• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 988 0

elaborated underground structures, with key personnel, including Mandela, living clandestinely. After his acquittal in the treason trial, for the court could find no evidence that the ANC advocated violence, Mandela went underground. This coincided with a huge ‘stay away’ campaign, in which Black withdrawal of labour by simply remaining at home rather than going to work was designed to make lethal confrontation less possible. The government responded by having armoured vehicles and helicopters patrol the townships in order to intimidate with a display of military might. The PAC unhelpfully exhorted people to go to work as part of its rivalry with the ANC, and the campaign quickly collapsed in a couple of days.

This was the immediate background to discussions within the ANC in 1961 regarding the abandonment of non-violent protest, ironically just at the time chief Luthuli won the Nobel Peace Prize. Mandela argued that ‘the attacks of the wild beast cannot be averted with only bare hands’. Moreover, there was the risk that spasmodic grassroots violence would result in further massacres while encouraging the view that Africans were barbaric savages. By directing violence, the ANC stood a chance of limiting its effects. Persuasively Mandela reasoned that non-violence was a tactic rather than an inviolable principle, which could be abandoned as political circumstances dictated. After interminable discussions, in which Indian ANC supporters clung to the strategy of non-violence, Mandela won the day, and was authorised to establish a military capability, Umkhonto we Sizwe, semi-detached from the ANC.45

Umkhonto recruited volunteers through still-legal trades unions, many of whose branch leaders were Umkhonto commanders. The Communist Party secured nearly US$3 million in aid for arms purchases from the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, the majority surplus AK-47s, or Skorpion, Makarov and Tokarev machine pistols and hand grenades. Because neighbouring states had their own colonial regimes, training camps for would-be saboteurs were opened in Dar es Salaam in Tanganyika (or Tanzania as it became after 1964). The journey there by train, foot and only later aeroplane via British protectorates in Basuto-land, Bechuanaland and Swaziland and then via the two Rhodesias was arduous and dangerous. Although sabotage was regarded as preparatory for full-scale guerrilla war, by being directed at things rather than people it would not harm the ANC’s considerable moral authority in the eyes of world opinion. Little thought was given to the logistics of such a campaign or how to attract and maintain international attention.

The campaign opened on 16 December 1961, the day Afrikaners celebrated a victory over a Zulu host at Blood River in 1838. The intention was to cause widespread economic disruption and a cessation of foreign investment. Bombs went off in electric power stations and government offices in Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth. Leaflets left at the scenes explained: ‘The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain two choices: submit or fight… we shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means within our power.’ There were some 194 attacks on further targets until July 1963, the average causing a mere US$125 damage. There were also disciplinary attacks on suspected collaborators, informers and state witnesses in terrorism trials. The South African state did not idly watch these developments. A Sabotage Act enabled it to ban individuals suspected of terrorism, proscribing even the reproduction of their words, while a year later the police were allowed to detain suspects for ninety days, the thin end of the wedge for widespread detainee abuse. For reasons that seem obscure, the Umkhonto leadership purchased a farm called Lilliesleaf in the White Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia to house a radio transmitter and duplicating equipment. Police penetration of the organisation led to a raid on the farm in July 1963 and the detention of almost the entire Umkhonto leadership.

Several of these men, including Mandela,