The Long Walk to Freedom (27 page)
The trial should have been an occasion of resolve and solidarity, but was sullied by a breach of faith by Dr. Moroka. Dr. Moroka, the president-general of the ANC and the figurehead of the campaign, shocked us all by employing his own attorney. The plan was for all of us to be tried together. My fellow accused designated me to discuss the matter with Dr. Moroka and attempt to persuade him not to separate himself. The day before the trial, I went to see Dr. Moroka at Village Deep, Johannesburg.
At the outset of our meeting, I suggested alternatives to him, but he was not interested and instead aired a number of grievances. Dr. Moroka felt that he had been excluded from the planning of the campaign. Yet, Moroka was often quite uninterested in ANC affairs and content to be so. But he said the matter that disturbed him more than any other was that by being defended with the rest of us, he would be associated with men who were Communists. Dr. Moroka shared the government’s animosity to communism. I remonstrated with him and said that it was the tradition of the ANC to work with anyone who was against racial oppression. But Dr. Moroka was unmoved.
The greatest jolt came when Dr. Moroka tendered a humiliating plea in mitigation to Judge Rumpff and took the witness stand to renounce the very principles on which the ANC had been founded. Asked whether he thought there should be equality between black and white in South Africa, Dr. Moroka replied that there would never be such a thing. We felt like slumping in despair in our seats. When his own lawyer asked him whether there were some among the defendants who were Communists, Dr. Moroka actually began to point his finger at various people, including Dr. Dadoo and Walter. The judge informed him that that was not necessary.
His performance was a severe blow to the organization and we all immediately realized that Dr. Moroka’s days as ANC president were numbered. He had committed the cardinal sin of putting his own interests ahead of the organization and the people. He was unwilling to jeopardize his medical career and fortune for his political beliefs, thereby he had destroyed the image that he had built during three years of courageous work on behalf of the ANC and the Defiance Campaign. I regarded this as a tragedy, for Dr. Moroka’s faintheartedness in court took away some of the glow from the campaign. The man who had gone round the country preaching the importance of the campaign had now forsaken it.
On December 2, we were all found guilty of what Judge Rumpff defined as “statutory communism” — as opposed to what he said “is commonly known as communism.” According to the statutes of the Suppression of Communism Act, virtually anyone who opposed the government in any way could be defined as — and therefore convicted of — being a “statutory” Communist, even without ever having been a member of the party. The judge, who was fair-minded and reasonable, said that although we had planned acts that ranged from “open noncompliance of laws to something that equals high treason,” he accepted that we had consistently advised our members “to follow a peaceful course of action and to avoid violence in any shape or form.” We were sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment with hard labor, but the sentence was suspended for two years.
We made many mistakes, but the Defiance Campaign marked a new chapter in the struggle. The six laws we singled out were not overturned; but we never had any illusion that they would be. We selected them as the most immediate burden pressing on the lives of the people, and the best way to engage the greatest number of people in the struggle.
Prior to the campaign, the ANC was more talk than action. We had no paid organizers, no staff, and a membership that did little more than pay lip service to our cause. As a result of the campaign, our membership swelled to 100,000. The ANC emerged as a truly mass-based organization with an impressive corps of experienced activists who had braved the police, the courts, and the jails. The stigma usually associated with imprisonment had been removed. This was a significant achievement, for fear of prison is a tremendous hindrance to a liberation struggle. From the Defiance Campaign onward, going to prison became a badge of honor among Africans.
We were extremely proud of the fact that during the six months of the campaign, there was not a single act of violence on our side. The discipline of our resisters was exemplary. During the later part of the campaign, riots broke out in Port Elizabeth and East London in which more than forty people were killed. Though these outbreaks had nothing whatsoever to do with the campaign, the government attempted to link us with them. In this, the government was successful, for the riots poisoned the views of some whites who might otherwise have been sympathetic.
Some within the ANC had unrealistic expectations and were convinced that the campaign could topple the government. We reminded them that the idea of the campaign was to focus attention on our grievances, not eradicate them. They argued that we had the government where we wanted them, and that we should continue the campaign indefinitely. I stepped in and said that this government was too strong and too ruthless to be brought down in such a manner. We could embarrass them, but overthrowing them as a result of the Defiance Campaign was impossible.
As it was, we continued the campaign for too long. We should have listened to Dr. Xuma. The Planning Committee met with Dr. Xuma during the tail end of the campaign and he told us that the campaign would soon lose momentum and it would be wise to call it off before it fizzled out altogether. To halt the campaign while it was still on the offensive would be a shrewd move that would capture the headlines. Dr. Xuma was right: the campaign soon slackened, but in our enthusiasm and even arrogance, we brushed aside his advice. My heart wanted to keep the campaign going but my head told me that it should stop. I argued for closure but went along with the majority. By the end of the year, the campaign foundered.
The campaign never expanded beyond the initial stage of small batches of mostly urban defiers. Mass defiance, especially in the rural areas, was never achieved. The eastern Cape was the only region where we succeeded in reaching the second stage and where a strong resistance movement emerged in the countryside. In general, we did not penetrate the countryside, an historical weakness of the ANC. The campaign was hampered by the fact that we did not have any full-time organizers. I was attempting to organize the campaign and practice as a lawyer at the same time, and that is no way to wage a mass campaign. We were still amateurs.
I nevertheless felt a great sense of accomplishment and satisfaction: I had been engaged in a just cause and had the strength to fight for it and win. The campaign freed me from any lingering sense of doubt or inferiority I might still have felt; it liberated me from the feeling of being overwhelmed by the power and seeming invincibility of the white man and his institutions. But now the white man had felt the power of my punches and I could walk upright like a man, and look everyone in the eye with the dignity that comes from not having succumbed to oppression and fear. I had come of age as a freedom fighter.
THE STRUGGLE IS MY LIFE
AT THE ANC annual conference at the end of 1952, there was a changing of the guard. The ANC designated a new, more vigorous president for a new, more activist era: Chief Albert Luthuli. In accordance with the ANC constitution, as provisional president of the Transvaal, I became one of the four deputy presidents. Furthermore, the National Executive Committee appointed me as first deputy president, in addition to my position as president of the Transvaal. Luthuli was one of a handful of ruling chiefs who were active in the ANC and had staunchly resisted the policies of the government.
The son of a Seventh-Day Adventist missionary, Luthuli was born in what was then Southern Rhodesia and educated in Natal. He trained as a teacher at Adam’s College near Durban. A fairly tall, heavyset, dark-skinned man with a great broad smile, he combined an air of humility with deep-seated confidence. He was a man of patience and fortitude, who spoke slowly and clearly as though every word was of equal importance.
I had first met him in the late 1940s when he was a member of the Natives Representative Council. In September of 1952, only a few months before the annual conference, Luthuli had been summoned to Pretoria and given an ultimatum: he must either renounce his membership in the ANC and his support of the Defiance Campaign, or he would be dismissed from his position as an elected and government-paid tribal chief. Luthuli was a teacher, a devout Christian, and a proud Zulu chief, but he was even more firmly committed to the struggle against apartheid. Luthuli refused to resign from the ANC and the government dismissed him from his post. In response to his dismissal, he issued a statement of principles called “The Road to Freedom Is via the Cross,” in which he reaffirmed his support for nonviolent passive resistance and justified his choice with words that still echo plaintively today: “Who will deny that thirty years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately and modestly at a closed and barred door?”
I supported Chief Luthuli, but I was unable to attend the national conference. A few days before the conference was to begin, fifty-two leaders around the country were banned from attending any meetings or gatherings for six months. I was among those leaders, and my movements were restricted to the district of Johannesburg for that same period.
My bans extended to meetings of all kinds, not just political ones. I could not, for example, attend my son’s birthday party. I was prohibited from talking to more than one person at a time. This was part of a systematic effort by the government to silence, persecute, and immobilize the leaders of those fighting apartheid and was the first of a series of bans on me that continued with brief intervals of freedom until the time I was deprived of all freedom some years hence.
Banning not only confines one physically, it imprisons one’s spirit. It induces a kind of psychological claustrophobia that makes one yearn not only for freedom of movement but spiritual escape. Banning was a dangerous game, for one was not shackled or chained behind bars; the bars were laws and regulations that could easily be violated and often were. One could slip away unseen for short periods of time and have the temporary illusion of freedom. The insidious effect of bans was that at a certain point one began to think that the oppressor was not without but within.
Although I was prevented from attending the 1952 annual conference, I was immediately informed as to what had transpired. One of the most significant decisions was one taken in secret and not publicized at the time.
Along with many others, I had become convinced that the government intended to declare the ANC and the SAIC illegal organizations, just as it had done with the Communist Party. It seemed inevitable that the state would attempt to put us out of business as a legal organization as soon as it could. With this in mind, I approached the National Executive Committee with the idea that we must come up with a contingency plan for just such an eventuality. I said it would be an abdication of our responsibility as leaders of the people if we did not do so. They instructed me to draw up a plan that would enable the organization to operate from underground. This strategy came to be known as the Mandela-Plan, or simply, M-Plan.
The idea was to set up organizational machinery that would allow the ANC to make decisions at the highest level, which could then be swiftly transmitted to the organization as a whole without calling a meeting. In other words, it would allow an illegal organization to continue to function and enable leaders who were banned to continue to lead. The M-Plan was designed to allow the organization to recruit new members, respond to local and national problems, and maintain regular contact between the membership and the underground leadership.
