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
azania@africamail.com
 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

2
 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

3
 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

4
 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

5
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.

6
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.

7
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

8
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.

9
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

10
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

11
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

12
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

13
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

14
 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

15
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

16
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.

17
 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]

18
 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.

19
 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

20
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.

21
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

22
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

23
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

24
 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

25
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

26
 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

27
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.

28
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

29
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

30
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

31
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

32
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

33
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

34
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.

35
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

36
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

37
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

38
 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

39
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

40
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

41
 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

42
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.

43
 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

44
 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.

45
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

46
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

47
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.

48
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

49
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.

50
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,

51
 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

52
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

53
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:

54
 “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).

55
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.

56
 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

57
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.

58
 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.

59
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

60
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.

61
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.”

62
 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

63
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

64
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

65
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

66
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

67
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].

68
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.

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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

70
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

71
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

72
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

73
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

74
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

75
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

76
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

77
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

78
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]

79
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.”

80
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.

81
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.

82
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

83
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.

84
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.

85
 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

86
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

87
 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)

88
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

89
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.

90
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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

92
INDEX
AAPC, 2, 44, 45, 47, 52
African National Congress/ANC, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,
7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20,
22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35,
36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47,
48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64,
66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79,
80, 82, 83, 84 (see also Congress Alliance)
Africanist Movement, 2, 6, 16, 20, 23, 30, 39,
40, 42, 45
Africanists, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 23, 25, 27,
28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 40, 41, 42, 43,
44, 45, 47, 48, 51, 52, 55, 78
All Africa People’s Conference, 44, 47
2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17,
18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32,
33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44,
45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59,
60, 62, 64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75,
76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84
ANCYL, 2, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 19, 21, 23, 28, 29,
34, 35, 36, 70
Anti-Communist League, 4, 81
Azanian People's Liberation Army/APLA, 4,
58, 66, 74, 76, 79, 80, 81BAC, 2, 27, 45, 46,
47
Bantustans, 57
Bashee River (see Mbashe River)
Basutoland, 2, 3, 8, 10, 13, 14, 15, 23, 26, 27,
32, 40, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 56, 68, 69, 70, 72,
75, 76, 77, 86, 87
Basutoland Congress Party/BCP, 2, 3, 4, 36, 40,
44, 46, 47, 48, 56, 58, 60, 63, 67, 69, 70, 72,
75, 77, 79, 86, 87 (see also BAC)
Benson, Mary 17, 35, 70, 86
Beyleveld, Pieter 32, 37, 42
Biko, Steve 4
Black Nazis, 74
Black Republic, 9, 30, 40, 50
BNP, 3, 46, 47, 55, 56, 64, 69, 77
Broederbond, 63, 79, 83
Bureau of African Nationalism, 20, 21, 34
Burgess, Stephen Franklin 30, 48, 86
Capricorn Society , 32, 40, 55
Carter, Jimmy 4, 80, 86
Castro, Fidel 71
Central African Federation, 32, 35, 40, 57
Charterists, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 51
China, 13, 15, 28, 50, 71, 76, 80, 83, 86
Chinese, 9, 13, 15, 24, 30, 31, 79, 81
Chunya, 80
Cline, Ray Steiner 4, 81
Congress Alliance/ COD, 2, 6, 16, 32, 34, 35,
37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 48, 49, 57, 63, 67,
70, 71, 72
Congress of Democrats, 2, 32, 37
Congress of the People, 2, 24, 32, 35, 36, 37,
49, 53
CPSA/Communist Party of South Africa 2, 8, 9,
93
10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
Criminal Law Amendment, 2, 24, 32, 34, 52, 60
Cuba, 70, 79, 80, 83, 87
Dadoo, Yusuf 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 32, 37
Davenport, T. R. H. 50, 86
de Lille, Patricia 5, 85
Defiance Campaign, 2, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21,
22, 24, 25, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 35, 39, 44, 50,
52, 60, 62
Desmond, Cosmas 74, 86
Dreyer, Peter 6, 86
Duncan, Patrick 46, 47, 55, 57, 63, 65, 74, 86
Erasmus, Frans 65
First, Ruth 36, 37, 39, 42, 66
Fort Hare, 10, 13, 14, 18, 21, 22, 28, 45, 69
Freedom Charter, 2, 6, 13, 16, 24, 32, 33, 34,
35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44, 45, 53
Gandhi, Mahatma 2, 13, 14, 26, 70
Garvey, Marcus 8, 13, 87
Gerhart, Gail 6, 14, 17, 18, 25, 29, 33, 37, 38,
41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 59,
60, 61, 86
Ghana, 2, 14, 24, 44, 47, 52, 56, 63, 69, 76, 80
Gibson, Richard 6, 73, 86
Guevara, Ernesto Che 30, 71, 79, 86
Gumede, Josiah T. 9, 30, 31, 70
Gun War, 26, 45
Harmel, Michael 15, 16, 20, 37, 86
Hodgson, Jack 32, 70
Hogan, Barbara 86
Hooper, Charles 63
Iliffe, John 7, 86
Indian Congress, 2, 12, 16, 17, 21, 32, 72
Irgun, 3
Isandhlwana, 48, 49, 63
Jolobe, William 51, 64
Kadalie, Clements 8, 21
Kasrils, Ronnie 84
Kathrada, Ahmad 72, 86
Kaunda, Kenneth 23, 71, 82
Kenya, 11, 24, 28, 32, 40, 54, 71, 72
Kenyatta, Jomo 16, 24
Kgosana, Philip 22, 54, 59, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67,
71
Khaketla, Bennet 56, 69, 77
Kondlo, Kwandiwe Merriman 6, 86
L’Ouverture, Toussaint 13, 49, 87
Lamche, Pascale 77
Langa, 53, 54, 59, 62, 63, 64, 65, 73
Leabua Jonathan Molapo 3, 4, 46, 47, 64, 76,
80, 81
Leballo, Potlako Kitchener 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 11, 13,
14, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29,
30, 32, 33, 35, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47,
48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60, 61,
62, 64, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76,
77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 87, 91
Leeman, Bernard 26, 27, 32, 37, 40, 42, 46, 47,
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

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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

95
 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

96
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)