Stephen Ellis. Cold War History. Volume 16, Issue 1. February 2016.

On 16 December 1961, an underground army commanded by Nelson Mandela, known as Umkhonto we Sizwe, publicly announced its presence in South Africa with a series of bomb explosions and the publication of a manifesto. Umkhonto we Sizwe was later adopted by the African National Congress as its armed wing, run jointly by the South African Communist Party (SACP). This article, using newly opened archives, demonstrates the degree to which Umkhonto we Sizwe was a SACP creation. It also examines in detail the circumstances in which Mandela joined the SACP central committee.

This article concerns Nelson Mandela’s relationship to the South African Communist Party (SACP) at the vital moment in the early 1960s when the guerrilla army Umkhonto we Sizwe, later to become the official armed wing of both the SACP and the African National Congress (ANC), was conceived and created. It demonstrates that Umkhonto we Sizwe was essentially a creation of the SACP, as newly available archives reveal.

It is already established that Umkhonto we Sizwe’s first commander-in-chief, Nelson Mandela, was a member not only of the Party, but of its central committee, as both the SACP and the ANC publicly stated on 6 December 2013, immediately after Mandela’s death. Some historians had already come to this conclusion. More recently, a document has emerged from the archives of the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee that notes Mandela’s membership of the SACP in 1962. The authenticity of this document has been confirmed by Vladimir Shubin, for many years the official of the central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) responsible for ties with the SACP and the ANC. As the historian Irina Filatova says, it is time to close the debate on Mandela’s SACP membership. If the question remains controversial it is mostly because Mandela denied throughout his life that he ever joined the Communist Party. We shall in due course briefly discuss some of his possible motives for doing this.

When an armed struggle against apartheid began in South Africa, in the early 1960s, there seemed no reason to suppose that the National Party government would either enter into negotiations or voluntarily dismantle its policy of apartheid, and its determination to retain a racially defined constitution was a polarising force. Among the regime’s opponents was the Communist Party, which, although having no more than 450-500 members, according to the Party’s general secretary, had impressive discipline as well as the important credential of having been open to people of all races since the 1920s. Since the banning of the original communist party in 1950 and its re-establishment as a clandestine party three years later, the SACP, reorganised into small cells, had gained experience of clandestine work in a Marxist-Leninist tradition redolent of the Comintern period. The ANC, open to black people of all political persuasions from its establishment in 1912, included a number of prominent communists.

The SACP was highly respected by officials of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and, until the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, it also had good contacts with the Chinese Communist Party.

Even before it came to power in 1948, South Africa’s National Party, which was to rule the country till 1994, had a visceral fear of communism. Thus, in the context of the Cold War, it is no surprise that the Soviet Union became a firm supporter of the SACP and its ANC ally, while the USA, particularly in the period up to 1975, had a strong security relationship with the South African government. Last but not least, South Africa’s vibrant white-dominated business sector was heavily oriented towards Western Europe.

Mandela’s Engagement with Communism

A good place to begin the story of Nelson Mandela’s relationship to communism is with his move from his rural home in the Transkei to Johannesburg in 1941. The young Mandela joined the ANC, and in 1944 was one of the founders of the ANC Youth League, a radical nationalist group that by 1949 was strong enough to depose Dr A.B. Xuma from the ANC’s presidency at the organisation’s national conference. It was at the same 1949 conference that some of the Youth Leaguers argued for the expulsion of communists from the ANC, although they were unsuccessful in persuading a majority to back them. ‘The communists in the ANC were powerful’, recalled A.P. Mda, one of the Youth League’s founder-members. ‘They could get funds, and they had a powerful propaganda machine in the communist press.’ Mandela was one of those who rejected communism at this time, on the grounds that it was an ideology alien to Africa.

The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) dissolved itself in 1950 when it was at the point of being declared illegal by the National Party government that had gained power two years earlier. Prevented from functioning in a party of their own, communists joined other groups in order to continue their political activity legally, with black communists working inside the ANC, Indians inside the Indian congresses, and so on. In 1953 veterans of the defunct CPSA secretly founded the South African Communist Party, the change of name being intended to emphasise its new identity as a clandestine party.

Meanwhile, also reacting against the policies of the National Party government, the ANC allied itself to other anti-apartheid groups including the Indian congresses and the Congress of Democrats—created by white communists in 1952 as a legal front organisation—in an arrangement known as the Congress Alliance. Mandela was one of those within the ANC who came to appreciate the need for South Africans of all backgrounds to work together in opposition to apartheid, and accordingly he dropped his earlier opposition to admitting communists to membership of the ANC. A.P. Mda, on the other hand, thought that an alliance with communism ‘delayed the evolution of a truly progressive struggle’ because of the Communist Party’s preoccupation with outmanoeuvring the nationalists within the ANC. ‘They were trying to take over the show and change things’, he asserted. The differences between those like Mda who believed in the primacy of black African nationalism and who thought it could be undermined by a close alliance with communists, and those like Mandela who were in favour of a strategic alliance with the clandestine communist party, were to turn into a major split when a faction led by Robert Sobukwe left the ANC in 1958-1959 to form the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC).

As his attitude towards communism shifted, so Mandela became more militant in his political views. When Mandela’s best friend Walter Sisulu was invited by the Congress of Democrats to visit Eastern Europe in 1953, talent-spotted by members of the newly re-founded Communist Party, Mandela urged him to continue his journey to China and to seek Chinese support for an armed struggle. This request for Chinese help was unsuccessful, but Mandela’s suggestion to solicit foreign assistance for an armed struggle is revealing of his view, even at that early date, that violence in support of a just cause was legitimate. A noteworthy passage in the memoir that Mandela wrote secretly in Robben Island prison in the mid-1970s, and which was to serve as the basis for the autobiography he published in 1994, is devoted to this subject. The passage in question occurs in a discussion on the morality of violence in politics in which Mandela advocates using force preferably when it has majority support. He nevertheless concludes that ‘[t]he real issue is whether the use of force will advance or retard the struggle’, and that if violence will advance the cause ‘then it must be used whether or not the majority agrees with us’. This begs the question of the identity of the person or organisation that is to decide what constitutes progress in the struggle. Having assumed a position of leadership, Mandela considered himself to have such authority. However, as we shall shortly see, he was also strongly influenced by the SACP’s view that the correct policy in any given situation could be determined by reference to the quasi-scientific method of Marxism-Leninism.

An interesting commentary on Mandela’s general political outlook at this time is provided by an article on the famous public declaration of 1955, the Freedom Charter, that he wrote for the monthly journal Liberation in June 1956. Describing the article many years later in his published autobiography, Mandela wrote: ‘I pointed out that the [Freedom Charter] endorsed private enterprise and would allow capitalism to flourish among Africans for the first time.’ The Freedom Charter, he maintained, ‘was not meant to be capitalist or socialist but a melding together of the people’s demands to end the oppression’. Not everyone in the ANC agreed with this interpretation of the Freedom Charter’s ideological foundations: for example, the ANC’s president, Chief Albert Luthuli, referred to the Charter’s ‘socialist basis’. Some leading communists thought that the Freedom Charter reflected their own Party’s views—unsurprisingly, since the document’s main draftsman was Rusty Bernstein, a leading Party member. The SACP’s top theoretician, Michael Harmel, writing in private rather than for publication, noted that the Freedom Charter ‘is identical in all its main provisions to the demands set forth in the immediate programme of the SACP adopted in 1953’. When Mandela’s 1956 article on the Freedom Charter was edited for publication by the communist writer and journalist Ruth First some years later, following Mandela’s arrest and incarceration, she left out the passage in favour of private enterprise and its role in creating what Mandela called ‘a prosperous non-European bourgeois class’, an omission that suggests his remarks on the possibility of capitalism becoming a tool of progress were not welcome inside the SACP. The story of Mandela’s article is a useful measure of how far he had moved since his days as a founder of the Youth League, but also of the gap that separated him from the Communist Party by the time of his 1956 commentary on the Freedom Charter. Nevertheless, it is notable that when the police raided Mandela’s premises in 1955 and 1956 they found an extensive collection of Marxist literature, including pamphlets published by the Communist Party of Great Britain for use by aspiring Party members.

The cooperation between anti-apartheid organisations that was reflected in their joint campaigns in the early 1950s and in the campaign surrounding the Freedom Charter had the effect of exposing various people and organisations to the ideas of others. A.P. Mda described how ‘the Defiance Campaign generated sympathies of the [c]ommunists toward the African nationalists, but also created more respect among nationalists for the communists, because of their active participation’. Before then, noted Jack Simons, a prominent member of the original CPSA that had been dissolved in 1950, the ANC had

consisted of a rather weak central committee, stronger provincial leadership, an annual conference meeting in Bloemfontein, and a membership of perhaps 10,000 subscribers. It had neither the organisation nor discipline expected of a party.

It attracted many new members during the popular campaigns of the 1950s but retained many of its older organisational forms.

The SACP was proud of its role in providing leadership to the Congress Alliance, acting, according to the minutes of a central committee meeting, ‘as co-ordinator and unifying factor; [as] principal publicist and mass educator’. Michael Harmel wrote that ‘[t]he building of the united front of national liberation’ was ‘the main direction of the Party’s activities’ before 1960. According to a younger Party member, Bob Hepple, the SACP in fact ‘engaged in no independent activities whatsoever’, working only within other organisations.

The SACP had a particularly notable effect in informing ANC members of international affairs. The SACP’s view on this matter included the perception that the Soviet Union was in favour of world peace and the emancipation of colonised peoples everywhere, and that colonies were uniquely the possessions of capitalist powers. Seemingly influenced by these ideas, one anonymous ANC official stated in 1956 that

[i]t must be acknowledged that it is a sign of political development for the African National Congress to have adopted in recent years a definite attitude on world affairs … It is the Western imperialists who are engaged on ruthless colonial wars.

This was an opinion that Mandela came to share, as may be seen from some of the newspaper and magazine articles he wrote in the late 1950s.

At that time and for years to come, the SACP’s worldview was rooted in the Stalinist interpretation of Marxism-Leninism. Many leading thinkers in South African communism were Jewish migrants from the Baltic States, or the children thereof. They came from a tradition that saw the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 as a promise not only for working people worldwide, but specifically as the liberation of their own communities, which had languished for centuries under the rule of tsars. Referring to Khrushchev’s famous denunciation of Stalin’s crimes at the twentieth congress of the CPSU in 1956, SACP member Bob Hepple wrote that

[m]ost of the Jews from Russia and the Baltic states who formed the core of communist sympathisers in South Africa dismissed reports of Stalin’s terror as ‘capitalist propaganda’, and refused to believe the authenticity of the reports of Khrushchev’s speech.

According to another former Party member the SACP of that time has to be regarded with reference to

the strict criteria by which Lenin formed the Bolshevik Party, and of the subsequent Soviet model that was never once questioned by the Communist Party [in South Africa] from its original formation in 1921 through to the downfall of the Soviet Union.

As the senior South African communist Ronnie Kasrils wrote in his memoirs, ‘ideological development in our Party marked time at 1917, and then at 1945 … Even the exposure of Stalin’s crimes by Khrushchev in 1956 failed to shake the basic ideological position of the old guard’.

After the historical turning-point marked by the killing of 69 demonstrators by the South African Police at Sharpeville in March 1960, the SACP’s approach to the ANC reflected the stance of communist parties worldwide following the Nazi attack on the USSR in June 1941, when the policy promulgated from Moscow was to endorse wars of national liberation and political mobilisation against the Third Reich.

After Sharpeville

Before 1960, then, Nelson Mandela was a militant senior leader of the ANC in the Transvaal. He had developed a close personal and working relationship with members of other anti-apartheid organisations, including the Communist Party. His closest political friend, Walter Sisulu, had joined the SACP five years previously and almost immediately been elected to the central committee. For years already both men had thought that an armed rising of some sort would one day become inevitable, and they were aware of the need for international support for such an endeavour. The Party continued to be dominated by white men, despite the fact that the SACP’s general secretary, Moses Kotane, was black. Several ANC veterans of the Youth League, by that time middle-aged, had joined the SACP. One historian refers to this group of black former Youth League activists who had joined the SACP as ‘the Sophiatown group’. He notes that they remained capable of evaluating the Communist Party quite dispassionately.

By 1960, Mandela had assimilated a great amount of Marxist-Leninist ideology. ‘The idea of a classless society strongly appealed to me’, he wrote in the memoir he composed secretly in prison. ‘Later I was to embrace dialectical and historical materialism as my philosophy.’ Wide reading in Marxist literature ‘brought me closer to members of the C[ommunist] P[arty]’, he recalled. He came to believe that ‘there is no contradiction whatsoever between the two ideologies’ of African nationalism and dialectical materialism. He also came to consider the Russian revolution of 1917 as ‘an immortal achievement which opened up vast possibilities for man’s forward movement’. When leading members of the ANC left to form the PAC in 1958-1959 in protest against the influence of communists within the organisation, Mandela remained loyal to the ANC.

Like many other people, Mandela sensed that the emergence of the PAC and the Sharpeville killings in March 1960, at a time when African nationalism was sweeping away colonial regimes across the African continent, changed the situation in South Africa fundamentally. He believed that the moment to take up arms, as he had been contemplating for years, had now arrived. Some (but not all) leading members of the SACP were coming to the same conclusion: their party, recognising the radical change in the South African situation after the Sharpeville killings and the subsequent banning of the ANC, for the first time formally debated the possibility of changing its policy on the question of violence. Of crucial importance was the fact that thinking inside the CPSU, a vital point of reference for the SACP, was also turning to the revolutionary potential of African countries. The Chinese Communist Party, with which the SACP had good contacts, was in the full revolutionary mode that was already troubling its relationship to the Soviet Union.

So effective had been the SACP’s work inside other organisations during the previous decade that in July 1960 two senior Party officials, Yusuf Dadoo and Vella Pillay, felt able to write a memorandum informing the CPSU that

[a]ll important positions and direction in the Congress [movement] and in other organisations are occupied by members of our Party. In the African National Congress, this is particularly the case … The policy of the African National Congress is therefore heavily influenced by our Party.

A year later, the SACP’s general secretary, Moses Kotane, informed the CPSU that in three of the organisations constituting the Congress Alliance (which included the ANC), as well as in the Federation of South African Women, ‘Party members are in the majority in the top leadership’.

Dadoo and Pillay wrote their memorandum of July 1960, cited in the previous paragraph, in preparation for meetings they had organised in Moscow, where they and two other SACP delegates, Joe Matthews and Michael Harmel, may have received at least unofficial assurances of support for a future armed struggle. However, according to Vladimir Shubin, a former Soviet official, no formal discussions took place on the question of armed struggle at this stage. From Moscow, Dadoo and Pillay travelled to Beijing at the invitation of the Chinese Communist Party. There they met Mao Zedong in person on 3 November 1960 and received from him promises of support for a military struggle.

Those within the SACP most fully informed of the debates on armed struggle in the second half of 1960, including those aware of the vital indications of support from China and the USSR, were all leading figures in the SACP’s Johannesburg district organisation. One of these was Ruth First, who, like other militants, had been impressed not only by Africa’s anti-colonial awakening but also by the revolutionary victory of socialist forces led by Fidel Castro in Cuba. Their comrades in other parts of South Africa were not always included in debates on the turn to the use of force. Thus, when Ruth First visited Durban to talk to her Party comrade Rowley Arenstein about armed struggle, apparently shortly before December 1960, Arenstein pointed out that non-violence was the official policy of both the ANC and the SACP, and that in any case neither organisation had weapons with which to fight. ‘She just laughed’, Arenstein recalled, ‘and said: well that might be the policy now but maybe not for much longer. And don’t worry, getting guns will be no problem.’ Arenstein concluded that the Johannesburg comrades ‘must already have been in touch with the Russians over getting arms’.

The views of those SACP militants most in favour of a turn to armed struggle were aired at a national conference held by the Party in December 1960. This took place at a house rented for the occasion in the northern Johannesburg suburb of Emmarentia. The conference, attended by about 25 people, duly passed a resolution instructing the Party’s central committee to prepare for the use of force. Nelson Mandela was one of those present. Bob Hepple, who also attended the conference, recalls having been told (he thinks by a leading Party member, Joe Slovo) that Mandela had been invited as an ‘observer’. Mandela ‘was not one of the district committee delegates, nor had he been a member of the central committee during the time (up to December 1960) when I was co-opted to it’, Hepple later wrote.

I do not know if he [Mandela] was co-opted to the Central Committee after the December 1960 conference. Several other members of the party have claimed that he did become a member in 1960.

However, the SACP veteran Brian Bunting, recalling the December 1960 SACP national conference that decided to prepare for the use of armed force, told an interviewer: ‘I remember M … was there as a member of the CC. That was the only time I met him in that capacity.’ The interviewer, fellow Party member Sylvia Neame, cut the name out from the notes she made of the interview but the context (and the first letter of the word that has been cut out) makes it clear that the portion of the page removed had had Mandela’s name written on it. A later member of the SACP central committee, John Pule Motshabi, was recorded in the minutes of a Party meeting as referring to ‘the recruitment’ of Mandela and Sisulu into the Party, implying a relationship between the adherence of the two, but unfortunately without supplying a date or further details. Another senior Party member, Piet Beyleveld, noting Mandela’s presence at a senior Party meeting and knowing that ‘the balloting was secret and the committee’s names were not supposed to be known even in Party circles’, believed that Mandela had been elected to the central committee. It was standard procedure for a national conference to elect only part of a new central committee, following which those openly elected proceeded to co-opt further members, whose names were not communicated to conference delegates or to the Party at large, the result being that ‘Conference members are not aware of the composition of the full C[entral] C[ommittee]’, according to Harmel.

As Bob Hepple wrote, ‘[i]t is entirely credible that Mandela was .

It has been established that the SACP’s December 1960 national conference marked the ‘real starting point of the armed struggle’ (again in the words of Bob Hepple), with the passing by the Party’s national conference, its highest organ, of a resolution favouring the use of force, as a result of which elements of a communist sabotage unit were put in place in the first half of 1961. The fact that Mandela was present at the 1960 SACP national conference meant that he was one of the handful of people who knew about the Party’s decision on armed struggle from the outset, and we are obliged to interpret his subsequent actions in this light. He was presumably aware also of the promises of support obtained from China and most probably from the USSR.

The occasion of the SACP’s December 1960 resolution on the use of force is so well attested that we can no longer take at face value the traditional account of how Umkhonto we Sizwe started. This traditional account is essentially the version given by Mandela at his 1964 trial, which avoids any mention of the December 1960 resolution. By the same token, we can no longer accept the ANC’s traditional version of how it adopted the new organ, Umkhonto we Sizwe. In this regard Mandela was the key actor, as in March 1961, having been acquitted of a charge of treason but fearing further arrest, he went underground, determined to ‘make preparations for the new phase of armed struggle’ that he knew to be upon the country. In a sequence of clandestine meetings in mid-1961 described in his autobiography, Mandela led an effort by ANC militants—many of whom were also SACP members—to persuade their National Executive Committee to adopt a policy of armed struggle. He and his fellow militants were not entirely successful, the most they could get being recognition that some members of the ANC were intent on forming an organisation dedicated to armed struggle and an agreement that those who joined this new body should not be expelled or disciplined. It is notable, moreover, that such limited approval as the ANC’s national executive did give was in regard to the formation of an armed group, and not for the actual launch of armed activity. The historian Scott Everett Couper has shown that the ANC’s president, Chief Luthuli, never accepted armed struggle as ANC policy, as Joe Slovo confirmed years later when he wrote that Luthuli ‘was not a party to the decision, nor was he ever to endorse it’. When Nelson Mandela and other trialists arrested after a police raid on their safehouse in Rivonia were convicted in 1964, Luthuli, still the ANC’s president, informed the United Nations Security Council that ‘the African National Congress never abandoned its method of a militant, nonviolent struggle’.

In the event, the leaders of Umkhonto we Sizwe launched their new organisation before the first cohort of trainees had returned from their military instruction in China and before Mandela himself had gone abroad for training. The leaders of Umkhonto we Sizwe seem to have acted thus hastily in order to steal a march on other organisations known to be planning or contemplating violence (such as the PAC and the networks that formed the later African Resistance Movement). They may also have intended to upstage those within the ANC who were opposed to violence, beginning with the movement’s president, Chief Luthuli, who knew that militants in his organisation were intent on action. Luthuli received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, amid great international publicity, on 10 December 1961. ‘There are no responsible persons among us in the African National Congress who advocate violence as a means of furthering our cause’, Luthuli told the crowd that welcomed him home on 12 December 1961.

It was just four days after he had spoken these words, on 16 December, that Umkhonto we Sizwe went public with a series of attacks and the publication of a manifesto.

Mandela’s Personal Role

As we have seen, when Mandela approached the ANC’s national executive in late June or early July 1961 with a suggestion that it formally adopt a policy of armed struggle, he did so in the knowledge that the SACP was already committed to this line. Nevertheless, Mandela always insisted that he was the prime mover behind Umkhonto we Sizwe’s formation. He describes in his autobiography how, in the wake of the June/July debates, he ‘immediately recruited Joe Slovo and along with Walter Sisulu we formed the High Command with myself as chairman’. Through Slovo, he was able to recruit other white communists with the technical knowledge needed to build bombs, including some with military experience from the Second World War. He also recruited the ANC Youth League activist Joe Modise, who was not an SACP member but had already shown his keenness to embark on sabotage. Mandela told the Supreme Court at his 1964 trial that it was only after constituting the new guerrilla army that he learned that the SACP would support it. This is a rather difficult statement to interpret, given that by Mandela’s own account, Slovo and other white, coloured and Indian communists—excluded by their ethnicity from formal membership of the ANC—were involved in the incipient underground army from an early stage and given also that Mandela was aware of the Party’s turn to armed struggle in December 1960. According to the leading SACP member Mac Maharaj, who spent many years in prison with Mandela, by June 1961 the SACP’s fledgling sabotage units had begun launching dummy sabotage attacks without actual bombs and cutting phone lines. Still according to Maharaj, it was at this period that Mandela contacted the Party, saying

‘You’ve got squads; can we sit down and talk about how we get about this problem’. And the party readily agreed. The two merge[d] their squads into the formation of MK [Umkhonto we Sizwe]. They agreed they could not be two separate structures.

Bob Hepple also recalls that, after the ANC’s national executive had agreed not to oppose the formation of a sabotage unit, in other words in June or July 1961, ‘[t]he military units that the SACP had begun to set up under Slovo’s leadership were merged into [Umkhonto we Sizwe]’.

It seems, then, that Mandela was actively working with existing SACP sabotage groups with a view to fusing them into one body with his own ANC volunteers from July 1961. In a letter to the government written while he was in prison, Mandela claimed that the actual formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe was in November 1961. He maintained that the SACP ‘was represented on the National High Command’, but that ‘its representatives formed a minority and did not in any way direct its policy’. According to Michael Harmel it was only in December 1961 that a decision was taken ‘by both organisations independently to set up a separate organisation as the beginning of a people’s fighting force’. Harmel described Umkhonto we Sizwe as jointly run by the two allies, the ANC and the SACP. Mandela’s 1964 statement to the Supreme Court may therefore be interpreted tentatively to mean that it was only in December 1961 that he learned that the SACP had taken a formal decision to adopt Umkhonto we Sizwe, although he had been working with senior SACP members for some months before that date in preparation for the launch of the new army.

‘The national leadership of [Umkhonto we Sizwe]’, also according to Michael Harmel, ‘was composed of an equal number of men nominated by each of the two founding organisations, three on each side’. This national command then established regional commands, but ‘in all cases, the effective control is in the hands of members of the Party’, he maintained. Harmel insisted that ‘[t]he overall strategy and direction of policy of [Umkhonto we Sizwe] remains at all times in the hands of the leadership of the Party’. The Party’s role in Umkhonto we Sizwe was particularly evident in Natal, where the ANC’s provincial leadership had never been canvassed for its views on armed struggle and where nearly every member of the new force seems to have been a Party member, and rather few were members of the ANC. The situation in Natal reflected the personal authority of Albert Luthuli in that province and his lack of enthusiasm for an armed struggle. These factors caused the Johannesburg militants to bypass ANC structures in Natal when recruiting for Umkhonto we Sizwe.

Thus, Mandela’s insistence that he was not only the first chairman of Umkhonto we Sizwe’s national command but also the organisation’s real founder, and that the SACP played only a minor role, has to be reconciled with the fact that the armed force that came to be known as Umkhonto we Sizwe was originally conceived by a resolution of the Communist Party at its national conference and that Party chieftains were adamant that that they controlled it. So complete was the SACP’s ownership of the new guerrilla army that within a few months, senior SACP members without official membership of Umkhonto we Sizwe were closely involved in weapons procurement, such as Vella Pillay, who, in company with Arthur Goldreich, in February 1963 met officials of the Czechoslovakian communist party in London with a request for ‘three tons of plastic explosives, 10,000 detonators, 500 machine guns, 300 pistols, 2,000 automatic rifles and military training for MK [Umkhonto we Sizwe] recruits’.

Mac Maharaj’s biographer has written that the 17-year delay in publishing Mandela’s autobiography was ‘because Slovo was saying that Mandela wasn’t telling the whole truth about his involvement on how MK was founded because he founded [Umkhonto we Sizwe] as a member of the party, not as a member of the ANC’. In the original national command of Umkhonto we Sizwe as constituted in late 1961, Mandela, Sisulu and Andrew Mlangeni were deemed to represent the ANC, with Slovo, Govan Mbeki and Raymond Mhlaba acting on behalf of the SACP, although Mlangeni and Mhlaba were actually abroad for training (in China) from October 1961. The authoritative Party document written by Michael Harmel in late 1962 or early 1963 that has already been cited throws further light on this early command structure of Umkhonto we Sizwe. ‘The national leadership’, Harmel wrote, ‘consists of five members of the Party, together with one completely reliable and trustworthy non-party man who we regard as a close Party supporter on the verge of Party membership’.[87] Joe Modise, who was not a SACP member, was co-opted to the national command of Umkhonto we Sizwe at around the time that Harmel wrote these words, and it is likely that Modise is the ‘non-party man’ in question.

Given the intricacy of the situation created by Mandela’s and others’ membership of several organisations simultaneously, it is small wonder that when Bob Hepple was appointed to the secretariat of the SACP central committee, he ‘quickly concluded that the whole set-up was blurred, that at the top, the party, and the ANC—the central committee of the former and the national executive of the other—were virtually as one and the same, indivisible from MK’. Even at high levels of the ultra-secretive SACP, there was not always clarity about who was a member. According to the veteran communist Ben Turok, ‘few, if anyone, knew the entire membership’ of a Party that had established a series of hermetic cells to avoid detection and that operated on a need-to-know basis. Being an underground party, the SACP did not issue membership cards. Members were not required to swear an oath of allegiance or to undergo any formal rite of initiation. Normally, candidates for membership were first identified and observed for a certain period and invited to read recommended Marxist texts that would bring them to a satisfactory level of theoretical knowledge. Only then were they invited to join. Members were usually required to pay a subscription and to be active members of a Party cell consisting of no more than four or five people, and it has actually been suggested that Mandela was a member of one such unit. However, some members were exempted from this requirement, particularly those who were lawyers, like the advocate Vernon Berrangé. A.P. Mda, basing his opinion on his conversations with his old friend Mandela, was convinced that Mandela had joined the SACP and thought that the Party valued him most especially as one of the few people able to rival the PAC’s Robert Sobukwe in popular appeal. Mda found it significant that at his 1962 trial, Mandela, clad in the traditional dress of the Xhosa aristocrat that he was, followed Sobukwe’s example almost verbatim in saying that he didn’t recognise the authority of the court.

Mandela certainly had the requisite knowledge of Marxist theory necessary for Party membership. A close analysis of Mandela’s statements on SACP membership at various trials and in his prison memoir suggests that, naturally enough, he wanted to conceal as much as possible from prosecutors and policemen. His knowledge of Marxism-Leninism was more extensive than he claimed in his famous 1964 trial speech. Walter Sisulu, too, denied Party membership at his trial, although he had in fact been a member since 1955 and had joined the central committee a year later. Mandela’s denial was described by Maharaj as the result of a ‘collective decision’. Moreover, it was a reflection of Party discipline, as the SACP constitution allowed for the expulsion of any member who disclosed the fact of his or her membership, a rule that Jack Simons called ‘a highly valued protective shield’. In Mandela’s case, however, his denial also owed something to a legal pedantry that was in keeping with his professional training—using his lawyer’s skills he could argue that, never having sworn an oath, signed an agreement or undergone any membership rite, he had never accepted Party membership. When Mandela’s close associate and former fellow-prisoner Mac Maharaj was asked about Mandela’s and Sisulu’s Party membership, he expressed himself as follows:

When I discussed it with [Mandela and Sisulu] in prison, they came to me on their own, and the one [Sisulu] said: If I die, whatever the repercussions, then reveal it. The other [Mandela] states his position that, in view of the positions he has taken in court, which was a collective decision, then began to bend it in his autobiography, to say he believes in the philosophy of dialectical materialism. But now, again, of course, there are problems there.

It seems that Mandela’s membership of the SACP central committee was not the culmination of any rise through the ranks, although it remains possible that he had joined the Party as a ‘secret’ member shortly after Sisulu had also joined, in the mid-1950s. It is most likely that Mandela’s membership of the central committee was the result of a bargain that he had made with the leaders of the SACP most probably at or immediately after the Party’s national conference in December 1960 whereby he joined at leadership level.

Mandela was, so to speak, a SACP member of a special type.

Mandela was acutely conscious of his personal stature and responsibility as a national leader of black South Africa, as those who spent time with him in his underground hiding-places in late 1961 recall. His princely training in the upper house of the abaThembu was important in this respect. The famous photos of Mandela, beardless but with a light moustache and with no parting in his hair, wearing traditional-style clothing in the form of a bedspread wrapped over one shoulder, with a beaded necklace and a bangle on his upper arm, clearly reflect Mandela’s own wishes in the matter of self-presentation. These photos were taken by Eli Weinberg in Wolfie Kodesh’s flat in Johannesburg in late 1961, shortly before Mandela’s first journey abroad, which was to strengthen still further his wish to emphasise his African identity. During the historic tour of Africa that he undertook from January to July 1962, with a brief visit to Britain, Mandela was shocked to realise just how damaging was the ANC’s relationship with the SACP in the perception of many nationalists throughout Africa, causing them to prefer the rival PAC. Mandela’s awareness of the appeal exercised by this pan-Africanist and anti-communist rival made him realise that his aristocratic origin, rather than being a burden as it could be in a communist party, might be turned to political advantage in the South African context. His choice of traditional dress during the trial in Pretoria that led to his conviction in November 1962 reflected a choice to represent himself as an African first and foremost. Yet Mandela also saw fit to point out to others that the date of his sentencing, 7 November, was the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution.

Coda: The Current Reality

Turning to the present day, we may observe that two key articles of ANC belief may now be seen to be historically unfounded. First, South Africa’s armed struggle was from the outset inscribed in the politics of the Cold War, as Umkhonto we Sizwe had its immediate origin in the Communist Party rather than in the ANC and it was formed only after prior consultation in Moscow and Beijing. Second, a substantial group within the ANC, including its president, Chief Luthuli, was opposed to the launch of an armed struggle and prevented it from becoming official ANC policy at the time of Umkhonto we Sizwe’s foundation in 1961. The issue was fudged, with consequences that were to be felt for decades.

It is not difficult to appreciate why Mandela denied his Party membership at his 1964 trial, choosing rather to emphasise his admiration for the British parliament and the American Congress. As Sisulu later noted, revelation of Party membership would have been devastating for the ANC, certainly as long as the Cold War lasted. The development of Nelson Mandela as an icon of struggle from the late 1970s onwards was an enormously powerful advertisement for the ANC that brought support throughout the world, including in Western countries among people who would be far less disposed to admire the ANC and Mandela if they had known of his communist party past.

Even after his triumphant elevation to the presidency in 1994, with the United States government and the American public having become enthusiastic supporters, Mandela continued to be wary of anti-communism, believing that South Africa’s ferocious right-wing networks constituted the greatest political danger to his country’s new dispensation. It seems that even at that late date, he still could not afford the political cost of acknowledging the full truth about his own biography and the key point of South African history relating the origins of Umkhonto we Sizwe to the Communist Party. Moreover, by this time his published autobiography, which included a denial of his Communist Party membership, had become a worldwide bestseller.

Accepting some key historical facts connected to the beginnings of South Africa’s armed struggle remains difficult for the ANC and the SACP today because it weakens the ideological glue that binds them still. During the exile period, the SACP became the main provider of intellectual and strategic direction to the ANC. If either organisation were to admit the possibility of correcting its standard version of the past on these and other crucial points, such as Luthuli’s continuing attachment to non-violence, it would threaten an important element of ANC/SACP mythology, posited as it is on the premise that the ANC was always the leading force of the Congress Alliance and that the actual course of events was a majestic unfolding of the logic of history, to which there was never any alternative.

Among the most cherished elements of Marxism-Leninism assimilated by the ANC was a belief in the inevitability of the historical developments that had been identified by Marxist revolutionary science. There emerged a ‘myth of true freedom as realisable only via the ANC’, as two recent authors have expressed it. Over the years since 1994 this historical myth has degenerated into ‘the art of making people chase shadows’, a tactic used to help the ruling party remain in power.

This is not dissimilar from what the ANC’s arch-enemy, the National Party, also did in its day. As a leading commentator put it:

One thing the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ South Africa have in common is a passion for inventing history. History is not seen as a dispassionate inquiry into what happened, but rather as a part of political mobilisation promoting some form of collective self-interest.