Mandela and Sisulu

MANDELA AND SISULU

EQUIVOCATION, TREACHERY, AND THE ROAD TO SHARPEVILLE

Written to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre 21 March 2010

Izwe Lethu

UNIVERSITY OF AZANIA PRESS ISBN 978-9980-85-005-8 [email protected]

SEQUENCE OF EVENTS

1940 The African National Congress (ANC) revives its fading fortunes by electing a cautious but modernizing president, Dr Alfred Bitini Xuma 1944 Radical young Africans associated with Anton Muziwakhe Lembede decide to form the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) rather than a more militant separate party 1945 John Beaver “J. B.” Marks revives the Communist Party’s reputation in the Miners Strike but consequent repression makes it impossible to utilize miners for political agitation for decades 1947 Lembede dies and is replaced by the ineffectual theorist Ashley Peter Mda 1948 The Purified National Party of Dr Malan wins the national election and, despite its slim majority, ignores its own economic advisers to implement apartheid 1949 The ANCYL succeeds in having a compromise strategy The Programme of Action adopted as ANC policy, which imitates Gandhi’s Nkrumah’s examples of peaceful mass protests but without due consideration for counter measures against the possibility of White regime extreme retaliation. Dr Xuma is replaced by Dr Moroka as ANC president 1950 Kwame Nkrumah’s Positive Action campaign in Gold Coast (Ghana). Nelson Mandela is appointed leader of the Defiance Campaign volunteers Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) dissolves to avoid prosecution 1951-2 Inspired by Nkrumah’s February 1951 election victory in Ghana thousands of ANC volunteers and affiliated minority ethnic organisations defy the pass laws and other race-based restrictions. Basutoland African Congress (BAC) founded in Basutoland against ANC wishes. P. K. Leballo heads most powerful (Transvaal) BAC branch. March 1952 Nkrumah becomes prime minister in Ghana. Dec 1952 The ANC leadership calls off the Defiance Campaign, frightened by escalating violence and impeding legislation. Dr Moroka is sacked and replaced by Chief Albert Lutuli 1953 The Criminal Law Amendment Act and Public Safety Act deter political activists from professional classes from confrontational activities. Growing anger from lower class ANC activists against leadership’s perceived cowardice. Communists secretly form South African Communist Party (SACP) and gain control over Congress of Democrats, Indian Congress, SACPO, and SACTU. ANC secretary general Walter Sisulu secretly visits Soviet bloc without Lutuli’s knowledge 1954 Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe and P. K. Leballo take over the leadership of the Africanist Movement from Mda and lead campaign against clandestine communist control of ANC 1955 Walter Sisulu secretly joins the SACP and manipulates The Congress of the People and the Freedom Charter events, taking advantage of Lutuli’s lethargy and isolation, to reduce the ANC to the position of a mere equal in a five man SACP executive committee in charge of the Congress Alliance: ANC, SAIC, SACPO, COD and SACTU. 1956 Inept blanket arrests of past and present activists and subsequent Treason Trial give international publicity to Congress Alliance leaders but exacerbates corruption and mismanagement in the Transvaal ANC. Africanist strength escalates 1957 Oliver Tambo alters the ANC Constitution to entrench elitist undemocratic structure of Congress Alliance. Nkrumah’s Ghana independent 1958 Basotho leader Ntsu Mokhehle elected to AAPC (“African Comintern” Steering Committee but British government imposes adopts new constitution on Basutoland

similar to Congress Alliance. Oliver Tambo closes ANC Transvaal Province Conference to prevent election of Robert Sobukwe in place of Nelson Mandela. Mokhehle advises Sobukwe, Leballo and Madzunya to form a new party backed by the AAPC of Kwame Nkrumah. BAC become Basutoland Congress Party (BCP) 1959 April formation of the PAC Africanist Congress. Sobukwe becomes president with Leballo as secretary-general. Rapid recruitment of young male lower class activists with considerable assistance from Mokhehle’s BCP. December ANC and PAC conferences both plan for national demonstrations in 1960. Challenged by ANC, the PAC decides to launch a major campaign rather than gain experience first 1960 Ntsu Mokhehle wins 36 out of 40 seats in the Basutoland election but 40 additional nominated members relegate him to a minor role. However, BCP controls eight out of nine local government district councils. March 21 PAC demonstrations commence with significant support from Basotho communities in the Transvaal and Cape. Main PAC leaders arrested before shooting at Sharpeville kills over 69 protestors. Pass laws suspended March 30 Colonel Terblanche disobeys orders to save Cape Town from probable police-PAC carnage. State of Emergency declared. PAC and ANC banned. Verwoerd survives assassination attempt and believes he has divine mission. Pass laws reinstated. May 4, PAC leaders jailed – Sobukwe for three years. 1950’s rural tensions in the Transkei escalate and coalesce into Poqo movement. ANC, Unity Movement and PAC all claim leadership but PAC eventually takes over. 1961 March 25-26, All In Conference Mandela announces formation of All Action Council. Police respond in May by arresting over eight thousand suspects. Mokhehle attacked for criticising Mandela. November 1961 formation of ANC military force, Umkhonto we Sizwe led by ten SACP members and Mandela and ostensibly modelled on the Israeli Irgun movement but emphasizing sabotage not combat. 1962 Mandela secretly leaves South Africa for other African states and obtains basic military training in Ethiopia. Urges an end to Alliance domination of ANC. Arrested in August after probable SACP betrayal and sentenced to five years jail. Leballo escapes to Basutoland from Tongaland detention and takes over as acting PAC leader. PAC violence in the Cape. 1963 Poqo/PAC Mbashe River bridge murders and other violence leads to severe White criticism of NP regime. Leballo warns that the coming war will cause widespread White civilian deaths. The British police raid PAC HQ in Maseru. Leballo evades capture for six months. Sobukwe detained after completing his sentence and sent to Robben Island. MK high command captured at Liliesleaf farm, Rivonia along with Mandela’s incriminating diary. “Rivonia Trial” begins. PMU formed in Protectorates. 1964 Mandela receives life sentence. Leballo expelled from Basutoland. Royalist-ANC oriented Marematlou Freedom Party (MFP) support plummets following Rothe murders. Shift in anti-BCP forces from MFP to NP-OMI backed BNP. Nkrumah declares one party state and himself as president for life. 1965 Overconfidence, neglect of eastern mountains, and SACP funding costs BCP election win. BNP government derided as NP-OMI puppet-“government of herd boys.” Leabua Jonathan becomes prime minister after bye-election. Traditional chiefs replace elected district councils. 1966 Leabua Jonathan meets Verwoerd in Pretoria. Vorster becomes prime minister after Verwoerd’s assassination. October independence for Lesotho. Thaba Bosiu violence – the Lesotho King attempts to become executive monarch and BCP tries to swamp government offices and seize power. King signs “suicide clause” and becomes a

restricted recluse. February, Nkrumah overthrown by coup. 1967 Albert Lutuli killed on railway line. Oliver Tambo becomes acting ANC president. 1968 Leballo, with Sobukwe’s support, reorients PAC towards a synthesis of Africanist thought with Maoism. Attempts to militarise exiles fiercely opposed by PAC exiled reformists. 1970 Ntsu Mokhehle wins the January general election but is denied power by a British mercenary led coup with links to rogue South African intelligence operatives. 1974 Following release from detention BCP activists launch an unsuccessful rising. Refugee Basotho are recruited by Leballo and Mokhehle as Lesotho Liberation Army (LLA) ostensibly as APLA guerrillas and trained in Libya. Portuguese coup enables Moscow –allied movements to take power in former colonies but Machel permits PAC’s ally ZANU to establish bases after ZAPU ineptitude 1976 Refugees from the Soweto and Cape rising solve the ANC/SACP and PAC recruitment problems. 1977 ANC/SACP ally to Leabua Jonathan to thwart BCP and PAC. Steve Biko, designated PAC deputy leader, murdered in detention 1978 Former CIA deputy director Ray Cline, funded by international extreme right wing Anti-Communist League, establishes office in South Africa to fund Inkatha, UNITA, RENAMO and other organisations. The Carter administration pressures PAC to adopt detente and dialogue. Massive American and Nigerian bribery buys support for American and Tanzanian backed David Sibeko’s reform faction. LLA quarantined in Tanzania. Leballo elected chairman (not president) of PAC and Sibeko seizes power when Leballo leaves for England. APLA officer funds LLA escape from Tanzania to begin war in Lesotho. Sibeko assassinated by angry APLA leaders. 1979 Guerrilla war begins in Lesotho. Zephaniah Mothopeng, senior PAC member inside South Africa and clandestine APLA recruiter, imprisoned 1980 11 March Tanzanian troops kill, wound, detain and split up ALPA for refusing to follow Vus Make and accept Nyerere’s decision that it is too dangerous to fight Pretoria. Zimbabwe becomes independence. Leballo arrives in Harare. LLA asks him for help since Mokhehle had disappeared. 1981 Tanzania installs Pokela as PAC leader and demands Mugabe expel Leballo when APLA troops in Tanzania reject Pokela. Leballo arrested and deported to Libya. Mokhehle, beset by declining health and mental pressures, leaves Botswana to hide in South Africa. Cline’s operatives take him to Lisikisiki near Port St John’s where he assists American, Rhodesian and other agents experiment with psychological methods and physical torture to “turn” guerrillas.” 1985 Pokela dies suddenly in Harare. Leballo manages to unite former rivals and in January begins to pressure Lesotho commander with Justin Lekhanya to remove Leabua Jonathan and restore democracy. Twentieth-fifth anniversary of Sharpeville demonstrations lead to ongoing violence. Agitation by internal political organisations more effective than external ANC/SACP and PAC. 1986 Leballo dies of hypertension aged seventy one (not sixty one as everyone believed). PAC degenerates into inept corrupt murderous mystical fascism. Lekhanya, also under pressure from Pretoria, seizes power shortly after Leballo’s death but appoints Lesotho Communist Party leader and former MFP secretary-general as ministers in his coup government. Leballo buried at Lifelekoaneng but Lekhanya forbids attendance. Mokhehle returns to Lesotho. 1991 Release of Nelson Mandela 1992 Lekhanya removed in a coup 1993 Mokhehle wins every seat in the Lesotho national election but BCP eventually splits

into four after he fails to address his bother Shakhane’s corruption 1994 Mandela elected president of South Africa. Parasitic SACP members elected under ANC umbrella. No viable left wing party contents the elections. Tanzanian-puppet PAC wins 1.25% of the vote and five seats. 1999 PAC wins 0.73 % of the vote and three seats 2003 PAC vice president Patricia de Lille breaks away to form new Independent Democrats party (ID) 2004 ID wins 1.7% of the vote and seven seats. PAC wins 0.73 % of the vote and three seats. Its leader, Mokotso Pheko, who claims two bogus degrees, is later sacked for corruption. He is replaced by Letlapa Mphahlele, a psychotic murderer 2009 PAC wins 0.27% of the vote and a single seat 2010 Fiftieth anniversary of Sharpeville Massacre

INTRODUCTION

This book is titled Mandela and Sisulu: Equivocation, Treachery, and the Road to Sharpeville. Linking Mandela and Sisulu to Sharpeville may seem inappropriate since both men denounced their rival Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) demonstrators who set off to protest and die that day. The PAC action had, to a significant degree, been caused by exasperation with Mandela, whose career between 1953 and 1960 was reminiscent of the Shakespearean tragic hero Hamlet, prince of Denmark, another dithering aristocrat who acted too late. Shakespeare doesn’t seem to have an immediately obvious character to match Walter Sisulu but the New Testament provides a fair match with Judas Iscariot. Two years ago, when we planned this work, we wrote to over thirty South African, British and American publishers noted in the past for their sympathy and support for resistance against the Pretoria regime to ask if they had any interest in a book on Sharpeville independent of the ANC. None replied. If we had written to right wing publishers stating we had a script castigating Mandela as an adulterous stooge of upper class Jewish and Indian pseudo-communists, who sold out the struggle so their clique could stick their noses in the trough, for sure we have evoked interest. However, so far as the “official” left is concerned, there is an unchallengeable orthodoxy about the political history of South Africa that cannot be challenged in the media, universities and in public debate. We accept that Mandela would most probably have emerged as president whatever the circumstances but that does not excuse the censorship about his early career. Had he been elected ANC leader in 1952, the 1955 coup would never had happened and the essentially conservative ANC would not have wasted the years 1955 - 1989 posturing as a Soviet vanguard movement that incited even more unsavoury American intelligence elements to infest the region. Under Mandela, the ANC could have broadened its appeal by accommodating the Africanists instead of trying to kill their dynamism. Free of Cold War involvement maybe South Africa could have achieved freedom far earlier. By acquiescing to Sisulu’s coup in 1955, which placed the ANC under SACP control, Mandela not only failed to create a true ANC military wing but also spent 27 years in jail for trying to rectify the situation seven years too late. The Sharpeville Massacre was certainly an indirect result of his prevarication. Although the Sharpeville Massacre is probably the most famous event in South African history next to the election of Mandela as president there are very few serious accounts of the issues that led to the national demonstrations that day, which Mandela himself opposed. Although neither the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) president Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe nor Potlako Kitchener Leballo, PAC secretary-general and eventual army commander, wrote about their experiences, some perceptive accounts survive. The best among them are Martyrs and Fanatics by Peter Dreyer, a member of the South African Liberal Party; African Liberation Movements by Richard Gibson, an African American Marxist; An African Explains Apartheid by Jordan Ngubane, a political maverick; and Black Power in South Africa by Gail Gerhart. These writers personally knew or interviewed in depth the major players such as the PAC and/or Africanist ANC leaders Sobukwe, Leballo, Ashley Peter Mda, and Nyakane Michael Tsolo. Of great value are Forty Lost Years by Dan O’Meara and The Apartheid State in Crisis by Robert Price as they facilitate placing the rise of the Africanist Movement and the PAC in their social and economic context representing the rise after 1945 of the African urban lower middle class still strongly linked to its recent rural past. Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (pages 345- 377) is a revealing account of finally coming to terms with the Freedom Charter and Congress Alliance intrigue that so damaged resistance to White rule. Works by Tom Lodge, and Kwandiwe Merriman Kondlo’s Afrikaner-supervised doctrinal thesis1 are deeply flawed by reliance on evidence taken from inept police informers and self-styled former PAC activists whose attempts to ingratiate themselves with ANC for gainful employment in 1993/4 was matched by the venom they displayed

1 Kondlo invented a first name for Leballo’s intelligence chief and, like Lodge, called Leballo “Potlake”. Lodge was based at York University, a short distance from where Leballo was staying and giving lengthy interviews to American and Irish academics, both (unlike Lodge) banned in South Africa. Lodge made no effort to contact Leballo. Lodge’s fawning adulation of Mandela [2006] is probably the most trivial account of South African politics in the 1950’s.

distancing themselves from their more principled comrades. The Sharpeville Massacre was very much the result of the failure of the ANC, despite the 1949 Programme of Action, to become a mass democratic movement. The inexorable implementation of draconian apartheid legislation in the 1950s desperately needed a united African opposition but the years 1952-1960 were wasted as leading officials and theorists from relatively privileged backgrounds fought to entrench themselves against “socially unacceptable” rivals from the increasingly militant and expanding urban African lower and lower middle class. This was the period where Mandela should have asserted himself but was instead distracted by the good life, his career, and higher class aspirations. The malaise of the 1950’s created a political culture lasting today. Whereas the Cuban revolution accomplished astonishing social, educational, medical, military, sporting, land distribution and other achievements within a short time of seizing power, the “new” South Africa remains a crime and disease ridden society with a huge disparity of wealth. The ruling ANC/SACP/COSATU alliance is rooted in the conspiratorial undemocratic elitism of the 1950’s that led to Sharpeville. In Professor Iliffe’s words “The deeper reality [of 1994] was that two elites [Black and White] sought a settlement which would enable them to contain, and perhaps in part relive, the immense pressures from below bred by demographic growth, mass poverty, urbanization, education, and the demands of youth…”. Now, as the “settlement” generation passes away, there can be a more open discussion of that period of history no longer dominated by academics, journalists, and writers who flattered the ANC to further their careers. This self-seeking attitude alienates the forces whose frustration not only led to Sharpeville but will also challenge the stability of the reformed apartheid state if they continue to be marginalised.

CHAPTER ONE

On 21 March 1960 thousands of supporters of the newly formed Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) presented themselves for arrest at Sharpeville police station south of Johannesburg. Some, including their leader Mike Nyakane Tsolo, were taken into custody but the others wavering between good humour and impatience, remained outside. Eventually a scuffle triggered the police into opening fire upon the crowd, killing at least sixty nine. Most were shot in the back. The massacre and its immediate consequences panicked the country’s White population but, despite African restraint, the White National Party regime banned the two major African political movements, the militant PAC and the more conservative African National Congress (ANC), forcing them into armed conflict. To those who have a better knowledge of the events that led to Sharpeville, the majority of accounts read as if the narrator is addressing an audience hoping they will not notice a gigantic elephant standing behind him. The elephant represents what cannot be mentioned and certainly not published in the “new” South Africa: the issues that reflect extremely badly on many ANC and SACP “heroes” and which nearly obliterated the ANC from history. There were four main factors behind the events that led to the Sharpeville Massacre. The first was obvious. Africans wanted opportunities to lead prosperous meaningful lives and therefore an end to minority White rule and racial persecution. They naturally received support from the Indian and “Coloured” (mixed race) communities and also from a few White dissidents, liberal, communist and otherwise. The second, barely alluded to any work on Sharpeville, was an attempt by Basotho politicians in and outside Basutoland (Lesotho) to play a significant role in South African politics as a means to rectify historical injustices and establish a powerful role in a future united “Azanian” state. The third was the culmination of a struggle that had split the ANC into two parties on class lines and mostly concerned the most effective strategy to achieve freedom. Lastly there was the treacherous behaviour of Walter Sisulu, the ANC secretary-general, who, taking advantage of the ANC president Albert Lutuli’s stress–induced indolence, succeeded in subordinating the ANC to control by the well funded, but clandestine, minuscule, and slavishly Moscow-oriented South African Communist Party, which he secretly joined in 1955, and whose philosophies and vision were in total contrast to those of the ANC. The ANC had been founded in 1912 by a group of westernized Christian professionals, traders, and members of the old royal houses and court circles. The party was at first a sort of social network among the aristocracy, its feudal retainers, main stream Christians, and the westernised elite that advocated parliamentary democracy and mercantile Christian capitalism on the British model, which blended male democracy (women were first admitted as ANC members in 1943) and the rights of hereditary nobility while encouraging a socio-economic system that emphasized personal acquisition, individual land tenure, career diversity, consumerism, the monetarization of relationships, and free trade. Its political strategy was completely ineffectual and characterized by polite petitioning to the Afrikaner dominated Union government. As a consequence of the ANC’s failure to oppose the 1936 Land Acts and move beyond its narrow appeal to relatively privileged Africans it was in danger of being disbanded in 1940. It owed its revival to a new leader, a modernizer named Dr Alfred Bitini Xuma (1893-1962), and the establishment of a radical Youth League inspired by Anton Muziwakhe Lembede. Despite or maybe because of its conservatism the ANC nevertheless faced down challenges from a number of rivals, some with international links, such as the Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Clements Kadalie’s Industrial and Commercial Union (ICU), the Trotskyite Unity Movement and Paul Mosaka’s short lived African Democratic Party (ADP). From 1945 onwards the ANC leadership’s most valuable ally was the Communist Party (CPSA), founded in 1921. The CP wanted to establish a Soviet Republic and it politicized industrial workers in order to create a vanguard to seize control of the country. Until recently the Communist Party was dominated by ethnic minorities, particularly Jewish Eastern Europeans and descendents of migrants from British Imperial India (modern India and Pakistan). In the 1920’s the CPSA did valuable

pioneering work encouraged by Joseph Stalin’s decision to support a “Black Republic” and its successful alliance under CPSA secretary-general Albert Nzula2 (1905-1934) with the ANC’s radical president-general (1927-1930) Josiah Tshangana Gumede (1870-1947). However by 1940 the CPSA’s credibility was in serious jeopardy for slavishly supporting Soviet dictates which had shifted from African revolution to acceptance of colonial rule and an alliance with Nazi Germany. One the important consequences of this Soviet reversal was that other anti-colonial movements such as the Chinese and Indo-Chinese communist parties became far more self reliant while George Padmore, the former Soviet agent for African revolution, also took an independent stance recruiting Kwame Nkrumah and other future African leaders to a more militant approach against White rule. Xuma recognized that the old ANC leadership style, apart from Gumede’s, had been somewhat lackadaisical and attached to the notion that high academic qualifications and professional status guaranteed adulation and support. Though Xuma was from a royal Xhosa background, he abolished the House of Chiefs, established an efficient centralized secretariat and accounting system, called for full participation of Africans in the Union, and allowed all races to join the party. He removed the word “Native” from the ANC’s name and united the party by abolishing the autonomy of the four provincial ANC’s. He favoured a socialist agenda and joint action with the CPSA. Padmore accused him of being a CPSA fellow traveller but years later in 1959 Xuma covertly joined the PAC. Despite the steady expansion of the ANC under Xuma the party was unable to gauge popular support outside the townships for its actions and the best it could do in such circumstances (especially during the Second World War) was to create a competent administrative structure with a political program more radical than the 1930’s but not radical enough to provoke the minority racist regime into banning it. Xuma still sought accommodation with the ruling United Party – he was later encouraged by the friendly greeting he received from White regime’s prime minister Field Marshal Jan Smuts at the United Nations in 1946. By 1940 the ANC had achieved little or no success in galvanizing support from the subsistence farmers, urban professionals, and underpaid artisan class but the creation of the ANCYL attracted a new generation of young African activists representing a wider socio-economic class. Industrialization, consumerism, education and urbanization were already diversifying African society before it was exposed to new influences and pressures in the Second World War. Between 1940 and 1950 the number of urbanized Africans rose from 14 to 22 per cent, their numbers in the manufacturing industries by 81%. After 1945 manufacturing always contributed more to the economy than mining, which thereafter sometimes even dipped below agriculture (e.g. 1950 – 1955). Eventually the demands of manufacturing would be the major force for ending minority European rule. The ANC and CPSA, except for the brief flurry in the late 1920’s, had advocated polices that were too narrow in their appeal. Occupations were diversifying (see Table 1)

Table 1. SOUTH AFRICAN WORKFORCE 1950 – 1970

Sector 1950 (%) 1960 (%) 1970 (%) Agriculture 40 36 28 Mining 22 23 21 Manufacturing 25 27 37 Commerce 13 14 14 Total Figures 2,219122 2,561,850 3,160619

Inevitably the new rising generation of schoolteachers, artisans, nurses, former soldiers, petty

2 Nzula was sent for studies in Moscow where he became an alcoholic and suspected Trotskyite. He died of pneumonia after falling asleep drunk in a snowdrift.

entrepreneurs, lesser clergy, clerks, migrant workers, subsistence farmers, criminal gangs, factory workers, and unemployed youth were impatient and interested in a far wider range of economic and social issues. The rapidly expanding African townships with a high concentration of intelligent skilled innovative and ambitious workers forming networks in long term residential areas inevitably heightened political awareness and facilitated political organization. For example African industrial unrest escalated after 1940 and by 1945 trade union membership reached 128,000, five times what it had been in 1940. Afrikaner economic and political power was still overwhelmingly rural and mindful of the Uitlander experience when foreign white skilled workers and foreign investment threatened their power. Afrikaners were hostile to the rapidly expanding urban African proletariat. Consequently there was a significant Afrikaner shift against Smuts after his 1943 election victory in the interest of Afrikaner self-preservation. The White electoral system was highly skewed in favour of rural Afrikaner constituencies and this was reflected until the late 1960’s in the regime’s parliament. Whereas Xuma’s ANC was advocating eventual African equality in every sphere of South African society, the competing imperial United Party and republican National Party rivals within Afrikanerdom were rooted deeply in the past. Smuts still dreamed of using the British imperial connection to enhance South Africa’s world status and gain local advantages as he had done after the First World War. Indicative of his mindset, Smuts complained when he lost the 1948 election that his old comrades had deserted him. An aide pointed out that all his old comrades were dead. Dr François Malan, who defeated Smuts in the 1948 election, still sought revenge for Smuts’ refusal to spare the First World War traitor Jopie Fourie, and sought to transform South Africa into a holy Afrikaner fascist arcadia. Colour and religion aside, the majority of black South Africans and the whites who controlled business and industry probably supported the ideals of the Xuma’s ANC – peace, education, land redistribution, economic cooperation, wage equality, an end of the pass system, and eventual universal franchise. The advent of Malan’s hideous experiment in social engineering in 1948 was indeed, in Dan O’Meara words, the start of forty lost years. The nature of the PAC’s national protests in 1960 was inspired by resistance ideologies developed by the ANCYL. The original idea for an ANC Youth League came from Manasseh Moerane, who later became editor of The World and joined Moral Rearmament, which Padmore identified as a significant threat to African liberation with its appeal to achieve upper middle class status mitigated by Christian values and “good works”. The ANC Youth League (ANCYL) was founded under William Nkomo at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre in Johannesburg in April 1944. The ANCYL became a dynamic closet revolutionary but ostensibly radical vanguard movement under Nkomo’s successor as president, Anton Muziwakhe Lembede (1914-1947), a puritanical Zulu intellectual from a poor subsistence farming family who had originally considered forming a separate organization to the ANC. Lembede had gained his BA, LLB and Masters degrees through distance education from UNISA but provided a focal point for a younger generation of African politicians particularly associated with University College, Fort Hare. However, from the very start the ANCYL was divided into two main camps that eventually caused civil war within the ANC. Lembede himself was rural oriented and rejected both the British-oriented ANC objective of a capitalist industrial economy and neglected rural class sustaining a sizeable urban westernized middle class society of individualistic acquisitive liberal Christians; and the CPSA target of establishing a Soviet state with a heavily policed, urbanized, industrial worker- military, professional, bureaucratic, and intellectual dictatorship fed by a demoralized, inefficiently collectivized, and despised peasantry. Lembede’s deputy was Ashley Peter Solomzi Mda (1916-1993), a Mosotho raised in the Aliwal North area of the Cape where his chiefly family had fled from Mafeteng, Basutoland, after an altercation with a British magistrate. Other like-minded prominent members were Ntsu Mokhehle (1918-1999) from Fort Hare and Potlako Leballo (1915-1986), an ex soldier, both from Basutoland; and Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe (1924-1978) of Fort Hare of Basotho-Pondo ancestry from Graaff- Reinet in the Eastern Cape. Mda, a hypochondriac with occasional genuine health problems, eventually lost his nerve and retreated into rural isolation, which he inappropriately compared to Lenin

in Switzerland and Mao Zedong at Yenan. However the other three, while occasionally liaising with Mda in the hope of persuading him out of his masterful inactivity, would form a close alliance up until Sobukwe’s death. The rival camp consisted of three Xhosa-speakers: the ANCYL secretary-general, Walter Sisulu (1912-2003), an entrepreneurial estate agent, talented administrator, but ultimately duplicitous political net-worker, disowned by his White father and racially taunted by Lembede; the ANCYL treasurer, Kaizana Oliver Tambo (1917 - 1993), a physics and mathematics graduate orphaned at sixteen, who taught at the prestigious St Peter’s School in Johannesburg (where he recruited many students as dual CPSA/ANC members); and the future ANCYL president Nelson Mandela, a charismatic member of the Thembu royal house, who married Sisulu’s cousin and would later be articled with Tambo in the same Johannesburg law firm. These three were urban oriented professionals with higher class aspirations and increasing involvement with dissident European and Indian politicians and professionals. Mda stated that the CPSA deliberately targeted Mandela, Sisulu, and Tambo as potentially valuable recruits, either as communists or fellow travellers, and in doing so severely weakened the ANCYL to such as extent that it became irrelevant after 1952. During crises, for example the Lifaqane/Mfecane of the early 1800’s, African society was extremely adaptable and frequently produced leaders, such as Shaka Zulu and Lepoqo Moshoeshoe, who were not from the traditional ruling class and succeeded by introducing innovations such as the short stabbing spear and gun bearing cavalry. Shaka replaced the traditional chieftaincy with military indunas while Moshoeshoe used polygyny to father a new ruling class. Lembede was also an innovator from a low status family but did not seek to become a leader in the old mode such as a chief, a professional, a cleric, or high ranking academic. Lembede was essentially a democratic populist who believed the only effective weapon to achieve liberation was mass African action. However, his rhetoric and methods of gaining support from the lower echelons of the townships and the impoverished rural areas indicated that he was a national-socialist. Edwin Mofutsanyana (1899-1995), a Mosotho and former CPSA secretary-general (until 1939) attacked Lembede for Nazi sympathies; and Potlako Leballo recalled that when he first witnessed Lembede speaking publicly in 1945 the speech provoked the Communist activist John Beaver “J. B.” Marks to exclaim, “The Führer has spoken!” Lembede’s mostly lower middle class supporters in the townships considered themselves to have a higher socio-economic status to their rural relations and were not prepared to communalize what little wealth they had acquired. This lower class based xenophobic anti-communist attitude had sustained a number of right wing White dictatorships world wide and brought the Malan Purified National Party (NP) to power in South Africa in 1948. Lembede believed that a fundamentalist political system was necessary to prevent the eternal problem of the African elite identifying with local liberal Whites and (later) being bought off by foreign interests. Besides closely following the NP’s rise he even investigated religion in the hope of discovering a faith his colleagues would embrace that would bolster nationalism and inspire them with a spirituality that despised material gain. He was extremely unsuccessful. Mda, a Leninist from a rural background where land was communally held, worked hard to divert Lembede from Nazi beliefs but the national-socialist influence persisted to such an extent that the PAC faction which disastrously participated in the 1994, 1999, 2004 and 2009 elections is justly described as mystical-fascist. Lembede’s extremism quickly alienated Sisulu, who not only failed his exams in Lembede’s School of African Nationalism in Orlando East but also endured abuse from Lembede on his mixed racial origins (his father was a White magistrate). Tambo later described Lembede’s Africanist Thought as “primitive” although Mandela was more accommodating. In status conscious ridden African society African nationalism was a more attractive concept than an appeal to members of the poorer classes to unite. Members of the poorer classes have higher class aspirations and often dislike being referred to in terms that have derogatory connotations although Lembede would not have objected to Ngubane’s description of him at teacher training college as the “living symbol of African misery.” The alternate Smuts-Hertzog regimes since 1919 had been damaging enough in every aspect of African life but in 1948 the situation took a catastrophic turn for the worst when Malan’s NP won the

general election. The South African economy needed a much larger educated skilled workforce and a just salary structure not only to support consumer goods expansion but to take advantage of markets as far north as Kenya. Malan’s solution, which ignored his slim coalition majority (79 to 74), his own economic advisers, and international outrage, was a madness called apartheid (hybrid English- Afrikaans for apartness). Under this scheme Africans would become impoverished citizens of powerless mini-states called Bantustans created in the scattered enclaves of official African land allocated in 1936 that comprised 13.7% of the country. Malan planned for cheap African labour to be phased out and entirely replaced by European workers. African urban areas would be scattered satellite townships built on a grid system that would be simple for the police and army to contain and attack but difficult for inhabitants to defend. Electricity, water, food supplies and communications could easily be cut (usually a single road or rail track led to the nearby city). Redundant African workers would be banished to the Bantustans, which would ultimately become foreign countries ruled by puppet dictators. Eventually no Africans would remain in the 83.3% of South Africa already allocated entirely to Europeans. Another stage of the plan, implemented in the 1950’s, was to “dumb down” African education so the level of scientific and mathematical skills would be considerably reduced, social science curricula distorted, and first language education expanded. In 1912 Afrikaans, a semi-creole language, had replaced mutually intelligible Dutch, a major European language with huge literary, technical and scientific resources, as the medium for education in Afrikaner education. Southern Africans rarely suffered sociolinguistic trauma through education in a second or third language unless it was Afrikaans. They recognized English as a useful tool not only for education but also for global participation, and while they respected their mother tongue and used it at home, in church, or reading books and newspapers if they were available, they opposed mother tongue education except in rural areas in the lowest grades. Even Afrikaans, despite immense political and financial backing, was still unacceptably underdeveloped and under-resourced in 1994. Besides confining Africans to a sort of permanent gulag or badly run zoo the new legislation also immediately threatened what few professional career prospects remained to the ANCYL leadership. In the 1940’s the CPSA began to revive and achieved successes in creating industrial unrest. The most serious resistance to the White power structure in the 1940’s came from the CPSA directed Miners’ Strike. The African Mine Workers Union was launched in 1941 under the presidency of the CPSA activist J. B. Marks (1903-1972) whose father was an African railway worker and whose mother was White. At that time the wage rate for African workers was (using present currency) R70 per year while white workers received R848. By August 12, 1946 when between 75 - 100,000 African mine workers went on strike for a daily wage of 10 shillings (One Rand) the wages were: Africans R87 and whites R1106. The strike lasted for five days and affected 32 of the 45 mines on the Rand. Brutal police suppression resulted in an official toll of 1,248 workers wounded and nine killed. The CPSA and Indian Congress activist M. P. Naicker later erroneously claimed in 1976 that “The brave miners of 1946 gave birth to the ANC Youth League's Programme of Action adopted in 1949”. There was no basis for this assumption. J. B. Marks’s just accusations of Lembede’s flirtation with national-socialism indicated there was no meeting point between the CPSA and Lembede’s immediate circle who inspired The Programme of Action. Firstly the massive system of informants, the pass system, the short term contract migrant labour system and intense vigilance by the mining companies, police, and tribal authorities made it impossible for political parties to build on the brief success of the 1946 Miners’ Strike. During the strike Marks and his executive, through police repression, had been isolated from the action which, despite being widespread on the Rand, was localised not national and had economic not political objectives. Secondly Lembede’s ideas were initially popular with African university students and young graduates as well as members of the post Second World War expanding African urban class of teachers, petty entrepreneurs, and ex-soldiers who recognized that mass action would enhance their own chances of attaining political leadership. For that reason they were not at all anxious to see any challenge from of a powerful African Miners’ Union, more so because they considered miners to be from an “uneducated” lower class strata. Lembede died in 1947, possibly

poisoned by a jealous girl friend, but his ideas were adopted in a somewhat diluted form as The Programme of Action at the ANC national conference in 1949. The animosity between Lembede and Marks was unfortunate because the concepts of spontaneous mass protest (Lembede) and carefully targeted and controlled mass protest (Marks) needed much deeper analysis and there should have been a meeting point between them because until 1955 ANC and CPSA members, despite rivalry and intrigue, generally had good relations. Several senior African CPSA office bearers such as Moses Kotane and J. B. Marks were also members of the ANC. The ANCYL was already working on The Programme of Action before the National Party extremist Dr François Malan became premier in 1948. Lembede had intended The Programme of Action to transform the ANC into an African led democratic socialist revolutionary movement but it was only adopted in 1949 after his death and was a compromise between the two major factions within the ANCYL. While the ANCYL intended to launch the programme as a means of convincing the African majority that nation-wide coordinated mass peaceful political demonstrations would bring freedom, the ANC’s Christian-oriented professional element stressed guarantees to assure Indian and Coloured organizations. This understandable widening of the focus nevertheless played a major role in diverting the struggle from its primary objective to one protecting class interests in the name of racial harmony. The launching of The Programme of Action was complicated by the banning of the Communist Party, whose international links had been considerably enhanced but was already experiencing divergent strategies for liberation in the wake of Josip Broz Tito’s victory in Yugoslavia and Mao Zedong’s 1949 victory in China. On the eve of the Second World War the Soviet Union had degenerated into a brutal paranoid isolated introverted state that had abandoned its earlier ideals of colonial freedom and world revolution, decimating its political elite and massacring a large part of its officer corps. However by 1949 it had assumed a global role establishing communist states in occupied Eastern Europe and North Korea, annexing parts of Japan and seeing communism triumph in China. Non-aligned newly independent countries such as India were adopting Soviet economic models while anti-colonial movements in Indo-China were adopting Marxist solutions, albeit modelled more on the Chinese people’s war strategies than the Soviet workers-military coup approach. Liberation literature was so scarce in South Africa that although Africanist church members knew about Garvey, who claimed his UNIA had been inspired by conditions in Basutoland, most political leaders were unaware of Toussaint L’Ouverture, or Mao Zedong’s writings. However Mahatma Gandhi’s (1869- 1948) political career had started in South Africa and his highly successful campaign in India of satyagraha - resistance through mass non-violent civil disobedience – was very influential in the ANC. Membership numbers of the CPSA were unknown and the identity and relative authority of its office bearers extremely nebulous but the party had revived its fortunes through its involvement with the 1946 Miners’ Strike. Although the strike had failed it demonstrated that the CPSA was again a credible force. Xuma continued to allow CPSA leaders such as Moses Kotane and J. B. Marks to hold National Executive Committee (NEC) positions in the ANC making the ANC appear less a political party than an ill defined movement. Lembede’s colleagues argued that the “all-inclusive, non- ideological character of the ANC,” was its weakness while Jordan Ngubane (who later joined the Liberal Party) criticised the policy of seeking alliances instead of encouraging mass recruitment which caused the ANC to “stop at every station to pick up all sorts of passengers.” The Victoria East Branch of the ANCYL (near Fort Hare) had been responsible for drawing up the completed draft of the Programme of Action. The branch president was Sobukwe and his vice president Ntsu Mokhehle, both of Fort Hare. In December 1949, the ANC held its conference in Bloemfontein. The Programme of Action had been passed to the branches, discussed in depth and returned to the conference for approval. According to Leballo, the Youth Leaguers reckoned that the older members of the ANC would be somewhat tired by the early morning and not in a good position to resist a determined assault for the Programme’s adoption. According to him, the Programme of

Action was presented to the conference at 2.30am and duly accepted, along with the election of Dr. Moroka as president in place of Xuma. Xuma was elected to the executive, but the presence of the CPSA in the new executive convinced Mda that, if Africanism was to prevail, it should be formally constituted. The Programme of Action today reads as quite a mild document but in 1949 it was almost revolutionary. Unlike the 1955 Freedom Charter, which seriously split the liberation struggle, The Programme of Action was widely discussed through the entire party structure so that every leading ANC member, particularly those on the Rand and at Fort Hare, had a say in its compilation. The Programme of Action was extremely Gandhian for it called “for civil disobedience, strikes, boycotts and stays-at-home and, thus, unequivocally committed the ANC to a new strategy, based on extra- legal tactics, mass action and the principle of non-collaboration.” Unfortunately but understandably, given the ferocity of the apartheid government, there were no directives about the next stage of the struggle should open conflict erupt. Gandhi had exhorted Jews in 1938 on the eve of the Holocaust:

“If the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the God-fearing, death has no terror.”

This was certainly not the sort of message volatile young African activists let alone the Jewish communists wanted to hear. In militant African minds this was a strategy for the older middle class professional membership – lawyers, doctors, and reverend gentlemen - to adopt but the youth reasoned that their elders’ martyrdom would inspire them to use violence to avenge them. They had plenty of examples to guide them. The methods used to crush the miners and thereafter control and isolate them should have warned the ANC what they could expect but even bellicose former soldiers like Leballo later admitted that the African political leadership, despite its rhetoric, underestimated the vicious vindictive obduracy of the NP regime. In 1949 there was an assumption that if the ANC could organise an escalating number of increasingly larger peaceful mass demonstrations the NP government would be forced to negotiate. While many Africanists (Mda, Sobukwe, Mokhehle, Leballo) later downplayed the influence of Nkrumah and the rise of his People’s Convention Party (PCP) in the Gold Coast (Ghana) it was clear the PCP experience was inspirational. Nkrumah, guided by Padmore, had split away from the more conservative but highly educated leadership of Dr Danquah, seized the initiative by supporting rural activism and launched a vigorous campaign of Positive Action in January 1950 that focused on civil disobedience, non-cooperation, boycotts, and strikes. The British arrested Nkrumah and many of his supporters and he was sentenced to three years in prison. However the British gave way and Nkrumah won Africa’s first true general election while still in jail. On the 13th February 1951, a day after being freed, he was asked to form a government. International Communism had considerable examples and strategies to guide the CPSA in the coming confrontation but the minuscule professional nature of the CPSA membership was ill suited to revolutionary activism and although the CPSA wanted credit for participation in mass demonstrations it did not want ANC grass roots activism to succeed. J. B. Marks evoked respect from the Africanists but his success in the Miners’ Strike ensured the regime took steps to prevent any similar occurrence. Despite Marks’s organisational abilities he does not appear to have been as influential in the CPSA as he deserved and future resistance strategies were thereafter conducted by over-cautious White communists like Joe Slovo. Sobukwe dismissed the communists as “quacks” in his view only intellectual communists. He continued: “They were wealthy and they used and enjoyed their wealth [but]…none of them was willing to materially come down to our level, or to accept the possibility that roles might someday be reversed.” Gerhart Interview 1970

The CPSA had immediate local problems not only with the NP regime but also with major religious groups. In 1949, the Roman Catholic Pope Pius XII decreed that anyone “professing, defending or spreading” Communist doctrine would be excommunicated. Lembede had been a Catholic but although the faith had a dominant position in Basutoland it was not very influential in South Africa since the Afrikaner heritage was Dutch Protestant and French Huguenot (Protestant) refugee, and most English speakers were also Protestants. However, on the eve of provincial elections the same year C. R. Swart, the justice minister in Malan’s administration, had announced that a departmental committee “investigating” Communism had produced a report which had disclosed that there was “a national danger” from the communists and that they were “undermining our national life, our democratic institutions and our western philosophy.” At beginning of 1950 after the adoption of The Programme of Action the Dutch Reformed Church advocated the closure of the Soviet consulate in Pretoria and urged the government to tighten the law punishing incitement of non-Europeans against Europeans. In March 1950 the Dutch Reformed Church Congress called for government action against communism and the NP duly introduced an Unlawful Organisations Bill into parliament. The Bill was withdrawn following protests that its terms of reference were too sweeping. It was replaced by a Suppression of Communism Bill. The bill defined communism as “... the doctrine of Marxian socialism as expounded by Lenin and Trotsky, the Third Communist International (the Comintern) or the Communist Information Bureau (the Cominform) or any related form of that doctrine expounded or advocated in the Union for the promotion of the fundamental principles of that doctrine .....” Among the list of sub-definitions was: “(b) which aims at bringing about any political, industrial, social or economic change within the Union by the promotion of disturbance or disorder, by unlawful acts or omissions or by the threat of such acts or omissions or threat.” A maximum penalty of ten years imprisonment was laid down for any infringement. Section (b) was to prove the relevant part of the Act which became law on 22nd June, 1950, for it enabled the authorities to stamp down on dissension through the use of banning, rather than bringing people to court. The same year South Africa entered the Korean War and incurred heavy warplane losses. In May 1950, six weeks before the Act became law, the Central Committee of the CPSA met at its office on the Sixth floor of the Stuttaford Building in Johannesburg to discuss the implications of the forthcoming Act. Of the sixteen members present, only two voted against the motion that the party should dissolve itself before the Act became law. These were W. H. Andrews, an English trade unionist, and Edwin Mofutsanyana, from Basutoland. Dissolution, with no reference to the party membership was unusual, and Mofutsanyana suggested that it was hardly appropriate for the party to dissolve itself, even before the government had passed the Act. Andrews asked the party to show some courage and face the coming onslaught. Michael Harmel, regarded as the party’s leading theoretician, spoke for the majority. Mofutsanyana described Harmel as pale and shaking as he urged the committee to dissolve the party. Later, Harmel wrote that the move had been necessary because, “No effective steps had been taken to prepare for underground existence and illegal work.” The CPSA leadership, being for the most part professional people, many of them lawyers, would be not only be subject to economic loss to a far greater extent than most of those affected by the provisions of the Act but also find it nearly impossible to lead underground resistance outside their class and ethnic circle. While Lembede, Mda and the Africanists were searching for an effective liberation doctrine, the CPSA could draw on numerous examples from allied movements including communist parties in Algeria, China, Indochina, India, Indonesia, Malaya, Burma and Korea. At the May 1950 CPSA dissolution meeting the central committee agreed to Resolution 212 whereby the party should be reconstituted secretly. In the meantime, its members were instructed to turn their attention to infiltrate, establish and take over other political organisations. A notable previous example of infiltration (which ended in mass murder of the communists April-May 1927) had been when the Soviet directed Communist International (Comintern) in 1922 ordered members of the Communist Party of China to join the Guomindang (Nationalist Party) to transform the Guomindang from the inside rather than

rival it. However the CPSA failure to create a large working class-peasant membership meant that clandestine activities were extremely precarious. In Thailand and Malaya communist insurgency was hampered and eventually failed because it was associated with ethnic minorities (Chinese) whose insurgents nevertheless far exceeded the entire CPSA membership (African and minorities) from 1921 till the present day. The CPSA membership was minuscule (even in the Soviet Union membership was a privilege. In 1986 about 10% of Soviet adult citizens belonged to the party, with over 44 per cent classed as industrial workers and 12 per cent collective farmers) and its leadership overwhelmingly urban, professional and from ethnic minorities (Georgians, Poles, Armenians, Balts, Jews3). The growing appeal of the Africanists was making it difficult to recruit outside the CPSA’s own socio- economic class so communist strategy therefore aimed at those opposition groups felt threatened by the empowerment of lower class Africans. The ex-CPSA used its professional expertise (its lawyers were always in demand) and superior financial resources to exercise disproportionate influence. Dr Yusuf Dadoo, a member of the CPSA central committee, was already president of the South African Indian Congress (SAIC) but stepped down in order to operate more freely. Monty Naicker, the Gandhian past president of the SAIC, resumed the leadership in name, while Dadoo, nominally no longer an office holder, retained the real power with Yusuf Cachalia as secretary-general. Moses Kotane, the secretary-general of the 1950 CPSA central committee, was ordered to work for the reconstruction of the CPSA which had been previously known as the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) as the underground South African Communist Party (SACP). He ostensibly worked for his own furniture business, operating between Alexandra and Johannesburg, but this was apparently a ‘front’ for his party activities. The SACP writers certainly did not recognise any break in the party’s history. Harmel’s history of the Communist Party dates the party’s 50th anniversary as 1971 and, since the CP was formed in 1921, it is evident that the dissolution in 1950 was merely a ploy to evade prosecution. Certainly no present SACP member considers any break to have occurred in the party’s history. The CP was secretly reconstituted as the SACP in 1953. In 1962, after Mandela tried to downgrade the importance of the Freedom Charter Congress Alliance, the SACP drew up a policy document, which was taken by some observers to mean that its secret reconvening belonged to that year. The secretive nature of the Communist party after 1950 ensured it would never be anything except a small clandestine, Soviet funded (until 1989), multi-racial anti-democratic elitist group of trade unionists and professionals that used the ANC for its own purposes and even since 1994 has never stood for national elections. After Lembede’s death in 1947, Mda worked for greater grass roots activism but because of his naïve directive that his Africanist group should hold back until the appropriate juncture he was quickly outmanoeuvred by the better funded, more dynamic and professionally assisted Sisulu, Mandela, and Tambo. Walter Sisulu was elected ANC secretary general in 1949 and replaced by Oliver Tambo after he was banned from political activity in 1953. Mandela was elected a member of the ANC NEC in 1950, appointed leader of volunteers in Defiance Campaign, and succeeded Godfrey Pitje as ANCYL president in 1952. Mda tried to counter the rise of his moderate nationalist rivals by organising the Africanists at Leballo’s lodgings at 142 Adams Street, Orlando East. In July 1950, Mda held a-meeting of the ‘hard core’ of African nationalists and Africanists at Bochabela Location in Bloemfontein. The seventeen activists present were A.P. Mda, Leballo, Sobukwe., G. Pitje, J. Ngubane, N. Mokhehle, V. Sifora, Dr. Conco, M. Yengwa, John Nyati Pokela, Cornelius Judah Fazzie, A. Z. Gwenje, T.E. Ka Tschunungwa, J. Lengese and Messrs Mzamane, Xgabashe and Kopo. This group was similar to the “Inner Circle” of the Africanist Movement that met at Adams Street. According to Leballo, the Inner Circle consisted of Mda, Leballo, Ngendane, ’Molotsi, Lekage, Makhetha, Tsoolo, Zephaniah Mothopeng (President of the Transvaal Teachers Association in 1950), Sifora, Pokela, Sobukwe, Phillip Gallant, Z. B. Molete and two others, including a woman, whose names escaped him. The Inner Circle held guidance line meetings two or three times a week, from 6pm to 6am, and also

3 Stalin once advised his Jewish colleagues to change their names in order not to upset Hitler

met at weekends. They read widely, wrote papers and held discussions. Their work was concerned with drawing from African experience to build up an ideology of resistance, as well as to inspire Africans to take a pride in their past and traditions and fight for their own freedom without help from any other group. George Padmore, though strapped for funds, had been extremely active since his expulsion from the Communist movement and the concomitant quarantining of his popular publications. He had remained in Europe and started an unofficial organisation in Hampstead, London, called the Pan African Brotherhood. After the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, Ras Makonnen, Wallace-Johnson and C.L.R. James formed the International African Friends of Abyssinia and, in 1937, the International Africa Service Bureau (IASB). Padmore was able to recruit younger African activists including Kwame Nkrumah and disseminate instructions on how to form and run clandestine political movements. Despite his expulsion from Soviet circles, Padmore’s methods remained distinctly Leninist with emphasis on the concept of a small hard core of trained revolutionaries directing the masses. Mda’s Africanists had the same organisation, ideology and titles (Inner Circle, Hard Core) as Kwame Nkrumah’s early political movement. Padmore, Nkrumah’s mentor, had been rumoured to have undertaken clandestine visits to Africa, including Johannesburg. Mda seems to have modelled himself on Padmore, but Mda stated in 1970 that he had never met him. Like Nkrumah’s People’s Convention Party (PCP), Mda’s Africanists, from less “respectable” class backgrounds, quickly began to upstage their more prestigious rivals mainly because the lower strata of African society with higher class aspirations could relate better to them. The Africanists displayed considerable class animosity and ridicule towards the ambitious professionals, especially Mandela with his playboy reputation. Ntsu Mokhehle self-deprecatingly referred to the Africanists as “simple country-folk” while Mda commented:

“The tendencies I saw during the and after the Defiance Campaign caused me to be pessimistic. I saw that the communists had resources. I was skeptical of our chances of maintaining control of the ANC. The communists had not just money, but also a press. They also had social pull; they could sweep people away by the glamour of associating with whites. If you went along with them, you would get the opportunity of dancing with white girls, going to parties, even kissing white girls, in private of course. You could stay in fine hotels, be in a fine social setting. We didn’t have, couldn’t offer, any of these advantages.” Gerhart interview 1970

Leballo was equally scathing:

“This Communist Party of South Africa, the so-called communists, it was never a real one. It was composed of rich Jewish people, you know, bourgeois elements, and these people were giving a lot of money to Mandela, Tambo. Particularly they were sponsors for them to article them for, you know, they were to become lawyers….And you find a number of them [European communists] in Johannesburg who were very rich, staying in Lower Houghton, the richest part of Johannesburg, and their money was very important...” Gerhart interview 1968

Sobukwe, who seems never to have known that Sisulu secretly joined SACP in 1955, the year he delivered the ANC under SACP control, agreed:

“In the case of Sisulu, everyone could see what had happened. While he was secretary- general, there was one period of about six months when the ANC was so poor that the phone and electricity were cut off in the office. These communists from the Indian Congress – Dadoo and Cachalia - came and supplied the ANC and Sisulu with money. Also Sisulu’s business was in trouble. You couldn’t blame him for being grateful to these men.

Sisulu even said this openly himself to us, that what else could he do?” Gerhart interview 1970

Mary Benson [1966], a close European friend of Mandela, described his political discussions with Indian and European activists, which contrasted sharply with the austere often puritanical Africanists:

“Great days – and, in [Ismail] Meer’s flat - over endless cups of tea and curry meals at any time of the day or night, they discussed and argued and planned. They studied and they listened to the gramophone. They could feel optimistic; they were young and planning for a better world .....”

Leballo and Mandela, despite their political rivalry, had a mutual respect but Leballo nevertheless teased Mandela by imitating his stiff and formal public manner haughtily reminding his audience in pompous tones that he was “of the Royal House of the Thembu.” Sobukwe was more critical of Mandela’s manner:

“Mandela was one man I never really knew personally until I was already in prison. We were never friendly, although I had heard him address meetings and had met him. He is a very “arrogant” man. He lacks a common touch. I remember him at one meeting around the time of the Defiance Campaign. People had gone there still undecided if they were going to participate. Mandela got up and said very peremptorily, “All those with us, come forward; all others get out.” And most people just got out. They were put off by his manner. Mandela was strong among the leaders, although we always recognized Tambo as superior in intelligence. Mandela had a way of attacking people very viciously if they disagreed with him, and were a “smaller” person than himself. He could reduce them to a “shriveling” mass, then he would “pat them on the head and draw them to him,” and thereafter they would be his men, always deferring to him, looking up to him. If he came across any man [such as Sobukwe] who wouldn’t look up and defer to him and acknowledge his superiority then he wouldn’t have anything to do with that person. Mandela could always attract weak people; but he could never get on with another strong person. In any relationship, he had to dominate. But he was an engaging person. He could always crack a joke, make you laugh; he always had a story to tell. But I was never friendly with him.” Gerhart interview 1970

Joe Matthews of the SACP confirmed the class division and contempt for rural activism when commenting on the arrival of Mangaliso Sobukwe in Johannesburg:

“... Some of us like Nokwe and others and myself ... had come to Fort Hare from Johannesburg.... We had spent five years in Johannesburg and had been in the Johannesburg political whirlpool and it was a very, exciting time to be in Johannesburg, during and just after the war. ... By the time we got to college we had ideas.... We were members of the movement; we had been in that movement for some time and we knew the iris and outs of the ANC. And we found ... chaps like Sobukwe and others had just come straight from Healdtown, six miles across to Fort Hare. And this was their life ... the quiet sort of life of that part of the country. And from there into teaching at Standerton, another little town.... He might have been able to adjust if he had been participating (in 1950-54) but, being out of the sort of practical day-to-day thing, he then came with what he considered was an idea which he had and which had not been fulfilled ... (he was a) sincere sort of chap. And sincere in away which, unfortunately, politicians are not. By that, I mean that he had the sincerity of a starry-eyed type.” Gerhart [1978:189]

Mandela confirmed the attractions of higher society, telling Godfrey Pitje and others in his office, “Look chaps, you can’t blame me for this. I’m beginning to look at things differently.” [Sampson 1999:118] However, not all were seduced. Peter Raboroko had been at school with Tambo yet identified so strongly with African township culture that Mandela, who admitted he had never mixed in lower class circles, sneeringly dismissed him as “shebeen intellectual.” Raboroko took it as a compliment. Therefore in 1950 the Africanists and the ‘disbanded’ CP, aware of each other’s intentions, were both intending to take over the ANC by utilising the class divisions within the movement. The Africanists believed that the ANC could be converted to a more effective form of resistance by a sustained grass roots campaign resulting from a mass membership whose ‘natural nationalism’ would support the Africanist view point and leadership. On the face of it, it appeared the ex-CP had little chance of combating the Africanists. However perceptions altered and ironically the CP profited by the Africanists’ success in the Defiance Campaign. Mda was in two minds about the Defiance Campaign. Although he wanted to politicize the grass roots through implementing mass action he believed that the ANC was hampered by its leadership’s professional concerns, its communist allies’ Soviet directed intentions, and its Christian-Gandhian concept of passive resistance. Mda’s ostensible objective was to provoke the racist regime into violence and then incite violent mass African retaliation although when this became a probability he lost his nerve and became a recluse. When the implementation of the Programme began in 1950 the new president-general of the ANC was Dr Moroka who not only had not sought the leadership (at the conference the ANCYL found him having illicit sex when they went to ask him) but was also an untested politician who was never able to exercise effective control over his party let alone deal with the communists. Moroka opened a Freedom of Speech Convention in Johannesburg but ANCYL and communists clashed over the latter’s attempt to seize control of May Day celebrations. The brutality of the South African police in breaking up the demonstration, killing 18 and wounding 30, briefly reconciled the two groups and on 26th June they joined with other organisations to demonstrate against the Bill for Group Areas and the Bill for the Suppression of Communism, combining the event into a national day of mourning. In 1951, the newly-formed Coloured organisation, the Franchise Action Council, organised strikes in the Cape Peninsular and Port Elizabeth, with Indian and African support, in protest against the Separate Representation of Voters Bill. The Programme of Action had stated, “The National Organisations of the Africans, Indians and Coloureds may co-operate on common issues” and on 17 June 1951, the national executive of the ANC, still lacking clear forceful leadership, decided to invite “all other national executives of the national organisations of the non-European people of South Africa to a conference to place before them a programme of direct action.” The difficulty that faced the ANC was that, although The Programme of Action called for Africans to free themselves, non-Africans would continue to protest against injustice, otherwise they would appear opposed or apathetic to African freedom. The ANC could not expect non-Africans to abandon resistance and so, to prevent confusion and rival demonstrations, it was necessary- so they believed - to co-ordinate activities. On 29th July, the leaders of the ANC, SAIC and FAC (Cape) met and resolved:

1. to declare war on Pass Laws and Stock Limitation, the Group Areas Act, the Voters Representation Act, the Suppression of Communism Act and the Bantu Authorities Act. 2. to embark upon an immediate mass campaign for the repeal of these oppressive laws, and 3. to establish a Joint Planning Council to co-ordinate the efforts of the National Organisations of the African, Indian and Coloured peoples in this mass campaign.

The Joint Planning Committee members were Dr. James Sebe Moroka, chairman, (ANC), W. M. Sisulu (ANC), J. B. Marks (ANC-CP), Dr. Y. M. Dadoo (SAIC-CP) and Y. Cachalia (SAIC). On 8 November, 1951, the committee made its report. It recommended that the ANC annual conference in December that year should call upon the Union government to repeal the following by February 1952:-

the Pass Laws, the Group Areas Act, the Voters’ Representation Act, the Suppression of Communism Act, the Bantu Authorities Act, the “policy of stock limitation and the so- called rehabilitation scheme.”

Should the Union government reject this ultimatum, the committee suggested that a Plan of Action be implemented:

“We recommend that the struggle for securing the repeal of unjust laws be DEFIANCE OF UNJUST LAWS based on non-cooperation. Defiance of unjust laws and regulations which are undemocratic, unjust, racially discriminatory and repugnant to the natural rights of man.”

The three stages of Defiance of Unjust, Laws were defined as below:-

1. Commencement of the struggle by calling upon selected and trained persons to go into action in the big centres, e.g. Johannesburg, Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Port Elizabeth and Durban. 2. Number of volunteer corps to be increased as well as the number of operation. 3. This is the stage of mass action, during which as far as possible the struggle should broaden out on a country-wide scale and assume a general mass character. For its success, preparation on a mass scale to cover the people both in the urban and rural areas would be necessary.

Volunteers were to enter areas where they were forbidden as units and to court arrest when challenged. Selected leaders were to announce that they were refusing to carry passes of any description. In rural areas, volunteers should resist cattle-culling and stock limitation and decide in the conferences of the rural areas upon which laws to defy. The committee also recommended that volunteers should instruct people not to co-operate with the coming enforcement of the Population Registration Act. Finally, the committee called for a “one million shilling drive” to finance the campaign, and for the issue of an “inspired National Pledge.” The committee’s recommendations were accepted by the 39th Session of the ANC, held in Bloemfontein in December 1951. The following month, Moroka and Sisulu, the ANC secretary- general wrote to Malan, the NP premier, calling for the repeal of repressive legislation and threatening a Defiance Campaign. On 29 January, Malan replied: “While the government is not prepared to grant the Bantu political equality within the European community, it is only too willing to encourage Bantu initiative, Bantu services and Bantu administration within the Bantu community.” Malan pointed out that the government, considered that the Bantu Authorities Act was “designed to give the Africans the opportunity of enlightened administration of their own affairs,” and warned the ANC that the government would not tolerate infringements of the law. The same month, in a move that further demonstrated the fragmentary nature of the ANC, the Inner Circle of the Africanist Movement officially launched the Bureau of African Nationalism in all four provinces of the Union, while maintaining silence over its membership. During the rest of the year, the Inner Circle members operated chiefly out of the Xhosa speaking Eastern Cape. Their choice was

significant. The area had had the longest exposure to European expansion. It was an area where both liberalism and extreme nationalism had had successes. The ANC and SAIC national executives met at Port Elizabeth on 31 May and agreed that the “campaign of defiance of unjust laws” would commence on 26 June, 1952. In May, before the campaign had even begun, the government, acting under the provisions of the Suppression of Communism Act, had ordered Kotane, Marks, Ngwevela, Bopape and Dadoo - Communist Party members - to resign from their ANC and SAIC posts and to stay away from political gatherings. The same month, The Guardian, the CP newspaper, was also suppressed, only to be revived as Advance. The two CP members of the National Parliament and Cape Provincial councils, S. Kahn and F. Carneson, were banned, as was Michael Harmel, then member of the Transvaal Peace Council, and E. S. Sachs of the Garment Workers’ Union. On 30 July, the police raided all premises of the ANC, ANCYL, the Franchise Action Council, the Natal Indian Congress, the Transvaal Indian Congress, the Cape Provincial Indian assembly and other non-European organisations and trade unions in the major centres of the Union. They also raided newspaper offices and the private homes and offices of leaders involved in the campaign. Between 12 and 15 August, twenty leaders of the ANC and SAIC, including Moroka and Dadoo, were arrested and charged the next month under the Suppression of Communism Act. Throughout these months, the Defiance Campaign proceeded as planned. Nelson Mandela was in charge of volunteers and these volunteers deliberately defied laws all over the country openly courting arrest, Altogether 8,057 volunteers were arrested. The Bureau of African Nationalism did important work throughout the Defiance Campaign. It circulated pamphlets urging resisters not to allow the campaign to be taken over by minority interests, but to keep faith with the resolutions of The Programme of Action. The writers of these pamphlets were Sobukwe, A.P. Mda, T. T. Letlaka, C. J. Fazzie, J. N. Pokela and others (they all used pseudonyms), and their work was distributed to ANCYL members around the Union. Leballo’s work consisted of sustaining mass support and leading by example. The Bureau focused on encouraging Africans to organise themselves for a political campaign on a massive scale. Up until then, opposition on a national scale had been a sedate affair, conducted by intellectuals or trade unionists like Kadalie, whose objectives were accommodation by the European authorities. Leadership in the 1950’s and, to a great extent thereafter, depended on a university degree. Lawyers and doctors easily became the accepted leaders of the African population but the Bureau of African Nationalism wanted the African masses to gain experience and throw up their own leadership, hence their call to ignore outside interference, although Mda was never specific about exactly the protestors should act according to a scenario of circumstances. Ostensibly the Bureau wanted Africans to learn their own power, and indeed had much success in laying the foundations for later widespread resistance but it became clear that Mda’s rhetoric conflicted with his personal distaste at the “uncouth” forces that were emerging. Despite Mda’s deepening disgust with the “Mankno-ites”4 and radical Africanist church members he had unleashed, the Bureau had received valuable assistance from Fort Hare University students, Mda’s preferred class of militant. Nevertheless Mda’s Leninist ambivalence towards his supporters narrowed his movement’s appeal. Sobukwe (in detention) and Leballo (in exile) later realised in 1964 after Poqo, which was a logical extension of the Defiance Campaign, that grass root activism needed more to sustain it and the movement had failed to attract significant numbers of educated activists, the older generation and women because the Africanist philosophy was too nebulous to achieve liberation and the implementation of an equitable society. Although the Africanists had achieved success in encouraging mass demonstrations newspaper publicity given to the arrest of former CP members gave the communists a prominence out of proportion to their actual influence on events. Professor Matthews, reacting to an accusation that the

4 4 Nestor Mankno (1888 – 1934) was a colourful erratic Ukrainian anarcho-communist revolutionary peasant general and artist whose troops voted to refuse his orders if he was drunk. The Soviet Red Army commander Trotsky so detested his independent line that he reportedly declared “It's better to cede the entire Ukraine to Denikin (White Army) than to allow an expansion of Makhnovism.” Deniken defeated the Reds but was in turn defeated by Mankhno. Eventually the Reds forced Mankhno into exile in 1921.

Defiance Campaign had been Communist-influenced, wrote:

“The Campaign was strongest and best organised precisely in those areas where the so-called Communist influence was weakest. Anybody who knows anything about the Communist Party of South Africa knows, or ought to know, that its influence was strongest in Cape Town, where its headquarters are situated, in Johannesburg and in Durban. The figures of the campaign speak for themselves ... Cape Town providing a negligible number (of incidents and arrests). The largest number (of arrests) came from the Eastern Cape where the ‘Communist influence’ was practically nil.”

Of the total of 8,057 volunteers arrested for deliberately infringing apartheid laws, 5,719 were arrested in the Eastern Cape, 1,411 in the Transvaal, 423 in the Western Cape, Mafeking and Kimberley, 258 in the OFS and 246 in Natal. In the Eastern Cape, “resistance was marked by notable religious fervour - it was often preceded by prayer - and it was supported by African clergy and by African trade unions. Secondly, the people in these parts had lost more than others since 1936, through the operation of the land and franchise laws that deprived them and their children of old-established rights.” Fort Hare also played an active part in politicising the area during the campaign although they also encountered class antagonism. In many areas it was evident that African working women were influential in encouraging resistance. In August, police reinforcements were drafted into Port Elizabeth, Grahamstown and East London. In October, serious rioting broke out at New Brighton location in Port Elizabeth. Europeans were attacked and one, a proprietor of a local cinema, was killed. Buildings were set ablaze, and a post office was wrecked along with several shops. The police shot dead and wounded several rioters in the suppression which followed and, about two weeks later, an even more serious riot occurred at East London after the police opened fire on a meeting at West Bank where protesters had defied a ban on gatherings. Three Europeans, including a nun and a doctor, were killed in the ensuing riot. Towards the end of the campaign, a few European protestors entered Germiston location on 8 December, 1952 and were charged with “behaviour in a manner calculated to cause Natives to resist and to contravene a law, or to prevail upon them to obstruct the administration of any law by leading a procession or group of Natives into the Germiston location.” The Defiance Campaign was now at its most critical stage as it was probable that violence in large urban centres would break out in retaliation to police suppression. Mandela had achieved considerable success but had not established a plan of action to deal with the more volatile situation. His ability to organise static mass demonstrations was laudable but designed as a political statement and publicity not as a step to more intense activity such as the mass targeting of specific locations for swift occupation and abandonment by flying columns, who would eventually add destruction to their repertoire and incite increased police brutality so that ultimately a massive police miscalculation would present the protesters with the sort of opportunity wasted by Kgosana in Cape Town in March 1960 nine days after Sharpeville. While such ambitious plans were extremely difficult to implement due to lack of communications it seems nothing at all was developed during these years concerning crowd direction. There was of course a tradition – the highly disciplined 19th century Zulu battle formations mixing speed, deception and force – but in the 1940’s and 1950’s it was inconceivable for any such drilling be permitted. Even when the film Zulu was shot in South Africa, Zulu warrior extras were issued with dummy heads and shields to double their apparent size. Eventually Mandela’s colleagues lost their nerve and called off the Defiance Campaign. Several were arrested and all were frightened by the lower class violence that had broken out. In December 1952, twenty leaders of the ANC, SAIC were found guilty of “statutory Communism” in contrast to “what is commonly known as Communism.” The twenty, who included Moroka, Sisulu, Marks, Mandela, Dadoo and Cachalia, were sentenced to nine months imprisonment with hard labour, suspended for three years. The Johannesburg trial witnessed the attempt of Dr. Moroka to dissociate himself from his fellow accused. He hired a separate lawyer and spoke of his opposition to

Communism. It is apparent that he did so because he wanted to emphasize that the ANC, not the CP covert membership, had initiated the Defiance Campaign and that he was against interference from Moscow. In the circumstances, his attitude was interpreted in a different light, especially when he entered a plea in mitigation that stressed his long and happy association with Afrikaner patients. At the ANC annual conference in mid-December 1952, Moroka found only his own OFS delegation prepared to support him for re-election. Leballo, speaking on behalf of the Transvaal rank and file, successfully nominated Albert Lutuli, the ANC Natal Provincial leader, as Moroka’s successor. Leballo and others had been impressed by Lutuli’s comments during riots in Natal when Africans had attacked Indians. Lutuli rejected criticism of such “racism”, pointing out that the sugar cane Indian workers had been left unmolested, while Africans had only attacked the mercantile Indians, whom they considered to be as much a part of the process of exploitation as the Europeans. In keeping with ANC tradition where many leaders did not actively seek office Godfrey Pitje was taken aback and not at all pleased when he was elected Mda’s successor as ANCYL leader with Mangaliso Sobukwe as national secretary. During Moroka’s term of office, paid-up membership of the ANC had risen to about 100,000. Lutuli was a Zulu chief, a fervent Christian and a nationalist, but not a member of the Africanist Movement, whose outlook he eventually dismissed as “right wing.” Lutuli’s election was a serious mistake. The obvious contender was Mandela. Mandela, although somewhat of a playboy, was ambitious, experienced, charismatic, and independent minded. In 1952 he was thirty four years old, the same age as Ntsu Mokhehle, Kenneth Kaunda, and Milton Obote when they respectively founded the Basutoland African Congress in October 1952, ZANC in 1958, and UCP in 1959; and four years older than Julius Nyerere, who founded the Tanganyika African National Union in 1954 aged thirty two. Moreover, Mandela was based on the Rand, the powerhouse of African politics. In contrast Lutuli (1898-1967) was the son of a Seventh Day Adventist missionary and became chief of the Zulu at Umzinyathi Christian mission reserve near Stanger in Natal in 1936. Lutuli became a Methodist lay preacher and qualified as a teacher before joining the ANC in 1944 and he became president of the Natal branch in 1951. Lembede (a Zulu), Leballo, and other militant nationalists regarded the Zulu area as a favourable area for armed insurrection but the Transvaal urban based ANC and communists dismissed Natal as a feudal backwater with an insignificant proletariat. Lutuli was never able to assert his leadership on the ANC and remained restricted to his rural home from early 1953 onwards. Without firm central control the ANC continued as a battleground between warring factions allied or opposed to the clandestine communists. Lutuli had an unfortunate but justified reputation for laziness and eventually took a partisan stance against the Africanists which included adopting Indian national dress as the ANC uniform. The ANC, traditionally elitist and conservative, probably considered Mandela too young to be its national leader but in April 1959, when Mandela was forty, Mangaliso Sobukwe was thirty four when he launched the PAC and seized the initiative from the vacillating ANC.

Josiah Gumede Albert Nzula Clements Kadalie Marcus Garvey Toussaint L’Ouverture

CHAPTER TWO

The abrupt termination of the Defiance Campaign in December 1952 incensed the more militant elements within the ANC. They argued the protestors should have totally ignored any regime reaction, allowed the rioting to spread and eventually forced the government to negotiate. Their agitation had been encouraged by Nkrumah’s election as prime minister of the Gold Coast (Ghana) on 21 March 1952, the declaration of a State of Emergency in Kenya on October 20, the failure of the American led UN force to defeat North Korean and Chinese forces, and the increasing success of the Viet Minh against French troops in Vietnam. They accused the ANC leadership of cowardice, refusing to sacrifice their financial interests and career prospects to ensure victory. In retrospect their anger appears to have had considerable justification. The ANC was still a united force in 1952 and far better placed than the PAC in 1960 to escalate the struggle because the NP regime, not yet firmly entrenched, was being challenged by the Torch Commando, and the NP leader, Malan, had turned seventy eight years yet was unable to appoint chosen successors. Had the White opposition United Party been more effective –and in 1952 there were far more White sympathisers for African rights than in 1960 – perhaps prolonging the Defiance Campaign would have forced negotiation. In early 1953 the National Party regime rushed through two historically significant laws that caused an impasse in African political activity until Sobukwe launched the anti-pass campaign of March 1960. The Criminal Law Amendment Act made it an offence to break any law by way of protest or as part of a campaign against any law, the punishment being a fine of £300 and/or three years imprisonment and/or ten lashes. The second law was the Public Safety Act, which was not used until 1960, but empowered the government to proclaim a State of Emergency and rule by decree. The Criminal Law Amendment Act proved to be too powerful a deterrent for the volunteers and the Defiance Campaign ended. This explains why the ANC and its ethnic minority allies overemphasized as spectacular triumphs the 1955 Congress of the People, the adoption of the Freedom Charter, and the Treason Trial. The truth was that the ANC, whose leaders and allies included a large number of lawyers, considered the legislation was so draconian that it was inadvisable to launch any further national protests. In 1953 the leading nationalist, Jomo Kenyatta, was jailed for seven years in Kenya for inciting violence and ANC/SACP leaders were rightly convinced the South African regime would treat them worse for far minor offences. In response to the two acts, ANC strategy from 1952 until 1960 was primarily conducted by ANC- CP lawyers cautiously probing to find legal avenues of protest while creating elitist alliances, denigrating and blocking lower class leaders, and encouraging media interest in their cause. The essential weakness of this approach was that the ANC-CP expected the NP regime to react rationally and in kind as if the struggle were a legal chess game played within existing social and economic parameters whereas in reality the pig headed rural bigots of NP were not only self driven and self centred but also incredibly ignorant of their opponents’ intentions, affiliations, and identities and were hell bent on contorting society into nightmarish dimensions. Although Sobukwe spoke publicly with Tambo during the Defiance Campaign and consequently lost his teaching post, he was still waiting orders “to launch” when the campaign was abruptly terminated because, according to Sobukwe, “the leaders got cold feet. When these laws were passed [1953 Public Safety Act and Criminal Laws Amendment Act], it became clear that they weren’t actually prepared to make sacrifices.” Leballo agreed:

“…in 1949 at the conference of the ANC in Bloemfontein, it was the decisive conference where the program of African nationalism for positive action, also for the boycott of government dummy institutions was put through by the Youth League. And

this program had succeeded, but the leadership failed - of the ANC - failed to carry out this program.”

He added

“…the main issue in this was to carry out the Programme of 1949, of African nationalism, on the basis of boycott, non-cooperation, and to struggle for real self- determination. (However) in fact it had been compromised. It had been sabotaged, by the so-called Communists, pseudo-Communists. At the time, you know, the Communist Party of South Africa was banned in 1950, and it decided to infiltrate into African organizations, particularly the ANC, to carry out their program. So they [used for their own ends] the militant Program of 1949, particularly to engage the African people into Defiance Campaign, passive resistance against the unjust laws. The so-called Communists at the time in fact stole this programme and made it one big strike in 1950 and we felt that it had been stabbed at the back.” Gail Gerhart interview 1968

Sobukwe elaborated:

“By this time the Program was already being compromised. The struggle was always to bring the ANC back to the Programme. During the 1950s it strayed far away. If the Programme had been followed we would all be living different lives today. Deviation began with the strikes in 1950. These were concocted by the left wing. We felt that they had nothing to do with us but were merely protests at the banning of the Communist Party. A split was already beginning in our ranks; the Youth League was on the decline. Some were going over to the communists. The main thing we didn’t like about the Defiance Campaign was the leadership role taken by Indians and Whites. It was a lesson we had learned, that whenever these groups were involved in any action, you had the Africans just “taking a back seat,” sitting back and letting these people run things. We felt this had to be overcome and that Africans had to learn to take the initiative, to do things for themselves. I recognized there were some non-Africans who fully identified with us and were prepared to sacrifice, but as a matter of principle we couldn’t let these people take any part because of the bad psychological effect this had on our people. One reason some Africans welcomed Indian and white support was that as of the time of the Defiance Campaign it became clear that campaigns would always end in everyone needing a lawyer and money for defense. This increased dependence on non-Africans. When the split began, we knew that Sisulu had gone over and Mandela had gone over. Tambo, we knew “was resisting.” We saw this happening in the Youth League. I myself was national president—no, national secretary. Pitje was president. We were elected in December 1949 at the ANC conference. We saw this split happening, but we were just too weak to prevent it.” Gerhart interview 1970

Lutuli was restricted to his farm at Groutville in early 1953 at the same time the SACP resumed activities. Lutuli’s ineffectual leadership enabled the SACP members of the ANC on the Rand to act with considerable freedom and the same year the Africanists suffered two major setbacks. Firstly their candidate R.V. Selope Thema lost the election for the presidency of the ANC Transvaal Province to J. B.Marks, whose popularity had increased since his role in the miners’ strike. Sobukwe acknowledged Marks was a good speaker, hard working and a strong leader but his election exacerbated tensions within the party. In retrospect Thema was a peculiar choice, being an arch

conservative and eventual member of Moral Rearmament. Secondly the Africanist cause lost considerable momentum when Mda, having launched Leballo against resurgent elitism in and communist infiltration of the ANC leadership, suddenly quit the struggle. Many liberation leaders balanced their political careers with professional development especially in law and teaching but after 1948 the rising generation of African politicians quickly discovered the appalling consequences of their career choice. Perpetual stress, frequent dismissal from employment, police raids, arrest, and detention took a heavy toll on their health and family but, unlike Mda, most preserved. Sobukwe named Leballo as the hardest working of his colleagues. Leballo suffered not only from high blood pressure and eventually problems from prison but also because - despite his enormous courage, frequent physical battles, and seemingly boundless energy - he was in fact older than Mda by a year yet pretended to be have been born ten years later in 1925 and tried to behave as such. Mda had ulcers and heart problems and had left teaching to qualify as a lawyer. He began practising at Herschel but was still highly respected even though the post 1952 generation of activists knew very little of him. In 1959 Mandela asked if Mda supported the founding of PAC because if he did “then the ANC is dead.” Mda himself was aware that many colleagues regarded him as a coward but he was more a theoretician who disliked the very forces he wanted to empower. Sobukwe had advised him to remain in a “strategic position” but he lacked the strength of character for example of the female political leaders in Sri Lanka, Burma, Pakistan, and India who experienced far more personal horrors than he could have imagined. In 1981 Mda could have saved the movement he had launched nearly forty years earlier with a minuscule percentage of the effort and will that sustained Sonia Gandhi but his timidity and mean spirited petty class snobbery killed it. With Mda’s departure Leballo became the main driving force for implementation of the Programme of Action. Leballo’s background is somewhat nebulous and he was extremely evasive about his life prior to 1945, often exaggerating or inventing episodes or claiming family histories (such as Mda’s) as his own. He was aware of controversy over his parentage. He was born to a chiefly family of Bataung origin at Lifelekoaneng near Mafeteng in Basutoland on 19 December 1915 when his father was away overseas serving in the Basotho contingent in the First World War but Leballo later claimed to be born in 1924 or 1925. Leballo rarely spoke of his family but said his mother was the sister of the famous Sesotho writer Thomas Mofolo. Leballo’s soldier father, to whom he was never close, was a teacher and an Anglican catechist who often beat his wife. The main influences in P. K. Leballo’s early life were his uncle Nathaniel, an Anglican pastor, and Motsoasele, his father’s half brother, a former warrior who had lost an eye at the Battle of Qalabane in the Gun War (1880-84). Leballo always wanted to be a warrior. As a child he accidently killed another boy in a herd boy conflict. Speaking in 1970 Sobukwe said “PK was a fighter! He was always for barging ahead. He could never hold his tongue when he was provoked.” Leballo went to Lovedale to train as a teacher but volunteered for the South African Army in 1940, eventually serving as a Sergeant.

Bernard Leeman, who served in several British regiments in England and Germany and retained senior military contacts, wrote:

“I took considerable pains in Germany, Britain, India and elsewhere to check every detail of the story he gave me about his military service. While certain details (such as his army number when attached to the Durham regiment, which he pronounced incorrectly as dur ham instead of durrum), are possibly embellishments of casual encounters, he had a detailed accurate knowledge of the battles of Sidi Rezagh in the North African campaign, the orders concerning prisoners of Erwin Rommel, the African mutiny at Tobruk, and German attempts to recruit African prisoners of war to serve in the Wehrmacht. His description of his days as a prisoner of war was of starvation and humiliation (as opposed to Leballo’s inventions which were always of heroic stances) and he was able to quote German military commands. However after his death a South African commentator dismissed his claim to have been a

prisoner in Germany, which surprised his family, which was adamant he had been a POW.” [Leeman 1995]

After the war Leballo qualified as a teacher but was constantly in trouble with authority. Sobukwe declared, “PK by nature is “an oppositionist.” He’s always got to be in opposition to something.” Leballo’s belligerence brought him into physical confrontations including one with the Afrikaner fascist Grey Shirts that left him unconscious. The Lovedale riot [Shepherd; Bolnick], disputes with the education department and the Anglican Church combined with daily indignity of being treated as an inferior being increased his militancy. While training as a teacher Leballo had lived in Orlando West sharing with a former soldier and Owen Mda, A. P.’s younger brother. However, a teacher who had left for America loaned her house to Leballo at 142 Adams Street Orlando East and this became the meeting place for A.P. Mda and the Africanists. Leballo was expelled from his teaching post after serving twenty eight days in jail during for fighting an inspector at Pretoria railway station. He became a salesman for Lipton’s tea, operating out of Pritchard Street in Johannesburg to the townships. An argument with the police ended in a black eye and dismissal from Lipton’s. He then worked for Paul Mosaka’s African Chamber of Commerce on a commission basis and as a ballroom instructor (he loved Strauss waltzes), recruiting shopkeepers and students to the Africanist movement. Dancing competitions were held at hospitals and schools where he gained more recruits. ANC/SACP denigrators implied he was a hardened criminal of dubious character because of a one month suspended sentence for forging a mythical Rand employer’s signature in his pass book. Leeman, writing in 1986 of his ten years with Leballo, confirmed Sobukwe’s view that he led an austere life selflessly sharing what he had with his comrades and preferring to read books on Erwin Rommel to socialising. Mda used Leballo as his shock weapon to challenge what he saw as the abandonment of the Programme of Action. However, Mda’s intellectual Leninist outlook was unnerved by Leballo’s direct and confrontational methods geared to recruiting a revolutionary army rather than creating a political party. Additionally, Leballo had a double role, being co-founder in 1952 of the Basutoland African Congress (BAC) in the protectorate. Consequently many of his adherents had dual party membership and increased the Basotho element in the ANC, especially in townships such as Sharpeville. It was inevitable that Leballo was more successful in recruiting volatile young men rather than existing ANC party members to the Africanist cause because the former class, particularly the Basotho with their history of successful resistance to Cape Colony rule, could not relate to Lutuli’s Christian Gandhian strategies. Nevertheless Mda, like his adversaries in the Communist Party, found that while in theory he thought “the people” should rule, in practice he wasn’t very happy when “the people” started to take control. Leballo’s methods and outlook were always of urgency. Even thirty years later if had he arranged to meet for example on a street corner in Harare or London he would become agitated if the other person didn’t arrive precisely on time. In the 1950’s he saw African society being inexorably shunted into oblivion, doomed to slave labour or barren overcrowded gulags by a regime that was periodically re-elected by the European population with increased majorities. It was understandable why he saw the leadership of Lutuli, Mandela, Tambo and Sisulu as disastrous because it was preventing participation in the struggle of the most effective shock weapon – young African men with roots both in the townships and rural areas – during the country’s worst crisis. Contrary to the ANC leadership’s belief, Leballo’s primary target was not them but the destruction of the European state and its exploitation of African labour and resources. Leballo’s recruitment drive soon had severe consequences for the ANC leadership in the Rand townships where branch officials were subjected to a constant litany of accusations including selling out to minority interests, cowardice, bourgeois class aspirations, and assimilation. The crisis deepened in 1953 when J. B. Marks and others of the clandestine SACP on the Rand organised an overseas trip for Walter Sisulu, the ANC secretary-general; Duma Nokwe (1927-1978), a former CP Youth Leaguer who was the chairman of the powerful ANC Orlando township branch (with 28 sub branches) of the

ANC (and a SACP member), Henry Makgothi (1928- ), and Andrew Mlangeni (1925- ) without Lutuli’s knowledge. Nokwe, Makgothi, and Mlangeni were all dual ANC/SACP members who had been recruited by Tambo while students at St Peter’s School. Sisulu’s delegation flew to Bucharest, Romania and then journeyed on for five months to visit the Soviet Union, Poland, China (where Sisulu enquired about arms supplies), Britain, and Israel. Duma Nokwe spoke slightingly of Leballo, stating that his “adherents …mainly operated a sort of dissident little group,” (a leading Africanist Z. B. Molete estimated there were about one hundred at the end of 1955) but Sisulu and his ANC/SACP colleagues’ clandestine journey was part of a strategy to neutralise the Africanists and increase international support. This strategy eventually gained ground through Lutuli’s parochialism, isolation, lethargy, and shared interests. The violent final days of the Defiance Campaign had startled the ANC- CP leadership. Grass roots activism was producing more volatile leaders with more militant objectives such as a prolonged war involving race and land as in Kenya and Algeria. The ANC-CP believed events were moving too fast. They needed allies and prestige to counter the Africanists. Leballo also needed allies now Mda had withdrawn to Herschel in the Eastern Cape. He stated “I felt that myself, as a great organizer, I was not able to lead, I was too violent and ruthless, so I felt that a man who is a bit cool, like Sobukwe, highly educated and an intellectual, he would be able to come and assist us. I’m just a good organizer, and so we had to get Sobukwe to come.” Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe’s political career was brief and tragic. Before Tambo fraudulently prevented his election as ANC Transvaal leader to replace Mandela in late 1958 he was a peripheral academic and relatively minor politician but succeeded, where Mda, Mandela, and Slovo did not, in inspiring lower class activists by inculcating a sense of worth and mission. Probably most important of all he not only understood, trusted and knew how to use Leballo but also – as Sibeko and Pokela were later too frightened to try – had no fear of personally confronting him and convincing him to accept a different opinion. In 1950, after leaving Fort Hare, Sobukwe had taught History, English and Scripture at Jandrell Secondary School at Standerton 160 km east of Johannesburg. Like Leballo, Sobukwe discovered a talent for training school choirs. He was still the ANCYL national secretary but Godfrey Pitje (ANCYL president), undertaking teacher training at the Wilberforce Institute in Evaton, never contacted him. However in 1954 Sobukwe, recently married to Veronica Zodwa Mathe a Zulu nurse he had met in 1949 during a nursing student strike, was appointed language assistant in Zulu at one of the country’s top institutions, the University of the Witwatersrand (“Wits”) in Johannesburg. Sobukwe’s mother tongue was Xhosa but is closely related dialect to Zulu within an Nguni continuum. Since their marriage was “mixed” they were housed on the edge of Mofolo in Soweto, a Basotho residential area bordering a Zulu one. At Wits Sobukwe took formal studies in Sesotho. Sobukwe’s appointment was immensely fortuitous for the Africanist movement and there may have been some African political backing as his degree grade was only an unexpectedly disappointing Pass. Sobukwe had risen to prominence with a remarkable speech as president of the Student Representative Council that had electrified the graduating class of 1949 at Fort Hare, appalled his brother, alienated the paternalist Europeans who had funded his early studies, and cost him any chance of a teaching position in his home area. Nevertheless he had excellent testimonials from his Fort Hare referees for his Wits application, Professor Z. K. Matthews5 and G. I. Mzamane (lecturer in Bantu Languages), but Leballo was probably correct in saying that political factors played a role in Sobukwe’s appointment. Sobukwe’s predecessor at Wits had been the late Dr Vilikazi, a lecturer in African languages and a friend of Lembede. Professor Wellington, of the Wits Geography department and a friend of Vilikazi, met Sobukwe through Leballo at an Africanist meeting in 1954. Wellington had served in the Second World War and used to discuss his experiences with Leballo. As with many university appointments

5 Zachariah Keodirelang Matthews (1901- 68), the son of diamond mine worker, had a distinguished academic serving as head of the high school at Adams College in natal (where Lutuli was teaching). In 1933 he went first to Yale and then to London School of Economics. He became head of Fort Hare’s Department of African Studies, resigning in 1958 when it became a Xhosa ethnic college.

there was probably networking at play. The new post gave Sobukwe more than double his old salary and placed him in the highest African wage bracket (£550 with a annual increments of £50 to a cap of £750) besides considerable prestige in an African society that equated success with acceptance in European institutions. He and Veronica had a tiny house with basic facilities and a vegetable garden. They produced four children including twins and if Sobukwe had chosen a purely academic career they would have had a relatively comfortable life where he would have probably ended his days as a high ranking academic in South Africa or the United States. In early 1955 he enrolled in an honours degree course in Sesotho with emphasis on Sesotho, Phonetics, Social Anthropology, and Xhosa riddles, graduating in March 1958. Again his degree was undistinguished (a Second) but he was the last African in that department for the next nineteen years to be allowed to study for an honours degree. Sobukwe’s arrival enabled the Africanists to make inroads into the educated African middle class repelled by Leballo’s aggressive township persona. In March 1954 Leballo had been elected chairman of the ANCYL branch in Orlando East, defeating Duma Nokwe, an SACP apparatchik. Leballo chaired regular three hour Africanist meetings at his house on Sundays and had become a nightmare for the elitist sections of the ANC, mocking their pretensions, jeering at their subservience to Whites, ridiculing their role as “eastern functionaries”, and calling for them to be ‘real’ Africans. The Transvaal leadership responded to Leballo’s defeat of Nokwe and his constant gate-crashing bellowing “No Stalinism here!” by trying to expel Leballo and MacDonald Maseko, chairman of the Orlando Branch. Leballo’s Africanist main branch (his post was in the Youth League) retaliated by expelling B.G. Makgothi, the ANCYL Transvaal president, who had gone to Romania. At length, the Transvaal leadership of Mandela, Sisulu and Nokwe became aggressive and open violence flared not only between them and Leballo but also ANC women who physically attacked him partly for his meanness towards his wife but mostly for disrupting the status quo. As Sobukwe commented

“It was hard to fight an established organization like the ANC… Being up against the ANC was like being up against a church. It was like a religion to its followers. Your father had belonged, so you belonged. People like Z. K. Matthews knew the appeal of the ANC in this way, and would never leave it. It had the tradition and aura of a church.” Gerhart interview 1970

With Sobukwe’s arrival the Africanists took a more intellectual approach. In November 1954, the Africanists launched their newspaper The Africanist, edited by William Jalobe, then Peter ’Molotsi and eventually Sobukwe. Despite his exit, Mda contributed articles and sometimes met the Africanists either in the townships or rural locations. The Africanist was cut on stencils in Basner’s office and the duplicated sheets distributed nation-wide, 2,500 going to the Transvaal, 2,000 to the Cape, 800 to the OFS, and 500 to Natal. The readership was apparently much in excess of these figures. The Africanists also established a covert Africanist central committee - Cencom - which would recruit and agitate within the ANC. Membership of Cencom varied. Mda, Leballo, Sobukwe, Pokela, Peter ’Molotsi, Ngendane, and Victor Sifora served more often than most. Geographical distance, personal relationships and employment all played a part. The Defiance Campaign succeeded in expanding national opposition to the NP particularly among the lower socio-economic strata in the townships and rural areas. This had several effects. Firstly it encouraged the Africanists; secondly many African communists and African nationalists developed mutual respect during their joint efforts; and thirdly there was a combined elitist ANC and hard line Moscow line communist backlash. Complicating everything was the lack of any central leadership. The communists refused to admit their party’s existence, the ANC leader Lutuli was restricted to Natal, Mda had become a nervous recluse, and Mandela, the ANC deputy leader, was ambivalent about his political philosophy sometimes playing the committed communist, at other times a bourgeois liberal. The ANC was in fact out of control and had become a loose confederation of warring factions

and rival ideologies bedevilled by the SACP’s smoke and mirror strategies seeking control without visible leadership. Lutuli had not sought the ANC leadership and was no more than a figurehead. Much of the subsequent success of Sobukwe was that for the first time since Xuma there was an African mass political movement with a leader who wanted to lead and was clearly in charge of his organisation. Significantly Leballo, the leader of the Africanist Movement following Mda’s departure, was prepared to step down as leader deferring to Sobukwe. Stephen Franklin Burgess, an American Maoist commentator, summarized the Africanists’ dilemma. In his view Mda was essentially a petty bourgeois with Leninist rhetoric who,

“had encouraged African mass involvement but intended that the leadership of the Africanists remain under the control of the intelligentsia. The notion persisted among the Africanists that the educated intellectuals had to play the leading role in guiding the mobilised African masses towards liberation and in properly defining the Africanist ideology.”

Leballo himself did not question this analysis nor Burgess’s other remark that,

“Leballo and Madzunya [see below] were more concerned with propagating Africanism in order to incite mass action than with projecting a correct ideological image.” [Burgess 1983]

Sobukwe, the first radical national leader since Gumede, was unusual because he was the only leading African academic in South Africa openly to oppose the general political trend. African demands for freedom were countered in the 1950’s and even later by a strong feeling not only among Europeans but also the educated and feudal minded African elite that lower class Africans were not ready to rule themselves or participate in democratic structures. The past fifty years had been dramatic enough with colonial expansion and contraction, civil wars, the end of empires, two world wars, the start of the Cold War rivalry, escalating Israeli-Arab conflict, and the decline of Britain and France as world powers. All major powers, irrespective of rhetoric and rivalry, believed events, especially the rise of African nationalism, were moving too fast. Even Sobukwe, who was criticized in 1959 for demanding freedom by 1963, later admitted that before Sharpeville he would have been willing to accept a limited qualified franchise compromise with the NP. South Africa’s strategic position, military capability, and mineral resources made it a valuable asset in the Cold War so the British and Americans were prepared to tolerate the apartheid regime, especially after Chinese Great Leap Forward and the 1960 Congo crisis, for fear a local Dedan Kimathi or Pierre Mulele would take power and lead the country into barbaric economic destruction or the Communist orbit or both. The Soviet Union was also cautious about African freedom for it had reversed its Black Republic stance only partly because of its foreign policy priorities. The Soviets did not want African revolution to take any other path different to the Soviet model (Che Guevara’s Congo attempt is discussed later) and when Marxist regimes eventually did get established in the 1970’s in the former Portuguese colonies and Ethiopia, they were (as in Russia) the result of military coups. Although the European, Coloured and Asian members of the CP and Trotskyite Unity Movement had a reputation for treating everyone equally irrespective of race, CP policy was based on the concept of transforming rural societies into industrial proletariats. The CP’s primary political direction was careful control of political activity by small groups of “professional revolutionaries.” It despised militant peasant action and opposed the Africanists because they believed an African government elected by a single universal franchise would result in a kleptocracy of township thugs and rural warlord militia linked to American intelligence agencies and international crime. Even Mda’s sudden retirement was partly motivated by visions that became reality in Liberia, Congo-Zaire, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Guinea-Bissau, and Sierra Leone in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. The Africanists justly accused the CP of wishing to join

not change the existing political structure so the country’s financial institutions, industries, armed forces, and strategic position could be incorporated into the Soviet orbit with minimal disruption. This may explain why even after the SACP took control of the ANC and its military wing between 1955 - 1962 it did not dissolve and become part of the ANC because it always believed in its vanguard role as a small undiluted group of manipulative revolutionary geniuses. However the elitist attitude of the South African communist leadership began to be undermined during the Defiance Campaign when non-European communists isolated from control by the European communist apparatchiks cooperated with African nationalists and thus resurrected the old camaraderie of the Gumede-Nzula era. Oliver Tambo was a nationalist but pessimistic about mass democracy. Mandela, whom Mda accurately described as a non-party communist, was, because of his Defiance Campaign experiences, moving away from Soviet vanguardism, liberal democracy, and feudal elitism towards a synthesis of socialism and peasant activism. Sobukwe, who personally disliked Mandela and avoided him in prison, nevertheless later described Mandela as either a Maoist or Titoist. Anthony Sampson, Mandela’s biography, noted that the charismatic self confident independent minded Mandela was early on regarded as a political “loose cannon” and therefore a potential danger in the eyes of Joe Slovo, the inflexible communist who was responsible for holding the SACP to the Moscow line in a time of deepening tension between Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Zedong over issues that included liberation strategies for Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Mandela believed he would emerge as ANC leader irrespective of whether or not he was a communist. He used communism because it provided him with useful lessons concerning liberation but unlike the SACP Soviet-oriented European and Indian leadership he was more interested in the Chinese, Vietnamese, and (eventually) Cuban experiences because their revolutions, unlike the Soviet October 1917 revolution, had been achieved through rural based revolutionary warfare. There was also a powerful anti-democratic force among Church leaders, professionals, liberals, and leading business people. Local European communities in East, Central, and Southern Africa were either openly racist or cloaked their racism in class terms but their views that Africans in Africa and the Diaspora from the lower socio-economic strata were not fit to rule themselves, run economies, let alone control armies and manage strategic resources were widely shared in European colonial government circles and in many parts of the southern United States and the Caribbean (even the West Indian Federation considered becoming a Canadian province). British Labour government colonial policy after the Second World War began to place emphasis on creating liberal multi-racial pressure groups, elitist philosophies, and political structures to protect ethnic minorities and British interests. The British, realising that African colonies were an economic burden, started a neo-colonial policy recruiting talented Africans to the idea of a community of nations – later the British Commonwealth – by establishing universities, encouraging African participation in government and giving scholarships. The British path to African freedom was to create large numbers of “suitable” assimilated middle class Africans and aristocratic feudal leaders who would rule jointly with local liberal Europeans and Asians in colonial political structures (the French went further by allowing Africans a role in the French Assembly) until their territories were politically, economically and socially as stable as Australia, Canada or New Zealand. Although the conservative British prime minister Harold Macmillan openly embraced African freedom in his Wind of Change speech in South Africa in 1960, British officials often advised and sometimes persuaded assimilated Africans, citing Congolese independence four months later, that without neocolonial external supervision and intervention universal democracy in Africa would bring political instability, economic chaos and bloodshed. This post-war policy of moderating African nationalism had hoped to use South Africa as a base. Smuts had at least acknowledged the potential of reaching accommodation with African nationalism. South African industry already drew migrant labour from east and central Africa. South Africa had gained South West Africa in the First World War as a mandate and had almost got control over Tanganyika (a proposed rival name had been Smutsland). Had it not been for the criticism from independent India and the creation of the United Nations (in which Smuts himself played a significant

role) it is highly probable that the British would have granted Smuts’ government control over Swaziland, Bechuanaland and Basutoland in order to boost himself against Malan. Britain’s post war Labour government (1945-51) had been optimistic that post war South Africa would be able to resurrect and perhaps extend nationally the Cape liberal tradition of a qualified franchise thus becoming a valuable ally in developing the resources and political institutions of sub Saharan Africa rather than a pariah state. After the 1948 election of Malan British hopes of moderating African nationalism were assisted by the creation of the multi-racial elitist Capricorn Africa Society, founded by an erratic right wing titled Scots landowner named David Stirling, who founded the elite initially Scots class based British army Special Air Service regiment (SAS) and later organized mercenary operations in Africa and the Middle East. Capricorn’s activities were influential in forming the Central African Federation (1953-1963) to stifle African rule in present day Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi. Capricorn was also active in Tanganyika where wealthy Asian and European settlers supported the United Tanganyika Party; South Africa (the Liberal Party sent Alan Paton to attend meetings); and Kenya where representatives of a East Africa’s largest Asian and European settler community served in the Legislative Council. Stirling, who settled in Southern Rhodesia, wanted a class based qualified non-racial franchise based on education, property, and military service. There were therefore many parallels between the struggle with African nationalism in the Central African Federation struggle (where six million Africans were represented by a mere six legislators) and the struggle within the African National Congress from 1949-1959. On one side were multi-racial elitists (Lutuli, Mandela, Sisulu, Tambo, Dadoo, Slovo, September) who believed that Africans could not liberate, govern, run a successful economy or protect minority interests without European and Asian support and ethnic administrative structures; and on the other hand there were the populists or Africanists (Mda, Sobukwe, Leballo) that believed Africans should liberate and govern themselves in an equitable non- racial society. Therefore the origins of the disastrous 1955 Congress of the People, the Freedom Charter, the Congress Alliance, and the 1957 ANC Constitution lay in this desire to exclude mass lower class participation in the liberation struggle and attempts to keep the ANC in public view while circumventing the Criminal Law Amendment Act. The Criminal Law Amendment Act had a deeply sobering effect on political activity and influenced the nature of ANC activity, which now had to eschew mass demonstrations for fear of imprisonment. Since the ANC was unwilling to launch armed resistance like the Algerians and Kenyans, the party confined itself to other measures. Lutuli, Mandela, Tambo, and Sisulu were receptive to the idea that the disbanded CP should create suitable front organisations with which the ANC could co-operate. Several Coloured, European and Indian non-communists were interested in forming pressure groups. The South African Indian Congress (SAIC) was already under CP control, which was in sharp contrast to the Indian Congress in India. The Indian Communist Party vote in state elections grew from 8.5% in 1952 to 13.5% in 1954. Nationally, in the April 1952 election, it won only 26 seats out of 489, compared to the Congress’s 364. The premier, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, denounced them as “Anti-India, anti-people, anti-progress, dazzled by Russia and China, but ignorant of India. They are without moorings in the land of their birth. They are pledged to a policy of creating mental and physical conflicts. They indulge in a cult of disruption.”6 Whatever the official ideology of the SAIC, its most prominent members were crypto SACP. The SACP was ‘reborn’ at the start of 1953 and, on 12 September that year the National Liberation League, a CP-inspired organisation, formed the Coloured People’s Organisation (SACPO) later renamed the Coloured People’s Congress. This organisation was ‘fronted’ by a non-CP member, Edgar Deane of the Coloured Furniture Workers Union, with Reg September and John Gomas, both CP members, holding power behind the scenes and later paving the way for their colleague, James La Guma, the 1950 CP central committee member, to assume the leadership in 1957, retaining September

6 Time Magazine Monday December 13, 1954

as secretary-general. Oliver Tambo’s suggestion to Europeans to form their own Congress was eagerly seized by the CP (if they had not in fact suggested the idea to Tambo in the first place). In October 1953, the European members of the CP, constituting the majority of the ‘new’ party, joined with other European organisations into the Congress of Democrats (COD). Like the SAIC and SACPO, COD was led by a non-CP member, in this case Pieter Beyleveld, who secretly joined the SACP in 1956. P. J. ‘Jack’ Hodgson, a CP member, was elected national secretary. In March 1955, eight African, three Coloured and one small European laundry union joined together into the newly-inaugurated South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) under Beyleveld’s leadership. The secretary of SACTU was Moses Mabhida of the SACP [Leeman 1985]. The Defiance Campaign had shown the potential of the Eastern Cape as a fertile ground for mass African agitation, but the Africanists understood the political importance of taking control of the Transvaal townships. Mandela had been elected Transvaal Provincial president in 1952, as well as ANC deputy national president under Lutuli, the Africanists holding back under Mda’s orders. In 1953, Mandela and Sisulu had to resign their seats under banning orders. Tambo took over as acting secretary-general in mid-1954 and took over officially in 1955. The banning severely weakened the ANC, already drifting under Lutuli’s weak leadership. Sobukwe explained the situation:

“…the real leaders were banned and couldn’t speak openly. Therefore we couldn’t directly attack them personally, and there was no way they could personally reply to us in public. We knew however that it was they who were responsible for the course of events in the ANC. While these banned men were behind the scenes, men of much lesser caliber - total fools - were actually in the leadership positions in Congress. We had no respect for any of these people; yet there was no point in personally attacking them, because they were simply carrying out instructions from the banned leaders, saying what they’d been told to say by the big boys. They tended to be dogmatic and there was no point in trying to engage them in argument. Our tactics in the face of this were to try to use every meeting and conference to speak directly to the people, to hammer home our line with all the persuasiveness we could. Pretty soon they got wise to this and began to exclude us from conferences. But we were up against a situation that has always existed in South Africa, namely that the masses will automatically follow a leader or organization that they have a loyalty to, without thinking about the wisdom or weakness of particular policies they are told to support. This is particularly true of the women. Oh, the women! We knew that our numbers were small and that it would be hard to put our views across. I was ANC chairman in Mofolo [in Soweto], and their tactic there was to have their own man with a rival branch, and when conferences came they would recognize him as a delegate instead of me.” Gerhart interview 1970

The rapid move by the anti-Africanist forces towards authoritarianism had several causes. Firstly many of the threatened ANC officials identified with the SACP Leninist concept of the ‘wise’ professional revolutionary, for it conveniently disposed of theories of liberation through mass peasant- worker-student action as unscientific and “primitive.” Secondly, Lutuli and other ANC Christian leaders felt that the Defiance Campaign race riots were a blot on African nationalists, showing them to be no better than their opponents, the National Party. Lutuli was therefore prepared to make an attempt to appease the non- African opposition groups, who had been appalled at the racial animosity displayed in the riots and killings during the Defiance Campaign. Although under no illusions of probable ulterior motives on the part of the communists, Lutuli was receptive to a public demonstration of multi-racial solidarity to emphasise the anti-National Party forces were morally superior and above racial hatred. Leballo, writing in The Africanist, prophetically stated that Lutuli’s

acceptance of the Freedom Charter would eventually lead to a coalition with the Europeans if the Africanist cause failed. In the 1950’s there was a considerable gap between the rhetoric of the liberation movements and what they actually believed. Africans had endured 300 years of European occupation and exploitation and yet until 1960 many of the liberation leadership- even “extremists” like Leballo - still could not perceive just how vicious the apartheid regime would become. The racial situation in the 1950’s was worse than Nazi Germany or Poland in the 1930’s yet Lutuli didn’t see it that way. Whereas he and in particular Jewish SACP leaders would never have interpreted the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto rising as the work of narrow-minded, racist chauvinists this was how they viewed the Africanists because Lutuli refused to accept that the NP government and South African European society as a whole was irredeemably evil. At the subsequent Treason Trial Lutuli confirmed this when he declared,

“The African National Congress was not working for the overthrow of the ruling classes. It was working for being given an opportunity to participate in the government of the country.”

Since Lutuli and the ANC Christian leadership bracketed the Africanists with the Afrikaner Nationalists as obsessed with racial pride and anti-communism there was therefore a natural inclination to demonstrate Christian moral superiority. In addition, the Christian ANC, lacking any political model except European Liberalism, tended to have no other policy except to oppose the Afrikaner Nationalists, having dissociated themselves from the African state building processes that preceded colonialism. European Liberalism in fact triumphed in 1994 but Lutuli’s ANC was incapable of hammering home (instead of politely petitioning as in the 1930’s) the message, backed by economic and employment statistics, that Africans did not want mayhem and destruction but merely a fair share in making the country peaceful and prosperous. As Sobukwe commented, “Just as in the earlier days, we felt the ANC was only reacting to moves made by the government. It had abandoned the Programme of 1949 altogether.” Since the CP had been ‘disbanded’, the multi racial elitist ideal of uniting with the SAIC, SACPO and COD seemed attractive and political advisable, in particular because it would combat the rising influence of ‘irresponsible’ lower class township and rural demagogues while avoiding the penalties of the Criminal Law Amendment Act. Again there were parallels with the Central African Federation, established on August 1, 1953, which was designed to find a compromise between radical African nationalism and the racist European regimes of South Africa, Angola, and Mozambique. A suggestion by the Cape ANC leader Professor Z.K. Matthews, who returned to the country in May 1953 after a year as visiting professor at New York Union Theological Seminary, provided the opportunity for the Christian multi-racial forces within the ANC and in the organisations informally allied to it to express their solidarity at a mass meeting. Professor Matthews, a prominent politician of AAC fame and ANC Cape provincial president since 1949, began to hold a number of meetings at his home in Alice in the Eastern Cape from the middle of 1953 onwards, discussing the issue of an All-In Conference. During one of the meetings, attended by Dr James Njongwe of the Port Elizabeth ANC (and like Matthews once a front runner to be ANC president) and Robert Matji, the ANC Cape secretary, the idea was put forward of convening another National Convention, but one that would be more representative than that of 1908-09, and which would include non-Africans, unlike the 1935-37 All African Convention. Professor Matthews envisaged that the conference should produce a charter that would be a reflection of the demands or visions of a future society, filtered upwards from the mass of common men and women. Matthews later said that his idea of convening such a meeting was to aid “the instilling of political consciousness into the people and the encouraging of political activity”. This was a strange statement, for Matthews was fully aware of The Programme of Action, which had been adopted only after energetic discussion at all levels of the ANC. He himself had rejected the ANCYL invitation to oust Xuma from the leadership. Critics speculated that his marriage to Frieda Bokwe, a Coloured lady

from a prominent Xhosa background, or contempt for Lembede influenced his mind. Certainly the whole exercise seemed an unnecessary exercise so far as the Africanists were concerned. Again, it seemed an attempt to maintain the ANC’s national reputation while avoiding prosecution under the Criminal Law Amendment Act. In 1953, a special conference of the ANC was convened in Queenstown to discuss a proposed Freedom Charter. The Bureau of African Nationalism campaigned against the idea, but its members were thwarted from sending delegates because, on arrival at assembly points, no bus or train tickets were forthcoming for Africanists. A. P. Mda and others managed to reach Queenstown and attacked the idea of the Charter. Mbobo of the ANCYL criticised Professor Matthews, still ANC Cape leader, for devoting his energies to Coloured advancement. In 1953, the ANC announced campaigns against the Bantu Education Act of that year and the Western Areas removals, which were designed to oust tens of thousands of Africans from the townships next to Johannesburg. The Bantu Education Act had emphasised the use of tribal languages in educating Africans and government statements confirmed the African view that the education system was being redesigned to fragment their growing unity and to close the door to skilled work and the professions. The poor response to the call to action was due to the ANC leadership’s attempt to use the preparations for the protests as an opportunity to build up its inter-group co-operation policies. Robert Resha of the Transvaal ANCYL was put in charge of the campaign to prevent the destruction of the affected areas, but he utilised the Rev. Trevor Huddleston, who eagerly took the chairmanship of the Western Areas Protest Committee. Huddleston had replaced Michael Scott (1907-1983)7, who had been declared a prohibited immigrant, as the leading anti-government Anglican cleric, but his sincere, yet rather blinkered enthusiasm, played into the SACP’s hands. The covert SACP needed a figurehead whom the NP regime might be cautious in subjecting to the penalties of the Criminal Laws Amendment Act. The Western Areas Protest Committee contained COD and ANC representatives. Huddleston’s presence and international repute gained publicity for the committee, which held public meetings with the SAIC and COD. Despite Huddleston’s hard work, the campaign was a humiliating failure. The campaign against the Bantu Education Act was also badly conducted, but it succeeded in establishing ANC links with the African Bureau in London, a philanthropic organisation, whose co-founder and secretary was Mary Benson, Mandela’s close friend, who was assisted by Scott. In the following years more contacts were established not only with philanthropic organisations but also Euro-centric socialist and left wing groups and publishers that were (and still are) repelled by the Africanists’ anti- European rhetoric. In December 1953 the ANC annual conference, its leaders believing (as did the creators of the Central African Federation four months earlier) that the deteriorating class and race relations within the freedom movement could be rectified by multi-racial elitist alliances, instructed “the national executive committee to make immediate preparations for the Organisation of a Congress of the People of South Africa, whose task should be to produce a Freedom Charter,” for all peoples and groups in the country. In March 1954, the Executives of the ANC, SAIC, SACPO and COD met under Lutuli’s chairmanship and agreed to the proposal to hold a Congress of People at which a Freedom Charter would be adopted. Africanist opposition was intense and the same month, Leballo was elected chairman of the Orlando East ANCYL. In June 1954, the ANC met at Uitenhage in the Cape. The ANC leadership refused to recognise the Orlando delegation and, although its members were permitted to attend the discussions as individuals, Leballo was banned from all proceedings. Joe Matthews, Z. K.’s son, was elected ANCYL president and Duma Nokwe secretary-general. Makgothi was confirmed as Transvaal ANCYL president. Several Africanist resignations from the ANCYL followed. The COD and SAIC had initially shown little enthusiasm for Professor Matthews’ proposals for a

7 Scott was a true Christian, who was banned in 1952 after identifying with the most wretched sections of the African community, sharing their lives in the shanties and championing African farm workers face to face against Afrikaner farmers. The Church refused to support him and thereafter he had to live on donations.

Charter, but this attitude changed dramatically when it was realised what possibilities the Congress of the People (COP) and the Freedom Charter offered. The meeting of the joint executives established a National Action Council (NAC) to prepare for the congress and the Charter. The COD, SAIC, SACPO and ANC were allocated two seats each on the council NAC. The SACP funded New Age, which had replaced Advance, along with the regional committees of the NAC and the ANC local branches all publicised the coming event and urged people to submit suggestions for the Freedom Charter. Lutuli later claimed, “Nothing in the history of the libratory movement in South Africa quite caught the popular imagination as this did, not even the Defiance Campaign.” Nevertheless, during 1954, African attention and ANC activity were ostensibly primarily concentrated on protesting against the Bantu Education Act and the Western Areas Act to such an extent that Professor Matthews noted at the end of the year, “that it seemed as if the idea of the Congress of the People was going to suffer temporary eclipse.” The Freedom Charter was a document that was not referred back to the ANC branches for discussion. It was supposed to reflect or distil “thousands of written statements… gathered at thousands of small meetings,” which had been “flooding into COP headquarters on sheets torn from school exercise books, on little dog-eared scraps of paper, on slips torn from COP leaflets.” Its compilation contrasted utterly with the open discussion culture introduced by Lembede when for example The Programme of Action had only been adopted in 1949 after intensive interaction with the roots membership. Lutuli was unable, through stress related illness, lethargy, and banning to participate in the drafting of the Freedom Charter or attending the Congress of the People itself. He was kept ignorant of the contents of the Freedom Charter until after its adoption. The Charter, as confirmed thirty years later by Joe Slovo, was written by himself with other members of the SACP. Their cynical tactics were a continuation of the secretive undemocratic methods employed since the demise of Nzula and had already incensed many of the 1950’s generation of the ANC. The infighting in Orlando East between the Africanists and the Nokwe-Resha-Makgothi group had spread to other branches. The same year (1954) Peter Hlaole ’Molotsi, an Africanist journalist, discovered that New Age had printed the resolutions of the ANC annual conference of 1954 before the conference had even met. What none of the critics realised, until after Sisulu’s death, that Sisulu had secretly joined the SACP and had, taking advantage of Lutuli’s apathy and sloth, deliberately and treacherously placed the ANC under its control. The Freedom Charter appeared a few days before the Congress of the People was convened. There was no reference back to the branches for discussion. The first copies of the Charter were distributed around the campus of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg by Ruth First, an editor of New Age and wife of Joe Slovo, who had replaced Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein as a member of the National Action Committee following Bernstein’s banning. Bernstein was Ruth First’s editorial colleague and all three were SACP members. Slovo and Bernstein later became respectively chairman and secretary of the SACP. On 22nd June, three days before the COP convened, the ANC’s working committee met to discuss the Freedom Charter. Other, banned, leaders including Mandela, Sisulu, and the new ANCYL leader, Joe Matthews also saw copies. Some points were questioned, but since Ruth First and others had already produced thousands of copies there was no time for amendments. On 25 June, 1955, the first day of the Congress of the People, seven members of the ANC national executive committee reviewed the draft. These included Dr. William Z. Conco, Lutuli’s representative, who later stated he had never seen the document before the Congress opened. Nevertheless, the committee resolved to “work harder for the achievements of the demands as contained in the Freedom Charter.” The police allowed the Congress of the People to hold its meeting at Kliptown near Johannesburg but raided it in the closing stages the following day. The COP was held in the midst of a struggle between the Africanists and the SACP for control and it was a meeting orchestrated and dominated by the latter. The delegates had been controversially chosen and the meeting was responsible for splitting the ANC. Two thousand eight hundred and eighty four people attended, including 320 Indians, 230

Coloureds and 112 Europeans. Slovo described the Congress of the People as “the most representative assembly ever held in South Africa,” and called the people who attended “delegates” who had been chosen “after sixteen months of public campaigning.” If these “delegates” had indeed been engaged in sixteen months of campaigning, it would have been expected that they would have had some idea about what they were campaigning for. Moses Qhobela Molapo, a future BCP leader and Lesotho foreign minister, was at that time employed as a journalist for New Age. He later described what took place:

“What happened is that no one had ever seen the Freedom Charter. It’s a complete fallacy to say that it was circulated. No one knew what the Freedom Charter was all about. The only thing we knew - there was quite a big campaign - was that we were going to hold a big conference at a place called Kliptown, about ten and a half miles outside Johannesburg, past Orlando, very near Pimville on a big open space there, so all the branches of the African National Congress were to elect delegates as if we were electing delegates to the Annual Conferences. The Coloured People’s Organisation did the same thing and the Congress of Democrats, in short, the Congress Alliance. I was elected for Orlando East Branch - I was then its secretary before becoming the Regional secretary, so I was a delegate to this Freedom Charter Conference. The first thing that we read about this document - we heard about, it - was when it was read at this meeting. It was read [by Pieter Beyleveld]. There was not even a vote, there was just a huge acclamation then and, after that, it was then circulated a bit, because of the Africanist group - later forming itself into the PAC - there were some pockets of resistance to its acceptance, but the New Age kept on ramming it ahead and proclaiming that it had been accepted all over South Africa.” Molapo 1978 Interview with Leeman

As for the Charter itself, Molapo considered “It is a beautiful document with flowery language. Whoever drafted it is a very cunning politician.” The authors at the time did not acknowledge their work but Ruth First, Lionel Bernstein, Mrs S. Muller, Mike Muller, Michael Harmel, Charles Baker, Fred Carneson and Joe Slovo were all suspected of having a hand in it, especially Ruth First and Lionel Bernstein. Later, aforementioned, in mid 1985, Joe Slovo claimed a major role in its compilation. After the contents of the Charter had been fully examined and elucidated, many ANC members felt tricked. Eventually many refused to accept the consequences of its adoption and formed the PAC. Yet the ANC had been placed in a very difficult position. Molapo explained:

“We just knew that some document of some importance was going to be presented. There was going to be a huge rally and the Congress Alliance was going to make a very important declaration which was going to cement the anti-apartheid forces inside South Africa. So, in that spirit then, we converged to Kliptown, but it was never circulated to us.” Leeman interview 1978

Sobukwe concurred:

“We knew that the Freedom Charter wasn’t actually drafted at the Congress of the People. It had been drafted by Slovo and his circle. People just arrived there and found the thing already printed up.” Gerhart interview 1970

The size of the Congress of the People, the publicity, the razzamatazz of the occasion and the

increasing difficulties being placed in the way of the ANC leadership’s movements all militated against the Freedom Charter being amended, rejected or even discussed formally at length. There was acute embarrassment at the way Huddleston had been used to give respectability to the occasion. He, Dr Dadoo and Chief Albert Lutuli had been awarded the Isitwalandwe (a feather worn by heroes in African society) by, of all people, Pieter Beyleveld. Dadoo and Lutuli had been prevented from attending the meeting so Huddleston accepted the thunderous acclaim for this rather foolish gesture alone. Nevertheless, the Transvaal Province conference of the ANC refused to accept the Freedom Charter later that year and, when the ANC met at its annual conference at the end of 1955, Lutuli himself did not support it and the conference refused to endorse the document. Sobukwe commented:

“We didn’t put much faith in Lutuli. He was a gentle old man, but he didn’t have much political sense. He was politically naïve. I don’t suppose there was ever a speech of Lutuli’s delivered at a conference that was in the original form in which Lutuli had drafted it. Leaders like Mandela had a cynical attitude to Lutuli… At one ANC annual conference - probably 1955 where the Freedom Charter was debated - there was a violent fracas. Calata was presiding. The Charter was finally shelved on the grounds that it was contrary to the constitution of the ANC to adopt it. They postponed it and then called a special conference the following April to adopt it. The conference was actually meant to consider another issue - passes for women - but this wasn’t discussed. People were just brought there to ratify the Charter.” Gerhart interview 1970

The reasons for Africanist objections to the Charter were several and obvious. They were not against it because its author or authors belonged to the SACP. Nor was the Charter a Marxist document. It was a means for an elitist alliance from several ethnic groups to take over the ANC and stifle democracy. Firstly, its preamble stated. “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white,” thus, without discussion, overturning the beliefs that sparked the 1912 and 1935 protests against the Land Acts and recognising that Europeans were citizens and not uncompromising invaders. Given the circumstances, this was astonishingly insensitive. Africans and Europeans had lived and worked together for three hundred years, during which the African population’s political, economic, and social situation had rapidly deteriorated. In 1948 the NP government had been elected because of its horrendous racial exclusion plan which gained increasing support in subsequent elections. (See charts below)

Year Party Seats Majority % 1943 Purified National Party 43 United Party 107 62 Independents 2 Total 152

Year Party Seats Majority % 1948 Purified National Party 70 5 46 United Party 65 62 Afrikaner Party 9 6 Labour Party 6 Independents 3 Total 153

Year Party Seats Majority % 1953 National Party 94 32 60 United Party 57 Labour Party 5 Total 156

Year Party Seats Majority % 1958 National Party 103 50 66 United Party 53 Total 156

Year Party Seats Majority % 1961 National Party 105 54 67 United Party 49 National United Party 1 Progressive Party 1 Total 156

Year Party Seats Majority % 1966 National Party 126 86 76 United Party 39 Progressive Party 1 Total 166

While land ownership had been a major issue among Africans as a whole, ANC and CP activism had focused on relatively elitist causes such as trade unionism and qualified voting rights. The Defiance Campaign’s success in the rural Eastern Cape had brought the land issue to the fore and it had become the slogan of the Africanist Movement. South African class and race were intrinsically entwined. The struggle between the two ANC groups was class-based but since very few Europeans like the Reverend Michael Scott identified with the lower strata of society the division was also racial. European voting patterns, escalating police violence, and proliferating apartheid legislation were breeding revolutionary conditions which the Freedom Charter was trying to defuse in order to protect its assimilated class leadership. Anthony Sampson, Mandela’s “official” biographer, mistakenly claimed that, “The Charter’s message was directed not against capitalists or Western democrats but against narrow nationalists, both Afrikaner and African.” Sampson therefore dismissed the aspirations of poor black people – the country’s overwhelming majority - as narrow nationalism because they wished to rid the place of the cause of their misery. Mandela himself gave the main reason for the Freedom Charter when he wrote an article marking its first anniversary that included the following passage that was removed by Ruth First Slovo when she later published Mandela’s collected works:

“For the first time in the history of this country the non-European bourgeoisie will have the opportunity to own in their own name and right mills and factories and trade and private enterprise will boom and flourish as never before.”

Journal of Democratic Discussion. No.19, June 1956

Secondly, the Charter declared that there should be “equal status in the bodies of state, in the courts and in the schools for all national groups and races.” In accordance with this resolution, the ANC, SACPO, SAIC, COD and the newly-formed SACTU were created equal partners in an ANC Congress Alliance, each organisation having one member in the executive. This structure was duplicated right down the national structure to the branches. Since each partner had one vote in the executive, this relegated the ANC to a position equal to the white COD, which never had more than five hundred members. Since the secretary-generals of all five organisations were SACP or SACP-oriented, the acceptance of the Freedom Charter marked a spectacular turn in fortune for the SACP. Slovo consolidated the SACP hold by using his power in the Alliance disciplinary committee to expel ANC members from the ANC for protesting against the COP and the Charter. Mandela, Tambo, Nokwe, Marks, Kotane, Sisulu, Joe Matthews and other multi-racial elitists or SACP members on the Rand

pressed the ANC branches to ‘toe the line!’ and accept the Charter. Molapo said,

“The African National Congress was just used. I’m sorry to say this. It was just used by the other, smaller organisations. I’m not questioning the sincerity of the people who sat in other bodies like SACTU and COD - I would hate to give that impression - but ... at national executive level - that is, in regard to the Congress Alliance - the African National Congress was not given its proper due in view of its preponderance in membership. Even at national level, very few people knew what the Freedom Charter was all about” Interview with Leeman 1978

Thirdly, the Freedom Charter only supported a universal franchise specifically linked to the multi- racial executive structure. This was not an oversight because Oliver Tambo emphasised this point when he rewrote the ANC constitution in 1957. The similarities were so close to the constitution of the Central African Federation that dispassionate observers would not have been blamed if they concluded David Stirling’s Capricorn Africa Society had taken over the ANC. Supporters of the Freedom Charter were labelled ‘Charterists’. On 31 March, 1956 a special conference of the ANC was convened to discuss the extension of passes by the government to include women. Delegates’ credentials were not checked until 1 April, and the special conference, deliberately packed with Charterists, ignored the agenda and (as Sobukwe claimed) instead passed a resolution accepting the Freedom Charter. Lutuli himself eventually swung round to support the document. His position was difficult. To have rejected the Charter would have caused great embarrassment and damaged his credibility. How could he have explained that the conference and document he had called for had been turned into a SACP coup? Writing in 1962 he in fact revealed that he thought the Communist Party had disbanded forever in 1950. He believed that the ANC could handle the communists in the party. He wrote: “If there is any danger of their using Congress for their ends and infiltrating into ‘key positions’, it can only be the result of apathy among non-Communists.”8 In December 1957 delegates at the ANC annual conference expressed dissatisfaction not only with the Transvaal leadership but also with the national executive. Despite the volatile situation, the conference adopted a Revised Constitution, prepared under Tambo’s direction. Section 2(p) of Aims and Objects read, “To strive for the attainment of universal adult suffrage and the creation of a united democratic South Africa on the principles outlined in the Freedom Charter” (Author’s emphasis). Lutuli’s control over the Transvaal ANC, which was pushing for confrontation with the Africanists, was seemingly non existent. He opposed the Africanists on multi-racial, elitist, and Christian grounds, referring to them as “our extreme right wing.” However it is impossible to accept that he was blind to the results of the Charter’s acceptance and his party’s subservience to the Alliance, any more than Tambo and Mandela were. Part of the answer rested in their realisation that this seemed to be their only way to power. The Africanists represented a rising force throughout Africa with which they could not identify. The rural areas and shanty towns were becoming increasingly politicised during the 1950’s. The ANC was urban-based and its centre was the Rand. The Africanists’ ally, BCP in Basutoland, had originally been an urban elitist organisation but had already begun to change into a mass peasant-migrant worker party by the time it absorbed Lefela’s Commoners’ League and escalated the process in 1957. The Africanist Movement was moving in the same direction and was fortified by the BCP migrants on the Rand, who were led by Leballo. In Kenya land hunger and pagan beliefs had succeeded in uniting 12,000 Gikuyu into a guerrilla war against European settlers, the British Army, and African collaborators. Leballo and other Africanists were prepared to take the consequences of unleashing a revolution but the ANC leadership was not. The fear of unknown rural forces combining with township tsotsis (crooks or uncouth hooligans), as the Charterists liked to portray Leballo, to bring carnage was completely unacceptable to the Congress Alliance leadership, whose strategy

8 Darrell D. Irwin Contemporary Justice Review: Issues in Criminal, Social, and Restorative Justice, 1477-2248, Volume 12, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 157 – 170

depended on building up a multi-racial professional elite able to direct and control African agitation, and eventually present itself as an alternative to the parties represented in the Union parliament. The Alliance wanted to use African protests to publicise itself not to influence its policy. This ‘direction from above,’ conflicted with the Africanist stand of ‘direction from below,’ originally propagated by the Comintern’s Black Republic strategy and eventually led the two parties into positions in which the PAC (Africanists) advocated a ‘People’s War’ in which the rural areas and townships would play a dominant role, while the ANC/SACP adopted nation wide co-ordinated acts of sabotage accomplished by its multi-racial membership to indicate its organisational abilities. By 1960 the ANC Alliance appears to have been moving rapidly to a policy whereby it would present itself as a government in waiting that would bring stability to a country torn apart by widespread violence but over which it actually had no influence. The Revised Constitution’s Section 2(c) ostensibly advocated democracy but actually stifled it through a federal system, where four ‘nationalities’ and the trade unions held equal power. It was an admission that the ANC was building an elitist non-democratic system of government, not a mass movement whose membership controlled the party. It was an open challenge to the Africanists. The Charterists had cause for alarm. Sobukwe had achieved something extremely unusual by recruiting and politicizing the dreaded tsotsi criminal gangs, many of whom were schoolboys. According to Leballo (who had a gift for mimicking tsotsi bass voices and acting out situations) in the crime-torn darkened streets of the townships, Sobukwe was permitted to pass unmolested by the Mosomis and other criminal gangs famed for their violence. Sobukwe, when pressed, commented:

“They (tsotsis) are the most bitterly anti-white element, anti-everything, especially in Johannesburg. In Johannesburg you do have classes in a way, and many Africans are quite “bourgeois,” materialistic. The tsotsis aren’t, and there is friction between them and the bourgeois element. We recruited entire gangs by getting together with their leaders and persuading them to work for us instead of fighting each other. They were some of our strongest supporters in the Transvaal. Anyone in the PAC leadership could walk through the townships at midnight, and no tsotsi would lift a finger against him. Ngendane once nearly got himself in trouble, though, because he was such a sharp dresser. One night some tsotsis stopped him and roughed him up a little. They didn’t beat him up, they just warned him that Sobukwe had said that the high were going to be made low and vice versa. They didn’t say this in words; they gestured with their hands, showing that high was going to be low. Their concept of politics wasn’t very sophisticated, but they had grasped basically what we stood for.” Gerhart interview 1970

Joe Slovo, saved from political eclipse through the Congress Alliance, defended it vigorously saying that, “The charge of minority dominance of the Alliance (was) ... groundless,” and summarised Africanist opposition to the Charter and its consequences as being directed against “the left ideological positions held by many of the leaders of the SAIC, CPC (SACPO) and COD”. There was disquiet within the ANC at Lutuli’s weak leadership. One ANC leader stated in 1955:

“There exists great inefficiency at varying levels of Congress leadership: the inability to understand simple local situations, inefficiency in attending to the simple things, such as small complaints, replying to letters, visiting of branches. There is complete lack of confidence of one another, lack of teamwork in committees, individualism and the lust for power. The result is sabotage of Congress decisions and directives, gossip and unprincipled criticism.”9

9 Problems of Organisation in the A.N.C. by Banned Leader www.disa.ukzn.ac.za:8080/.../LiNov55.1729.455X.000.014.Nov1955.4.pdf

Mandela was furious when the Rand Daily Mail revealed (truthfully, as Mandela admitted) that the ANC had neither an organizational structure nor a filing system let alone membership lists, and its officials were far inferior to their counterparts in other countries. One reason why the Africanists gained adherents was precisely because of this soporific drift which contrasted sharply with Leballo’s perpetual freneticism. Lutuli revealingly responded in his laissez-faire manner to criticism that the SACP had taken over the ANC by stating that if they had indeed done so, it was the ANC’s fault. Leballo’s determination to fight the elitist Charterists on all fronts gave him a large following. Originally a ‘‘guinea pig” for the Africanist Movement he emerged as its leader willing with Sobukwe to take the consequences of his beliefs. Tommy Mohajane, a PAC member who later worked against Leballo, summarised Leballo’s appeal:

“PK spoke a language we all understood. Before he came along, the ANC were talking about class warfare and multi-racial solidarity. None of it made any sense.” [Leeman Interview 1982]

Sobukwe,” wrote Gail Gerhart [1978:192], “stood in awe of Leballo’s boundless stamina and physical courage, finding in it a spur to own sometimes reluctant involvement.” The two men complemented each other, each encouraging the other to succeed in new fields. However at the end of 1956 national attention was focused on the arrest of one hundred and fifty six members of anti- government organisations including Mandela, Tambo, Nokwe, Resha, Z. K. Matthews, Joe Matthews, Beyleveld, Slovo, Ruth First, Dr Naicker, Alex La Guma, Reg September, Helen Joseph, Lionel Berstein, Sisulu and several Africanists. The Treason Trial lasted five years and all defendants were found not guilty. The trial gave the Congress Alliance enormous publicity and equated its moderate ideology with revolutionary activity. Anthony Sampson declared that the National Party government was “not only trying the opposition, they were creating it...For the greatest single upshot of the treason hearings was the emergence, both in African and European minds, of the name ‘Congress’ as a real force,” The blaze of publicity surrounding the arrests and trial caused the Charterists to try to end the volatile results of the Africanist-inspired bus boycotts of 1956-57, so as not to pull public interest away from the trial. Their role in the Treason Trial - albeit an inadvertent choice - was to bolster the prestige of the higher social classes in the class struggle within the ANC leadership. The removal of many ANC leaders, the bulk of them Charterists, during the lengthy Treason Trial (December 1956-61) obliged the Charterists to fill party posts with lower level functionaries, who were mostly incapable of performing their duties and therefore exacerbated the already deeply unsatisfactory situation. Nokwe, Sisulu’s successor as ANC secretary-general, was on the one hand despairing that the party was still too placid and unfocused while on the other his staff welcomed regular visits from well mannered Xhosa-speaking Afrikaner policemen as if they were agreeable social occasions. At first both groups in the ANC demonstrated their solidarity for the Treason Trial detainees but, as 1957 progressed, the Africanists were unable to tolerate the behaviour of the ‘shadow’ leadership in the Transvaal. At the Transvaal Provincial conference of the ANC in October 1957, the shadow Transvaal Executive failed to get Africanist support to accept it en bloc for re- election. Criticism escalated at the annual conference in December. Africanist petitioners in the Transvaal and the Cape, backed by articles in the African press, expressed widespread dissatisfaction with the Transvaal and national leadership of the party. A vote of no confidence in the Transvaal leadership failed but the matter was set aside for a special conference held on 23 February, 1958. In 1958 the Africanists had been joined by a remarkable Venda named Josias Madzunya, who had a large personal following in Alexandra Township. Madzunya had a magnificent beard and coat which made him look extremely sinister in European eyes and consequently he was frequently portrayed as the embodiment of the Black Peril. Madzunya concentrated on mass rallies and politicising, drawing fire from the liberals, multi-racial elitists, SACP and other elitists. Unfortunately Sobukwe and

Leballo had their own class snobbery and ill treated him. Sobukwe explained,

“…he was a critic of the ANC. He wanted to be with us. But he was uncontrollable, like a “wild steer.” We thought we could let him draw the fire of the enemy, and use him to test our strength…Madzunya was not an educated man. He probably didn’t grasp the full import of our philosophy. His thinking was rather “primitive” - he wanted to put spears and shields on our flag! He didn’t trust middle class educated people like the rest of us. He said such people would never be able to suffer and sacrifice.” Gerhart interview 1970

Leballo commented,

“His difficulty was that he was leading a tribal group from Vendaland in the northern Transvaal. Now he had a group of loyal people that supported him and therefore when he became an opposition man from his own branch in Alexandra Township, he found the Africanist movement opposing the ANC, so he just jumped in, in 1958…We also used him as an Africanist. We wanted him, to use him in opposing some of the programs in the ANC. He had (a large personal following) but this was tribalistic. That’s why he had the difficulty, because he could only have a following from his area, or those who speak his language.” Gerhart interview 1968

When Stephen Segale led the petition against the Transvaal leadership in February 1958 tempers worsened as Charterists tried to prevent Africanists from entering the Orlando Hall where the conference was being held. Leballo called for new elections, intending that Sobukwe would become the Transvaal Provincial leader although Madzunya was a strong candidate. The meeting enthusiastically welcomed this demand for elections, but the Charterists, chairing the meeting, hurriedly closed the conference, saying that the time for leasing the hall had expired. The meeting broke up in chaos. Eventually the Transvaal leadership was suspended and the ANC executive committee took direct control of the Provincial branch, through emergency powers. In 1958, the COD and SAIC partners in the ANC Alliance succeeded in forcing through a resolution calling for a ‘stay-at-home’ strike, although the ANC itself, after discussions throughout its branches, rejected the idea. The Africanist branches, which were growing in number, had been chiefly responsible for opposition to the proposed strike and, when the strike failed in April 1958, the Alliance called for the Africanists to be disciplined. Mandela, the ANC Transvaal president, convened a dubiously-constituted caucus in May 1958 that expelled Leballo and Madzunya from the ANC. This just exacerbated the situation and did nothing to weaken the Africanist onslaught. A ban on political gatherings prevented the issue being settled until after August 1958, when restrictions were lifted by the new National Party government. On 1 November, 1958, the ANC met for the annual Transvaal Provincial conference. Raboroko and Molete stated that they planned to put up Madzunya as candidate for the Transvaal presidency, while Leballo says that he intended to nominate Sobukwe. Oliver Tambo was in charge of delegates’ credentials. Lutuli spoke at the conference on the 1st and criticised the Africanists for injecting “the virus of prejudice and sectionalism” into the African community. Lutuli and Tambo left the hall during the last part of the discussions on the first day and went to Nobaduza Mpanza’s house in Orlando East. There they were hastily informed by Leslie Masina (of SACTU) that the Africanists were attempting to elect their own Transvaal leadership and repudiate the NEC. Although Tambo once claimed he wanted to keep the Africanists within the ANC because they provided much needed criticism he hurried back to the hall and, in scenes of violence disqualified all the Africanist branch delegates.

On 2 November Orlando Communal Hall was defended by Charterist thugs, armed with iron bars and clubs, determined that only delegates approved by Tambo would be allowed entrance. This was not just a provincial matter. The Transvaal Province was the most important branch– the powerhouse - of the ANC. Whoever controlled the Transvaal Province could take over the whole party. Indeed, had Mandela successfully sought the ANC presidency in 1952 many of the organisational problems arising from a weak Natal based leader would have been avoided. With Mandela as president in 1952 there would have been no Freedom Charter or Congress Alliance. In response to Tambo’s threat the Africanists assembled their own thugs - each side had about a hundred - and squared off as police and security watched from a distance. It is a matter of speculation who would have won a fair election but Tambo’s actions signified he was not confident of holding off Sobukwe. The ANC was in crisis and losing ground, assailed from the left by the Africanists and bedevilled by the nature of the Alliance, SACP scheming, and Lutuli’s dithering. The Africanists had previously been divided over the issue of staying in the ANC. Leballo had advocated withdrawal while Mda preferred taking it over. The actions of the ANC leadership at the November Transvaal conference decided the issue. If the Transvaal had fallen to the Africanists the entire history of African politics would have been very different, reducing the SACP to the supportive role envisaged by David Ivon Jones (1883-1924) in the 1920’s and broadening the ANC’s class appeal. The Africanists decided to break away from the Charterists and maintain the principles “of the ANC policy as it was formulated in 1912 and pursued up to the time of the Congress Alliances.” The breakaway of the Africanists on the Rand was followed by similar moves in the Cape and Natal. In December 1958, Sobukwe, Leballo and Madzunya visited Basutoland to attend the Maseru Basutoland Congress Party (BCP) annual conference as guest speakers. Leballo had been a co-founder of the BCP in 1952, its original choice for secretary-general, and in 1958 was chairman of its richest and most powerful branch, the Transvaal Province. During their stay they spent a considerable time alone with their friend and colleague the BCP leader Ntsu Mokhehle discussing the liberation struggle and the All Africa People’s Conference, to which Mokhehle had been elected a member of the Steering Committee. The AAPC, created in Ghana by Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore as an African version of the Comintern, was a totally African response to the problem of freeing the continent from foreign domination and a more militant organisation that the later Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and African Union (AU). The importance of Ghana for the Africanists cannot be understated. It was the first colonised black African country to receive independence on the continent through the efforts of its own people. Moreover, Nkrumah was a Pan Africanist, picked and trained by Padmore and with experience among Diaspora African Americans. His triumph did much to convince the Africanists that their ideology for liberation was correct. For his part, Mokhehle advised Sobukwe not to waste time remaining as the leading spokesman for a breakaway group, but form a new political party. If Sobukwe followed this advice he should also resign from his post as a language lecturer to concentrate solely on politics. Mda had opposed the idea for a new Africanist–oriented political party when it had been raised after the Defiance Campaign but before the 1955 Freedom Charter crisis. He elaborated:

“…the idea that the ANC could be transformed from within was still there. There was a very strong belief in the inevitable survival of the ANC. People would comment that other groups had come and gone, but the ANC had always remained. There were the trappings of reverence around the ANC; it was almost like a church. People regarded the ANC with a decree of fetishism that had nothing to do with the freedom struggle. There were two schools among African nationalists. One had faith in being able to supplant the communists; the others had lost faith in it and advocated a new party. The ANC looked viable still. It had withstood so many challenges. There was a sense of fatalism in attacking the ANC that the ANC would still come out ahead.” Gerhart interview1970

In 1958 he was still opposed to an Africanist breakaway. Speaking of the events that persuaded Sobukwe to consider forming a new party Mda stated:

“Eventually there was a definite bid by the youth to take over the ANC [November 1958]. This would have succeeded if the people in power hadn’t resorted to thuggery and open forms of violence, including murder. We didn’t think the cause of party unity was worth the physical sacrifice of some leaders, our own boys. The new bid for leadership became more and more open. The Africanists now had their own paper, and their own program, as expounded in The Africanist. In the Transvaal, Leballo and others had strong popular backing. It was clear that the ANC old guard - i.e. the ANC’s “new” old guard - was prepared to use even thuggery to hold on to their positions.” Gerhart interview 1970

Sobukwe was unable to discuss the proposed break in person with Mda. He described what happened:

“I was going down to the Cape - was I going to Grahamstown to work on my [Xhosa] riddles? - And I went by Engcobo to look for Mda. I forget who was accompanying me. We didn’t find him home. I don’t recall exactly when this was. But we decided we would just have to go ahead with what we were doing without consulting him. Even PK said this, and he was a great admirer of Mda. But AP wrote us to say he disapproved of the break.” Gerhart interview 1970

A greater disappointment appears to have been Sobukwe’s failure to recruit Professor Matthews. Sobukwe admitted, “…we couldn’t get anywhere with him. He was too much an ANC man, although we knew he agreed with a lot of what we were saying.” Since Matthews had been instrumental in launching the idea of the Freedom Charter, Sobukwe’s approach to Matthews seemed politically inappropriate. However it was clear that Matthews had never intended his idea to be the means of foisting SACP control over the ANC. Shortly before his death in 1986 Leballo conceded that Mda and Matthews may have been right. The Africans should have continued to fight for control of the ANC rather than have broken away. However in April 1959 the Africanists founded the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) with Sobukwe as president and Leballo secretary-general. While Mda refused to join the new party he posed between Sobukwe and Leballo in the group photograph of the bulk of the PAC National Executive.

CHAPTER THREE Basutoland – The Africanist Second Front

Ntsu Mokhehle, Sobukwe’s deputy in student politics at Fort Hare, was the leading member of the Africanist Movement in the British Protectorate of Basutoland (Lesotho) and from 1958 its direct link with Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore’s All Africa People's Conference (AAPC). Mokhehle, suspended from Fort Hare for a year during a student strike, had graduated with a teaching certificate and a Masters of Science degree in Zoology in 1949. Had he remained in South Africa it is likely he would have become a senior member of the Pan Africanist Congress and even succeeded Sobukwe as leader in 1978. However he chose to return to Basutoland because of two psychic experiences [Leeman 1985] that convinced him he had a special mission to accomplish in Basutoland. In October 1952, against ANC wishes, he launched the country’s first political party, the Basutoland African Congress (BAC), which initially focused on issues such as democracy, incorporation into South Africa, racially based pay scales, migrant labour, and the colour bar. Lesotho, San Marino and the Vatican are the only countries totally surrounded by another. Lesotho was the only southern African kingdom that defeated White (Cape Colony) forces and retained its independence, albeit as a British protectorate. Despite this success it had previously lost its best farming land to the Afrikaner Republic of the Orange Free State either by conquest or corrupt unauthorised land “sales” to Wesleyan missionaries. The status of the Basotho chieftaincy had been enhanced by its resistance in the 1880-4 Gun War but thereafter it declined as the British magisterial system and other innovations changed the mutually beneficial relationship between chiefs and commoners to one where chiefs were no longer chosen by commoners but appointed by the government. The paramountcy (the name given to office of monarch) became increasingly authoritarian particularly after Griffith (1913-39) allied himself to the arch-conservative French Canadian Catholic Missionary Order of Mary Immaculate (OMI). The chieftaincy proliferated because of polygynous marriages (Moshoeshoe [ca. 1786 - 1870], founder of Lesotho, had intended to build an empire administered by his numerous sons and grandsons) and the ensuing succession disputes, infighting, status quarrels, murders, controversial executions and litigation resulted in the Moore Commission’s report of 1954, which criticised the Regent and recommended that British officials should take on the task of administration from the chiefs. The Basotho Regent, Chieftainess Amelia ’Mantsebo, was acting on behalf of her polygynous late husband’s heir Bereng Seeiso, born in 1940. A simple kindly devout Catholic, she was advised by low ranking chiefs and ill served by senior regional chiefs who disliked strong central power. To everybody’s surprise Ntsu Mokhehle, a commoner, Anglican and closet republican, became the protectorate’s most effective opponent of the Moore Commission and its report arguing that the British were deliberately weakening the chieftaincy so the Protectorate could be annexed by South Africa. The British, who detested Malan’s NP government, protested their innocence and abandoned reform. The BAC’s success gained it support from groups which later formed rival political parties, namely the senior chiefs, the minor chiefs, and the anglophiles in the bureaucracy, education, and literary circles. However, political development became more divisive when Mokhehle, expelled from his high school teaching job, became a professional politician and switched his focus to recruiting the peasantry and migrant workers inheriting the militant but fading peasant movement Lekhotla la Bafo and taking advice from the CP veteran Edwin Mofutsanyana. Mokhehle gradually abandoned his westernized persona such as speaking through an interpreter but grew intolerant of other university graduates in the leadership (Basutoland had a small University College founded and dominated by the Canadian missionaries in order to train a Catholic administrative elite). The party leadership was also largely Protestant with a power base in the country’s relatively prosperous northwestern lowlands and

in the South African townships around Johannesburg. Until 1960 the majority of Congress members were in the Transvaal, led by Leballo, and the Transvaal Province remained thereafter not only the most militant branch but also the party’s major source of funding. Consequently, while Mokhehle had to deal with local Basotho issues, the Transvaal Basotho were urging a stance more revolutionary than the ANC and SACP. In 1956 he lost monarchist support when he displayed indifference to Chief Seepheephe Matete’s request to demand the installation of Bereng Seeiso, as king. He knew that if there had been a powerful paramount, the BCP would never have emerged. Matete therefore formed the kingdom’s second political party, the Marema Tlou, a Sesotho expression meaning let’s cooperate to kill the elephant. Next, the BAC’s increasing republicanism and nationalism not only alienated the future court circle and minor chieftaincy but also the OMI, which drew considerable support from women. The Regent’s advisers were minor chiefs, and in 1957 one of them, a BCP member Kaiser Leabua Jonathan Molapo, who had converted from Protestantism to Catholicism, approached his European friend Patrick Duncan, son of a former governor-general of South Africa and eventually PAC representative in Algiers whom Leballo sacked in 1965 for congratulating Leabua Jonathan on his election win of 1965. Duncan was a radical Basotho-phile who ran a bookstore opposite Maseru on the South African side of the Caledon River. Leabua wanted to form a new political party. Duncan, a South African Liberal Party activist, met the OMI Bishop Des Rosiers on 10th January, 1958 and jointly drew up the manifesto for Leabua’s new Basotho National Party (BNP), which would absorb the embryonic Catholic Democratic Party of two commoner brothers Gabriel and Anthony Manyeli [Leeman 1985]. In 1958, as a result of chiefly pressure the British agreed to a new constitution that established an eighty seat legislative council and an eight seat executive council to be introduced following elections in 1960. At the end of the year a delegation went to London consisting of the Regent, five chiefs including Matete and her advisers, one of whom was Leabua Jonathan Molapo, two British officials, and a constitutional adviser Professor Cowen (married to Patrick Duncan’s sister). The new structure weakened the power of the new paramount while creating a decentralized district council system that the minor chiefs mistakenly believed they would control. Half the seats in the legislative council were for appointed members, twenty two for the senior chiefs and eighteen nominated by Bereng Seeiso when he became paramount. Elections would first be held for nine district councils. The elected members would then in turn elect 40 members for the legislative council. Leabua formed the Basotho National Party (BNP) at the beginning of 1959. Soon afterwards the senior chiefs and the Marema Tlou succeeded in obtaining agreement for Bereng Seeiso to be “placed” as paramount in 1960 after the elections. The London talks gave Mokhehle an opportunity to establish himself as a Pan African statesman liaising with the Africanists in the ANC. The BAC raised nearly three hundred pounds for Mokhehle to lobby in London during the delegation’s visit. On his outward journey he addressed the party in the Transvaal and on his way home he was appointed to the Steering Committee of the All Africa People’s Conference (AAPC), organised by Nkrumah and George Padmore in Accra Ghana, after a powerful speech where he emphasised that Southern African freedom was the key to Africa’s future. The AAPC was an African version of the Comintern, (the Communist International) dedicated to coordinating liberation from colonial rule and Mokhehle’s appointment (Nkrumah’s personally nominated him) made him the key regional figure for African-backed African revolution. The BAC renamed itself the Basutoland Congress Party (BCP). In December 1958, aforementioned, Ntsu Mokhehle held private talks with Sobukwe, Leballo, and Madzunya in Maseru. Writing twenty years later in November 1978 Mokhehle stated:

"Mr Potlako Leballo was the Basutoland African Congress provincial secretary in the Transvaal when they started the PAC - the decision to break away from the ANC was taken in Maseru before me - and Leballo was the link between the Pan Africanist group in the ANC and the BAC. From the Transvaal provincial secretary, Leballo easily became the

secretary-general - this we did to keep the PAC - BAC links strong and it continued until 1960. Leballo is the real founder of the PAC - and he is the man who decided, promoted and sponsored Sobukwe's presidency of the PAC - some ignorant people may be startled by this and tend to challenge it - but it just happens to be true - here much of what I say is what took place before me and, to a greater extent than not with my help." Letter to Leeman

The full extent of Basotho involvement in the events that led to Sharpeville belongs to that secret history of Southern Africa that includes funding by the Soviet Union, the American CIA, Nkrumah, Nasser and other individuals and agencies whose contributions are impossible to gauge but which often had far reaching effects. Certainly the Basotho involvement had dire repercussions for Mokhehle and the BCP.

CHAPTER FOUR The Founding of the PAC

On 6-7 April, 1959, with funds provided by the Accra-based All Africa Peoples Convention, the Africanists held a conference at Orlando Communal Hall at which the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) was founded. Leballo stated that he realised the need for an intellectual for the post of party president and made sure that he himself was not put forward when nomination time came. He said that he arranged for the speaker to point at him when the time came for nominating candidates for the presidency. The Speaker complied whereupon Leballo shouted “I nominate Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe!” and delighted supporters carried Sobukwe forward for a unanimous election, giving Leballo the peculiar distinction of having personally successfully nominated both Albert Lutuli and Sobukwe for the respective leaderships of the ANC and PAC. Leballo defeated A. B. Nqcobo for the post of secretary-general. Burgess presents a differing opinion about the election. He believed that although Leballo and Madzunya’s pioneering work had brought mass support for Africanist ideas, the movement’s hierarchy was still dominated by intellectuals and it was even questionable if Leballo was certain of gaining a seat on the national executive committee (NEC). It was widely expected that Madzunya would obtain an important post, and he did stand for treasurer and received the required votes. Leballo later privately confessed that he, Sobukwe, and other leaders decided that Madzunya, as a Standard 5 leaver, was too uneducated and erratic to be trusted with the office so they switched the votes in favour A.B. Ngcobo (grandson of a Zulu regimental commander at Isandhlwana), who had lost to Madzunya by a single vote. Leballo admitted, “…in the Inner Circle we had already decided that Sobukwe would be the man, I would be the man, and we felt, well, we must give Natal two or three positions and so on, and the other people.” [Gerhart interview 1968] The Africanists had wanted Mda’s support for the new party. When it was not forthcoming Sobukwe said, “We just had to go ahead without him. We still respected him, but his opinion wasn’t sacrosanct any longer. We still saw him as the repository of our ideas.” Half a century later most commentators feel that the break with the ANC was a mistake but at the time there were very pressing and maybe intractable reasons why Sobukwe had to form a new party. Firstly the SACP take-over of the ANC was a real issue, and just cannot be explained away by the unctuous fatuous dishonesty of Slovo, the Penguin African Series writers and other authors (One reason why Leballo found Maoism attractive was because Mao admitted to making mistakes from which he learnt). While both the SACP and PAC suffered from clandestine American intervention (the PAC fatally), the SACP connection with the ANC made it in American eyes an enemy of the West, irrespective of the idealism of the Anti-Apartheid Movement and support for ANC prisoners. Without SACP domination African liberation would have gained more support from the ANC’s natural allies, the rising African American middle class of politicians, civil rights campaigners, athletes, academics, lawyers and military officers. It is significant that no real pressure was made by the Americans and British towards democracy in South Africa until the Soviet Union had fallen and this was also the reason why American interests bolstered Inkatha. Secondly it was not so much the ethnic minority nature of the SACP leadership but its unethical manipulative behaviour that was anathema to most Africans. Through Lembede’s work the ANC had established up to 1954 a process of extensive consultation with decisions taken from the grass roots upwards, a process that Mokhehle instituted in the BCP with immense success in their opposition years of 1965-1970. The SACP and its creation the Congress Alliance took decisions from the top downwards and in secret. Consequently Africans saw the Alliance as illegitimate and not worthy of loyalty. Conversely the PAC, although more democratic, did not get immediate support because it was largely characterized by a class of activist that did not appeal to more conservative, status conscious, middle class Africans, especially women (as the BCP found in Basutoland) and these were prepared to overlook the SACP coup so as not to risk the precarious limited socio-economic

position they had achieved in the racist state. Thirdly although Mda urged Sobukwe to continue his attempt to change the ANC from within, it is difficult to imagine that even if the ineffectual Lutuli had been removed it would have been possible to oust Mandela, Tambo, and Sisulu let alone overturn the ‘decisions’ of the Congress of the People because the South African regime would have used its power to prevent the dismantling of the Alliance, which had split the liberation movement and in its opinion and had fortuitously equated the ANC with communism. The NP regime was probably not intelligent enough to have used the 1957 – 1961 Treason Trial for the purpose of strengthening the Alliance, but it certainly had that effect. Sobukwe was careful not to attack the ANC itself, intending instead to politicize fresh recruits rather than cause more defections. His social status as a university teacher, his common touch, his willingness to sacrifice, and his ability to inspire and direct were a welcome alternative to the Alliance where everyone seemed to be a leader but nobody was in charge and where priority was given to the future protection of considerably wealthier ethnic minorities rather than achieving African freedom. Most importantly of all, the liberation struggle needed a leader who would be a man of action even though it meant certain martyrdom. While Mandela, Lutuli, Tambo, Sisulu and their Alliance colleagues looked for gaps in the small print of legal constraints and started to place their political hopes in boycotting potatoes and cigarettes, Sobukwe based his strategy on the example of 1879 Battle of Isandhlwana where a single man had turned the battle against the British troops. The African population could be likened to the Zulu impi laying flat in the grass as the British-Xhosa mercenary square methodically fired at them. After several volleys one warrior from the umCijo regiment called out demanding to know if this humiliating posture was really what the Zulu king had in mind when he ordered them into action. As one the Zulu troops rose and charged, panicking the Xhosa side of the square into flight, exposing the rear side of the three other sections of the square. No British soldiers wearing red jackets escaped the massacre [Morris 1965]. There had been and would be other examples such as in 1916 when the scholar-poet Padraig Pearce transformed Irish republican nationalism into Ireland’s dominant political force through the badly planned Easter Rising; and on 12 January 1964 when a Ugandan stone mason named John Okello refused to run away when challenged by a policeman and instead seized his rifle and by morning had led a rising that had overthrown the Arab gerrymandered government of Zanzibar [Okello 1967]. Madzunya continued to support Africanist ideas but the following year he held back his large personal following in Alexandra from participating in the demonstrations that led to the Sharpeville massacre. Like others, Madzunya said he felt the PAC was not ready for the action it took, but other factors, including his justifiable bitterness as being kept out of the NEC, obviously played a large part in making him refuse to use his enormous influence. The Transvaal membership dominated the PAC inaugural conference at Orlando Communal Hall of 4 - 6 April, 1959 but the NEC had a national character. Sobukwe, Leballo, Mothopeng, ’Molotsi, Ngendane, Peter Raboroko and N. D. Nyoase were based in the Transvaal; A. B. Ngcobo, H. S. Ngcobo and Hlatswayo were in Durban; E. A. Mfaxa, N. N. Mahomo, C. J. Fazzie and M .G. Maboza in the Cape; and Z. B. Molete in the OFS. Of the NEC, five were Xhosa, six Sotho and four Zulu. Although he remained influential Mda did not accept the need for the PAC and was not allowed to attend the launch of the new party. The rhetoric, membership and manifesto of the PAC were revolutionary. The party attributed Africans’ menial existence in Southern Africa to the results of European exploitation of the New World and industrial development both of which had been achieved by “the greatest mass chattel slavery the world has ever known.” It bracketed the Congress Alliance with the fate of Toussaint L’Ouverture and George Padmore, who had allied themselves with European revolutionaries who had eventually betrayed them. The party listed land loss and national subjugation as the two major issues confronting Africans. It accepted that African society was fundamentally socialist and that the South African regime could only be overthrown by an African movement that galvanised the “illiterate and semi-literate African masses” into taking power for themselves. Sobukwe was amenable to allowing financially disadvantaged Indians and Coloureds joining the party but was strongly opposed by A. B.

Ngcobo and gave way because the PAC was extremely weak in Natal where most South African Indians lived. The PAC envisaged a democratic socialist African society replacing the present white structure. This new state would eventually unite with the rest of Africa to combat, “the forces of imperialism, colonialism, herrenvolkism (master race-ism) and tribalism.” The PAC’s manifesto did not call specifically for Whites to be driven into the sea, but the implication was clear:

“Already European exploiters and oppressors have been dramatically expelled from such countries as Indonesia, India., China, Burma, Vietnam etc. These are today being systematically routed and forcibly caused to retreat in confusion. The post-war world has witnessed the expulsion of European imperialist exploiters and oppressors from large tracts of Africa...... ”

Furthermore, it stated that, “The African people will not tolerate the existence of other national groups within the confines of one nation.” The Whites and Indians were therefore given a choice of absorption or expulsion. Leballo called for the “white foreign dogs” to leave the country. ’Molotsi admitted that, although the PAC membership reflected the gut feelings of Africans, it did not openly adopt the slogan of driving the whites out because “we wanted a lease of life to continue - to get the bloody bastards, that’s all” [Gerhart 1978:216]. Many liberal and other White commentators were unable or unwilling to accept how much their presence was resented. A conservative Eurocentric historian T. R. H. Davenport writing in 1978 felt “...a predominantly expatriate (my emphasis) element sees as inevitable the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order, on the grounds that the inherent logic of the situation rules out the possibility of a peaceful transition to an acceptable social system.” Confrontation had differing interpretations, ranging from non-co-operation to open violence, but the PAC as a whole accepted that a white exodus was inevitable and was prepared to suffer years of economic hardship as Africans learned technical and administrative skills to revive industry (if that were their intention). Anything was better than continued subjugation to the “Boer slave-labour system known as South Africa.” The PAC was the first movement in South Africa to call for African liberation and African rule, although the Soviet Black Republic thesis envisaged the same ideal in the late 1920’s. The PAC was open-minded not only to radical political philosophies but also to Christianity. However in both cases the party looked for African initiatives not European direction. Sobukwe encapsulated the exasperating role of the SACP when he declared: “Like Christianity, communism in South Africa has been extremely unfortunate in its choice of representatives.” The Rev. W. M. Dimba, leader of the largest federation of African independent churches, attended the PAC inaugural conference and in the 1960’s the PAC close links with Beijing being attracted to its peasant-based communist political processes. The PAC drew strong support from those township criminal gangs whose activities were interpreted as manifestations of anti-settler activity. The entry of the Mosomis and other gangs, accompanied by a crowd of weight-lifters, boxers and general thugs at the inaugural conference, panicked the white pressmen, who took refuge on the stage. Sobukwe and many of his colleagues felt that preparation in depth should precede final confrontation. The general strategy followed that of the Defiance Campaign, a number of waves in an incoming tide. Nation wide demonstrations would gather momentum, politicising PAC supporters, who would gain experience as the demonstrations and reprisals escalated, until at length a final assault would destroy the white edifice. The nature of the PAC membership seemed to be conducive to the party’s strategy, which called for action by people who had nothing much to lose. The PAC’s rejection of ANC/SACP moderation had attracted thousands from the most frustrated and embittered elements of African society. Unlike the ANC, the PAC had little money, no prestige, no ‘revered’ leaders, little experience, but was new, young and extremely dynamic.

“Translated into the parlance of the ordinary African - the van driver, the office tea boy,

the factory worker, the shop assistant, the street sweeper - nationalism had less to do with moral niceties than with rough and ready justice, little to do with constitutional rearrangements, but much to do with the bald realities of power...the ordinary African was nothing if he was not anti-white, and the PAC was determined to mirror the emotions of the common man.” Gerhart [1978:217]

The PAC membership was much younger than the ANC. Sobukwe used teenagers widely particularly as couriers. Adult women, from the experience of South African liberation history, seemed conservative and were not found in any significant numbers in the PAC. In brief,

“The PAC was a new organisation with an untried leadership, but at least it shared the same sense of urgency and frustration, the same explosive anger as the younger generation. What the PAC was actually saying, or not saying, was less important than the ‘language’ it was speaking. It was speaking a language attuned to the mood of the youth, in contrast to the more restrained accent of the ANC. ‘An organisation,’ as one PAC man put it, ‘of our fathers and mothers.” Gerhart [1978:222]

In particular, the PAC attracted widespread support from disaffected unemployed urban youth who despised the genteel ways of the middle class. Alienated and without a meaningful place in society they wanted immediate action. The inaugural conference had divided the party structure into six regions, as opposed to the ANC’s four. It called for the mobilisation of the African masses by presenting to them a clear political ideology and course of action. Its advocacy of the use of vernacular languages indicated the areas it sought support - among the non-westernised rural population, many of whom were migrant labourers. Originally the PAC suggested that a ‘Status Campaign’ should precede the final assault, so African political consciousness could be strengthened and sounder organisations emerge. Boycotts and other tactics were suggested as methods of fulfilling this campaign. The PAC office was on the second floor of Mylur House in Dube South. Leballo’s house was also used for party work such as duplicating. Sobukwe paid the office rent and other party bills from his own salary, which caused friction with his wife. William Monde Jolobe, who at Lovedale used to follow the principal Rev. Dr. Shepherd carrying his books in a wheelbarrow, acted as secretary and stenographer, although he needed beer to make him work efficiently. The PAC organised a campaign to recruit members. On 31 July 1959 Leballo reported that 101 branches had been formed with 24,664 members. Probably half the members were branch activists. The Transvaal headed the list with 47 branches and 13,324 members, followed by the Cape with 34 and 7,427 members, Natal with 15 and 3,612 members, and the OFS (hell on earth for Africans) with 5 and 301 members. Repression in the OFS was extremely difficult to combat overtly. The ANC was particularly aggressive against the party’s rise in Natal and Zululand. In October 1959, Jacob D. Nyaose launched the PAC’s trade union movement, the Federation of Free African Trade Unions of South Africa (FOFATUSA). Nyaose was leader of the African Bakers and Confectioners Union. This joined with the Garment Workers Union (GWU), which had broken away from SACTU, and with nine other unrecognised African trade unions, giving FOFATUSA a membership of over 17,000. Lucy Mvubelo and Sarah Chitja of the GWU respectively became vice- president and secretary-general. The ANC and PAC both held their annual conferences in December 1959. The ANC made a tactical mistake by holding theirs a week earlier. Between 1956 and 1958 both Charterist and Africanist sections of the ANC had been involved in economic boycotts. The Charterists had concentrated on boycotting Afrikaner owned large scale tobacco and potato enterprises while the Africanists had

targeted buses. The Charterists had hoped to organise a massive 26 June 1959 campaign against the Pass Laws but the Treason Trial and the launch of the PAC disrupted plans so little was accomplished. Nevertheless the Pass Laws issue remained the chief target for both ANC and PAC. At the December 1959 conference Nokwe, Sisulu, Mandela, and Tambo presented a plan which extended the economic boycott and set March 31 1960 for the start of an anti-pass campaign which would culminate in passes being incinerated on 26 June. This appears to have been the gap in the small print of the Criminal Law Amendment Act because the Alliance lawyers would have been able to argue in consequent trials that their clients (the Alliance leadership) would not have been in breach of the Act. The conference also expressed disquiet at the PAC’s rapid expansion. When Leballo announced the PAC membership figures the following week of 16 - 20 December 1959 he was personally disappointed. He had hoped to recruit 100,000 members but his figures totalled 31,035 distributed between 153 branches. Sobukwe later confirmed that the figure of actual signed up members as about 20,000, which that was immensely impressive given that in 1959 the ANC’s estimated membership after 47 years of existence had dropped to about 28,000. The PAC reported that there was friction in the party between the regional executive committee and the branches on the Rand. The regional executive was accused of hindering expansion. The NEC responded by establishing a national working committee to deal with the branches and allow local initiatives to act unimpeded by regional bureaucracy. The PAC had originally intended to launch a “status campaign” demanding courteous treatment from whites in the workplace or when being served in shops. This would be followed by a more combative campaign of Positive Action. However Sobukwe immediately recognised the futility of such moves in the wake of the ANC’s announcement of a more militant anti-pass campaign. The PAC had organisational advantages over the unwieldy structure and ill defined leadership of the Alliance. It was able to make immediate decisions and switch tactics whereas the Transvaal cabal of Mandela, Sisulu, Tambo and Nokwe had to liaise with the other four sections of the Alliance as well as Joe Slovo’s clandestine dual or treble role communists, and pay lip service to Lutuli’s leadership. The PAC therefore abandoned the Status Campaign as impractical and called for immediate confrontation whereby Africans would engulf the white security apparatus in Gandhian waves of martyrs demanding to be arrested for having destroyed their passes. The Alliance was furious at being upstaged. Joe Slovo denounced the PAC’s campaign as “an ill organised, second class version of the 1952 Defiance Campaign” but Sobukwe had no choice. The Alliance, as Mandela was rapidly coming to realise, was - despite its rhetoric - flabby, pompous, status conscious, and conservative. It was listening to the same ideas from an urban, professional, and not very efficient urban elite that was being outmanoeuvred by impecunious lower class activists it affected to despise. If the Alliance had matched the PAC’s rapid decision making, organisational flexibility, and clarity of purpose it could have quickly regained the initiative. Although the Alliance could have adapted its plans to counter the Africanists it did not do so. Despite its annoyance at the PAC call for an earlier anti-pass campaign the ANC may have believed that the ANC December announcement had doomed the PAC by forcing it into premature mass action. However a more plausible reason is that the ANC preferred the PAC to act first knowing that its leadership would be subject to the draconian provisions of the Criminal Law Amendment Act. The ANC’s own plans were not confrontational and the ANC’s protest would probably not have been in breach of the Act. The ideal scenario as far the ANC was concerned was for the PAC to launch a very poorly supported peaceful protest that would result in its leadership being discredited and also jailed under the terms of the Act for three years. The PAC’s volatile membership, the ANC’s own call for a 31 March national day of action and the AAPC decision in Ghana that the continent should be free by 1963 all served to propel the PAC forward. Sobukwe had intended to give the PAC some opportunities to gain experience in less confrontational skirmishing which did not breach the Act as he had originally planned with the Status Campaign but the ANC’s anti-pass campaign was a challenge to see which party was a more effective force. Most importantly of all Sobukwe wanted to end the seven year stalemate in African resistance politics. The 1953 Criminal Law Amendment Act had stifled the ANC/SACP and reduced it to gesture

politics, like the Freedom Charter, the Congress of the People with its farcical award of battle honours, and proposed campaigns that first had to be vetted by SACP lawyers. The Treason Trial was the shape of things to come: the NP regime content to tie up assimilated malcontents in litigation for years on flimsy unconvincing evidence that would deny them martyrdom but assure the white electorate that their government was ruthless in defence of national security. In January the PAC decided to encourage support in the Cape. Sobukwe admitted that when the PAC was launched

“…we were weak in PE [Port Elizabeth] weak in the Western Cape. When we got to PE on our tour in 1960, you could only whisper that you were there from PAC because the ANC was so strong there. You were more afraid of the ANC than of the police in PE! It was like a religion, and religion was strong there too. Cape Town had no organization at all. We felt strongly that if we could build our strength in the Transvaal, then other things would follow.” Gerhart interview 1970

His prophesy was fulfilled to a degree he could never have imagined because the Western Cape was to provide an unbelievable opportunity that could have ignited a national rising. Both ANC and PAC were weak in the Western Cape, probably because the large Coloured population’s political militancy had been tempered by partial assimilation, the Cape Liberal tradition and a tendency to look down on Bantu-speaking Africans. In 1960 in the Cape Town area it was estimated that only ten per cent (75,000) people were African, compared to 411,000 Coloureds. Nevertheless the PAC was able to accomplish encouraging recruitment among the migrant worker population in the Langa townships where the ratio of men to women in the migrant hostels was 25:1 and where was considerable anger at the regime’s expulsions to the “tribal homelands.” Sobukwe and Leballo set out from Johannesburg in February 1960 driving Howard Ngcobo’s Volkswagen Kombi van. If the consequences had not been so tragic, there is something immensely amusing and surrealistic in the vision of a bookish junior university language assistant (Sobukwe) and an expansive ex-army sergeant (Leballo) careering off in a VW van to Cape Town to galvanise migrant workers into changing history while wise, well funded, internationally connected, self anointed, odiously bourgeois elements reclined in the better suburbs of Johannesburg mocking their efforts and pointing out where they had gone wrong. At Aliwal North they held a public meeting mostly of young militants led by Nyati Pokela, who was a teacher at Aliwal North High School. Next they drove to Cape Town visiting different branches and committees, and finally held a public meeting at Langa along with the Ngcobo’s, and Selby Ngendane, who was on there on holiday. Leballo always looked back with nostalgia to that trip, his last as a free man in South Africa, recalling the grapes that were piled in the van and in particular the public meeting:

“Well, we felt very much encouraged because of the response there. And we were in top form in our speeches there, and I remember even today there are still some people who imitate the way I speak. And we collected a lot of money, particularly at this public meeting here. You know, the big tins and this, the bath that we use for washing, money was just put so into them. We made almost about £250 there. And the response was so great that in fact in those areas we wiped out the ANC in those areas completely. People had never heard of such a fire before. It was so much a fireworks that they believed that freedom was overnight.” Interview with Gerhart 1968

Leballo’s famous speech at was significantly peppered with Sesotho:

“Everybody felt the electricity as Potlako Leballo, national secretary, climbed on to the platform and waved his pipe in the air. His powerful voice rang out in Sesotho “This is Potlako of the Leballos. Of whom it is said ‘hold your shield tightly, your father’s land has been looted by foreigners.’”10

Langa was eleven kilometres from the city centre and had a population of about 25,000. Sixty-six percent lived in dormitory barracks. Langa had close ties with Nyanga, nearly nine kilometres further out. Nyanga had been established as a dumping ground for Langa and Windermere’s “excess” populations and was denied facilities and services to force Africans to move to the tribal homelands. The young male population in the two townships, having nothing much left to lose, was potentially explosive. However, while Sobukwe could openly speak against violence, the regime, through its ubiquitous spy, agent provocateur, and informer network, would have quickly dealt with Leballo had he called for carnage. There was perhaps a solution that was never utilised. Mandela, Tambo, Sobukwe, and Leballo had attended Xhosa and Basotho initiation lodges. Had the PAC decided on violence there could have used elements from the Africanist Churches, the tsotsi gangs, and the initiation lodges to create a clandestine network of politicized militant activists. This is similar to what Dedan Kimathi had accomplished in Kenya with his “oathings” supervised at night by disguised or reclusive functionaries [Henderson 1958]. Nana Mahomo had been the first to suggest recruiting tsotsis and if there had been more time small groups of tsotsis could have recruited to be sent ostensibly for tribal initiation but instead be trained, allocated specific tasks by disguised instructors and eventually given small arms if available. The ZANLA commander Tongogara used young activists extensively as scouts, informers, and messengers and they progressed later to guerrilla status. Other movements such as Ulster sectarians and Islamic extremists recruited heavily from school low achievers who welcomed the status of “soldier” or “jihadist” rather than “unemployed loser.” Southern African and British academics have focused on social and economic causes of dissent while almost totally neglecting the warrior culture of Leballo and others who loved combativeness and welcomed the chance to take part in a war where right and wrong were so clearly defined. Unfortunately Sobukwe did not instruct his followers to be flexible within the parameters of non- violence when dealing with unforeseen circumstances. As far as the Western Cape was concerned Sobukwe stated,

“Privately, on the Cape tour and at other times in preparing for the campaign, I had told leaders that if the police ordered crowds to disperse, then they should be ordered by the leaders to disperse.” Interview with Gerhart 1970

The Western Cape PAC had been invigorated by a more dynamic leadership in January 1960 when Philip Kgosana became regional secretary. Kgosana was a twenty-three year old Cape Town University student from the Transvaal who had modelled himself on Sobukwe. The most senior leader in the area was Nana Mahomo, a member of the PAC NEC and also a University of Cape Town student. Mahomo had played a prominent role in the 1957 bus boycott but in early 1960 began to have reservations after inevitable imprisonment and had gone to Johannesburg where he and ’Molotsi drew up a plan for PAC external representation. Kgosana’s impecunious life as a student in a Langa slum

10 Tom Lodge [1985], who suffers from the English disease of ingratiating himself with the great and shunning the vulgar throng and sweaty masses, gives an incomprehensible Sesotho “original” of this speech, which should read something like: "Ke 'na Potlako oa Leballo, eo ho thoeng o tšoere thebe ha lefatše la habo le hapiloe ke balichaba" (Lesotho) "Ke nna Potlako wa Leballo eo ho thweng o tshwere thebe ha lefatshe la habo le hapilwe ke badichaba" (RSA) "Ke nna Potlako wa Leballo, yeo ho thweng ho ena, 'tshwara thebe hantle, lefatshe la heno le poketswe ke badichaba.'" (RSA).

had forced him to approach benefactors for survival. Patrick Duncan of the Liberal Party hired him on a commission basis to sell Contact and Kgosana also made other Liberal Party connections through Africanists. The PAC was ambivalent towards the Liberals, the country’s only legal multi-racial political party which like Capricorn only supported a qualified franchise. Sobukwe was close friends with the Rand Daily Mail journalist Benjamin Pogrund, his eventual biographer, and Leballo later appointed Duncan, who spoke French, as PAC representative to Algeria. Duncan’s fortnightly paper Contact gave the PAC publicity. The PAC’s differences with the Liberals were based on a mixture of opposing views concerning class, communism, capitalism, and race. Sobukwe had considerable difficulty with Pogrund’s obsessive idealistic support for Israel’s brutally cruel occupation of Palestine but joked that when apartheid ended Pogrund would move to a shack in Soweto while Africans would move to mansions in the plush White suburbs. Prominent Liberals such as Duncan, Jordan Ngubane, and Alan Paton did valuable work publicising injustice but they were politically erratic. Duncan was rejected by the ANC, helped found the BNP, joined the Liberals, and eventually the PAC. Ngubane began as an Africanist11, switched to the Liberals, and ended up in Inkatha. Eurocentric Alan Paton, a paternalist and renowned author with a taste for illicit sex with Zulu girls (a habit which cost his father his life and almost also his own), lost a finger hitting a disobedient African in the teeth. He at first placed his faith in the United Party’s Jan Hofmeyr [Alexander 1995] and then supported Capricorn. Kgosana’s links with the Liberals were to have historical repercussions on his judgement. Sobukwe and Leballo visited Port Elizabeth, Stutterheim, and King Williamstown before returning to Johannesburg. Peter ’Molotsi and Nana Mahomo were ordered to leave the country to represent the PAC overseas during the campaign. However it was becoming clear that enthusiasm might wane unless the PAC acted soon. Leballo said later that there was criticism that the PAC had not undertaken enough preparation: “We were being pestered. Even Ngubane and A.P. Mda and many others said that we had not done spade work.” Sobukwe testified that Leballo “hero-worshipped” Mda, but he himself was clearly exasperated by Mda’s posturing, fear of imprisonment, and eternal wait for perfect conditions. He was hardly alone. Sobukwe commented on the PAC NEC:

“Except for PK, they were a rather cautious lot. It was a strange group. They were always raising reasons why something or other couldn’t be done. PK was always optimistic about success, but the rest were cautious.”

However he had no illusions about certain aspects of Leballo’s personality:

“PK and I always worked very closely together, and I knew everything he knew. There was no question of my being deceived. Everyone knew that PK always exaggerated. He would add a naught to every figure. If there were 25 people at a meeting, PK would come and tell you there were 250. But we always knew to allow for this.” Interview with Gerhart 1970

At the September 1959 PAC NEC meeting in Bloemfontein Mda had lectured them on Mao Zedong’s achievements and how to organize but Sobukwe was no longer impressed. Sobukwe, lacking funds, was relying on Jordan Ngubane’s connections with a Durban Indian printer to produce a series of mass leaflets. The first, to be issued in January 1960, was to alert supporters of impending action, the second was to tell them to save and money, the third was the date and instructions for the campaign launch. When Ngubane failed to deliver, he wrote to Sobukwe advising against launching the campaign. When Mda also wrote in the same manner Sobukwe was too angry to reply. Because of Ngubane’s circulars failure, the start of the PAC campaign was shifted from 7 March to 21 March 1960.

11 Ngubane may have regarded himself as a PAC member. Leballo would have known but never mentioned it. Sobukwe said that Ngubane and A.B. Ngcobo (who dominated the Natal PAC) weren’t on speaking terms.

Meanwhile the PAC’s allies in the Basotho heartland were experiencing mixed success. National elections were held in Basutoland for the first time in January 1960. The BCP was far better organized and experienced than the BNP but neither party was able to take advantage of a large section of its natural constituency. The 1960 election permitted Basotho in South Africa to utilize a proxy vote. The BNP acknowledged that most Union Basotho were BCP supporters but the British estimated only 2% of eligible Basotho voters in the Union used the proxy option. The Basotho Catholic rural women were supportive of the BNP but since the vote had been granted to tax-payers over 21 years of age only 56 of the registered voters were women. The Marema Tlou had declined since it had been a one issue party whose only success had been the installation of the new paramount. Party loyalties were not clear in the first round of voting. In some constituencies there were several candidates claiming to their party’s official choice; while many candidates stood as independents in fear that party affiliation would damage their chances and they waited until the second round to reveal their allegiance. The BCP won six of the nine councils, the independent candidates two and the Marema Tlou one. The district council members then voted thirty BCP members, five Marema Tlou, four Independents and one BNP to the legislative council. When the nine district councils were convened, the BCP controlled eight of them, due to the Independent members identifying with the party. The Marema Tlou control of Mohkotlong District enabled it to survive and eventually align with ANC/SACP to thwart Mokhehle taking power in 1965. Nevertheless the BCP 1960 election victory resulted in a defeat for Mokhehle. The last stage in the elections was the legislative council’s election of three of its members to the executive council. Mokhehle’s electoral majority of thirty out of forty elected members was negated by forty additional nominated members. Twenty two were senior chiefs, four were British administrators, and fourteen nominated by the paramount. Consequently Mokhehle found himself in a minority. The final stage of the election elevated three members of the legislative council to the executive council. Ntsu Mokhehle, Bennet Khaketla (his deputy) and Gerard Ramoreboli, a leading Catholic member of the BCP, stood as Congress candidates. Only Khaketla was elected, coming second behind the Marema Tlou’s Chief Samuel Matete (forty four votes) with forty one votes. Ramoreboli was fifth, with thirty three, and Mokhehle sixth, with thirty. Khaketla and Matete were joined in the executive council by Chief Leshoboro Majara (who had quit the BCP for the BNP) and MacFarlane Lepolesa (nominated by the paramount) of the minuscule Progressive Party. The executive council therefore reflected opinions, not electoral support [Leeman 1985]. Mokhehle had hoped in 1958 he would soon be able to speak as Basutoland’s elected first minister. Now, as the PAC surged into confrontation he was merely a party leader subordinate to his own deputy in a colonial legislature dominated by feudalists. He felt like Gulliver in Lilliput. Sobukwe would have been considerable boosted had Basutoland achieved independence in 1960 like many other African countries that year. Certainly it was well prepared with a strong, though somewhat damaged, democratic tradition with a single language, no minority problems, a common culture, and high literacy rate. It had pressing economic problems since its rising population could no longer be sustained after the Afrikaner conquest of the western farmlands. There were severe soil erosion and the male workforce was mostly absent in South Africa, thousands of them migrant workers on the gold mines. However, had Basutoland been far removed from White racist states it would have been an early candidate for independence. The British were not prepared to irritate Pretoria by granting it. The 1958 Basutoland constitution in fact closely resembled the legislative arrangement implemented in South Africa’s puppet micro nations, the Bantustans [Rogers 1980] Sobukwe was still inspired by the Ghanaian example of achieving independence. This probably explains his refusal to consider preparing for a violent response to the PAC protests. In addition he had an optimistic interpretation of international events, and the South African judicial system, which had dealt leniently with previous peaceful protests. In Ghana Nkrumah had been jailed for three years after his Positive Action campaign of 1950. International protests and local agitation forced the British to permit elections which Nkrumah won while still in prison. The day after his early release he was asked to form a government. External opinion also encouraged Sobukwe’s pacifism. On 3 February 1960 the

British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, addressed the South African parliament in Cape Town and repeated the warning given earlier in Ghana that a “wind of change” was sweeping through the continent. However Patrick Duncan (at that time a liberal), who used his status as the son of the former Governor General to attend social functions, noted that Macmillan suddenly went deaf when Duncan suggested he meet African leaders. Nevertheless Macmillan’s speech, combined with the granting of independence that year to seventeen former sub-Saharan French, British and Belgian African colonies boosted PAC expectations. There was also ample evidence of hardening NP attitudes. The regime’s Prime Minister, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, was not an Afrikaner but a Dutch immigrant obsessed with the theoretical aspects of race-based social engineering irrespective of consequences. Not only were plans already under way for a referendum to make the country a republic but the NP had as early as the 1930’s been developing an Africa oriented defence policy and this became more urgent in 1960. Of particular concern was the impending uncertainty and power vacuum caused by colonial withdrawal. The Belgian administration in the Congo had originally tried to defuse Africa nationalism with an unsuccessful plan similar to the Central African Federation where a few members of the African elite would be co-opted into government and the universal franchise delayed indefinitely. However seventy one Europeans had been killed in rioting in the Congolese capital in January 1959.12 A year later the party of the jailed left wing working class politician Patrice Lumumba won local elections paving the way for national elections in May and independence on 30 June 30. In Rwanda in 1959 the Belgian backed Tutsi feudal elite, comprising 15% of the population and a model for Verwoerd’s Bantustan policy, had been swept away in a bloodbath by the Hutu majority. Sobukwe’s strategy was therefore to show that the eleven month old PAC had the organizational ability to conduct significant if not national protests against the Pass Laws that would entail wave after wave of peaceful protestors surrendering themselves for arrest until the White security services were overwhelmed. There had been a local historical precedent of peaceful self sacrifice when the Xhosa had undertaken a massive apocalyptical campaign of cattle killing partly in the belief the sacrifice would be rewarded by divine extermination of the whites, and partly in exasperation with their venal tribal hierarchy. It is reasonable to assume from later developments elsewhere such as Eastern Europe and the Philippines but most importantly Cape Town that if Sobukwe’s strategy of self sacrifice had been maintained for a week the idea would probably have seized the national imagination and escalated. Sobukwe was fully aware that he was facing a minimum three year prison sentence but reasoned that if the campaign’s momentum continued the NP regime would be forced to concede to PAC demands. The Congress Alliance was highly critical of the PAC’s campaign, firstly because many of its own leaders were defendants in the Treason Trial and the Alliance did not want the PAC to show that national protest was possible without them. Secondly there was a probability that the Alliance hoped that its leaders would be found guilty, sentenced and then released following international protests to negotiate with the NP regime. Despite this, it made no effort to pre-empt the PAC protest adding support to the theory that it believed the PAC would fail and then be further humiliated and hopefully obliterated by the launch of the Alliance’s campaign the days later. Press conferences played an important part in resistance politics. They announced exactly what the party intended sometimes as a record for consequent legal trials but mostly so the message could be disseminated in the popular press and on radio. On 6 March Sobukwe had informed the regime’s commissioner of police Major General C. I. Rademeyer that the PAC campaign would be peaceful and would commence on 21 March. On Friday morning 18 March 1960 Sobukwe gave a small press conference in Mylur House. He confirmed that a national non-violent anti-pass law campaign would

12 It is debatable if Verwoerd’s regime felt any greater affinity with the predominantly Flemish-speaking Belgians than with British colonials but the impact of Afrikaners listening to horror stories in mutually intelligible Flemish would probably have had more sobering than in English.

commence on Monday 21 March. PAC members had been told to leave their passes at home and present themselves for arrest at police stations. If they were turned away they would return later to demand arrest. If they were charged they would not ask for bail, nor offer any defence no pay any fine. After release they would return to be rearrested. He emphasised to the PAC membership that the campaign was not focusing on throwing stones at Saracen armoured cars to become “small revolutionaries engaged in revolutionary warfare” but on abolishing the pass laws. His circular We Will Win to all regions and branches of the PAC was absolutely clear on the issue of non-violence:

“My instructions are that our people must be taught NOW and CONTINUOUSLY, THAT IN THIS CAMPAIGN we are going to observe ABSOLUTE NON- VIOLENCE……Let us consider for a moment what violence will achieve. I say quite POSITIVELY, without fear of contradiction, that the only people who will benefit from violence are the government and the police.”

Despite Sobukwe’s consistent denunciation of violence Leballo was still sceptical. The PAC leadership was in Sobukwe’s image, the membership had been recruited by Leballo with BCP encouragement. Sobukwe’s approach was Gandhian or Christ-like martyrdom; Leballo’s almost an Islamic jihad.13 The young volatile male lower class element in the PAC was unsuited to Sobukwe’s approach. The NP regime was far more confrontational than it had been in 1950-2 and recent events had made it even more paranoid. On 21 January there was enormous African resentment when four hundred and twenty African and six white miners were lost in a cave-in at a mine with a poor safety record. Three days later four white and five African policemen were killed in a riot following a raid on an illegal liquor outlet at Cato Manor Durban township of Cato Manor. It was impossible for Sobukwe and the NP regime to gauge at what point on the continuum Africans of the lower social strata were between fatalist acceptance of the apartheid regime at one end of the scale, and fanatical genocide on Rwandan lines at the other. Academic researchers and other commentators stress that the African population did not appear particularly politically volatile in early 1960 and certainly not near breaking point. That may have been true but given the lengthy nature of African endurance of the semi-slave labour system it is also equally pertinent to stress that widespread township black on black violence was mostly the result of releasing pent up frustration at marginalization and helplessness against white domination. There are many global examples of perceptions of the demeanour of clandestine revolutionaries before and after taking power. Nevertheless Leballo thought that his tsotsi reputation militated against the PAC becoming a national movement. The ANC had started as part of the struggle against White domination but after 1955 was rapidly declining because it was not only failing to articulate wider class aspirations but was also adopting the anti-democratic and tribal divisiveness of the NP regime, creating administrative power structures based on insignificant ethnic concerns. Leballo believed that the PAC needed intellectual leadership to attract the skilled and intelligent hence his appeal for Sobukwe to lead and later, in 1981, for Pokela to become PAC chairman if he (Leballo) could still be APLA commander. In the end he wore two hats. First, as PAC secretary-general he obeyed Sobukwe not to launch an armed rising. Second, although he had resigned from the BCP, Leballo still maintained influence as its former Transvaal Province leader and encouraged the Basotho to respond aggressively if the NP regime used violence. The Transvaal Basotho were in many ways similar to Rwandan Tutsi refugees in Uganda. Both Tutsi and Basotho engaged in anti-government activities in foreign countries to boost their own national claims. Leballo, a Mosotho border chief, had an exact knowledge of how much Basotho land had been lost and in what manner (Afrikaner violence and missionary “sales”) during the 19th century. Eventually officially only a South African politician Leballo maintained a significant Basotho following inside Lesotho and

13 Leballo was raised an Anglican. In Libya the APLA force including Leballo nominally converted to Islam and he took the name Muhammad. However, although he adopted several Swahili customs through lengthy residence in Tanzania, he never expressed any interest in religion apart from occasional references to the gods of Africa, by which he meant ancestors.

on the Rand up until his death in 1986 and his success in expanding the PAC so rapidly was very much because of the Basotho and encouragement from Ntsu Mokhehle. The BCP had won the January 1960 national election but, aforementioned, Mokhehle had been denied an executive role through the British using nominated leaders to dilute the democratic decision. Had Mokhehle been elected to the Executive Council, perhaps Leballo would have been less cautious in the preparations for the March 21 campaign. Evidence exists that Leballo had made some preparations at Sharpeville to respond in kind if the NP regime used violence but Sobukwe’s uncompromising attitude, probably fuelled by the fear of informers, prevailed. If Leballo had infiltrated violent armed protestors into Sharpeville it would not have been difficult for the NP regime to isolate the township. However, it is important to emphasise Sobukwe’s overall strategy, which was not reliant on centrally controlled action but on igniting a spark that would inflame the whole country and let unknown leaders emerge to lead their people to freedom. The PAC strongly upheld the idea of spontaneity, believing that,

“The revolutionary energy of thousands of young Africans seemed coiled tight like a spring, ready to be released. It was immaterial that other evidence could be marshalled to show that African political consciousness was not, in fact, particularly high countrywide, and the limits of African tolerance had been far from reached. Even Sobukwe, who was much less prone than some of his colleagues to take the tenets of nationalism literally, was swept along by a conviction that the time was right, and the masses would find the way.” Gerhart [1978:233]

Unlike Langa and Nyanga where Kgosana addressed crowds of several thousand on the evening of Sunday 20 March, the PAC executive in Orlando held no rally. The following morning when Sobukwe rose at 5am to have breakfast there was no indication about the general mood concerning action. Sobukwe did not see his children when he left home at 6.30am as they had gone to the home of Veronica’s mother. He was joined along the four and a half kilometer route to Orlando police station by small numbers of PAC supporters. Leballo reported that they were heckled as failures by ANC leaders driving to work. They visited Jacob Nyaose’s house but were informed by Mrs Nyaose that her husband was out. She was immediately contradicted by her small daughter, who blurted out that her father was in fact hiding in a wardrobe inside and, evading her mother, led them to a bedroom where they discovered Nyaose immaculately dressed for work motionless in a wardrobe. He was taken out to accompany them. Selby Ngendane declared he had to deliver some keys but was forced along too. Zephaniah Mothopeng sent a note saying he had to visit his father, who was seriously ill. Sobukwe tore the message to shreds in a fury but Mothopeng, rent by conscience, appeared after all and was arrested along with the others. Surprisingly Orlando, the Africanist stronghold, responded poorly to the Positive Action Campaign. Hundreds, instead of the expected thousands, turned out for the demonstrations. The reason seems to rest in the PAC leadership’s absence in the preceding weeks touring the country. At Sharpeville large numbers of members had been recruited through door-to- door canvassing but Orlando had been neglected. Another cause had been PAC intellectuals maintaining their bureaucratic dominance and so stifling the very forces they intended to encourage. Alexandra also failed to join the demonstrations. Madzunya was still angry at the rigged voting that had denied him an NEC post on the PAC. On the night of the 18th he declared that he could not support Sobukwe’s campaign because it was badly prepared, but on the 20th he was more forthright:

“Sobukwe and his gang can do what they like, but they have themselves failed to organize Orlando West, because they are intellectuals, and they only drink tea in their houses.” Lodge [1983:205]

Other problems had arisen through the PAC’s limited funds and lack of transport. Howard

Ngcobo’s Volkswagen Kombi was hired to deliver circulars and transport the NEC in campaign tours. Even in the days preceding 21 March Leballo himself was kept busy duplicating circulars. A sympathetic official at the United States Information Service had given him a minor job and Leballo used the library’s copying service. This was the basis for Joe Slovo’s claim that the PAC had been formed by the CIA.14 At 8.30am when about 200 PAC demonstrators had gathered Sobukwe entered the police station to announce that he and his companions had no passes and were presenting themselves for arrest. The station commander Captain De Wet Steyn told Sobukwe he was busy and he should wait outside. Steyn then went out to warn the crowd to stop its noise otherwise there would be trouble. Next news arrived of violent confrontations at Bophelong and Baopetong near Vereeniging where the police had shot dead at least two people and Air Force planes were executing low runs over the protestors. The police may deliberately have been waiting for bloodshed before arresting Sobukwe. While Sobukwe was ostensibly protesting against the pass laws, his arrest along with Leballo, Ngendane and eight others by Special Branch officers, who had arrived at 11am, came after the deaths, enabling the regime to claim that deaths had resulted as a direct consequence of Sobukwe challenging the Criminal Law Amendment Act.

Sharpeville Sharpeville was a township serving the steel and coal industries of Vereeniging and Vanderbijlpark, eighty kilometres south of Johannesburg. The authorities considered Sharpeville to be efficiently run and relatively healthy with a low crime rate, a clinic, a brewery, electricity, water, and a cinema. Local members of the Trotskyite Unity Movement had criticised the ANC at the end of the Defiance Campaign and had failed in an attempt to boycott the 1953 coronation celebrations. In 1960 the township had a population of about 36,600 with almost 60% teenagers and children. School leavers did not want employment in the low paid heavy manual labour industries and were frustrated by the shortage of high school places and in particular the pass laws, which prevented them looking for work elsewhere. Making the situation worse was the removal to the “homelands” of about 5000 neighbouring residents with close social and economic ties to Sharpeville. Probably of greatest importance was Sharpeville’s Basotho character. Because of the NP regime’s tribal obsessions the ANC and PAC regarded tribal references as taboo. Nevertheless Sobukwe admitted there was some truth in the assertion that Sharpeville was a militant area because it was nearly all Sotho and identified with Leballo when he spoke to them in the vernacular. Sobukwe himself had used Xhosa with significant effect during the campaign tour of the Cape. Leballo agreed that Sharpeville’s militancy owed much to unemployment and pass raids were too severe there but stated that the rapid expansion there of the PAC was due to efficient young Basotho men from the protectorate who had worked with Leballo in the BCP. He elaborated:

“The Sotho population there, in fact it’s almost 90 per cent. And when we were issuing even circulars we only sent them in Sotho there. We didn’t bother to have [joint] circulars in Sotho, Xhosa, Pedi and all, English and other languages. It was too easy.” Gerhart interview 1968

The PAC at Sharpeville also used coercion, warning bus drivers that while Sobukwe had ordered them not to use violence against the whites the rule did not apply to those who collaborated with strike

14 This is what Slovo [1997:134] wrote about the PAC: “It was founded at a meeting held at the United States Information Library where Potlako Leballo, one of the leaders of this group, was employed. His previous career as a teacher had come to a sticky end when he was imprisoned on a charge of fraud involving the misuse of school funds collected from African parents.” Leballo did have convictions for an assault charge and for forging his pass book but Slovo is the only known source for the school and PAC origin stories. His book is a disappointment except for the account of his early life and his eventual return to Lithuania. His disinformation and the failure of ZAPU in Zimbabwe led to the dispatch of a senior Soviet intelligence officer to the area where he discovered that Slovo’s reports were either fabrications or highly exaggerated.

breakers. On the morning of the 21st waiting bus passengers were told not to go to work but no buses arrived anyway. The Sharpeville PAC leader was the branch secretary Mike Nyakane Tsolo, a Mosotho who remained loyal to Leballo till the latter’s death. The Sharpeville PAC wanted Leballo to lead them on 21 March. Leballo explained that he and the Sharpeville youth were advocating violence:

“I was under heavy pressure (to participate in a violent confrontation), to the extent that the President didn't want to do - to go to Sharpeville, to lead the demonstration there. The pressure was so much, and at Sharpeville where we had organized the youth there, came and pleaded with the President. And when he refused I decided that I would escape and run away so that the day of the struggle there they had already collected their weapons. And I was of the opinion that as far as I knew that South African police were so brutal and inhuman - The only way is that before we are mowed down brutally we should also fight. (However) I can say I was rejected by almost everybody (in the NEC)…I was defeated completely…I had no one to back me on this question…they did understand my argument but unfortunately it was a democratic centralism we were discussing.” Gerhart interview 1968

Leballo gave an identical account in the 1980’s [Leeman 1985]. The Sharpeville activists left Leballo’s office at about 8pm on the 20th but Sobukwe, knowing that Leballo was planning to incite the Sharpeville demonstrators, not only made sure the promised transport did not arrive but also had him watched throughout the night. On the morning of March 21st between five to seven thousand demonstrators marched to the municipal offices at Sharpeville, led by the PAC secretary of the Vaal Triangle. Tsolo walked ahead to advise the police that interference was inadvisable. He was arrested along with several others and spent his confinement in the Sharpeville police station. From the radio messages and exchanges he overheard between the police he concluded that the police experimented with different tactics on the various demonstrations, shooting at some places, using low-flying aircraft at others and ignoring the demonstrators’ demand for arrest elsewhere.15 Reports of the eventual crowd size at Sharpeville ranged from over 7000 [Pogrund:132], 10,000 [Sampson:130] to 20,000 [regime premier Hendrik Verwoerd]. Lodge [210] and Pogrund [136] stressed that the 300 strong police force backed by Saracen armoured cars at Sharpeville was edgy because of the Cato Manor police deaths three months earlier sparked by a policeman treading on a shebeen queen’s foot and there is general agreement among white commentators that some of the police panicked. The crowd was certainly unpredictable and volatile. At 1.15pm there was an altercation at the police station compound gate when a demonstrator was arrested. A white policeman was either deliberately or accidentally pushed to the ground and many demonstrators surged forward through curiosity, hostility or believing there was an opportunity to fulfill their objective of swamping the police station demanding to be arrested. At this point a Rand Daily Mail (RDM) team including Sobukwe’s white friend Benjamin Pogrund was amiably chatting to demonstrators who had engulfed their car. Suddenly firing broke out. Tsolo, inside the police station, stated that it seemed a direct order initiated the shooting. Pogrund was caught by surprise by initial shots but felt one or two policemen opened up followed by a sustained volley of automatic and single shots. His colleague Ian Berry was able to take dramatic photographs of the fleeing crowd before the RDM team barely escaped death as the front ranks of the demonstrators, having briefly retaliated against the police with stones and knobkerries, vented full fury on the white journalists. Verwoerd claimed three shots were fired from the crowd while the Star newspaper claimed the police reacted to a bombardment of stones. The Afrikaans Vaderland reported the police were assailed by an armed mob of fanatics crazed with a blood lust. Bishop Ambrose Reeves swiftly moved to record testimonies from hospitalized victims.

15 Tsolo eventually went into exile in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His family said he avoided talking about “the issue.”

The Commission of Enquiry into the Sharpeville Massacre never publicly issued a full report of its findings but accepted the police claim of crowd hostility and aggression. Officially police gunfire killed sixty seven to seventy two demonstrators including ten children and eight women. The PAC estimate of wounded was higher than the official figure of 186 because Africans wounded by police preferred to avoid hospital if their injuries were not life threatening. Only about 15% of the victims were shot while facing the police. Three policemen sustained minor injuries from stones. Officially the police discharged 705 rounds of ammunition. The police killed other demonstrators at Langa, Vanderbijl Park, Nyanga and Gugulethu. Strikes and further shootings followed. In the aftermath of Sharpeville, the ANC came out in support of the PAC and declared a national day of mourning. Whites inundated the Canadian and Australian high commissions to enquire about emigration and many bought weapons. Investors from overseas withdrew millions of pounds from South Africa. The NP regime was condemned in a torrent of world criticism and on 30 March a state of emergency was declared, the first since the Afrikaner rising in the First World War. Steel-helmeted troops patrolled the streets of Johannesburg. The effective power brokers of the ANC/SACP, Mandela, Slovo, Sisulu, and Nokwe, met on the evening of the massacre to discuss strategy. They resolved to launch a pass burning campaign combined with a national day of mourning on which workers would stay at home. Nokwe was dispatched to advise Lutuli to burn his pass. However on 25 March the Commissioner of Police announced that nobody would be arrested for pass violations and the next day the Pass Laws were suspended for the first time before Lutuli’s much publicized photo opportunity looking solemnly at the charred remains of his pass book. Mandela, Nokwe and many others followed his example but since the laws had been suspended the exercise was pointless. Police Commissioner Rademeyer then wrecked the ANC’s long planned national anti Pass Campaign by explaining that the suspension of the pass laws had been motivated by the need to protect the African population from harassment by political agitators. If Rademeyer or his political controllers had been quicker witted (they had had three months warning) they would have used such an announcement for March 20 and so avoided Sharpeville and wrecked both the PAC and ANC’s campaigns. In the wake of the massacre the ANC at least had a ‘Plan B’ - The Day of Mourning was scheduled for March 28. Sobukwe was furious. Just before the police opened fire at Sharpeville Sobukwe had joined his leading PAC colleagues at Johannesburg police headquarters at Marshall Square following police searches of his house and university office in his presence. Sobukwe had been held in reserve during the Defiance Campaign and the news from Sharpeville severely shook him. His inflexibility hampered him. Whereas Leballo, eternally combative, optimistic, exuberant, and expansive, had weathered several major setbacks by bouncing back with often seemingly overambitious objectives, Sobukwe may not have been in a state of shock (although he did suffer an extraordinary lapse by approaching Joe Slovo about an appeal [Pogrund 1990:169]) but he was brooding too long on how his campaign had resulted in horrendous unexpected consequences. Years later the world boxing champion Mike Tyson observed perceptively “Everyone gotta plan till they get hit” but at least Sobukwe’s mind was clear and he was being supplied with newspapers and allowed visitors. He needed a statesmanlike stance but instead responded to Lutuli’s destruction of his pass by observing caustically that “Lutuli now had the courage which he has lacked for over twelve years to burn his reference book after passes have been suspended,” and the PAC was angered by what they interpreted as Bishop Ambrose Reeves’ self- serving work recording accounts in hospital from Sharpeville wounded. Sobukwe’s bitterness at what he perceived as his timid upper class political rivals using the massacre to enhance themselves was understandable but as a suddenly emergent national figure he was in danger of appearing petty, divisive, and mean spirited. The enemy was the racist state not the ANC Alliance. Perhaps he could have issued directives treating the Alliance as a misguided overcautious well meaning junior partner. Instead he warned the Alliance and Liberal Party to keep their hands off the PAC’s campaign. It was as if he were sulking that the PAC campaign should have been successful as the Gandhian and Ghanaian example he had followed and he was unable to deal with the failure. The NP verkramptes

were fully aware of events in India and Ghana and were not British colonial administrators with homes to return to elsewhere. Passive resistance as an end in itself suddenly seemed not the wisest strategy and he might have well been hanged for a lion than a lamb as Leballo had suggested. More liberal pressure resulted in Lutuli, not Sobukwe, being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Lutuli’s book Let my people go had been ghost written by Rev Charles Hooper, an Anglican pastor subordinate to Reeves. The two main branches of the Africanist movement – the PAC and the BCP of Lesotho – respectively failed in 1960 and 1970 to establish an effective command structure once their leaders had been detained. In the case of the PAC the party was too young to have had time to establish effective leadership beyond the third and fourth levels but Sobukwe’s strategy dictated that unknowns would fill the void. His belief was almost realized in Cape Town. History is full of incidents where one person turned the course of a battle, such as the UmCijo soldier at Isandlwana. There are also examples where a commander won a battle by deliberately ignoring or disobeying an order, such as the British admiral Horatio Nelson clapping a telescope to his blind eye to inspect a naval signal commanding him to withdraw. Lastly there are cases of local commanders deciding to disobey orders, with disastrous results such as at Isandhlwana when Colonel Durnford moved troops out of camp to block what he thought was an escape by a limited Zulu force but instead was overwhelmed by the entire Zulu army [Morris 1965]. Molete was the most senior leader still free but the initiative lay with Philip Kgosana, the PAC Western Cape secretary. Kgosana was talented and dedicated with highly effective organizational abilities. On the evening of March 20 about ten thousand of his followers gathered at Langa police station and were baton charged. The crowd retaliated with stones and came under fire. This enraged the protestors who attacked vehicles and set light to buildings. The death toll was unknown but probably numbered less than ten. The next day, the March 21, Kgosana proceeded cautiously aware that police and army reinforcements had arrived during the night but nevertheless staged demonstrations outside three police stations around Cape Town. Although over a thousand succeeded in being arrested at Wynberg the PAC was more cautious in Langa, Nyanga, and Nyanga West. Rather than order his 5000 followers at Langa police station to surrender themselves Kgosana ordered them to disperse because he feared violence but advised them that in the evening they would probably receive new instructions from party headquarters. Meanwhile activists had been highly successful in dissuading workers to stay away from work. Once Kgosana had learnt of about forty deaths at Sharpeville he went into Cape Town and was absent when police attacked his supporters who had gathered for the evening message. They threw stones at the police, who then killed two whereupon rioting and arson spread through Langa. On Tuesday morning the police counter attacked by raiding hostels and beating anyone they found but the PAC responded by blocking bus movements at Nyanga. What followed was surreal. Kgosana began disregarding Sobukwe’s implicit instructions. In May 1959 Sobukwe had warned off his followers from associating with Bishop Ambrose Reeves, Bishop Huddleston, and Patrick Duncan although he relented enough to accept unconditional help from the Liberal Party and the highly respected White women’s pressure group The Black Sash while ordering the party not to deal with SACP fronts such as the COD. On Wednesday evening Kgosana should have been discussing strategy with his lieutenants. Instead he attended a dinner party organized by Patrick Duncan. Also present were Anton Rupert, Randolph Vigne and Thomas Ngwenya. When the Second World War broke out Anton Rupert had supported the German Nazi Party and then played a major role in developing Afrikaner economic development before founding the Rembrandt Tobacco Corporation in 1947 with the support of the clandestine Broederbond. Rupert was the country’s most powerful Afrikaner businessman and had significantly financed the National Party throughout the 1950’s. Now however he was beginning to doubt its policies and in 1958 broke with Verwoerd. Nevertheless he was hardly an appropriate dinner companion for the PAC’s pivotal figure and neither were his fellow guests. Duncan had been the Liberal Party’s national organiser and represented it in

Accra when Mokhehle was elected to the Steering Committee. Although he edited the African- oriented radical publication Contact he was loose cannon, having assisted Leabua Jonathan to launch the BNP [Patrick Duncan papers, York University UK, quoted in Leeman 1985]. Randolph Vigne was vice president of the Liberal party and a future prominent member of the Armed Resistance Movement while, remarkably, Ngwenya held dual membership of the Liberal Party and the ANC. Nevertheless this was an opportunity for Kgosana to sound out his fellow diners, especially Rupert, on their views of the regime’s impending intentions. Although Kgosana was potentially the most dangerous man in the country Rupert didn’t see it that way. Rupert was fully aware of Verwoerd’s success in curbing the verligte wing of the NP regime and if he gave Kgosana advice it would have been to warn him not to be fooled by supposedly conciliatory approaches because the basic nature of the regime was uncompromising kragdadigheid (determination to use force). Rupert nevertheless patronized Kgosana, belittling the PAC and urging him to remember that he was just a young man with a chance to enjoy life. Kgosana was unimpressed but a seed may have been planted in his mind that powerful Afrikaners might listen to him. Given Kgosana’s subsequent messianic delusions in exile he may have imaged he was the new Nkrumah about to negotiate for power. On Thursday Kgosana maintained his maverick stance by continuing to avoid his followers preferring instead to visit the offices of Contact and New Age, the SACP newspaper. By the evening a hundred Langa residents demanded arrest at Cape Town police headquarters and on Friday 25 about half of the city’s African workers remained on strike. Elsewhere the PAC campaign was over. That day Kgosana resumed his activist role leading around 3000 supporters to police headquarters in Caledon Square to demand arrest. The police hauled in a handful including Kgosana but shortly afterwards he and his companions were released because the police commander, probably aware of developments in Johannesburg, declared that the pass laws were being suspended. Kgosana and his delighted supporters, unaware of Rademeyer’s impending announcement that would wreck the ANC’s anti-Pass campaign and the remnants of the PAC’s own struggle, naturally interpreted the suspension as their own triumph. The Caledon Square episode of 24 March – a large crowd, arrests, negotiations and release of Kgosana and fellow leaders – had proved a fortuitous practice run but the PAC leaders failed to develop a new strategy for the changed circumstances. Rademeyer had outmaneuvered them by temporarily removing their Pass Law target; and the ANC had seized back the political initiative by calling for a general strike out of respect for the Day of Mourning. Sobukwe and the other PAC national leaders were in no position to help. They appeared in court on Thursday 24 March where Sobukwe asked to attend the funeral of the slaughtered demonstrators. The magistrate refused on the grounds that he would not grant bail. Sobukwe had directed the PAC not to seek bail or pay fines and he responded: “We don’t ask for bail.” Although there was never any chance of him personally being granted bail his inflexibility was costing the PAC valuable strategic ground. The “no fine, no bail” policy had been designed for mass arrests following peaceful incidents. Sobukwe did not recognize that the dramatically changed circumstances now required leadership on the outside. Instead of immediately reversing his decision to allow some of his fellow leaders to take control he waited until weaker members cracked before permitting them to accept bail or fines, which seriously undermined their authority. In the meantime he was still able to communicate with Z. B. Molete and William Jolobe through visitors. Molete was more dynamic but Jolobe served as PAC acting president until Leballo escaped from restriction near Richards Bay in late 1962. Both Molete and Jolobe urged their supporters either to continue the anti-pass campaign or stay at home from work but the PAC was in danger of being outmaneuvered by the ANC decision to switch from its March 31 anti-pass campaign into the Day of Mourning for the PAC’s Sharpeville victims on March 28. Africans were already staying away from work in considerable numbers and Sobukwe was furious about the prospect of the ANC claiming the escalating absenteeism as an ANC triumph. The Day of Mourning of Monday 28 1960 received huge national widespread. There was general agreement that in urban areas 95% of African workers stayed away from work in respect for the

Sharpeville massacre but arrests early the next morning netted more leaders including Molete, who was detained for five months. In Cape Town Colonel Terblanche continued his cautious strategy to ensure there was no repetition of Sharpeville. He considered rightly that some flexibility might defuse the situation and did not interpret granting bail to Kgosana as a major concession. Although the situation was still dangerous, he advised against arresting Liberal party activists, many of whom were distributing food and other supplies to the volatile townships. Terblanche made further allowances. He arranged for loudspeaker equipment to be supplied to the Langa PAC for the Day of Mourning service on March 28 attended by about 50,000 township residents at which no uniformed police attended. Despite this Terblanche resumed violent raids that evening and the following morning aimed at breaking the strike. Kgosana was totally unprepared for the reaction planned by anonymous PAC activists in Langa and Nyanga. He was still in bed on the morning of Wednesday 30 March when he learnt that thousands of marchers from Langa and Nyanga were converging on Cape Town sixteen kilometers away. He rushed to join them and was informed it was a protest against the police raids and their target was police headquarters in Caledon Square. He convinced them to head instead for the parliament building (The regime’s members of parliament divided their sessions between two parliament buildings, one in Pretoria and the other in Cape Town) to confront the Minister of Justice, Frans C. Erasmus. When the marchers, estimated at between thirty to fifty thousand, reached the intersection of Rowland and Buitenkant streets they encountered a police block. Kgosana negotiated with the detective in command and the marchers, amiable and cooperative, agreed to divert to Caledon Square. Saracen armored cars and armed soldiers were stationed outside parliament. To everyone’s astonishment, without a shot being fired, the tens of thousands of African demonstrators found they had occupied barely defended central Cape Town. If trouble broke out intervention by the parliamentary guard could have incited the demonstrators in a hostile destructive perhaps murderous flight that would have wrecked, looted, and burned government offices, prestigious buildings, banks, diplomatic missions, major stores, and even the docks and shipping. If the crowd had been forced back to the townships it could have caused carnage in the white suburbs it had passed on the way in. Terblanche was waiting at police headquarters in Caledon Square and was prepared to negotiate with Kgosana, who had taken command of the march. Kgosana demanded the release of Sobukwe and the other leaders, an end to police brutality, and a meeting with Erasmus, a hard-line former defence minister (1948-59). Terblanche phoned the minister for instructions. The exact details of the conversation have never been revealed but it is clear that Terblanche refused Erasmus’s order to use force against the crowd. He could give Kgosana no assurance about releasing the PAC leaders or changing police tactics but promised a meeting with Erasmus if Kgosana dispersed the crowd and returned at 5pm. The rapport already established between the two men obviously affected Kgosana’s judgment, already exhilarated from his dealings with Rupert and his success in controlling large demonstrations. He took Terblanche at his word although there is no evidence that Erasmus had promised such a meeting. One would have expected Kgosana to have stood his ground a little longer, insisting on Sobukwe’s release, more so if he had spent the last few days entirely in the company of the more militant lower echelons of the party. While he later justified himself by saying his decision to disperse the marchers was in accordance with Sobukwe’s instructions about obeying police orders to that effect he had already considerably deviated from PAC guidelines by enjoying far too cordial relations with inappropriate company. He could have been more reserved and distant with Terblanche, Rupert, and Duncan, consulted more with his followers, and considered strategies more suited to the changed circumstances, which is a circumspect way of stating he should have considered violence or uncompromising passive resistance. Ultimately the negotiations and promises, real or fabricated, were of no consequence because the regime declared a state of emergency after Kgosana had ordered the marchers to disperse. When he arrived at 5pm for his interview with Erasmus he was arrested and held without trial for five months. Erasmus’s fury at Terblanche’s non-confrontational approach cost

Terblanche his career. Erasmus should have been profoundly grateful. In 2004 Kgosana was awarded an ANC decoration, Officer of the Order of the Disa,16 “for courageous leadership and negotiating skills during this historic march [which] prevented a bloodbath and was an important milestone on the road to democracy in South Africa.” The Emperor Frederick the Great of Prussia once roared at his elite guards when they faltered during an attack: “Dogs, do you want to live forever?” When a cause is great enough extremist political activists and soldiers know that success may depend on them risking their lives at a decisive moment. As individual battle honors for valor reveal, many vital heroic acts are performed by the most unlikely people who often survive the ordeal. Caledon Square was awash with suitable candidates. Those who were political activists and irregular troops in the South African and Lesotho liberation movements are painfully aware of the broken lives, wretched existence, failed or unhappy marriages, estranged children, impecuniousness, imprisonment, loneliness and loss of status in exile, bitterness, stress-related alcoholism and other afflictions, betrayals, and tragedies that this career path gave most of us. Joe Slovo lost his wife Ruth First to a parcel bomb and Albie Sachs was mutilated in the same way. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for twenty seven years, Sobukwe restricted until his death, Ntsu Mokhehle twenty three years a prisoner, fugitive, and eventually a traitor with a mind so damaged he could not remember Mandela’s name when he welcomed him during a state visit. Very few ever had the opportunity to take dangerous risks but those that did testify that it compensated for all the setbacks, indignities, and jealous criticism they experienced before and since. O’Meara’s book speaks of South Africa’s lost forty years but he focuses on Afrikaner politics and economic opportunities not on the lives of Africans, particularly the class that entered Cape Town fifty years ago on 30 March 1960. It would be interesting to consult surviving participants to ascertain if they feel they should have attempted to seize control of Cape Town that day. In retrospect were their lives after the march fulfilling enough so that they had no regrets about marching home peacefully? Any rioting in central Cape Town would eventually have been ruthlessly suppressed but its consequences would have been far more serious than the 1976 Soweto and Cape risings, which were confined to the townships. Cape Town was inadequately garrisoned and before the march dispersed the regime was already calling in sailors to help bolster security. News of sustained street fighting, destruction of property including police headquarters, and insurgent capture and use of weapons would inevitably have inspired similar actions in Durban and other volatile urban areas. As the regime’s security forces took control the focus would have shifted to more national stay-at-home strikes, bolstered by newly politicized activists forcing workers to comply and then systematically murdering police spies and informers while developing an alternative government, as Michael Collins achieved in Ireland. Street fighting and large numbers of casualties in Cape Town would not have toppled the NP regime but anger at further massacres would probably have created a national culture of formidable and lasting urban resistance that manifested itself in a growing cycle of industrial action, attacks on Whites, and student unrest. While rural and lower class urban Afrikaners would have remained as obdurate as ever, the panic after Sharpeville indicated that the English speaking community would have rapidly lost confidence and the consequent flight of capital, skills, and investment would possibly have strengthened the verligte pragmatic reformist element’s hand in searching for a compromise with the ANC, as eventually happened. Future resistance was severely compromised by the split in the liberation movement along class lines which denied the militant PAC funding from the South African middle class and the Soviet bloc. Funds were therefore allocated to easily identifiable upper class ANC/SACP professionals. In the 1970’s the Lesotho Liberation Army (Lekhotla la Topollo) was transported, equipped and supplied by an APLA officer with limited independent means and donations from Basotho miners on the Rand and at Welkom17, but PAC had

16 Disa was a pagan Swedish chieftainess whose name was given to a South African orchid. 17 The APLA officer’s initial thirteen thousand pound sterling donation (including £3000 to Qhobela Molapo the BCP London representative) and a large Bedford van (which was actually lost when SWAPO, a Soviet allied movement, duped Selatile by reneging on its promise to import it into Tanzania free) enabled the LLA to travel in a large group, which convinced the miners that the war was

achieved very little in getting miners’ support. After Sharpeville Whites inundated the Canadian and Australian high commissions to enquire about emigration and many bought weapons. Investors from overseas withdrew millions of pounds from South Africa. The NP regime was condemned in a torrent of world criticism and the March 30 State of Emergency was the first since the Afrikaner rising in the First World War. Steel-helmeted troops patrolled the streets of Johannesburg. Resistance in fact continued after Kgosana’s decision to send the marchers home. Serious violence threatened the centre of Durban on March 31 and April 1, and freelance vigilantes kept African commuters away from work in parts of Johannesburg. However, although rural police forces areas were being depleted in answer to the urban emergencies, resistance petered out. Most commentaries on Sharpeville and its aftermath stress that the PAC was ill prepared and Kgosana easily duped but it appears more accurate to apportion blame on the ANC’s refusal to accommodate the aspirations of the expanding African lower middle class and migrant workers whose frustration created the PAC. The NP regime missed a strategic opportunity by failing to follow the advice of Len Lee-Warden, the COD white MP for the Western Cape African voters, who argued that the PAC alone should be banned:

“If ever there was a need, it exists today for the government to realise that it has in the ANC a friend and not an enemy, because these two organisations that we are asked to ban are so diametrically opposed that the government should seize the opportunity of appealing to the ANC to assist it to restore peace and order in South Africa.”

Had the NP regime followed this line, the ANC would probably have split again as radicals chose to distance themselves from being labelled government stooges. However both parties were banned on 8 April 1960. On 9 April Verwoerd was shot through the cheek and ear by an English speaking White farmer, who hanged himself in mental institution in October 1961. Verwoerd survived and returned to work convinced he had been spared for a divine mission. The pass laws were restored on 10 April and, since Africans could not work without a pass, there were humiliating scenes when large numbers queued to pay for new ones. Sobukwe’s refusal to consider alternative strategies had been directed by a determination to avoid violence. His insistence on principle and his cynical dismissal of the media had unforeseen consequences besides undermining the credibility of colleagues who accepted bail. The PAC represented working class and rural activists who used the vernacular, and distrusted or loathed Whites, especially journalists. More importantly they distanced themselves from the global caring middle class stereotyping Africans as Christ-like martyrs. Sobukwe’s last public appearance was in a magistrates’ court and had he known this was the last time he could make any impact he might have acted differently but the offences from an international viewpoint seemed rather trivial and the sentences perhaps could have been ameliorated by paying fines or altered following appeal by lawyers who could prove that Sobukwe and his NEC had no connection to violence and the onus was on the South African Police. However Sobukwe had criticised ANC leaders for hiring defence lawyers at great expense while the ANC rank and file were jailed. Consequently he insisted on a policy of “no plea, no bail, no defence, no fine,” with the result that on May 4 he was sentenced to three years jail, a mere forty-three days after Sharpeville. Leballo and three others received two years and the remaining fourteen eighteen months, including Madzunya who had boycotted the demonstrations. Kgosana

worth funding. The Mokhehle brothers ordered collections from the miners to be sent west by car over a weekend to Botswana where much was embezzled by Shakhane at the Gaborone casino and, in partnership with Moeketsi Sello (now a Lesotho member of parliament), for illegal diamond dealing. Mapefane was sacked for his carefully worded suggestion that the money be sent east, direct to the LLA on the Lesotho borderlands. Funding from the APLA officer terminated when Ntsu Mokhehle and Dr Tsiu Selatile asked for 46,000 Rand to buy a house for Ntsu Mokhehle and his Motswana mistress. Molapo splurged his funds at Harrods in London but later gained popularity with ex-LLA guerrillas by falsely claiming to have funded their journey from Tanzania to Botswana [PAC DVD data disk – letters and shipping documents].

skipped bail and was smuggled out of the country by two schoolboys working for BCP, one of whom, Matooane “Chazi” Mapefane, later trained the PAC’s military wing in Libya and commanded the Lesotho Liberation Army. The other, Tsiu Selatile, became the first African member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Before his trial Sobukwe was incarcerated in Number Four prison at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg. He was then transferred to Stoneyard in Benoni and then to Stofberg Gedenkskool in the OFS close to the Vaal river near Deneysville. From there he was moved to Witbank, east of Pretoria and then to Pretoria central jail. The PAC policy of offering no case enabled the regime to incarcerate the leaders in a space of weeks before international opinion and local activists could be organized to publicize the case. In contrast Mandela’s trial in October 1962 commenced more than two months after his August 5 arrest in which time a support committee had been formed. The Rivonia trial lasted six months under the international media spotlight and not only restored Mandela’s fading political credibility but made him a global figure. Zondeni Veronica Sobukwe [1997] stated that her husband was first held in Number Four prison at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg and then transferred to Stoneyard in Benoni. He was then taken to Stofberg, from there to Witbank, from Witbank to Pretoria Central Jail. Leballo said that jailed PAC Executive was sent for hard labour at Blue Sky prison near Boksburg. From there they were moved to Stofberg Gedenk Skool in the OFS to clear a forest, remove boulders and dig an irrigation lake. When many began to crack under the physical strain and abuse Sobukwe ordered many of them to pay their fines and go home. Violence erupted between the guards and prisoners but according to Leballo the authorities later allowed some leniency and Sobukwe was able to use his authority in organising labour. After the construction had been completed, the prisoners were moved to Witbank Agricultural Prison in the northern Transvaal, but Sobukwe and Leballo with a few others were sent to New Lock Prison in Pretoria. Leballo was held in extreme conditions in solitary confinement for frequent indiscipline. His sight was damaged, his blood pressure rose and he suffered thereafter from rheumatism and hypertension, which made his pretence of being ten years younger than he actually was more difficult to sustain. He was released in May 1962 and banished to a game reserve in Tongaland between Swaziland and the Indian Ocean. With the assistance of Joe Mkwanazi, a PAC activist and headmaster of the nearby Mseleni Mission School, he managed to escape and was smuggled across the Basutoland border by Ntsu Mokhehle. The Tanganyikan leader Julius Nyerere had urged Mandela to wait until Sobukwe was released before stated an armed insurrection so Mandela arranged to meet Leballo to ease over differences and form a united front but Mandela was arrested on August 6, 1962, the day before Leballo reached Maseru.

Mandela burning his pass book when the pass laws had been suspended.

CHAPTER FIVE

Basutoland had a historical reputation as “the centre of all native agitations” [Leeman 1985:45]. In the 1960’s the ANC, PAC and SACP tried to make secure bases in the protectorate, the PAC purely for military reasons, the ANC and SACP to infiltrate or form client Basotho political parties. In addition the NP regime and OMI Canadian Catholic missionaries worked to install the BNP as the government at independence while the departing British administration formed a special military unit to counter perceived future BCP linked unrest and favoured politicians subscribing to constitutional monarchy and the “Black Englishman” ideal. Ntsu Mokhehle had won thirty six of the forty elected seats in the new legislature but was not treated as premier in waiting. His deputy, Bennett Khaketla, had joined the party late, in 1958, to protect his newspaper Mohlabani, which supported BCP’s views, when the BCP launched its own new publication, Makatolle. When Khaketla refused the BCP demand to decline his seat on the Executive Council, with eventual catastrophic consequences, the BCP began the first of a series of local battles to preserve unity and focus on the future. Externally the Transvaal province branch of the party was heavily embroiled in the March 1960 demonstrations because the BCP permitted dual party membership until December that year. Secondly Mokhehle was Nkrumah’s man in Southern Africa working for freedom for both Basutoland and South Africa by 1963. While grateful his decision to return to Basutoland had saved him from sharing the fate of the PAC leaders he felt even more as if he were in Lilliput. He fought off leadership challenges, juggled the diverse elements within the BCP: the South African based left wing and the anarchistic “Russians” (migrant miners), the militant republican peasantry in Basutoland, the small but influential Maseru based anglophiles, and the newly formed radical student union, but did little or no work in winning over the Basotho Catholic rural women, who had a hard headed realism and no interest at all in Afro-Asian Solidarity and other issues if they did not bring their migrant men folk home and give their children a better future. Nor could he make any headway with the University College, Roma. Whereas University College Fort Hare had enabled many of the most talented and politicized young Africans to formulate political strategies and go on to head the ANC, BCP and PAC, Basutoland’s only university was a creation of the Canadian OMI and geared to producing carefully screened conservative Catholic civil servants. Of great importance was that, despite his setback after winning the election, of the Fort Hare generation he was the only leader who had practical political experience free of persecution and, despite his lasting friendship with Sobukwe and Leballo, was committed to parliamentary democracy not armed insurrection. Over the next ten years he would accumulate a wealth of practical experience in parliamentary practices and developing communal peasant initiatives but ultimately would be forced into revolutionary warfare. After Sharpeville, Joe Matthews was dispatched by the SACP with considerable regular Soviet funding to take over the BCP. His initial attempt failed but obliged the BCP to terminate dual party membership as the ANC-PAC dispute was causing friction. Mathews then switched his funding to form the Lesotho Communist Party. This was not at all successful and the LCP split into factions respectively allied to Moscow and Beijing. Matthews then accompanied Mandela to other African countries. His observations on Mandela’s rapid political development, in particular his changing attitude towards the PAC, alarmed the SACP. While the PAC leadership had been locked away influential members of both ANC and PAC concluded that given the savagery of the NP crackdown and its steps to break from the Commonwealth and declare a Republic in 1961, the two parties should consider a united strategy. In April 1960, Peter ’Molotsi, Nana Mahomo (PAC) and Oliver Tambo (ANC) came under pressure in Ghana to unite against the White enemy. The next month in Addis Ababa, the Second Conference of Independent African states established offices in London, Cairo, Accra, Dar es Salaam and facilities for representatives at the United Nations, the Afro-Asian countries and the British Commonwealth for

the newly-constituted South African United Front (SAUF) to which the PAC, ANC, SAIC and the South-West African National Union (SWANU) belonged. Z. B. Molete had been released in August 1960 and became PAC acting president. He and Joe Molefi discussed unity with the ANC. On 16th and 17th December, 1960, a consultative conference was held to decide on unity and a joint course of action. The PAC delegation, Molete, Molefi and Francis Mbelu, called for a full conference which should be attended by African delegates alone. No objection was raised by the Congress Alliance delegation of Govan Mbeki (SACP), Dr. William Conco, Dr. Njongwe (ANC) or the ex-ANCYL leader and non PAC Africanist, G. M. Pitje. A Continuation Committee was formed in December, but in March 1961 the PAC withdrew from the proceedings, feeling that they were being used by the ANC to bolster that party's declining fortunes. On 25th and 26th March, 1961, an ‘All-In Conference’ was held at Pietermaritzburg, ostensibly to decide a suitable course of action regarding protests against the NP regime’s decision to quit the Commonwealth and declare a republic on 31st May that year. The PAC and BCP believed that conference was stage-managed by the ANC to demonstrate the party's new-found militancy under Mandela to the detriment of Lutuli. The ANC dominated the 1,400 member conference and Mandela appeared dramatically - his first public platform appearance since his banning in 1952 - to issue an ultimatum to the Verwoerd government. Having done this, it was announced that he was the secretary of a newly-formed National Action Council, but that the identity of the other members of this organisation must be kept secret. With that, he disappeared. The conference, guided by the ANC, endorsed Mandela's appeal for a stay-at-home strike to coincide with Republic Day. Jordan Ngubane (Liberal Party) and other delegates severely criticised the event arguing that they had convened in the spirit of earlier meetings (1912 and 1935-36) when Africans from widely differing backgrounds had met to find common ground. The police responded on 24th May by arresting 8,000-10,000 ANC suspects. Mandela evaded capture during the massive round-up which greeted his call for action. The PAC denounced the ‘stay-at-home’ call and the protests were a failure. Mokhehle criticised Mandela for alerting the white authorities in advance and said he had "run away" to Basutoland after "causing a mess," a statement which was virulently attacked in New Age. New Age continued its assault in a later edition, stating,

"Mr Mokhehle's bold statement (perhaps for the benefit of the South African Police) that Mr Mandela has run away to Basutoland and was present at a meeting to discuss 'the conquest of the BCP' is the most despicable slander and lie ever fabricated by what is supposed to be a responsible leader of a struggling people."

Mokhehle clarified his remarks by explaining that Mandela, Sisulu, Moses Kotane and Matthews met the BCP Executive to seek support for the 31st May protests. They wanted the BCP to join them in setting up a printing press, the use of which should be denied the PAC. They also asked the BCP to organise anti-Republic Day demonstrations in Basutoland. Lastly, they advised the BCP to demand independence, instead of responsible government. Mokhehle, aware of Matthews' activities, doubted their sincerity and declined to assist. Lutuli now found his passive resistance beliefs were no longer acceptable to his SACP allies and, more importantly, Nelson Mandela. Several opponents of White minority rule such as Mahatma Gandhi, Josiah Gumede, Potlako Leballo, James La Guma, Joe Slovo (who added three years to his age to be accepted for Second World War Service), “Rusty” Bernstein, Jack Hodgson, and Mary Benson had served in the local military forces from the South African War to the Second World War but until 1960 only Leballo had seriously considered armed revolution. The SACP/ANC, given their class concerns and Soviet allegiance, adopted a carefully controlled sabotage strategy that would cause extensive economic damage, refrain from killing anyone, and eventually force the White regime to negotiate so the ANC/SACP could join and modify the existing structure rather than replace it. This contrasted with the revolutionaries who had seized power in Cuba in 1959 by combining urban and rural resistance and cooperating with other organizations including the

Communist Party, which at one stage had held ministries in the ousted Battista government. Later, in 1965, Fidel Castro’s deputy Ernesto “Che” Guevara set up a military mission in eastern Congo to assist rural rebellion but, because of the growing Cuban and Vietnamese dependence on the Soviet Union, immensely valuable Cuban and Vietnamese military and political support was denied the PAC and wasted by the ANC when it formed its armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in November 1961 with Mandela as its commander. The other ten members of his Mandela’s high command (Dennis Goldberg, Jack Hodgson, Ahmed Kathrada, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni, Joe Modise, Elias Motsoaledi, Walter Sisulu, and Joe Slovo), were all members of the SACP, once again reducing the party’s appeal for mass recruitment in order to sustain its narrow upper class leadership structure with its obsession for tight control and caution being of more importance than mass action, the very factors that had split the party in 1959. Umkhonto we Sizwe stressed it was “working in the best interests of all the people of this country, black, brown and white.....” a laudable objective where class and colour were synonymous but did not resonate with the mass of African militants whose only contact with Whites was confined to mostly disagreeable situations. The SACP/ANC argued optimistically but unconvincingly, given historical precedents such as the allied bombing of Hitler’s Germany and the siege of Stalingrad, that sabotage was the answer because “smashed railway lines, damaged pylons carrying electricity across the country, bombed-out petrol dumps cut Verwoerd off from his power, and leave him helpless.” The first MK recruits were sent for military training to Algeria followed by Mhlaba, Motsoaleli and others to China but before their return, on 16 December 1961 (Afrikanerdom’s “holiest” day), MK damaged post offices and other government facilities in Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and Durban. The SACP then assisted Mandela to leave the country to get support for the political and military struggle [Mandela 342-2]. For much of his journey he was accompanied by Joe Matthews, whose funding of Mokhehle’s rivals was causing problems for the BCP. Mandela evaded capture during the massive round-up which greeted his call for action. He left Southern Africa, visiting Algeria, Britain, Ethiopia and other countries, meeting Nyerere of Tanganyika, Haile Selassie, General Abboud of Sudan, Bourguiba of Tunisia, Keita of Mali, Senghor, Sekou Toure, Tubman of Liberia, Ben Bella, Boumedienne, Kaunda, Oginga Odinga, Nkomo, Obote and also two leading British politicians, Hugh Gaitskell and Jo Grimond of the Labour and Liberal parties. However SAUF, the alliance between the movements, collapsed in Dar es Salaam in January 1962. The same month Mandela addressed the Pan-African Freedom Movement in Addis Ababa. The effect of his few weeks of travels had been profound. It had been his first journey outside South Africa and he had been taken aback at unusual sights such as an African airline pilot. He had met with the leaders of African freedom movements who had utilised methods similar to those employed by the PAC in achieving their objectives - most notably Algeria and Kenya. He had encountered criticism from African leaders on the ANC's acceptance of control by a small group of Whites. There was never any question of Mandela going over to the PAC, despite his second wife Winnie’s more radical outlook and sympathy for that party, but he could no longer tolerate the ANC’s subjugation to the SACP. Lutuli’s position was unclear but while Mandela was in Addis Ababa he withdrew the ANC from that the Congress Alliance. Unfortunately SAUF finally broke up in Addis Ababa the next month when Kgosana (who was subsequently expelled from the PAC) attacked the organisation in Mandela’s presence. Mandela then undertook military training in the hills surrounding Addis Ababa. He accepted that despite bitterness between ANC/SACP and PAC the struggle would be far more successful if they cooperated utilising their strengths in different spheres. While Mandela found Sobukwe awkward and petty, he respected Leballo and years later in 1985 (to Leballo’s annoyance) magnanimously appointed Leballo as his defence minister in a proposed unity cabinet. He believed that if he explained matters face to face with the SACP they would accept the loss of their dominant role and continue to be a valuable ally. Some time in 1962, the South African Communist Party took decisions to deal with Mandela's action. A Programme of the South African Communist Party was adopted at what was called “The

Fifth National Conference of the South African Communist Party held inside the country in 1962.” (sic). It was, perhaps, felt inconceivable by others that a national conference would be held anywhere else and, if indeed it was held in South Africa, its attendance must have been minuscule, for it escaped the notice of Lutuli and everyone else. No date apart from the year has ever been forthcoming and it is likely that no meeting numbering more than two or three people was ever held. The SCAP recognised the continental rise of African socialism but called it a “mistaken” concept. It reiterated that “The whole of international experience has proved beyond any shadow of doubt that the main truths of Marxist-Leninism are fully applicable to countries in every stage of social development.” Deviation could only result in the “betrayal of the working class.” Two statements were indicative of the mindset of its author(s): “Africans live in every part of our country,” and “race hatred and antagonism.....are the greatest threat to the continued security and existence of the White population.” Events in the Congo, the “Mau-Mau” rising in Kenya and the expulsion of White settlers from Algeria, Indonesia, and Vietnam certainly influenced their thought, more so because many of the SACP were eastern European Jews whose families had been exterminated by racist murderers from a class that frighteningly resembled supports of the PAC. Mandela returned to South Africa via Bechuanaland and reached Liliesleaf Farm, Rivonia, which had been bought by the SACP as MK’s operational headquarters. He was completely in the hands of the SACP for his meeting was with Sisulu, Kotane, Mbeki, Marks, Nokwe and Dan Tloome, and ANC deputy-secretary general but SACP member and its future chairman. Mandela later wrote “I proposed reshaping the Congress Alliance so that the ANC would clearly be seen as the leader, especially on issues directly affecting Africans [Mandela 1994:370]. Mandela then left for Durban and met Monty Naicker and Ismail Meer, both of the Indian Congress/SACP. Naicker and Meer opposed Mandela’s suggestion as did Lutuli himself at Groutville although Lutuli said he would mull over the matter further. Lutuli objected to Mandela’s report that African leaders had advised the party what to do. Lutuli believed they should not interfere. One important point was not raised. Although the Kennedy administration had not yet achieved much progress with African American issues, it was clear that changes would eventually be implemented and inevitably the African American professional class would be highly influential in the future. Given domination of the ANC by the SACP the ANC could hardly expect American assistance when it was directed and funded by Soviet apparatchiks. Certainly the terminally bourgeois Oliver Tambo would have gained far more international support in exile if he had not postured as an overweight undertrained revolutionary; and South Africa would have been seen more like the Confederacy than a bulwark against Communism. BCP sources state that Mandela in had earlier hid in eastern Basutoland in 1961/2 and intended meeting Leballo, who was due to arrive clandestinely in Maseru in Mokhehle’s van on August 6, 1962. Joe Matthews was back in Maseru and, according to the BCP, announced on August 4 (sic), “Hey, have you heard? Mandela’s been arrested.” In his book Mandela made no mention of Leballo stating instead that he intended to travel back to Johannesburg on August 5 and was arrested at Cedera near Howick by an Afrikaner police officer who knew exactly where to find him and had an arrest warrant in his name and knew the name of his driver since Bechuanaland, Cecil Williams (1906-1979), of the SACP, a White former soldier and theatre director who was later hailed as a gay hero. Mandela was sentenced to five years for leaving the country illegally while Williams was released and allowed to return to his native England. Despite the highly likely retention of South African police records concerning Mandela’s arrest, the issue of who betrayed him has never been seriously investigated. Colonel Art Spengler, head of the Witwatersrand special branch, would surely have known who assisted him. Similar lack of enthusiasm elsewhere such as Ireland, Lesotho (most notoriously Shakhane Mokhehle, Ntsu’s half mad brother) and Kenya (where colonial records were destroyed) and examples from Eastern Europe indicate that many leading personalities often played a double game by acting as informers against their political rivals. Mandela rejected the usual suspect, the American CIA. Had the CIA been involved, the special branch would have rounded up the SACP at Liliesleaf Farm so there is probably much justification in

the BCP claim that Mandela was betrayed by an SACP member after he had demanded an end to the Alliance. At the time the leading suspects were Joe Matthews, Harold Wolpe, Cecil Williams, and SACP members in Durban. Wolpe’s wife later wrote that she was disappointed that her husband was seemingly ignored for a high position in the post 1994 South Africa, and Joe Matthews’ fall from grace was why he ended his political career as an Inkatha junior minister. Leballo had spent almost three years in humiliating brutalized conditions and his primary objective was to drive the Whites into the sea and achieve freedom by 1963, as Sobukwe and Mokhehle demanded for their respective countries. Leballo’s strategy contrasted sharply with ANC/SACP, which seemed mesmerized by the NP. Leballo was constantly on the attack and unconcerned with any NP reaction, whereas ANC/SACP, in Richard Gibson’s prophetic words, “was always looking for the great conference table in the sky.” ANC/SACP wanted reform while Leballo wanted to sweep away the White state and replace its structure with one developed through revolutionary warfare, trusting in Sobukwe’s dictum and the historical experience of the Lifaqane/Mfecane that “the people would find their way.” He reasoned that although there would be widespread carnage and severe economic hardship the long term future would be far happier than reforming the inequitable racist state. Looking at the “new” but still deeply inequitable and troubled South Africa sixteen years after Mandela’s advent to power, perhaps Leballo had a point. Leballo found the exiled PAC members in Maseru feuding among themselves, which eventually led, after his departure in 1964, to the murder of members of the “Katangese” faction of the Western Cape PAC regional chairman Christopher Mlokoti by the Pokela faction. On 20th December 1960, the PAC decided at their second National conference to adopt a policy of armed insurrection. Since the 1950’s, peasants in Pondoland had been agitating against certain local injustices including corrupt chiefs and other symbols of oppression. On 6 June, eleven of them were killed by police. The peasants retaliated by killing twenty collaborators and two chiefs and, by September, Thembuland was experiencing unrest. In November 1960, a State of Emergency was declared in the Transkei (which contains both Thembu and Pondoland). Eventually 4,769 peasants were detained (officially) of whom twenty were hanged. Both the ANC and the Unity Movement claimed responsibility for instigating the risings but, in reality, the peasants had taken the initiative themselves. Other elements such as the vigilante Makhulu Span and Pondoland “Congo mountain men” (linked to paganism, ritual murder and witchcraft) contributed to the breakdown in order with individuals and groups claiming political allegiances without necessarily having any formal contact with the parties concerned. By the time Leballo established PAC headquarters in Bonhomme House in Maseru, PAC militants were already committing violence in the name of Poqo whose meanings included “pure undiluted nationalists.” Some PAC branches in the Cape had instigated violence and linked the resistance in the Transkei. Mandela was too closely related to Poqo’s chief adversary, the corrupt Mantanzima regime, to consider involvement. The PAC was already combing with Poqo before Leballo’s arrival in Maseru. At the end of September 1962, the PAC convened a presidential Council consisting of Leballo as acting president, John Nyati, Percy Gqobose, Z. B. Molete, E. Mfaxa, N. M. Ntantala and J.J. Letlaka. Zephaniah Mothopeng, released from prison, visited Sobukwe in detention and brought the PAC leader's endorsement for continued armed struggle. In October, Leballo over flew South Africa in a United Nations aircraft for Dar es Salaam and then the United Nations in New York. On his return, he stopped off in Accra and Cairo. He expressed disquiet over the failure of the external missions to organise military training on a large scale. Only a few PAC members were being trained in Egypt. President Nkrumah made arrangements with Mahomo, ’Molotsi and Vus Make (of bus boycott and Treason Trial fame) respectively the Accra, London and Cairo PAC representatives, for a Swedish freighter, purchased for £124,000 to be loaded with arms in Egypt. These would be landed on the Transkei coast for Poqo. Between October and December 1962, Poqo violence escalated in the Transkei. In October an adviser of Chief Matanzima was assassinated at Comfimbava, and Chief Mayeza Dalesile at Encobo. An attempt on Matanzima himself took place in December. In the Cape, Mlami Makwetu, Wellington

Ishongayi and other militant PAC members took control of the local party structure at Langa from less radical officials. Their agitation led to the attack in Paarl on the night of 22/23 November 1962, when 250 men left Mbekweni location and attacked the Paarl prison and police station. Five were killed, fourteen wounded and two Whites killed. Some of the attackers were later hanged. On the night of 2 February 1963 came the PAC’s defining moment, from which, despite Leballo’s later conversion to Maoism, it never progressed. The “Black Nazi” element asserted itself when about fifty PAC members attacked a caravan park at the Mbashe (Bashee) River Bridge in the Transkei close to where the youthful Mandela had attended initiation lodge. They slaughtered five Whites, including a woman and two young girls, and allegedly roasted their bodies on a bonfire. Thirteen of the killers (five from one family) were executed, two died in jail, and two were jailed. The PAC’s association with fascist slaughter was exacerbated by Leballo’s press conference in March (see below). In early 1963, the PAC’s Swedish freighter was sighted in the Indian Ocean, but failed to keep a rendezvous with Poqo off St. John's. No more was discovered until a report came that it had visited Madagascar and had eventually been sold elsewhere for £160,000. No culprit was ever found but American celebrity Maya Angelou’s husband, Vusumzi “Vus” Make, who later descended into alcoholism, corruption and treachery, is generally held to have been responsible. If the SACP had acquiesced to Mandela’s demands of reorienting its relations with ANC, its significant influence in clandestine trade union work would have assisted a Mandela-Leballo alliance to smuggle in weapons to rural activists who possibly would have restrained their extreme anti-White activities in gratitude to White SACP assistance. Denied cooperation, Leballo’s strategy was to exploit every avenue that would provoke violence from the regime and cause the lowest socio-economic elements into armed retaliation. Inevitably this encouraged the Black Nazi element. In Leballo’s case he respected and formed lifetime friendships with a handful of people he called “White Africans” - Whites who either shared his austere tastes, teetotalism, simple life style and political and/or military commitment to destroying the Pretoria regime such as Patrick Duncan (briefly) Cosmas Desmond (by reputation), Reverend Michael Scott, and his Tanganyika-raised APLA intelligence chief. Leballo’s racist reputation was class based. He hated White oppression, luxury, and White dissident arrogance cloaked in Marxist terminology. Poqo activists were mostly urbanised African youth still retaining strong rural connections. They tended to have had some formal education but were more often than not unemployed. They shared the tsotsis’ disgust with African class aspirations (many were in fact tsotsis) and were virulently anti-White. In March 1963, the PAC agreed that a national rising would commence on 8 April. On 21 March, the PAC issued a press statement declaring that the time was ripe for a “knock-out blow” against the Whites and that it was possible that White women and children would suffer in the months to come. The same day, the South African parliament was informed that Poqo and PAC were the same organisation and posed a serious threat.” A sense of panic had already afflicted White society. The NP government was under extreme pressure to take action. Home Guard units established in every Transkeian town had failed to quell the violence and the scheme had been extended to thirty-five towns in the rest of the Republic. Judge Snyman, investigating the Paarl attack reported that stronger acts were needed because "Poqo (is) nou sterker as ooit." (Poqo is stronger than ever). The respected columnist Dawie (usually P. J. Cillie) writing in Die Burger, the influential Afrikaner newspaper, said of Poqo:

“Similar movements have existed in many countries, or still exist. They are not easily uprooted. It is the outgrowth of a majority's natural striving for political rights and domination in a united South Africa.”

On Monday, 25th March The Rand Daily Mail carried banner headlines BLACK WAVE NEARS sandwiched between two lesser headlines -Only Arms Can Save S.A. - Donges and Vorster and Fouche Face Poqo Probe suggesting NP incompetence. Die Burger printed a cartoon of a giant snake

marked “Poqo” and called for action in an editorial on “Black Terrorism.” The generally ineffectual opposition United Party criticised the government for being too slow in dealing with Poqo while the Progressive Party's only M.P. warned the government that more Poqo risings would occur unless the government changed its policies. In brief, White opinion across the entire political spectrum was insisting on immediate dramatic action. On Sunday, 24th March, Leballo and Z. B. Molete met a single journalist in what was reported as “at a press conference behind locked doors in (Leballo's) Maseru office.” In a small article the next day, overshadowed entirely by the “BLACK WAVE NEARS” headline, the Rand Daily Mail reported that Leballo had stated that Poqo and PAC were the same. Other reports said that Leballo had claimed Poqo was 155,000 in strength, divided into 1000 cells, all poised for the order to attack. Die Burger took the claims more seriously, announcing that, “The police and army are standing ready,” and that John Vorster, the Minister of Justice, was assuring parliament that action was imminent. However, it is clear that the press conference had no influence at all on NP retaliation for the authorities were already working towards Snyman’s recommendation of drastiese stappe (drastic steps) against Poqo. On 29 March, two PAC couriers, Cynthia Lichaba and Patricia Lethalo, were arrested at the Caledon Bridge frontier in possession of seventy letters from the PAC headquarters in Maseru, warning that there was danger in Basutoland and urging members in South Africa to ‘stay put’ until the situation in Maseru was clarified. On 1 April, the British-led Basutoland police raided PAC headquarters, in Bonhomme House, which the party shared with the BCP. Leballo evaded capture by hiding in Dr. Maema's surgery and then in the grounds of the Evangelical Church. He was discovered by a Mosotho policeman, who warned him to keep low as the police had orders to shoot him on sight. In the evening, Pokela and Mokhehle took him by land rover to Tsiu's Village at Berea Mountain, on the edge of Maseru, where the headman gave him shelter. The British raid on PAC headquarters was believed to have been undertaken with members of the South African security forces. The latter had their own sympathisers and working in the British police force in Basutoland, so captured material may have been passed to South Africa through them. Lieutenant-General J. M. Keevy of the South African police denied that captured lists of PAC members had been handed over by the British but, in the British parliament, the Duke of Devonshire, under-secretary for Commonwealth Relations, fuelled suspicions when he stated that it was “unwise to reply” to reports of the discovery of a Poqo list. The raid was used by rival movements as a weapon against Leballo. It was claimed that Leballo's ‘press conference’ had caused the raid, which had netted a list of 15,000 PAC members’ names. Gordon Winter, a BOSS agent who had befriended Leballo, later wrote that a certain Hans Lombard had managed to obtain a list of 4,000 members whom Leballo intended to activate when the time came. Winter said that the 15,000 figure was the number given by the South Africans in order to alert Whites to the Poqo menace and give credit to the government for smashing the rising. Keevy stated that the arrests throughout South Africa after the raid were the result of the capture of the seventy letters. Z.B. Molete, Elias Ntloedibe and Elliot Mfaxa were detained in Basutoland, while Joe Molefi went to ground. On 3 April, fifty three suspected Poqo members were arrested in Johannesburg and another twenty in the Cape a day later. These figures supported Keevy's claim that the captured letters guided the police but did nothing to stifle ANC and other critics. Jack Halpern of the SACP blamed the raid on Leballo's “personal instability” and his love for “exaggerated claims.” At the same time, Halpern studiously ignored the eight thousand arrests that resulted from Mandela's ultimatum in 1961, calling him “widely admired and even revered for his courageous underground leadership.” Mandela remained silent on the issue but the ANC was reported as threatening to kill Leballo (in contrast to its policy nto to harm Whites) if he was ever found again while the Rand Daily Mail, reporting on Leballo's presumed death, said that he was “believed killed by his own people.” Mokotso Pheko, a supporter of the Pokela faction PAC, who later had to flee Zambia when the PAC revealed his habit issuing denunciations of Leballo under pseudonyms, justified the attempt to overthrow Leballo in 1979 because “of his (Leballo's) 1963 stupid statement in which he got 10,000 PAC members

arrested.” Tom Lodge, a controversial academic writer on the PAC and Poqo with a personal vendetta against Leballo, did not even consult contemporary documents when writing on the “press conference,” giving its date incorrectly as 1 April. Lodge referred to Leballo throughout his doctrinal thesis and major book as “Potlake” and sneered at Leballo’s post-Poqo military strategy without having read his work [communication to Leeman]. Ironically, Leballo's success in inflaming the most wretched, the most violent and the most “ungrateful” sections of the African population brought him more hatred from pious hypocrites and the liberal-elitist establishment than it reserved for the system they ostensibly opposed. His tutor at Lovedale and comrade-in-arms in North Africa, Professor Macquarrie, suggested Leballo during his prisoner of war days had been recruited by the Nazis, while the South African liberal press, with its prejudice about who should be African leaders - graduates, army officers, ordained ministers or government appointed chiefs - derided his hopes for freedom, addressing him as “self-appointed” leader of the PAC. Leballo was, irrespective of conditions, constantly belligerent, uncompromising and answerable only to Sobukwe. What he had achieved was spectacular. Supposedly marginalized by expulsion from the ANC for rightly denouncing Sisulu’s treacherous double game, in a matter of a few months his manic energy had upstaged the ANC and brought armed confrontation between the NP and its African opponents. Next, within a short time of escaping from restriction he was held responsible for seriously threatening the republic’s security and had been listed as “Public Enemy Number One.” Later he would train and launch the first major guerrilla attack into the region through the Lesotho Liberation Army (1979) and in penniless exile still manage to break Leabua Jonathan in January 1986. Ridiculed, and a major target for yellow journalism, he was a major force in South African and Lesotho politics from 1952 until his death in 1986 although severely weakened by an American financed, Tanzanian supported leadership coup in 1979. Such was the hostile reaction of the SACP that he is rarely mentioned in any publication and then overwhelmingly disparagingly. Denied the Egyptian arms, its Basutoland headquarters closed, and with Leballo in hiding, the PAC suffered a further major setback when Sobukwe, scheduled for release in May 1963 was detained indefinitely under another law, called “The Sobukwe Clause” which empowered the government to detain a prisoner after the expiration of his sentence if the regime’s minister of justice considered that after release he would be likely to further the aims of communism. On 3rd May, 1963, Sobukwe was sent to Robben Island, instead of being released from detention. The new prison on Robben Island, which Sobukwe “opened”, measured 250 x 150 yards - the exact size of the Koffiefontein internment camp where the new minister of justice, John Vorster, had been held as a traitor during the Second World War. In 1964, Sobukwe and the other PAC prisoners on Robben Island were joined by Nelson Mandela and several African members of the ANC. Sobukwe remained on Robben Island until 1969 and then in restriction in Kimberley until his death from lung cancer in 1978. Poqo resistance continued. The police station and airport at East London and the police station at King William’s Town were attacked on occur on 8 April. On 9 April, Poqo attempted to destroy Johannesburg’s power lines and seize arms and ammunition. With MK’s sabotage also on its mind, the NP quickly retaliated by passing the “ninety day law” enabling police to detain people without trial. By 5 June, 1963, a total of 3,246 suspected Poqo members were under arrest, 124 of whom had already been convicted of murder. Further activity continued. In April 1965, two hundred PAC members were found guilty of anti-state activities in the Port Elizabeth area, and an additional thirty were sentenced for planning a rising in the Western Cape. Scattered outbreaks continued until 1968. Leballo remained hidden at Ha Tsiu close to Maseru until September 1963, by which time it was generally believed he was dead. His reappearance in the spectators’ gallery in the Basutoland House of Assembly prompted the NP regime to pass the Prevention of Violence Abroad Proclamation aimed at anyone planning insurrection against the South African government from another country. Eventually in August 1964 the South Africans pressured Britain into expelling Leballo from Basutoland, where he ranked as the chief of Lifelekoaneng near Mafeteng. He established a secure headquarters firstly in Ghana and gave serious attention to training guerrillas. About a hundred PAC recruits went for

training in Ghana, Egypt, and Algeria, while more went to China at a later date. These eventually formed the Azanian People's Liberation Army (APLA) under Templeton Ntantala. The name Azania was chosen by the PAC in Ghana as an alternative to South Africa. Later, evidence was submitted to support the name as archaeological diggings in the 1930’s in the northern Transvaal had identified to a possible occupation of Mapungubwe by Cushitic “Azanians”. Despite Mandela’s imprisonment, Umkhonto we Sizwe remarkably lasted unscathed until 1 July 1963 when a raid at Liliesleaf farm captured almost all the MK high command and discovered Mandela’s incriminating diary implicating his role in sabotage. Pascale Lamche, director of the film Sophiatown, commented:

What this … shows is that they were a bunch of bungling intellectuals. They didn't really know how to do this. The fact that they kept hundreds of incriminating documents is ludicrous. I’m sure that no other underground guerrilla movement, in basically a police state, kept documents that could send them away for eternity. But they did because they realised they were making history and needed to keep all this stuff. BBC Interview 26 March 2004

The location of MK headquarters was attributed to a South African intelligence agent, Gerard Ludi, who had joined the Congress of Democrats. Mandela’s trial contrasted vividly with Sobukwe’s. The PAC leader was arrested, convicted and imprisoned in a space of forty three days and his sentence never evoked more than a small fraction of international attention. Even his suffering in jail was dismissed by his supposed close friend Benjamin Pogrund in order to denigrate Leballo. Lastly while Mandela was accused by an international pariah comparable to modern Myanmar - the Afrikaner Republic of South Africa - Sobukwe and his colleagues had been answerable to the Union head of state, Queen Elizabeth II (Regina vs Sobukwe and others). Nelson Mandela’s defining moment was the Rivonia Trial where he was defended by a team of White lawyers led by Bram Fischer. Fisher was a secret member of the underground SACP but his wife was Jan Smuts’ niece and he was an Oxford University Rhodes Scholar, son of an OFS Judge President and grandson of the Orange River Colony’s only prime minister, who became Minister of Home Affairs after Union. Fischer was assisted by George Bizos, who wrote a vital phrase in Mandela’s speech; Arthur Chaskalson, later Chief Justice 2001-5; Harold Hanson, a King’s/Queen’s Counsellor since 1946; Joel Joffe, now a British Labour Party Baron in House of Lords; and Harry Schwarz, a prominent United Party politician and co-founder of the Torch Commando. The trial attracted world attention. The indictment was served on 9 October 1963 and the trial was due to commence on 26 November but after complications began on 3 December 1963 and ended 12 June 1964. World outrage at Mandela’s life sentence was so great that it gave him and the ANC immense lasting sympathy and political capital he would never have accumulated had he fled into exile. Since Mozambique, Rhodesia, Angola, and South West Africa (Namibia) acted as colonial and racist settler buffers between independent Africa and South Africa, Ntsu Mokhehle remained the PAC’s best hope in the region. Between 1960 and 1964 Mokhehle’s strongest rival had been the hybrid Marematlou Freedom Party (MFP), an amalgam of senior chiefs, the new Paramount, the Anglophile elite and ANC/SACP oriented politicians funded by Matthews (who had abandoned the Lesotho Communist Party) and favored by the outgoing British administration, which had introduced a paramilitary unit, the Police Mobile Unit (PMU) unit, based on Britain’s only armed police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The PMU and the Lesotho Mounted Police (LMP) were commanded by British officers hostile to the BCP. The MFP secretary-general was Bennet Khaketla, who was fêted in Moscow as the leader of Basutoland’s ANC. However in 1964 an ambush of BCP leaders by MFP supporters at Rothe cost the MFP considerable support to the advantage of the BNP, which was backed by the conservative OMI and the NP regime in Pretoria. In the 1965 pre-independence election

the BCP and MFP together gained more votes but fewer seats than the BNP18. The BCP was unable to obtain proxy votes from its huge membership in South Africa and the BNP took great advantage of the newly enfranchised Basotho Catholic women. Over confidence cost the BCP the election because it had deemed election boundary changes to fit demographic change unnecessary until after the election. Had the changes been implemented it would won more seats in its northwest strongholds and gained a majority in parliament. Nevertheless, Matthews’ funding of the MFP is still considered the major reason for the loss. The chief benefit of the 1960-1965 period was the BCP’s experience in running district councils where elected members who were not voted to parliament were determined to make the councils more efficient than under the traditional chieftaincy. Unfortunately most of this experience was lost in the dismantling of the councils after 1965 and through the BNP regime’s reliance on foreign expertise and aid. In one incidence the local peasants built a rival road parallel to a government sponsored road to show that foreign assistance was unnecessary, and during the coup regime’s rule foreign projects often foundered through lingering resentment, such as when a herd of horses sponsored by the Irish government was driven over a cliff [Ferguson 1990] . The BCP councils remain the only example in Southern African politics where the Africanists experienced power [Leeman 1985] but their experience was never utilised by international development agencies after 1994. It was as if, from the 1960’s onwards, there had been a concerted effort, not just by the petty chief BNP government and mining interests (which caused the aerial slaughter of diamond miners in the 1970 repression) but also by international agencies and Christian organisations (such as the one that finances American pilots to fly round showing condoms to villagers and “proclaim the Lord”) who did not want local peasants to direct their own affairs. Ntsukunyane Mphanya, the BCP leader, expressed the party’s disillusionment with the UN and other organisations, by publishing his work Matsema on land law and agricultural practices in Sesotho, not English.

18 BNP 108,140 votes, 31 seats (Party leader, secretary-general, deputy secretary-general, chairman, vice-chairman and treasurer all lost); BCP 103,068 votes, 25 seats (Party deputy secretary-general lost); MFP 40,414 votes, 4 seats (Party leader and secretary- general lost); Marema Tlou (remnant of original party) 5697, no seats; Independents 79 votes, no seats. BNP overall majorities in 23 out of 60 seats. [Leeman 1985]

CHAPTER SIX

Ironically Sobukwe’s success in mobilizing and articulating lower class opposition to the ANC/SACP’s elitist anti-democratic leadership clique ended in defeat following the bannings of 1960 as the PAC was geared to mass politicization not lobbying for support in exile. The Mbashe river murders continued to haunt Leballo and convinced him that the party should eradicate its national socialist element. Consequently, with Sobukwe’s approval, he reoriented the PAC towards Maoism although he remained loyal to Nkrumah, despite the latter’s descent into surrealistic dictatorship and his overthrow in 1966. Leballo established a personal rapport with Zhou Enlai and met Mao Zedong but many of the APLA cadres sent for training resented their austere puritanical environment and their sexual demands appalled their hosts [Hutchison:188]. Leballo’s frequent rueful Sesotho comment of despair when dealing with indiscipline meant “obsession for huge breasts.” A major problem was that, free from the psychotic demonic South African pressure cooker, refugees often lost control, unable to believe that life could be so pleasant. Generous funding, educational scholarships, high social status, offices, interracial sex, abundant alcohol, freedom from police harassment and other pleasures took a high toll. Z. B. Molete swiftly degenerated into alcoholism and sexual adventure and younger cadres were reluctant to exchange their new freedom for a remote military camp. Leballo was hard pressed to assemble an armed force dedicated to the concept of the guerrilla as a social reformer, a task that was even beyond Guevara in his 1965 dealings with Laurent Kabila, whom he described as being primarily interested in consuming alcohol and bedding women. Guevara would certainly have appreciated Leballo but the Sino-Soviet split cast Cuba in the Soviet camp to which ANC/SACP adhered and the invaluable Chinese alliance abruptly terminated after Zhou and Mao’s deaths in 1976. The Chinese never seemed to grasp how much their assistance and example were appreciated. The PAC’s Maoism has either been dismissed by commentators as posturing or ignored. Tom Lodge, a much quoted but bigoted and unreliable authority, implied APLA’s commitment to Maoism was limited to singing children’s songs [Lodge 1983]. American and European based Marxist- Leninists provided the PAC with ideological insights and contributed to the PAC journal Ikwezi. Leballo also respected and quoted the revolutionary African American nationalist Robert F. Williams, exiled in Cuba and China. One White American Maoist, a nephew of Senator John Danforth, a member of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, advised the party on the Carter administration’s Southern African policy initiatives. Leballo was often overcommitted to Maoism and, despite his readiness to grant impressive military titles to newly trained troops19, once contemplated abolishing ranks. He was however fully aware of the failure of the Tanzanian Ujamaa experiment, modelled closely on China’s agricultural communes. Nevertheless Maoism was a far more powerful and practical ideology for South African liberation than Lemebede’s Black national-socialism or the post 1986 PAC’s mystical fascism. It recognised that it was possible for humiliated, impoverished, and violated peasants and industrial workers, if given guidance during a revolution, to act judiciously and with restraint to create a better society. While Mao Zedong degenerated into authoritarianism, mismanagement, debaunchery and murder, his major upheavals – collectivisation, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution - temporarily broke class and gender discrimination, inspired lower class elements to have more faith in their abilities and power to change society, and thoroughly discouraged the same type of corrupt bourgeois class associated with Mandela, Mbeki and Zuma that has flourished in South Africa since 1994. Leballo, a soldier by nature and training, aformentioned unsuccessfully struggled to create an entirely military organisation in exile dedicated to the Guevara- ite/Maoist ideal of the guerrilla as a social reformer. Inside South Africa his ideas would have had more appeal among the 1976 generation than Biko’s “Black Consciousness”: in exile the majority of

19 Zola Vimba of the APLA high command stated “Everybody wants to be a chief but nobody Indians.”

his colleagues were moitivated by higher class aspiratiosn and financial gain and, free from the horrendous constraints of apartheid, deeply resented and bitterly opposed his attempts to regiment them into an idealistic self-sacificing guerrilla army. After Leballo’s death the PAC Maoists lost out to the OAU, UN and American backed mystical fascists and some remained in self-imposed impecunious exile. Leballo’s theories were outlined in his 1967 PAC’s Revolutionary Message to the Nation, which were an extension of the Programme of Action, the Defiance Campaign, and the PAC’s Positive Action of 1960. Although mainly a military treatise drawing inspiration from conflicts in China, Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, Greece, Cyprus and Malaya for a campaign aimed at making South Africa ungovernable while avoiding major military engagements, Leballo emphasized that the PAC intended to empower the lower classes at the expense of the westernized African upper middle class typified by Mandela, Sisulu and Tambo and their Moscow oriented “pseudo” communist allies. Leballo believed that escalation of the guerrilla war would place strains on White manpower forcing the regime to permit Black workers to enter previously reserved occupations; and the break down of infrastructure would lead to the proliferation of self-reliant Black groups. He called for the abolition of the external missions and, like the original Lesotho Liberation Army in the late 1970’s, reliance on direct contributions within Southern Africa. The Revolutionary Message to the Nation placed far greater emphasis on the role of lower class activists in revolutionary activities and the construction of an alternative Azanian state. This contrasted sharply with the ANC/SACP ideal of joining the White state in order to reform it. After 1985 the contradictions in South African society in fact reflected some of his predictions – the break down in White control, pressure from the South African officer corps to reform apartheid, and the rise of myriad self help Black groups. However, the post Leballo PAC/APLA, corrupt, inept and having distanced themselves from his policies, had no influence on developments and spiralled into irrelevance. Within South Africa although business, finance and industry recognized that the black population wanted participation not conflict, the composition of White parliament in 1960 was still skewed to return members of parliament who represented rural Afrikaner concerns. The NP electoral triumphs following Sharpeville indicated that while Whites needed compliant Black workers and a larger Black consumer market they recoiled at events in the Congo and the PAC’s random racial murders, and therefore supported draconian measures against any dissent. After Verwoerd recovered from his wounds he consolidated his power over the NP through the Church, Broederbond and other extra- parliamentary measures to such an extent that, compared to his dictatorial rule, previous administrations appeared anarchic and directionless. The Cape NP verligtes were sidelined and the political crack down ushered in considerable prosperity between 1964 and 1972 enabling the White population to enjoy luxuries such as extra servants, swimming pools and more cars. Liberation activists kept a very low profile during this period. Leballo faced down several challenges to his leadership from colleagues who wanted alternatives to military confrontation. He received support from Sobukwe and George Magombe, secretary-general of the Tanzanian based Organisation of African Unity African Liberation Committee (OAU-ALC). By the end of 1973 both ANC/SACP and PAC were experiencing manpower shortages. APLA had about seventy troops stationed near Mbeya under Ntantala, who had established a commercial smuggling operation in Swaziland while his troops had used donated clothing to attract local women and had conquently fathered an entire village. In 1974 BCP refugees were offered military training by the ANC/SACP and PAC. Koenyama Chakela, the BCP secretary-general, argued that an ANC/SACP alliance would be more beneficial since troops could infiltrate from Mozambique, a route denied PAC. His deputy, Ntsukunyane Mphanya, whose followers in the 1974 captured Mapoteng police station by using their only bullet20, claimed Tanzania offered BCP independent training as they did anti-

20 The BCP had one rifle, one revolver and one bullet. The next morning the British led Police Mobile Unit, commanded by John McFall, murdered at least fifty residents of Mapoteng in retaliation. Mphanya made an epic escape down a sheer cliff and across flooded rivers. The PMU doused his wife in gasoline in order to burn her to death but she was saved by a relative serving in that force.

government movements in Seychelles, Uganda and Zaire. In the event Mokhehle accepted Leballo’s offer. ANC/SACP anger at the PAC claim to have more than one hundred and eighty new recruits ultimately led to an alliance with Leabua Jonathan’s coup regime in Lesotho and Leabua’s establishment of diplomatic relations between 1978 and 1983 with the Soviet Union Cuba, Mozambique, North Korea, Bulgaria, China and East Germany. In 1976 the ANC and PAC (whose external representatives were largely disinterested, incompetent, and in the case of Douglas Dumile Dominic Mantshontsho – in Botswana Sibeko caught him making a phone call to the South African police - probably working for Pretoria) respectively recruited about four thousand and five hundred refugee students following the Soweto and Cape risings. APLA was initially trained by the LLA commander in Libya, Matooane Mapefane. In 1977 one hundred and seventy eight Libyan trained LLA soldiers were sent to the PAC holding camp at Itumbi, Chunya, near Mbeya in Tanzania. Sobukwe’s death in 1978 fatally wounded the Africanist alliance that had lasted since the 1940’s. The Carter administration negotiated with the NP regime to settle Zimbabwe. The NP agreed to put pressure on the Smith regime to negotiate with ZANU and ZAPU and in exchange the Americans would pressure ANC/SAP and PAC to abandon military action and embrace détente and dialogue. ANC, firmly in the Soviet orbit and still waiting for the “great conference table in the sky,” were amenable despite their sizable MK force in Angola. The Soviet Union, despite the historical precedent of Tsarist Russian military participation against the British in the South African War [Wilson 1974], was not prepared to upset the Cold War balance of influence by a direct challenge to South Africa’s position as part of the British-American alliance. Thus, the ANC/SACP (as well as President Nyerere of Tanzania) were adamant that military force would never defeat the NP regime and dissenting exiles often found themselves in serious trouble from governments such as Sweden. Leballo, who believed that massive arms smuggling would eventually bring down the White structure, disagreed. Consequently David Sibeko, the PAC UN representative who had proved himself a genius at diplomacy and gaining support, was persuaded by Andrew Young, Carter’s UN ambassador and Sibeko’s lover, Mariam Mohammed, the Nigerian ambassadress in Botswana, to take control of the PAC with funds that totalled at least US$250,000 and maybe even US$500,00021. Sibeko succeeded in installing his clique as the new PAC National Executive Committee but had to accept Leballo as leader albeit with the title of Chairman instead of President. Meanwhile the old APLA of Ntantala resented their loss of status to the more militant younger APLA and launched a coup that was thwarted by LLA troops in Dar es Salaam defending the PAC office. At the PAC conference in Arusha, Ntantala’s group of seventy was expelled from the PAC despite Leballo’s desire to retain Ntantala, whose smuggling operations had at least provided valuable intelligence and given him organisational skills. Sibeko also succeeded in terminating assistance to LLA, who managed to extricate themselves by Mokhehle’s personal appeal to Leballo’s intelligence chief, who had limited but sufficient personal funds available for transport. The LLA travelled south and began the war in Lesotho with filched ANC AK47’s and weapons provided by Basotho miners. In 1979 the main LLA force was wiped out in a battle in northern Lesotho and Sibeko announced he had replaced Leballo, stating that Leballo had resigned for health reasons. The Sibeko coup backfired. Leballo had certainly not resigned and Sibeko’s arrogance cost him his life when he brusquely dismissed the young APLA high command’s demand for a share of funds. They shot him dead in his flat in Oyster Bay, Dar es Salaam. On 11 March 1980 the main APLA force APLA at Chunya refused Tanzanian Colonel Matiko’s order to recognise Vus Make as their new leader. The Tanzanian detachment killed several cadres, wounded many more and split the rest up into detention camps. In 1980 Leballo arrived in Harare to reestablish his authority but Tanzanian pressure, as the controlling power of the OAU ALC, resulted in his arrest and expulsion in 1981. During the

21 Sibeko handed a package to an exiled schoolboy in Dar es Salaam to take to London by plane and then flew ahead to meet the boy at Heathrow airport. The schoolboy surreptitiously opened the package on the flight and discovered it was full of US dollar notes. He carefully removed $400 for his own use.

crisis, when he and his Tanzanian appointed rival Pokela were both in the city, A. P. Mda, the one man who could have acted as mediator and saved the party from oblivion, remained silent. After his expulsion, Leballo’s personal friendship with Jerry Rawlings of Ghana enabled him to find sanctuary but little funding. Eventually he brokered a deal between the Libyans and Museveni’s Ugandan resistance whereby he would receive weapons through northern Zaire to arm those APLA cadres that had escaped Tanzanian detention. However, Museveni’s troops reneged and kept the shipment. Throughout the whole of 1985 Leballo used incriminating evidence (his White intelligence chief had served for three months undercover as Lekhanya’s adjutant with the rank of major in 1977) to pressure the Lesotho commander Major General Metsing Lekhanya to overthrow Leabua Jonathan and restore democracy but died of hypertension on January 8, 1986, a few days before Lekhanya’s coup, which had also been caused by South African pressure. Leballo’s total disillusionment with Mda and Mokhehle caused him much anguish, especially the realization that Mda despised him and Mokhehle had become a traitor. On September 25, 1985, three and a half months before his death, he wrote:

“I have the most dynamic revolutionary ideas of strategy and tactics of a people's war to wipe out the foreign illegal occupiers of our fatherland-Azania. ... It is a pity that one day I will die without having fulfilled this ideological goal...... Sometime if I don't write or reply to your letters on time, please, don't blame me, sometimes I feel terribly a disappointed person.” Letter to Leeman

Leballo has been obliterated from South African political history apart from appearing in ANC/SACP literature and collaborators’ academic works (Lodge and Kondlo) respectively as an incompetent buffoon who sought to derail the brilliantly crafted strategy of Mandela and an embarrassment to Sobukwe’s genius. Leballo was immensely effective as a grass roots activist and tireless campaigner but was ill served by less dedicated personnel in exile. His APLA commander Justice Nkonyane simply gave up hope after Chunya while others, such as Zola Vimba, were alcoholic sexual predators. However, Leballo’s 1950’s activisim and his adoption of Maoism made him the most credible left wing opponent to the ANC/SACP. During the 1980’s and 1990’s several PAC members were honoured at their death by commentators who stated that they “were the PAC.” Mothopeng certainly deserved recognition but Leballo was the party’s major force. Without him the PAC would probably have been as ineffectual as AZAPO (Biko’s legacy), the Unity Movement, and other parties that attracted intellectuals. With his death the PAC collapsed. The break with Maoist strategies also changed what the PAC represented. Mandela, despite his association with the SACP, was a symbol of democracy. Without the Maoist emphasis on lower class political participation, the post Leballo PAC appeared merely an extremist Black male cult that intended to solve the nation’s economic and social policies by killing Whites. Leballo’s Tanzanian host in Harare exclaimed after his expulsion that, as far as she was concerned, the PAC had become a collection of “mangy old men and loud little boys.” Gail Gerhart, whose interviews give an unmatched insight into the Africanists’ viewpoint, paid Leballo ill service when she dismissed him, without explanation, as “a poor substitute for Sobukwe at the helm of the PAC” [1978:252]. Thami ka Plaatjie, a dismally unsuccessful PAC secretary-general in the 21st century stressed [email February 11, 2010] that Leballo had made “serious miscalculations that had disastrous results for the PAC and the Azanian Revolution.” Ka Plaatjie, Gail Gerhart, Z.B.Molete, and Peter Raboroko, all critics of Leballo, never provided specific details when asked and could not explain how, rid of Leballo and with American, UN and OAU support, the post-Leballo PAC failed so miserably. Leballo was absolutely loyal to Sobukwe and never criticised him yet it is clear that much of the PAC’s failure in 1960 had been caused by Sobukwe trying to create a passive middle class Gandhian movement out of a militant lower class that wanted violent action, and he miscalculated fatally by dismissing Leballo’s request for a “Plan B.” Fortunately many of Leballo’s papers have been

archived and await the day when researchers less burdened by class prejudice can assess Leballo’s achievements in a more balanced fashion, in particular his choice of a Maoist revolutionary path. In the meantime, any positive mention of PAC actions up until 1986 is dismissed as “apologetic” – the classic riposte of the academic eunuch who has no convincing counter argument. Despite (or maybe because of) his success with Leballo in launching the first large scale guerrilla incursion into South Africa and Lesotho in 1979 Ntsu Mokhehle became reclusive and vanished at the end of 1980 causing Mapefane and Jama Mbeki, the LLA intelligence chief and Thabo’s PAC brother, to approach Leballo in Harare in 1980-1 for funds and weapons. The full story of Ntsu Mokhehle’s activities between 1981 and 1986 has yet to be made public22 but it is clear he was a traitor who went over to Pretoria; and Jama Mbeki’s murder in Lesotho was caused by Shakhane Mokhehle informing the Lesotho military of his activities. Leballo’s White APLA intelligence chief had correspodned regularly with Mokhehle and during 1980 and 1981 offered to house him in Zimbabwe and it is a mystery why Mokhehle never considered this option. Mokhehle’s ideological collapse was linked to the arrival in South Africa in 1978 of Ray Steiner Cline, former deputy-director of the American CIA and Nixon’s Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) at the Department of State until 1973. Cline established an office in South Africa. As CIA chief in Taiwan, Cline had instigated the formation of the Anti-Communist League funded by Asian and Latin American dictatorships, intelligence agencies and dubious wealthy organisations such as the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and right wing Japanese politicians suspected of links with organised crime. Cline had two daughters. The younger, Sibyl had married an obese American fascist mercenary named Robert MacKenzie linked to Soldier of Fortune, who had been given a vanity rank in the Rhodesian ersatz Special Air Service regiment. The elder daughter, Judy May Fontaine, had a relationship with Leballo’s White APLA intelligence officer while studying Chinese at London University 1967-8 (her father was CIA chief in West Germany after narrowly missing out to Vice Admiral William Francis Raborn as director of the agency23), hence the PAC’s interest in Cline’s arrival in South Africa in 1978. Ray Cline, Sibyl and her husband funded and publicised UNITA and RENAMO besides assisting independent or rogue intelligence operatives who supported Inkatha [Minter 1994]. It is possible that Cline had a hand in the bribing of Sibeko but he was certainly involved in the incomprehensible recruitment of Ntsu Mokhehle. Mokhehle had endured severe refugee status problems since December 1979 when the ANC/SACP succeeded in persuading an Economist journalist to publish an article suggesting that Mokhehle and the LLA were “marching from Pretoria.” Instead of ignoring the bait, Mokhehle insisted publicly that the LLA had been trained in Libya with the result that Zambia’s erratic president, Kenneth Kaunda, expelled Mokhehle for violating the terms of his refugee status. Mokhehle had no luck either in Botswana and his unfortunate sexual priorities decided against exile outside Africa. According to his own account he entered South Africa illegally and lived in poverty near the border. Mphanya (forthcoming book) argued that Botswana and Zambia had refused him continued residence and that he illegally entered South Afrcia in the trunk of a car, hiding in the bush near Zeerust until his brother Shkahne had secured permission for him to stay, only to find that Mokhehle became a prisoner of covert South African intelligence activities and was held at Vlakplaas and then Lisikisiki camp in the Transkei under the supervision of MacKenzie, Cline’s son in law, who was serving as a mercenary Major in the Transkei Defence Force. MacKenzie became a co-director of Cline’s Global Strategy Council whose fellow directors included experts in psychological warfare and Donald Rumsfeld, US secretary of defence for both President Ford and President George W. Bush. LLA cadres of a new force, created by MacKenzie and Mokhehle, suspected of disloyalty later testified that Mokhehle, whom they named “the Vulture” (Ntsu

22 Ntsukunyane Mphanya (email 21 February 2010), stated he is publishing a book on Mokhehle’s activities between 1980 and his return to Lesotho. The draft manuscript was released on March 10. 23 Raborn’s tenure was regarded as unsuccessful. David Barret concluded, “[Raborn was] incompetent at CIA, not understanding the agency or the intelligence business” - The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story From Truman to Kennedy, David Barrett, University Press of Kansas. Ray Cline himself had achieved notoriety as a “China expert” predicting the Chinese would not intervene in the Korean War.

means “eagle”), personally supervised their torture. MacKenzie’s incompetence ensured that the new LLA never became a formidable force and he was later easily outwitted, killed and dismembered by child soldiers in Sierra Leone. After Lekhanya’s coup Mokhehle returned to Lesotho and was eventually elected prime minister in 1993 aged seventy four. Although in declining health and with a broken mind (Romanian doctors in the 1970’s exclaimed “this man has no blood going to his brain”) he nevertheless enjoyed enough lucid moments to obliterate a leadership challenge from his foreign minister, the venal Qhobela Molapo,24 provoked by Shakhane’s corruption and past betrayals. However, aforementioned, when Nelson Mandela visited Lesotho Mokhehle could not recall his name. He died in 1999, a complex, enigmatic and tragic figure. Shakhane was sidelined and died in 2005. Sibeko’s partial coup, Tanzanian hostility, Leballo’s death and Mokhehle’s defection ensured the BCP/LLA, despite launching the first major guerrilla incursion in 1979, was unable to assist the liberation of South Africa. Mandela sent troops to assist the Lesotho government following a disputed election but their intervention destroyed a large part of Maseru in 1998. After Leballo’s death the PAC went rapidly downhill. It had a series of leaders, the inexperienced Johnson Mlambo, who was unable or unwilling to prevent his colleagues from engaging in a continental car theft enterprise; the dying veteran Zephaniah Mothopeng, and the uninspiring Clarence Makwetu and Bishop Stanley Mogoba. Many PAC leaders were desperate for status and financial gain and therefore agreed to the 1994 settlement since the new constitution guaranteed parliamentary and provincial council seats to parties that gained even less that 1% of the vote. Young PAC Maoist militants - PAC Revolutionary Watchdogs - unsuccessfully argued that since the PAC was very weak and none of its economic and social objectives were in sight the party should therefore boycott the elections and build up its oganisation for a future thrust for power when the social and economic order was in crisis. They likened the situation to the Muzorewa-Smith agreement in Zimbabwe, which failed because it did not appease the militants. The Watchdogs also opposed participation on ideological grounds as they saw the ANC/SACP-NP pact as a means of creating a new multi-racial elite enjoying a first world life style at the expense of a vast derelict third world underclass. Joseph Mbatha, a Year 10 student in 1994 and a chairman of the Pan Africanist Student Organisation (PASO) as well as an Azanian National Youth Unity (AZANYU) member described the younger generation's attitude to the Makwetu leadership's attitude to elections:

“There was PAC Congress in 1993 at Umtata in eastern Cape. ... It was there where the PAC started declining. The PASO, AZANYU and other members of PAC distanced themselves for elections. I want to state this, there was split already in PAC because we distanced ourselves as a Youth of Azania from the talks with the settlers regime. We called ourselves as Revolutionary Watchdogs under the banner of PAC. ... When there was time to vote for the PAC to participate in talks with the regime. The Congress became in disorder. The Youth of PAC ran out of the Congress. We unite ourselves outside the Congress against the captured leadership.

Mbatha summarised the attitude of the PAC Revolutionary Watchdogs to the Mandela election victory:

“The ruling class has only adjusted by co-opting some of the oppressed. The genuine aspirations of the African are not addressed.” [Letters to Leeman]

Other watchdogs admitted that resentment at the settlement impacted on the post 1994 growing crime wave.

24 Molapo once noted “give a dog a bad name” referring to one of Mokhehle’s first names - Sejabanana (seizer of girls) but he himself was descended from Molapo Moshoeshoe, associated with traitorous activities, and he was a relative of Leabua Jonathan Molapo. Mokhehle outwitted Molapo by accepting expulsion from the BCP and immediately forming a new party, the Lesotho Congress Party, which was confirmed in power in 1998 by Mandela’s invasion after a disputed election.

The “settlement” PAC leadership decision to put personal gain before principle effectively eliminated the PAC. Leballo’s “the guerrilla as a social reformer” was certainly not echoed in the PAC suicidal election slogan of “one settler one bullet.” Mokotso Pheko was elected PAC president in a corrupt stage-managed conference that would have shamed Tambo in 1958. Pheko was a derisory figure who claimed two doctorate degrees, one he awarded himself from his own Daystar University, the other bought from a bogus degree mill named Kensington University. Pheko’s self-published vanity entry on Wikipedia states: “Dr Pheko is considered to be one of the greatest exponents of Pan- Africanism on par with Nkrumah, du Bois, Lumumba, Sobukwe and Cabral.” Pheko was sacked for corruption and replaced by Letlapa Mphahlele, a psychotic murderer who ordered the slaughter of a church congregation. The presence of these appalling specimens in the South African parliament is argument enough for raising the bar to 5% of national votes for political parties to gain seats. In August 1998 a PAC organizer, Portia Lusaseni, announced that the men executed for the Mbashe River murders would be honoured for ‘heroic achievements’ The post-Leballo history of the PAC is mirrored by other movements in Haiti, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia and elsewhere where alienated lower class militants took up armed resistance but established nothing more than failed bloodstained racist bandit states. In Ethiopia, China, Vietnam, 1916-1922 Ireland, and Cuba these forces, combining with disaffected middle class activism, were far more successful but in Zimbabwe, Peru, Tamil Sri Lanka, Columbia, Eritrea and Cambodia, Maoist and other leftist activists terrorized or oppressed the class they originally represented. The parallel between Mugabe’s ZANU(PF) and the post-Leballo PAC is particularly disturbing because ZANU(PF) achieved freedom through American and British support yet degenerated into fascism despite ongoing international goodwill. The PAC vote in 2009 was 0.27% and a single seat. In contrast the SACP, still acting as a sort of Iranian Council of Guardians or latter-day Broederbond, received no direct votes. Twelve of its office bearers are in parliament including its general-secretary, Blade Nzimande, minister of higher education and training, the SACP leader who, in 2003, revealed Sisulu’s treachery as if it were a heroic act. They are listed as ANC. Instead of being a militant vanguard of a mass movement that could have accomplished the revolutionary political, social and economic changes the country needed, apart from a brief period under Nzula, the party remains a pampered privileged undemocratic parasite that has failed to accomplish any significant reform the sixteen years of freedom. In conclusion, neither party had much impact in bringing apartheid to an end or influencing the country’s future. By the time the Cold War ended in 1989 large areas of Africa had been devastated or mismanaged by superpower rivalry, multinational exploitation, ethnic disputes, military coups, anti- colonial struggles, and ideological experiments. In South Africa the new class of urban Afrikaner professionals in the military, business, industry and international trade at last found common ground with middle class Africans and manufacturing and industrial workers to share their labour, knowledge and expertise to create a prosperous future. This entailed considerable risk but skillful negotiations backed by industrial action associated with the trade union organizer Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa (1952- ), who founded the National Union of Mine Workers in 1985 and was a dominant force within the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM). Ramaphosa’s activism succeeded where ANC, PAC and SACP had failed for although the manufacturing industries employed more wokers, the miners were a far more powerful unit and not seen as a dangerous disruptive force like militant unemployed township proetstaors. The final agreement that led to the 1994 election gave enough hope to the electorate that the county’s wealth, resources and facilities would be available on more equitable basis. Ramaphosa’s success led to a power sharing within the ANC known as the Tripartite Alliance between the ANC, SACP and COSATU (which, like the SACP, has never stood for elections as a separate entity) that was a reflection of the present industrial nature of the South African economy. Ramaphosa was elected ANC Secretary-general and was Mandela’s choice as successor but his ethnicity (Venda like Madzunya) and the former exiled ANC/SACP factional cliques denied him the post in favour of Thabo Mbeki, an ineffectual apparatchik. There has been speculation that a

Ramaphosa presidency might have undertaken more radical steps to alleviate the causes of crime and growing political alienation to which the relatively privileged nature of the present ANC Tripartite Alliance cannot relate but after his tenure as ANC secretary-general he quickly identified with the corporate business elite and lucrative international service. In particular, the land issue, which evoked the PAC battle cry of Izwe Lethu and has caused numerous murders of White, mainly Afrikaner, farmers since 1994, is still unresolved. An atrociously insensitive nepotistic appointment was that of the SACP activist Helena Maria Dolny (1954- ), widow of the late Joe Slovo, to the post of managing director of the Land Bank, the key body that finances South Africa’s large agri-industries, a reflection of the historical Soviet antipathy to cooperative farming (such as coffee and tea ventures in Tanganyika) and contempt for small scale peasant farming despite success in Kenya where Gikuku farmers were allocated former White farms. The Tripartite Alliance brings to mind another unnatural construction. The author of the novel Frankenstein, an English writer named Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), wrote of forces similar to those that created the PAC and today’s ubiquitous homicidal priapic narco-militias: “The same energy of character which renders a man a daring villain would have rendered him useful in society, had that society been well organized.” Any system focused solely on economic development will inevitably face violent opposition from marginalized citizens who have escaped becoming social or psychological derelicts. From Union until the 1970’s South Africa was governed by a small clique answerable to Afrikaner farming interests, which eventually instituted the horrendous apartheid experiment that came close in the 1980’s to engulfing the country in anarchy and carnage. From the 1970’s South Africa has adopted the global liberal mercantile capitalist model of Adam Smith without, as elsewhere, his insistence on restraint.25 Although the 1994 settlement alleviated some pressure, Marxist analysis still identifies major contradictions in South Africa society that will probably lead to further crises. The present South African political, economic and social structure is mainly dependent on manufacturing and other industries but long term predictions conclude that, when the country’s exploitable resources are exhausted, much of Southern Africa will revert to a subsistence rural economy. This conclusion is guided by acceptance that Malthusian catastrophe will not be alleviated by brilliant scientific and technological innovations. Any new development, as always, tends to favour a powerful minority at the expense of the bulk of the population. South Africa, with its continuing two tiered society, can easily spawn militant anti-establishment movements. Since 1994 the ANC government, like its Afrikaner predecessors, has represented only a certain section of society not because of gerrymandered electoral boundaries but by conspiratorial politics, dating back to Walter Sisulu’s treachery in 1955, through which influential minority groups, now represented by COSATU and SACP (its nepotistic membership provides fast track access to lucrative employment and influential positions holding disproportionate power as in the case of Max Sisulu (son of SACP Walter), Thabo Mbeki (son of SACP Govan), Helena Dolny (widow of SACP Joe Slovo), ANC minister Barbara Hogan (wife of SACP Ahmad Kathrada); and Kasrils and Modise, ineffectual SACP hacks, in defence. The 1955 structure imposed by Sisulu’s Freedom Charter Congress Alliance coup still stands. The present ANC secretary-general is Gwede Mantashe, a past Secretary-General of the National Union of Mineworkers, who is also the national chairman of the South African Communist Party. By accepting this arrangement, Presidents Mandela, Mbeki, Motlanthe and Zuma have failed to harness and accommodate the energy and aspirations of the increasingly volatile and dissatisfied underclass and it is therefore extremely likely that the country will again see a rise of a lower class based movement similar to the PAC of 1959. The schizophrenic liberal mercantile capitalist/Soviet Marxist nature of the ANC structure is reflected in its nebulous ideology. One of the most absurb pieces of reading is Raymond Suttner’s work on what he terms the “the intellectuals” of the African National Congress26, a list of self-serving undemocratic conspirators almost indistinguishable from the Capricorn Society.

25 Adam Smith [1759] The Theory of the Moral Sentiments 26 Raymond Suttner “The character and formation of intellectuals within the ANC-led South African liberation movement” in

In March 2010 Winnie Mandela, Nelson’s former wife, was associated with remarks to the effect that the 1994 settlement could be interpreted as a highly unsatisfactory arrangement so far as the lower echelons of African society were concerned. This had earlier, aforementioned, been expressed by commentators as diverse as Cambridge University’s Professor John Iliffe and the PAC Watchdogs but is a significant admission emanating from one who had greatly benefitted by the 1994 changes. South Africa has experienced a complex political history. It has two main White populations with separate languages, religions, economic traditions – one feudal, the other mercantile and industrial capitalist - and political heritage – republican, and monarchial with imperial connections. Tensions between these two groups resulted in major conflict between 1899 and 1902, the aftermath of which dominated relations into the 1960’s. Simultaneously both White populations were subjected to rapid industrialization, especially in mining and manufacturing, as the country sought to become self- sufficient as part of its anti-Imperial political agenda. The industrialization had a far more dramatic effect on the majority African population whose social and political structures were severely eroded or completely destroyed in a lunatic scenario where their labour and skills were essential to the country’s prosperity but their efforts were hamstrung and the country’s future jeopardized by the political dominance of the Afrikaner farming class and their lower class urban ethnic allies working to reduce them to a derelict existence in rural human zoos. Aforementioned, by 1950 politicized Africans were in the main groups. The first, encouraged by 19th century liberalism, believed in assimilation into the upper middle class English speaking community; the second, understandably identifying Whites as a irredeemably malignant force, believed that their expulsion as the country’s only solution. The third, minuscule but highly influential, strive to create a Soviet style dictatorship of an industrial class of privileged workers and Marxist intellectuals. The second group, associated with the Africanist Movement and the Pan Africanist Congress at first looked to their own experience to develop an appropriate political philosophy and liberation strategy because their eventual mass membership could not identify with middle class parliamentary democracy or Soviet vanguardism. They could relate to the expulsion of Whites from Indonesia, Algeria and Vietnam but because of their geographical isolation and continued suppression were unable to develop appropriate economic, social and political models. The chief success of their 1980’s youthful rural and township ideological inheritors was to make the country ungovernable but before they could develop their own alternative institutions they were outmanouvered by the National Party- ANC/SACP alliance and 1994 “settlement.” Not unnaturally the 1994 settlement has engendered continued bitterness because of its failure to create the long expected equitable society. The most obvious resistance to the status quo comes from criminal elements. In 1959 the PAC received significant support from the criminal underclass. Politics and crime are often closely related. Templeton Ntantala, David Sibeko and Vus Make embezzled funds while the Harare clique that surrounded Pokela were part of a highly organized car theft ring that also prospered under Johnson Mlambo, Clarence Makwetu and Joe Mkwanazi. Mokotso Pheko of bogus degree infamy was sacked as PAC leader for embezzlement. However, the criminal Robin Hood style thuggery that assisted PAC between 1959-64 was supportive of idealistic political and economic sentiments. It opposed the SACP’s cynical manipulation of the ANC and was highly critical of higher class aspirations among the PAC leadership. In post 1994 “democratic” South Africa the lower class criminal gangs often echo the tsotsi threats of Sobukwe’s day about the self-seeking upper class. Yet while Sobukwe, Leballo and Madzunya targeted ANC upper class elitism, SACP secret power deals, and capitalist exploitation the present day ANCYL targets are almost shadows from the past – Afrikaner farmers and “imperialists”. The former senior PAC politician Patricia de Lille tapped into class resentment and quickly upstaged her old party by championing popular issues and corruption but the ANC government appears to have channeled criticism away from itself by allowing full vent to the ravings of its ANCYL leader Julius Sello Malema (1981- ). Malema draws inspiration from Robert Mugabe’s pantomime presidency in Zimbabwe which has shown that nationalist movements led by

African Intellectuals: Rethinking Politics, Language, Gender and Development Thandika Mkandawire Zed Books (2005)

western educated intellectuals can nevertheless establish fascist criminal states that lay blame for their own monstrous inadequacies, kleptomania and mismanagement on a tiny White ethnic minority. The most obvious block in South Africa to an equitable society is the gerrymandered electoral system that has permitted the SACP and COSATU to dominate government without electoral support. Both groups are self-serving, elitist, urban oriented and linked to powerful business interests. Malema’s rhetoric is anti White and Indian and therefore ostensibly supportive of the less privileged African majority but his lifestyle, despite a dismal high school record, is immensely and ostentatiously wealthy. He is a national socialist bourgeois with a self styled revolutionary but blatantly racist rhetoric. He is hostile to gender equality and fervently supports Mugabe’s kleptocracy. Nevertheless he provides a useful service to the ANC government by directing resentment away from its shortcomings. Given Mugabe’s long standing success in holding on power, the alienated marginalized South African urban underclass and criminal gangs are not at all attracted to developing an idealistic political ideology with a clearly defined convincing equitable economic agenda that would win an election. Malema is hardly of the caliber of former ANCYL leaders and his accession to the ANCYL presidency may be indicative of the ANC’s ideological bankruptcy rather than cynical deviatory ploy. Nevertheless he has succeeded in attracting the lower class national socialist element that was once the PAC’s natural constituency and is more supportive of Zimbabwean style warlordism than parliamentary democracy. In March 2010 nothing appears to distinguish Letlapa Mphahlele, the psychotic murderer who heads the PAC, from Julius Malema, the ANCYL leader who rejoices in the continuing murder of White farmers. Letlapa’s clarion call was “One settler, one bullet” while Malema exhorts his followers to “Kill the Boer.” While such slogans were justifiable fifty years ago, both serve the present ANC government’s purpose of diverting attention to its own ineptitude. While Malema’s accession shows that it is possible for a poorly educated non parliamentary “firebrand” to take control of the ANCYL it is therefore conceivable for a more astute genuine left winger to do likewise but remain independent of ANC manipulation to link up with idealistic left- wing, perhaps even Maoist African junior officers in the South African army, who, disturbed by lack of progress in implementing social and economic justice, might consider a coup in support of their proposals for drastic change. This would be a most unfortunate development but is part of a continental process whereby westernized Africans used lower class aspirations to gain freedom and the implementation of a parliamentary system that exacerbated class divisions and favoured a small elite. In South Africa the origins of this development lie squarely in the 300 year old racial divisions but to a significant extent to the decision of Lutuli, Mandela and Sisulu to protect their class interests rather than accommodate aspirations of activists from a lower socio-economic status. While alienated lower class activists and criminal gangs may not challenge the increasingly ineffectual ANC/SACP/COSATU regime, their lower class peers in the South African military are in a more formidable position to do so and can draw on examples from Ethiopia and Cuba where “People’s armies” have implemented more equitable and safer societies. Military coups ostensibly against incompetent and corrupt rule, as for example the ones led by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser (Eqypt 1952), Houari Boumedienne (Algeria 1965), Major Nzeogwu (Nigeria 1966), Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi (Libya 1969) Mengistu Haile Mariam (Ethiopia 1974) Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings (Ghana 1979, 1981), Staff Sergeant Samuel K. Doe (Liberia 1980), and Captain Valentine Strasser (Sierra Leone 1992), have had mixed results but have not deterred opportunistic and/or idealistic young military personnel or aggrieved militants (John Okello in Zamzibar 1964) from seizing power irrespective of international or continental opinion (Niger 2010). There is certainly significant lower class alienation from parliamentary rule in South Africa and it is therefore not surprising that the wheel has turned full circle so that once again the ANCYL represents lower class aspirations as under Lembede, Sobukwe and Leballo in the late 1940’s and 50’s. Given better ANCYL leadership and support within the military it is inevitable that, if parliamentary government continues to lose credibility, there is going to be a dramatic demand, or even action in the

form of a coup, from non-parliamentary forces to implement significant economic and social justice in South Africa. Rectifying social and economic injustice is usually far beyond the capabilities of traditional military personnel, and many from self styled “revolutionary” states such as Iran, North Korea, Eritrea and Zimbabwe are as corrupt and self seeking as military juntas in Myanmar/Burma, Fiji, Equatorial Guinea, and Sudan. In conclusion, unless the current South African parliamentary system abandons its role of exacerbating class division and siphoning further resources to the already wealthy, the country will be in considerable danger of entering a political cycle experienced by other African countries where military intervention in government had led to instability, bloodshed and economic disaster.

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Lodge, Tom [1977] “The Pan Africanist Congress: positive action and the Poqo rising” Southern African research in progress collected papers 2 York University Centre for Southern African studies Mandela, Nelson [1978] The struggle is my life. London: IDAF for Southern Africa Mandela, Nelson [1994] Long Walk to Freedom. London: Abacus Mandela, Nelson. [1965] No easy walk to freedom. London: Heinemann Marks, Thomas A. [2007] Maoist People’s War in Post-Vietnam Asia. Bangkok: White Lotus Press Matthews, Herbert L. [1975] Revolution in Cuba – An Essay in Understanding. New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons Martin, T. [1976] Race first – ideological and organisational struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Westport Conn: Greenwood Mbeki, G. [1964] South Africa: the peasants’ revolt. London: Penguin 1964 Minter, William [1994] Apartheid's Contras: An Inquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique. London: Zed Books Morris, Donald R. [1965] The Washing of the Spears – the Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation. London: Jonathan Cape Mphanya, Ntsukunyane [2004] A Brief History of the Basutoland Congress Party 1952-2002. Morija: Morija Press Ngubane, Jordan K. [1963] An African Explains Apartheid. New York: Praegar Nkrumah, Kwame [1963] Africa must unite. London: Heinemann Nzula, Albert [1933] Forced labour in colonial Africa. Moscow O’Meara, Dan [1997] Forty Lost Years The Apartheid State and the Politics of the National Party, 1948 to 1994. Randburg: Ravan Okello, John [1967] Revolution in Zanzibar. Nairobi: East African Publishing House Omer-Cooper, John [1966] The Zulu Aftermath. Longman Padmore, G. [1949] Africa: Britain’s third empire. London: D. Dobson Padmore, George [1949] Africa: Britain's Third Empire. London: D. Dobson Padmore, George [1956] Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa. London: D. Dobson Parkinson, Wendy [1980] This gilded African: Toussaint L’Ouverture. London:Quartet Pogrund, Benjamin [1991] Sobukwe and Apartheid. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press Price, Robert M. [1991] The Apartheid State in Crisis Political Transformation in South Africa 1975-1990. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press Reeves, Bishop Ambrose [1960] Shooting at Sharpeville The Agony of South Africa. London:Victor Gollancz Robertson, J. [1971] Liberalism in South Africa 1948 – 1960. Oxford: Oxford University Roux, E. [1964] Time Longer than Rope: A History of the Black Man's Struggle for Freedom in South Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press Rupert, Anton [1967] Progress through partnership. Johannesburg: Nasionale Boekhandel 1967 Sampson, Anthony [1987] Black Gold. New York: Pantheon Books Sampson, Anthony [1999] Mandela. London : HarperCollins Sanders, Peter [1975] Moshoeshoe: Chief of the Sotho. London: Heinemann Shepherd, R. H. W. [1940 (sic)] Lovedale South Africa. 1841 –1941. Lovedale: Lovedale Press Shepherd, R. H. W. [1971] Lovedale South Africa. 1824 –1956. Lovedale: Lovedale Press Sisulu, Elinor [2004] Walter and Albertina Sisulu - In Our Lifetime. Claremont: David Philip Slovo, Polkovnik Yossel Mashel [1962] Programme of the South African Communist Party: the road to South African freedom. Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, Lubyanka, Moscow/ Inkululeko, London Slovo, Joe [1997] Slovo – the Unfinished Autobiography. Melbourne: Ocean Press Sparks, Alistair [2003] Beyond the Miracle – Inside the New South Africa. London: Profile Books Stalin, J. V. [1953] “Marxism and the national question.” in Works 1913 vol. 2 Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House Tabata, I. B. [1960] Education for servitude: Bantu (apartheid) education. London: Pall Mall Van der Horst, S. T. [1949] Native labour in South Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press Vincent, T. G. [1971] Black power and the Garvey movement. New York: Ramparts Press Von Freyhold, Michaela [1979] Ujamaa Villages in Tanzania Analysis of a Social Experiment. New York: Monthly Review Watson, P. [1978] War on the Mind: the Military uses and abuses of Psychology. London: Hutchinson Weiner, Tim [2007] Legacy of Ashes – the History of the CIA. New York: Penguin/Allen Lane Wilson, Edward T. [1974] Russia and Black Africa before World War II. New York: Holmes and Meier Wilson, F. [1972] Labour in South African gold mines 1911 – 1969. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Winter, G. [1981] Inside BOSS – South Africa’s secret police. London: Penguin Zwelonke, D. M. [1972] Robben Island. London: Heinemann African Writers’ Series

OTHER PAC/BCP Data Disk [2009] Letters, documents, photographs, and 24 hours recorded interviews mostly concerning P. K. Leballo, Ntsu Mokhehle, Nyakane Tsolo and other leaders 1970- 1986

INDEX AAPC, 2, 44, 45, 47, 52 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 African National Congress/ANC, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Criminal Law Amendment, 2, 24, 32, 34, 52, 60 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, Cuba, 70, 79, 80, 83, 87 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, Dadoo, Yusuf 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 32, 37 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, Davenport, T. R. H. 50, 86 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, de Lille, Patricia 5, 85 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, Defiance Campaign, 2, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 80, 82, 83, 84 (see also Congress Alliance) 22, 24, 25, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 35, 39, 44, 50, Africanist Movement, 2, 6, 16, 20, 23, 30, 39, 52, 60, 62 40, 42, 45 Desmond, Cosmas 74, 86 Africanists, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 23, 25, 27, Dreyer, Peter 6, 86 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 40, 41, 42, 43, Duncan, Patrick 46, 47, 55, 57, 63, 65, 74, 86 44, 45, 47, 48, 51, 52, 55, 78 Erasmus, Frans 65 All Africa People’s Conference, 44, 47 First, Ruth 36, 37, 39, 42, 66 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, Fort Hare, 10, 13, 14, 18, 21, 22, 28, 45, 69 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, Freedom Charter, 2, 6, 13, 16, 24, 32, 33, 34, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44, 45, 53 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59, Gandhi, Mahatma 2, 13, 14, 26, 70 60, 62, 64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, Garvey, Marcus 8, 13, 87 76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84 Gerhart, Gail 6, 14, 17, 18, 25, 29, 33, 37, 38, ANCYL, 2, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 19, 21, 23, 28, 29, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 59, 34, 35, 36, 70 60, 61, 86 Anti-Communist League, 4, 81 Ghana, 2, 14, 24, 44, 47, 52, 56, 63, 69, 76, 80 Azanian People's Liberation Army/APLA, 4, Gibson, Richard 6, 73, 86 58, 66, 74, 76, 79, 80, 81BAC, 2, 27, 45, 46, Guevara, Ernesto Che 30, 71, 79, 86 47 Gumede, Josiah T. 9, 30, 31, 70 Bantustans, 57 Gun War, 26, 45 Bashee River (see Mbashe River) Harmel, Michael 15, 16, 20, 37, 86 Basutoland, 2, 3, 8, 10, 13, 14, 15, 23, 26, 27, Hodgson, Jack 32, 70 32, 40, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 56, 68, 69, 70, 72, Hogan, Barbara 86 75, 76, 77, 86, 87 Hooper, Charles 63 Basutoland Congress Party/BCP, 2, 3, 4, 36, 40, Iliffe, John 7, 86 44, 46, 47, 48, 56, 58, 60, 63, 67, 69, 70, 72, Indian Congress, 2, 12, 16, 17, 21, 32, 72 75, 77, 79, 86, 87 (see also BAC) Irgun, 3 Benson, Mary 17, 35, 70, 86 Isandhlwana, 48, 49, 63 Beyleveld, Pieter 32, 37, 42 Jolobe, William 51, 64 Biko, Steve 4 Kadalie, Clements 8, 21 Black Nazis, 74 Kasrils, Ronnie 84 Black Republic, 9, 30, 40, 50 Kathrada, Ahmad 72, 86 BNP, 3, 46, 47, 55, 56, 64, 69, 77 Kaunda, Kenneth 23, 71, 82 Broederbond, 63, 79, 83 Kenya, 11, 24, 28, 32, 40, 54, 71, 72 Bureau of African Nationalism, 20, 21, 34 Kenyatta, Jomo 16, 24 Burgess, Stephen Franklin 30, 48, 86 Kgosana, Philip 22, 54, 59, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, Capricorn Society , 32, 40, 55 71 Carter, Jimmy 4, 80, 86 Khaketla, Bennet 56, 69, 77 Castro, Fidel 71 Kondlo, Kwandiwe Merriman 6, 86 Central African Federation, 32, 35, 40, 57 L’Ouverture, Toussaint 13, 49, 87 Charterists, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 51 Lamche, Pascale 77 China, 13, 15, 28, 50, 71, 76, 80, 83, 86 Langa, 53, 54, 59, 62, 63, 64, 65, 73 Chinese, 9, 13, 15, 24, 30, 31, 79, 81 Leabua Jonathan Molapo 3, 4, 46, 47, 64, 76, Chunya, 80 80, 81 Cline, Ray Steiner 4, 81 Leballo, Potlako Kitchener 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 11, 13, Congress Alliance/ COD, 2, 6, 16, 32, 34, 35, 14, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 48, 49, 57, 63, 67, 30, 32, 33, 35, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 70, 71, 72 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60, 61, Congress of Democrats, 2, 32, 37 62, 64, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, Congress of the People, 2, 24, 32, 35, 36, 37, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 87, 91 49, 53 Leeman, Bernard 26, 27, 32, 37, 40, 42, 46, 47, CPSA/Communist Party of South Africa 2, 8, 9, 56, 61, 64, 69, 77, 78, 81, 86

Lekhanya, Metsing 4, 81 Mokhehle, Shakhane, 5, 72, 81, 83 Lekhotla la Bafo, 46 Molapo, Moses Qhobela 36, 37, 39, 46, 47, 83 Lembede, Anton Muziwakhe 2, 8, 10, 11, 12, Molete, Z. B. 16, 28, 43, 49, 63, 64, 65, 70, 73, 13, 14, 15, 16, 23, 28, 34, 36, 48 75, 79 Lenin, V. I. 10, 15 ’Molotsi, Peter 16, 29, 36, 49, 69 Lesotho, 3, 4, 8, 36, 45, 54, 58, 63, 66, 67, 69, Moroka, James Sebe 2, 13, 19, 20, 21, 22 72, 76, 77, 80, 81, 86 Moshoeshoe, 46, 87 Lesotho Communist Party, 4, 69, 77 Mothopeng, Zephaniah 4, 16, 49, 59, 73, 82 Lesotho Liberation Army/LLA, 4, 66, 67, 76, Mphahlele, Letlapa 5, 83 80, 82 Mphanya, Ntsukunyane 79, 87 Liberal Party, 6, 13, 32, 46, 55, 62, 63, 70 Mugabe, Robert 85 Lifelekoaneng, 4, 26, 76 Nasser, Gamal Abdul 47 Liliesleaf, 3, 72, 77 National Party/NP, 2, 3, 8, 10, 11, 13, 20, 24, Lisikisiki, 4, 82 29, 30 33, 35, 38, 39, 42, 43, 46, 47, 53, 57, Lodge, Tom 6, 54, 59, 61, 75, 86 58, 60, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 73, 74, 75, Lombard, Hans 75 76, 77, 79, 8087 Ludi, Gerard 77 New Age, 35, 36, 37, 64, 70 Lutuli, Albert 2, 4, 8, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 32, Ngcobo, A. B. 48, 49, 50, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 48, 49, Ncqobo, Howard 53, 59 52, 62, 70, 71, 72, 85, 86 Ngendane, Selby 16, 29, 41, 49, 53, 59, 60 MacKenzie, Robert 81 Ngubane, Jordan 6, 11, 13, 16, 55, 70, 87 Madzunya, Josias 2, 30, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, Nkomo, William 10, 71 59, 67, 84 Nkrumah, Kwame 2, 3, 9, 14, 17, 24, 44, 45, Mahomo, Nana 49, 54, 55, 69, 73 47, 56, 64, 69, 73, 79, 83, 87 Makatolle, 69 Nokwe, Duma 18, 27, 29, 35, 36, 39, 42, 52, 62, Makgothi, Henry 27, 29, 35, 36 72 Malan, François 2, 10, 11, 13, 15, 20, 24, 32, 46 Ntantala, Templeton 73, 76, 79, 80 Mandela, Nelson 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 16, 17, 18, Nyanga, 54, 59, 62, 63, 65 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 35, Nyaose, Jacob 51, 59 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 49, 52, 54, 62, 66, Nyerere, Julius 4, 23, 68, 71 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 82, Nzula, Albert 9, 31, 36, 83 83, 84, 85, 87 Nzimande, Blade 83 Mao Zedong, 10, 13, 31, 48, 55, 79 Oblates of Mary Immaculate/OMI, 3, 46, 69, 77 Mapefane, Maotooane "Chazi" 67, 80, 81 O’Meara, Dan 6, 10, 66, 87 Marematlou Freedom Party/MFP, 3, 4, 77 Padmore, George 9, 10, 14, 16, 44, 45, 47, 49, Marks, J. B. 2, 11, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 22, 25, 27, 86, 87 39, 72, 87 Pan Africanist Congress/PAC, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, Maseru, 3, 44, 46, 47, 68, 69, 72, 73, 75, 76, 86 10, 11, 23, 24, 26, 37, 40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 47, Matanzima, Kaiser 73 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, Matthews, Joe 18, 36, 39, 42, 45, 70, 7-74, 79, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 79, 87 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, Matthews, Z. K. 21, 28, 29, 34, 35, 42, 45 86, 87 Mbeki, Govan 71, 72, 73 Pass Laws, 19, 52, 57, 62 Mbeki, Jama 8 Pheko, Mokotso 5, 75, 83 Mbeki, Thabo 82, 85, 86 Pitje, Godfrey 16, 18, 23, 25, 28, 70 Mbashe River, 3, 74, 79, 83 Pius XII, 14 Mbashe River, 3, 83 PMU/Police Mobile Unit, 3, 77 Mda, Ashley Peter 2, 6, 10, 11, 16, 17, 19, 21- Pogrund, Bejamin 55, 61, 62, 77, 87 32, 34, 43-45, 49, 50, 56, 81 Poqo, 3, 21, 73, 74, 75, 76, 86 Miners Strike, 2 Port St John’s, 4 MK/Umkhonto we Sizwe , 3, 71, 72, 76, 77, 80 Pretoria, 3, 4, 15, 27, 56, 65, 67, 68, 74, 77, 80, Mkwanazi, Joe 68, 85 81, 86 Modise, Joe 71, 84 Price, Robert 6, 87 Mofolo, Thomas 26, Programme of Action, 2, 7, 12, 13, 15, 19, 21, Mofolo Township, 28, 33 26, 27, 34, 36 Mofutsanyana, Edwin 11, 15, 46 Public Safety Act, 2, 24 Mohlabani, 69 Rademayer, C. I. 57, 62, 64 Mokhehle, Ntsu 2, 3, 4, 10, 13, 14, 16, 17, 23, Ramaphosa, Cyril 83, 84 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 56, 59, 64, 66, 68, 69, 70, Rand Daily Mail, 41, 55, 61, 74, 75 72, 73, 75, 77, 80, 81, 83, 86, 87 Reeves, Ambrose 61, 62, 63, 87

Revolutionary Watchdogs, 82, 83 Special Air Service Regiment (UK), 32 Rivonia, 3, 67, 72, 77 Special Air Service (Rhodesian imitation), 81 Robben Island, 3, 76, 87 Stalin, Joseph 9, 87 Rothe, 3, 77 Tambo, Oliver 2, 4, 11, 16, 17, 18, 24, 25, 27, Rupert, Anton 63, 64, 65, 87 28, 31, 32, 33, 39, 40, 42, 43, 49, 52, 54, 69, SACP/South African Communist Party, 2, 3, 4, 72, 83 5, 7, 8, 16, 17, 18, 24, 25, 27, 29, 31, 32, 33, Tanzania, 4, 79, 80, 87 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 48, 50, Terblanche, Terry 3, 65 52, 56, 62, 63, 64, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, Thaba Bosiu, 3 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84 The Criminal Law Amendment Act, 2, 24, 32 SACPO, 2, 32, 34, 35, 39, 41 Thema, Selope 25 SACTU, 2, 32, 39, 43, 51 Transkei, 3, 73, 82 SAIC/South African Indian Congress, 2, 16, 19, Treason Trial, 2, 24, 34, 42, 49, 52, 53, 57, 73 20, 22, 32, 34, 35, 39, 41, 43, 70 Trotsky, Leon 15 Sampson, Anthony 18, 31, 39, 42, 61, 87 Tsolo,Mike Nyakane 6, 8, 61, 87 Scott, Michael 35, 39, 74 tsotsis, 40, 41, 54, 74 Selatile, Tsiu 68, 69 Umkhonto we Sizwe/MK, 3, 71, 72, 76, 77, 80 September, Reg 32, 42, 55, 73, 76, 81 Unity Movement, 3, 8, 30, 60, 73 Sharpeville, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 22, 27, 30, 47, 49, Verwoerd, Hendrik 3, 57, 61, 63, 64, 67, 70, 71, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 79, 87 79 Shepherd, R.H.W. 27, 51, 87 Vigne, Randoph 63 Sibeko, David 4, 28, 80, 82 Vusumzi "Vus" Make, 4, 73, 74, 80 Sisulu, Walter 2, 6, 8, 10, 11, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, Warlordism, 85 25, 27, 29, 32, 33, 36, 39, 42, 49, 52, 62, 70, Williams, Cecil 72 72, 76, 83, 84, 85, 87 Wind of Change, 31 Slovo, Joe 14, 28, 31, 32, 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 48, Winter, Gordon 75, 87 52, 60, 62, 66, 70, 84, 87 Xuma, Alfred B. 2, 8, 9, 10, 13, 30, 34 Smuts, Jan 9, 10, 11, 31, 77, 86 Young, Andrew 80 Sobukwe, Mangaliso Robert 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 13, ZANU(PF), 83 14, 16, 17, 18, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, Zhou Enlai, 79 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, Zimbabwe, 4, 32, 80 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 73, 76, 77, 79, 80, 83, 87 Soviet Union, 13, 15, 28, 30, 47, 48, 71, 80

PAC Central Committee elected at Arusha, Tanzania, 1978 Left to right: E. S. Makgakala, G. Mathutha, E. L. Makoti, V. L. Make, S. M. Sibeko, P. K. Leballo, M. Mokgoatsane, E. L. Ntloedibe, E. Radebe, E. Sibeko, H. E. Isaacs, R. Xokelelo

Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe Potlako Kitchener Leballo Ntsu Mokhehle

Anton Muziwakhe Lembebe Ashley Peter Mda Kwame Nkrumah

George Padmore Mike Nyakane Tsolo Cyril Ramaphosa

Albert Lutuli Oliver Tambo Nelson Mandela Walter Sisulu Jama Mbeki

Patricia de Lille Andrew Young Mahatma Gandhi Helena Maria Dolny Ray Steiner Cline

Jan Smuts François Malan Hendrik Verwoerd John Vorster Joe Slovo

Mokotso Pheko Letlapa Mphahlele Metsing Lekhanya Leabua Jonathan “Chazi” Mapefane

Peter Raboroko Zeph Mothopeng J. B. Marks Joe Matthews Ntsukunyane Mphanya

Alfred B. Xuma James Moroka Michael Collins Mao Zedong “Che” Guevara

Philip Kgosana in Cape Town Cape Town March 1960

Police retaliation Funeral service for the fallen at Sharpeville

Jack Mosiane’s Strike, Maseru 1961, which challenged the BCP leader Ntsu Mokhehle under arrest in January 1970 BCP’s militancy Police chief Ntoi (left), Lekhanya (second from right)