THERE was perhaps no other period in our history when the Party played such a seminal role in the unfolding of the struggle as in the years between 1960 and 1963. The ANC had just been outlawed. Its structures as a mass organisation made it more difficult for it to swing into underground activity at the grassroots level. As happened when the Party was banned in 1950, its national leadership included inherited elements whose staying power in risky, illegal conditions had still to be tested.
It was becoming more and more clear that we were in for a long haul. While the sabotage campaign continued sporadically, the thoughts of the leadership began to turn to the next phase of the strategy, which was now irreversibly committed to revolutionary violence as the only remaining option.
By the end of April 1963 the High Command of MK prepared a document (code-named Operation Mayibuye) containing proposals for the stage- by-stage preparation for the launching of the “people’s war”.
Hundreds of activists would leave the country to be trained in the techniques and art of organising and leading a guerrilla struggle. At the end of their training they would, with the help of some of the newly independent African states, return with the minimum necessary armed equipment to a widespread set of strategic areas which had already been selected. In the meantime, a network of full- time organisers was to be appointed to prepare these areas both politically and organisationally, more especially to ensure a relatively speedy integration of the local populace into the armed struggle. All these organisational preparations would be accompanied by intensive national campaigns of mass mobilisation including a national anti- pass campaign.
Hindsight, that most infallible (and sometimes irritating) critic, will surely demonstrate how utterly unreal our expectations were. But the national underground leadership which met at the Rivonia headquarters to discuss the plan felt, by and large, that its objectives were obtainable. Not for the first time in the history of radical struggle did the optimism of will displace the pessimism of intelligence, leading, at best, to an heroic
A High Command was appointed, consisting, in the first place, of Nelson Mandela representing the ANC’s working group in Johannesburg and me representing our Central Committee. We were asked to make recommendations on the rest of the High Command, and these were decided upon by the ANC and Party leaderships. The High Command was then charged with the task of creating regional commands and MK units in all the urban centres.
The first phase of armed action in 1961 was a sabotage campaign directed against government installations. Instructions were issued to avoid attacks which would lead to injury or loss of life. No one believed that the tactic of sabotage could, on its own, lead to the collapse of the racist state. It was the first phase of “controlled violence” designed to serve a number of purposes. It would be a graphic pointer to the need for carefully planned action rather than spontaneous or terrorist acts of retaliation which were already in evidence. And it would demonstrate that the responsibility for the slide towards bloody civil war lay squarely with the regime.
The point was strongly featured in the proclamation accompanying the first sabotage acts which expressed the hope that “even at this late hour” the actions would awaken everyone to a sense of realisation of the disastrous situation to which the regime’s policy was leading, and would bring the government and its supporters to their senses before it was too late and before matters reached the desperate stage of civil war. In addition, armed propaganda was designed to emphasise the break with the period of non- violent campaigning and to create an atmosphere in which young militants would be inspired to join underground combat units.
Theory apart, this venture into a new area of struggle found us ill-equipped at many levels. Among the lot of us we did not have a single pistol. No one we knew had ever engaged in urban sabotage with homemade explosives. Some of us had been in the army but, for all practical purposes, our knowledge of the techniques required for this early phase of the struggle was extremely rudimentary.
The first to be sent to jail for an act of sabotage was Ben Turok, secretary of the South African Congress of Democrats. On December 16 1961 an incendiary device wrapped in a brown paper bag had been left in the drawer of a desk in the Native Divorce Court, then housed on the same block as the Rissik Street Post Office. The device was found by the police virtually intact; it had started burning but snuffed itself out because of lack of oxygen in the drawer. On the scorched remains of the brown paper bag were a number of palm and finger prints whose identity could not immediately be traced.
Five months later, Turok was among those arrested in a police swoop designed to interfere with mass demonstrations which were being planned for May 31 1962 in protest against the celebrations of the first anniversary of the declaration of the Republic. The arrest gave the police a special bonus; they had discovered that the prints found on the wrapping paper of the incendiary device coincided exactly with those taken from Turok when he was detained.
There was an element of poetic irony about the outcome of the trial. Turok was indeed guilty. But he had worn gloves from the moment the device was delivered to him until he had deposited it at the target. At first, it seemed to me that the police had taken an educated guess as to who the culprit was and “planted” the fingerprint evidence.
But what really happened was this. While Jack Hodgson was busy distributing the incendiary devices on December 16 one of them prematurely caught fire in his motor car. He managed to dispose of the offending device but the flames had already charred the outer wrappings of the others. When Turok received his own parcel, he naturally felt uneasy about the attention that its outer charred wrapping would attract on his journey to the target area. To avoid this he rewrapped the device in the old paper packet which he found in the boot of his car and which unfortunately bore his prints from a much earlier handling. Without these fortuitous interventions Turok’s arraignment (and the consequent three-year jail sentence) would never have occurred. Seemingly, poetic justice sometimes visits the good as well as the evil.