History's Youngest Heroes: Nelson Mandela and the Defiance Campaign

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I'm Nicola Cochlin, and for BBC Radio 4, this is history's youngest heroes.

Being young, maybe she didn't think too much.

She thought, right, I'll just do it.

She thought about others rather than herself.

Rebellion.

There's a real sense of urgency in them, that resistance has to be mounted, it has to be mounted now.

Risk.

Was he breaking the law?

Possibly.

Was he in fear of prosecution?

Possibly.

You know, but he was still prepared to do it.

And the radical power of youth.

Well, sticking to your guns,

that take gods.

That really takes gods.

Episode 1.

Nelson Mandela and the Defiance Campaign.

The South African black nationalist leader, Mr.

Nelson Mandela, is to be freed from prison tomorrow.

The announcement was made by President F.W.

de Klerk at a news conference in Cape Town three hours ago.

Well, I'm a South African.

I was 19 years old on the day that he was released.

Professor Johnny Steinberg teaches African studies at Yale University.

He remembers the day in February 1990 when Nelson Mandela walked free from prison.

A day after he's released, he came home to Soweto, which had been where he lived 27 years earlier.

And I was one of hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of Soweto there to get a glimpse of him, to celebrate perhaps the most extraordinary day in my country's history.

We may remember Mandela as a dignified elderly man who spent 27 years imprisoned by the apartheid regime in South Africa.

After he was released, he negotiated an end to racial segregation in his country and became its first black president.

But Mandela's political career began decades before when he was a young student.

In the summer of 1952, Regalia Bam was 19 years old.

Like all black people in South Africa, she lived under the restrictions of apartheid.

And I remember the evening prayer as I was preparing to go to school, a boarding school.

My father says,

We will not see the freedom

during our lifetime, but I pray to God that the generations to come and our children will see the freedom.

Four years earlier, the South African National Party brought in the apartheid system.

Meaning separateness, apartheid enshrined racial segregation in law.

It privileged those who were defined as white and instituted political and economic discrimination against those who were defined as as Indian, coloured, meaning multiracial, or black.

In the early 50s, the young African National Congress activist Nelson Mandela led the Defiance campaign, protesting against these laws.

I was part of a group that was supporting the Defiance campaign.

The Defiance campaign was an action of defiance, absolutely the word, to defy the laws of apartheid.

Under apartheid, schools were segregated along racial lines.

Black students were given a much more limited syllabus than white students.

We had many strikes.

I was part of one of the many big strikes myself at that time.

And

that was the time, that was the atmosphere of the young people.

Pandela's campaign focused on peaceful action.

A station, train station.

Instead of being on the side of the black people only, we were now going to stand also on the side of the white people.

We were going to go to cafeterias where you couldn't go to buy something in a cafeteria.

No, now, we're going to do that.

With the Defiance campaign, Mandela inspired vast numbers of people and learned the sacrifices it took to be a freedom fighter.

He described his own life as a long walk to freedom.

His activism as a young man would put him on a path to being hailed as one of the greatest heroes in world history.

Later in life, Bam worked closely with Mandela.

And I often say to myself, Mandela, he was

the chosen one.

He was not the only one clever and bold.

As Mandela would say all the time, I'm no angel.

You know, he liked that.

I'm not an angel.

I'm just any person there.

That the time had come

for us as a people

to

have a liberator.

Choli Shasha Mandela was born in 1918 in the countryside of the Eastern Cape.

When he was eight, his primary school teacher gave him an English name, Nelson.

His father was a minor aristocrat in the Tembu aristocracy.

Yet his was not a luxurious life.

There was no electricity, there was no running water.

He lived in a hut with no furniture.

None of his older brothers or sisters had been to school or were literate.

When Mandela was 12, his father died of lung disease.

His mother shipped him off to a place he'd never been before, to people he'd never met before, and it was to the king of the Tembu as a foster child, essentially.

From now, his guardian would be Jongentaba Dalanjebo, Regent of the Tembu Kingdom.

Mandela would live in the Great Place, a compound of traditional huts and western houses.

After he moved there, he rarely saw his mother.

He remembers thinking that everybody around was better than him, that he was out of place, that he didn't belong there.

He wet his bed at the age of 12.

It was really a terrible transition.

Mandela lived in the shadow of the Boulder Boys.

He was in a way a very innocent, very naive boy, very respectful of the adult world, not really a rebel.

White settlement in South Africa began in the 17th century.

The first settlers were Dutch.

Later, the British arrived.

It was the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and then gold in 1886, which suddenly made South Africa enormously wealthy and prosperous.

The capital that built the gold mines was mainly British capital, and the great fault line in South African politics was between English-speaking and Afrikaans, Afrikaans being the nation that grew out of the Dutch sectors.

In his late teens, Mandela was sent to an all-black boarding school.

The school aimed to turn out what Mandela himself described as black Englishmen through the enforcement of Victorian values.

Two years later, he enrolled at Fort Hare, a small, prestigious university for black Africans.

He arrived full of hope.

a strikingly handsome 21-year-old wearing a wristwatch and a fresh pinstriped suit.

What he was going to become was a court interpreter.

And that may sound quite humble to us, but in that world it was very high.

To be a court interpreter was to be fluent both in English and in Posa, and to be the interface between white power and black people.

It was a very elevated role.

To be a young black man and to turn up at university at all.

put you in the very, very top echelons of the black elite.

By his own recollections, he wasn't particularly political there.

You know, the Second World War began while he was at Fort Hare, and he was very much on the British side.

And when one of his fellow students said, well, I hope the British lose the war, because if they lose the war, they may also lose their empire, he was absolutely shocked to his core.

He didn't believe that such a thought was possible.

During his second year at Fort Hare, a student protest broke out over the quality of the food and the treatment of a canteen worker.

And he happened to be elected to the Students' Representative Council.

And the council had to decide whether to resign in protest over the food.

And the rest of the council all capitulated.

Mandela disagreed with the council.

He backed the protesters.

For that, he was suspended.

He was young.

He didn't really know what he was getting into.

And suddenly he'd been expelled from this wonderful elite institution.

He was confused.

He wasn't quite sure what to do next.

And in fact, he almost certainly would have simply gone back to university the next year and apologized and would have been readmitted if something else hadn't happened.

Mandela arrived back home to find his guardian Jangin Taba furious with him.

But he'd also arranged a marriage for Mandela and for his own son who was a close friend and cousin of Mandela's.

Neither Mandela nor Jangin Taba's son Justice wanted this.

Together they hatched a plan to run away.

They secretly sold several head of Mandela's guardian's cattle and used that money to flee and to go to Johannesburg.

This wasn't easy.

Black men had to carry passes and a journey like this required authorization from the district chief magistrate.

Mandela asked the magistrate to sign his pass.

And the magistrate got on the phone to the king and the king absolutely lost his temper and said these boys are trying to escape from me they've stolen my cattle you must immediately arrest them

and when the magistrate put down the phone Mandela who'd I think done one or two law classes said well, well, hold on.

You can't arrest us because the king has lost his temper.

We haven't broken a law.

Johannesburg was 500 miles north.

With no official means of getting there, they scrambled for a lift.

They eventually found a white woman.

She was prepared to take them.

She was charging them a fortune if money to do so.

And at that time, a young black man would not sit in the passenger seat of a car driven by a white woman.

So they filed into the back of her car.

And

Nelson's cousin Justice was a very rambunctious, charismatic, talkative man.

And he was the one sitting behind the driver's seat.

And this woman was very, very nervous and unsettled that such an appetite young black man was sitting behind her where she couldn't see him.

And so she got Mandela and Justice to swap places.

The quiet one Mandela, she was comfortable sitting behind her.

And that's how they drove to Johannesburg.

He got a taste of the city's racism on the journey there before he got there.

As they drove into the city, Mandela was struck by the noise, the electricity, the traffic.

Johannesburg, he wrote, was a city of dreams, a place where one could transform oneself from a poor peasant into a wealthy sophisticate, a city of danger and opportunity.

Its Zulu name was Aigoli, place of gold.

Even in such a place, the young Mandela stood out.

He was six foot two, broad-shouldered, athletic, very good-looking.

You know, he turned heads.

This tall,

handsome man,

walking in a stately manner, and had this beautiful partition, you know, of his hair, which was the fashion at that time.

And of course, we all already knew of him.

We knew who he was.

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In Johannesburg, Bergalia Baum met Mandela for the first time.

When I came to Johannesburg, the first shock that I have to enter Johannesburg and have a permit to enter because it is a place that belongs to white people.

And so you are not supposed to be here

when you go to a station for a train.

Oh, there's a

different side for black people.

There were some buses that you can't get onto.

And then if you do come into a bus, you know that you must all sit at the back.

It's day to day.

It's everywhere.

Corner you turn, the shops, the use of facilities of any kind.

You know the humiliation.

It overwhelms you.

Despite the discrimination they faced, many black people moved to the city to look for work.

They would come to Johannesburg and work in the gold mines for usually nine months a year.

And in that time, they were locked in single-sex compounds, living in rooms with 20, 30, 40 other black men.

That would not be Mandela's fate.

Mandela told his cousin, Garlic M.

Bikeni, he wanted to be a lawyer.

And M.

Bikeni nearly falls off his chair.

I mean, he doesn't know black lawyers.

There are hardly any.

And he scratches his head and he says, I know who to send you to.

There's an estate agent.

His name is Walter Sisulu, and we'll go to his office.

Sisulu ran a real estate agency.

What he didn't tell Mandela about Sisulu is that he was one of the leading black activists in Johannesburg.

Sisulu arranged a placement for Mandela in a small white Jewish law firm.

But for Mandela, this would be a shock.

He had lived most of his young life among the black elite, rarely encountering any white people.

Now,

here they were, all around him.

He had to drink his tea from a separate cup to white people.

You know, the white secretaries would send him out to go and buy their shampoo.

He could not but see it everywhere.

And the fact that he was an aristocrat, the fact that he'd lived in a sheltered world, is really what accounted for how offended he was, for how deeply and violently unnatural he felt this to be.

It's where he acquired real anger

and where he had to decide what to do with his anger.

In 1943, age 25, Mandela enrolled as a part-time law student at the University of the Widwattersrand.

The entire law school other than him was white.

There was one moment where he walked into class and everybody stopped what they were doing and stared at him.

He found an empty seat, sat down, and the man next to him very extravagantly got up and went to sit at the other side of the room.

Mandela often visited Walter Susulu at his home in Soweto, a black township just outside Johannesburg.

Susulu was a socialist-leaning member of the African National Congress, or ANC.

The ANC had been founded in 1912 to advocate for the rights of black South Africans.

Mandela attended some ANC meetings, but conversation at home was largely about how out of touch the organization seemed.

Mandela had seen tens of thousands of young black people arrive in Johannesburg to help in the efforts to fight the Second World War.

Yet their townships became even more squalid.

It was unclear to Mandela that the ANC had much to offer them.

It was very much a staid, middle-class, gentlemanly organization and really asked for the admission of black people into political life rather than demanded it.

Mandela and Sisulu could see other organizations, such as trade unions and the mostly white-led Communist Party, grow among the new urban masses.

They were so aware of a generational gulf between them and their elders, and the very idea of youth came with militancy, with urgency.

And so in their minds, there was a natural connection between the style of politics they wanted and the fact that they were young.

Mandela was among those building a new organization, the ANC Youth League.

It was a youth wing of the existing ANC, so it wasn't meant as a direct frontal challenge to the ANC.

It was a decision to work from within.

In 1944, Mandela was in Walter Sissulu's living room.

He looked up to see a young woman walk in.

She was a nurse, Evelyn Massey.

It was a very electric mutual attraction.

It all happened very quickly.

Before they knew what had happened, she was pregnant.

They married quietly in the native commissioner's office in Johannesburg.

She was the breadwinner.

It is thanks to her that

they got a house in Soweto.

You know, she bought the groceries that were in the cupboard.

She freed him to become a lawyer.

Though Evelyn had little interest in politics, politics, Mandela was becoming increasingly involved in the ANC Youth League.

Its manifesto urged every African to determine his future by his own efforts.

He became its secretary, organising new branches and recruiting members.

Mandela also attended communist meetings.

He was very suspicious of the Communist Party because so many of its members were white and Indian.

And there were times where he, you know, he was a big, strong man.

He literally used his muscle to push white and Indian speakers off platforms.

At the same time, he was making real friendships with Indian and white communists.

And he was learning from them.

I would hear those days how

radical Mandela is.

People knew, even those of us who were not active and very far from the ANC Youth League, that he was, oh, he's very radical.

That was the word about him.

He dressed stylishly, he was charismatic, he was full of energy.

He was very, very seldom at home.

And he began having a lot of extramarital affairs, but always with fellow activists.

Evelyn was deeply, deeply unhappy.

Their marriage became bitter and conflictual and nasty.

There's also evidence that he beat her.

Mandela strongly denied his wife's accusations of violence, though he did say he once used force to disarm Evelyn when she attacked him with a red-hot poker.

The couple had four children together.

Sadly, their first daughter died in infancy.

Their marriage was heading for divorce.

In May 1948, Mandela was 29 years old and awaiting news of the general election.

Very few black people had voting rights.

The incumbent government held vague notions of integration.

The opposition, the National Party, led by D.F.

Milan, pledged a strict policy of racial separation.

The National Party was an Afrikaans party and not an English party, and the ticket on which they had run their campaign was called apartheid.

The National Party's victory came as a shock.

Black people of South Africa had always been discriminated, had always been deprived of many opportunities.

No land, no business, less opportunities at that time for education.

A whole array of things.

It's just that when the apartheid came, it really had a policy.

Under apartheid, the government formally classified all South Africans according to race.

White, Indian, coloured, or black.

Each racial group could own land, occupy premises, and trade only in its own separate area.

If you are going to town and you are going to stand in a line where black people must stand, even if the line is going to be two hours and the other line is short,

you stand in that line because you don't have much of a choice.

You can't break the law alone.

The ANC Youth League responded with a policy of a national liberation movement, led by Africans themselves.

Behind the scenes though, it was divided between two rival theories of nationalism, Africa for the Africans and a multi-racial Africanism.

Mandela later wrote that he was sympathetic to the ultra-revolutionary position.

I was angry at the white man, he said, not at racism.

By the spring of 1951, Mandela was 32 years old.

He was president of the Youth League and had increasing influence within the wider ANC.

He persuaded the ANC to adopt a program of mass action.

And they decide that the first phase of mass action is a defiance campaign.

Break segregation laws, ignore curfews, enter the door for white people at the post office, stand on the white side of the platform at the train station, and it's decided that black people are going to do this en masse.

But Mandela and Sisulu could not agree on who should take part in this protest.

Sisulu insisted that they should draw on the support of Indian and coloured people.

Mandela at this point is famous as an Africanist, as a Black people going it alone person.

There's an ANC national congress in December 1951.

He marches into that congress saying, Defiance is good, but not with other races.

And he gets a pretty tepid response.

Over the next 48 hours, Mandela changed his mind.

So by the time he gives his closing address at the end of that conference, he's all for multiracial action.

In its Defiance campaign, the ANC offered Mandela the position of volunteer-in-chief.

Which means he would be in the shop window.

He would be the face of the Defiance campaign.

He moved from black exclusive politics to multiracial politics because of his ambition, because he was offered a place right at the front of it.

The Defiance campaign followed the Indian activist Mohandas K.

Gandhi's principles principles of non-cooperation and non-violence.

First, small teams of volunteers entered white areas without permits or used white-only toilets.

They informed the police so they could be arrested with minimal disturbance.

At a rally in Durban on the 22nd of June, Mandela addressed a crowd of 10,000.

Nelson Mandela thought that it was going to overthrow the government.

He believed that it would be so successful that the country would ground to a halt.

It would be impossible to enforce apartheid laws.

Four days later, in Port Elizabeth, huge crowds marched singing freedom songs.

Across the country, they burned their passports and entered whites-only areas.

On the first day, over 250 volunteers around the country were arrested.

Mandela was one of them, interned for two days in a police station in Durban.

Over the next five months, the campaign grew and grew.

It was very successful.

You know, 8,500 black people were arrested.

Among them were very respected people, doctors, lawyers, nurses.

And so Black South Africa was an audience to their most respected people breaking the law.

Mandela urged further action.

The government, alarmed by the partnership between African and Indian people, dubbed the protesters anarchists and communists.

And then something very, very upsetting happened.

It was in a poverty-stricken township on the edges of the city of of Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape.

Thousands of black people gathered.

The police tried to break up their gathering.

They threw stones at the police.

The police opened fire, killing a number of people.

In response, survivors raged through the township, setting fire to property.

Three weeks later, in a separate incident, Police broke up a religious meeting in the South African city of East London and fired shots into homes in the area.

Some protesters ran riot.

And there happened to be a white woman who was both a Catholic nun and a doctor who lived in the township.

She was dragged from her car and killed, and her body chopped up.

And that so scandalized white South Africa that the state really came down very heavily on the Defiance campaign after that and effectively ended it.

Mandela said this violence was not connected to the Defiance campaign, which had been deliberately non-violent.

Though these outbreaks had nothing whatsoever to do with the campaign, he wrote, the government attempted to link us with them.

Mandela was arrested again and banned from public appearances.

From the end of 1952, he was not allowed to leave Johannesburg without permission.

He was not allowed to address a crowd.

He was not allowed to attend an ANC meeting.

At various points, he was not permitted to be in the presence of more than one other person.

The Defiance campaign failed to overturn laws.

But Mandela said this was not the point.

The ANC was revitalized.

Membership grew to 100,000.

Many were drawn into direct action.

So many activists were imprisoned that Mandela argued the stigma had been removed.

From the Defiance campaign onward, he wrote, going to prison became a badge of honor among Africans.

It was one he famously wore himself.

And he realized that he was in this this for life and that he'd require a lot of fortitude to be a leader.

It was the first time he realized that it wasn't as simple as galvanizing the masses, putting them on the streets and the regime battling.

That it was a lot harder than that.

It required more thinking than that.

For Mandela, still in his early 30s, it was only the beginning of a life dedicated to change and justice.

He began to accept that armed struggle had a place in that campaign.

It took more than 40 years to overturn apartheid.

And he would do it.

Bagalia Bam, who went on to become a leading social activist in South Africa, looks back on this period with astonishment.

You are so sure that you're going to change the system.

I mean the coin.

You know,

it's not a laughter I do, but I'm amazed.

I'm amazed at us, at myself as well, at the time we were,

how we were absolutely sure

that it's going to change.

Absolutely sure.

Coming up on this series of history's youngest heroes.

Julian of Norwich.

One of the first women to write in the English language.

A trailblazer, but at a cost.

Why would somebody choose to have themselves blocked up into a tiny little cell with sort of limited contact with the outside world?

Out of choice.

A Lakshmi Bhai, the Rani of Jhansi, India's warrior queen.

She was a small woman, leading her troops, astride a horse, a sword in each hand, taking on the might of the entire British Empire.

Next time, will Lady Jane Grey give up her faith or face the executioner's axe?

You have someone who is knowingly risking death because there is something that matters more to them than their life itself.

The brief reign of Lady Jane.

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In our series, Child from BBC Radio 4, I'm going to be exploring how a fetus develops and is influenced by the world from the very get-go.

Then, in the middle of the series, we take a deep look at the mechanics and politics of birth, turning a light on our struggling maternity services and exploring how the impact of birth on a mother affects us all.

Then we're going to look at the incredible feat of human growth and learning in the first 12 months of life.

Whatever shape the journey takes, this is a story that helps us know our world.

Listen on BBC Sounds.

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