile Ndimba, who had said: ‘If instructions are given to volunteers to kill, they must kill’? It was, Mandela admitted, ‘an unfortunate way of illustrating discipline’, but was not ANC policy. When shown a reference to the ‘seizure of power’ from 1951, he responded: ‘I don’t read any force or violence in this phrase.’ Asked about lectures prepared by Rusty Bernstein which had a clear Marxist message, he said: ‘Unfortunately the manner in which they were handled may have given the impression that they carried some authority from the ANC.’
But Mandela was able to show that neither he nor the other ANC leaders had advocated violence at any time in the previous decade, and that while he refused to criticise the communists, he was not committed to the Party.
KENTRIDGE: Did you become a communist?
MANDELA: Well, I don’t know if I did become a communist. If by communist you mean a member of the Communist Party and a person who believes in the theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin and who adheres strictly to the discipline of the Party, I did not become a communist.43
When Kentridge privately asked him why he didn’t attack Stalin after he was denounced by Khrushchev in 1956, he replied: ‘It was not our political function. What Stalin did was not against us.’ Kentridge reckoned that Mandela saw communists as his enemies’ enemies, and therefore his friends; but after much contact with him, he was certain that he was not a Stalinist or a member of the Communist Party.44
Some of Mandela’s colleagues would later insist that at this time he was indistinguishable from the communists, or was even a secret member of the Communist Party. ‘He was very close,’ said Ben Turok, who was a member of the Central Committee. ‘If he wasn’t in the Party, that was tactical.’45 Rusty Bernstein said simply, ‘By the sixties I found it hard to tell who was in the Party and who was not.’46 The government would continue to charge that Mandela was a Party member, which anti-communists abroad would eagerly take up. Even in 1966, after four years on Robben Island, he would be informed by the Department of Justice that he was being listed as a member of the Party. He wrote back to ‘emphatically deny that I was a member of the CPSA since 1960 or at any other time’, and asked to see affidavits and details of any communist conferences that he had attended. Four months later the Department informed him that they had decided not to put him on the list ‘at this stage’.47 In fact, as his communist friend Ismail Meer said later, ‘Nelson was never, never, in the closest scrutiny of a well-organised security system, found to be a member of the Communist Party.’48
The peculiar South African obsession with communism in any case distorted the question. Many South African communists and their sympathisers, like Mandela, were pragmatic in their support: Mandela would later suggest that he was using the communists more than they used him.49 Subsequent events would show how little he was committed to their basic dogma. But in the early sixties, the more ruthlessly the apartheid government became, the more courageous and admirable the communists appeared – like the French communists in the wartime resistance against the Nazis.
Certainly the banning of the ANC pressed it closer towards the Communist Party, forcing them together underground. After the state of emergency