For the next decade, Walter Sisulu would be the ANC’s chief organiser. At the beginning of 1950 he began working at the ANC’s office in New Court Chambers in Commissioner Street. It was a modestly resourced headquarters: £400 in the bank account as well as a typist and a clerk. He would stop visiting New Court Chambers on July 22 1954, the day he was issued with the first of a succession of banning orders, confining him to Johannesburg’s magisterial district, and compelling him to resign from the ANC and prohibiting him from attending any of its meetings.
For the sake of appearances, he was replaced as secretary-general first by Oliver Tambo and then by Duma Nokwe, the first black South African advocate, although he continued to work full-time as the ANC’s main manager, maintaining much the same schedule of daily meetings, and “doing all the work”, as he told Anthony Sampson. He would meet with Nelson Mandela almost every day, he recalled. As their reports indicate, the security police were quite aware of this, presumably choosing to maintain their watch rather than disrupt his activities.
Sisulu would help to lead the ANC through the key period in which it functioned as a mass movement. During this time its signed-up membership swelled from a few thousand in 1950 to a total that may have reached 100,000 between 1952 and the date of its prohibition on April 8 1960. Figures for 1953 suggest a much lower total, of 29,000, though there may have been considerable growth thereafter.
In 1952, during a “Defiance Campaign” of civil disobedience against six “unjust laws”, 8,000 volunteers served prison sentences. In 1954, this was followed by a call on African parents to withdraw their children from primary schools in objection to a new “Bantu Education” syllabus.
The ANC also invested efforts in unsuccessful attempts to summon resistance against the removal of African residents from inner-city and freehold areas to segregated townships, most notably and disappointingly in Sophiatown. Between 1954 and 1955, a year of preparations culminated in a Congress of the People on June 26 1955 which adopted a Freedom Charter, drafted after the collection by “freedom volunteers” of thousands of handwritten demands throughout the country. The ANC adopted the Charter in 1956. In 1957, capitalising on the enthusiasm generated by a locally instigated bus boycott in Alexandra and working in conjunction with the largely communist-led South African Congress of Trade Unions (Sactu), the ANC launched a “One Pound a Day” campaign with another national stay-at-home.
They were outflanked and pre-empted by a new rival, the PAC, which launched its own anti-pass campaign on March 21 1960
From 1958 a potato boycott championed the cause of farmworkers, a group normally neglected by trade union organisers, and another unevenly supported stay-away tried to influence the white electorate to vote against the National Party. More effective with respect to mobilisation was a rolling sequence of protests, demonstrations and passive resistance against the issue of passes for African women, beginning in 1956 and continuing through the rest of the decade. This prompted Sisulu and his colleagues to plan an offensive against the pass laws in general for 1960, but they were outflanked and pre-empted by a new rival, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), which launched its own anti-pass campaign on March 21 1960.
The PAC called upon African men to assemble outside police stations without their passes and await arrest. At one of the few centres in which the PAC enjoyed a mass following, in Sharpeville outside Vereeniging, police fired into a crowd of pass protesters, killing at least 69 people. Nationwide tumult followed and the government enacted legislation to ban both the ANC and the PAC. Sisulu was one of the principal personalities in driving this decade-long resistance to the implementation of apartheid. His contribution was twofold. First, he was probably the most decisive planner in the ANC’s campaigning — in Rusty Bernstein’s words, “the senior strategist” or, as Mary Benson noted, “always unassuming but vital to planning”. As one of Mandela’s biographers note, during the 1950s “Mandela’s first reflex in considering many a problem was to ask, ‘What does Walter think?’” Second, to quote Ruth First, he was at “the centre of the organisational drive of the ANC” or, according to Joe Matthews, the movement’s “quiet engine”.
A more recent assessment has Sisulu as “the organisational and tactical dynamo who transformed the ANC from a genteel lobby group into a vehicle of mass resistance”. The specifics of his role as a strategist and organiser need to be teased out. As Benson notes, Sisulu’s leadership was “unassuming”. This was partly a reflection of his own personality, but it was also the case that from the beginning of his tenure as one of the ANC’s top officials he adopted a principle of collective leadership. Even his reports as secretary-general were signed off by all his fellow executive members. This kind of self-effacement complicates any assessment of Sisulu’s personal imprint on the ANC’s history. Philip Bonner has suggested that the Defiance Campaign was Sisulu’s brainchild. This seems reasonable enough. Mandela remembered that it was Sisulu who “first broached the idea” of a national movement of civil disobedience. Their first discussion about this was in June 1951. Sisulu envisaged a broad effort that would mobilise Indians as well as Africans, and his view would prevail over Mandela’s, who wanted an exclusively African project.
Sisulu arranged Mandela’s appointment in February to replace Dr Alfred Xuma after an angry altercation at the first executive meeting. The ANC leadership remained divided over the question of alliances and whether it should support the May Day protests. On May Day itself, Sisulu and Mandela were present when police shot a number of people dead in Orlando, and they subsequently helped the wounded to get to hospital.
Sisulu then summoned an emergency meeting of the ANC working committee and persuaded its members to support a jointly organised response, overcoming objections from Mandela and AP Mda. Sisulu warned that the ANC was in danger of lagging behind popular predispositions. Charged with organising a national stay-away with Yusuf Cachalia, Sisulu then spent the next month travelling, enjoying a warm reception in Port Elizabeth, where he made friends with Raymond Mhlaba, at that time probably the most effective communist activist in South Africa. In East London he needed to allay apprehensions among nervous local leaders, while in Durban he engaged in careful diplomacy with George Champion and the Zulu king. Champion’s provincial authority was increasingly disputed, and political factionalism as well as lingering Afro-Indian tensions would have an enervating effect in KwaZulu-Natal through the early 1950s despite Sisulu’s efforts as a mediator. Hence, whereas in Port Elizabeth the strike call on June 26 evoked a massive response, in Durban it was mainly Indian workers who stayed away, a pattern that would repeat itself during the Defiance Campaign.
A major proportion of Sisulu’s working day was taken up with face-to-face meetings, and when he visited other parts of the country, he seems to have invested considerable time in having conversations with branch-level activists
Sisulu would report in December 1949 that “the masses” were “marching far ahead of the leadership”. In fact, support for ANC campaigning was very much a reflection of the state of local organisation, and Sisulu would spend a lot of time touring local branches, encouraging their leaders and, in the Eastern Cape, helping them raise funds from mainly Indian traders. The ANC did not have the kind of bureaucracy or following that could mobilise or communicate through written messages or telephone calls, although, visiting him in Soweto in the mid-1950s, Anthony Sampson noticed that Sisulu had a telephone in his house, something sufficiently unusual for him to mention it. Consequently, to be effective in inspiring a participatory popular movement, national leadership needed to be locally visible to ANC members on the ground. As a result, a major proportion of Sisulu’s working day was taken up with face-to-face meetings, and when he visited other parts of the country, he seems to have invested considerable time in having conversations with branch-level activists.
By the end of the year Sisulu was working closely with Mandela. After the ANC conference endorsed his proposal for the Defiance Campaign, he and Mandela jointly drafted a letter for joint signing by Sisulu, as secretary-general, and Dr James Moroka, as president, addressed to the prime minister, DF Malan. Mandela drove across the Free State to take the letter to Moroka for signing: he’d just passed his driving test. His and Sisulu’s text presented an ultimatum: repeal of the acts by February 29, failing which defiance would follow. The choice of the word “defiance” was deliberately assertive. As Sisulu admitted, while drawing inspiration from Gandhi’s model of civil disobedience, “We didn’t really accept the ‘passive’ aspect.” The government needed to know that the ANC was “fully resolved” to bring freedom, democracy and “the elimination of exploitation of man by man” within “our lifetime”, aims supported by all “enlightened” men and women. Sisulu’s contribution is evident perhaps in the reference to exploitation as well as in the letter’s lack of even any formal expression of deference. Apparently, Malan was angered by the letter’s “impertinence”. His secretary replied on January 29, rebuking Moroka and Sisulu for their presumption in writing to the prime minister directly: they should have written to the minister of native affairs. In any case the government had no intention of repealing any laws and would “make full use of the machinery at its disposal to quell any disturbances”. The South African Indian Congress sent a similar letter to Malan but received no reply.
As Sisulu and Mandela had proposed in their meeting with Xuma in 1949, campaigning needed demonstrably selfsacrificial leadership. People expected leaders who were willing to go to jail, they believed, leaders who, in the words of one of the songs that opened meetings during the campaign, “never refused when you are sent”. JB Marks’s speech in anticipation of his arrest at the outset of the campaign was typical in its evocation of biblical martyrdom. Referring to the ANC as the new Noah’s Ark, he went on to announce, “This is the hour now. I am being crucified and I feel the weight of the cross.”
Sisulu avoided this kind of self-dramatisation, but his directing role in the campaign was very publicly evident from its outset on April 6 1950, when he spelled out the plans in front of a crowd of 5,000 at an open space in Fordsburg popularly named Freedom Square or Red Square, which was used by the Communist Party in the 1940s. Today the site is occupied by the Oriental Plaza shopping mall. It was probably Walter’s decision to appoint Mandela as “volunteer-in-chief”, a shrewd recognition of the need for charismatic authority for the campaign and, as Jonny Steinberg has noted, a canny exploitation of Mandela’s vanity.
*This is an edited extract from Walter Sisulu: A sense of outrage by Tom Lodge with Roger Southall, published by Jacana Media. The book launch will take place at The Forge in Braamfontein March 24, when Roger Southall will be in conversation with Bongani Ngqulunga. rsvp@jacana.co.za.
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