Turning on a tickey
'I'll hold on for as long as I can,' said Nelson Mandela, 'but be quick, I'm in a tickey box. '
The note of urgency in his voice was prompted by more than mere impatience. Mandela was on the run.
He had just been acquitted by the
Supreme Court of heinous crimes against the state. Paradoxically, his
proven innocence meant that he had probably become a wanted man.
Mandela did not wait to find out. On his own initiative he went
'underground'. He took on disguises - a flamboyant jackal-skin coat in
one instance; the nondescript dress of a chauffeur in another.Trying to look inconspicuous, the man-on-the-run hung on to the end of a telephone in a public booth - known in South Africa in those days as 'a tickey box' because it accepted only the tiny silver threepenny coin of that name and because public booths sometimes felt that tiny. Mandela, a former amateur heavyweight boxer who at that time resembled Muhammad Ali, hunched himself into the booth and waited for a reporter of the Johannesburg Star to find a pencil
No tape-recorders, no microphones were thrust under Mandela's nose on this occasion; no jostling pack of media people trying to catch his every word. He was forced to keep feeding 'tickeys' into the slot while he told an anonymous voice at the end of the line his plans for a three day 'stay-away'. That peculiarly South African political weapon the 'stay-away' had not acquired its name 30 years ago, so he and the reporter from The Star talked of demonstrations. There would be three days of African anti-republican demonstrations - including 31 May when whites would vote in a referendum on whether or not to rid themselves of the British monarchy and introduce an Afrikaner republic.
Looking back, we can now appreciate that mid-1961 was a critical moment in the life of apartheid. In that year the gates were already open to a new world beyond colonialism, and Africa was queueing up for 'freedom'. Afrikaner nationalists in South Africa had seized power and squeezed it. Afrikaner nationalism, arrogated to itself - by hook and by legalised crook - an unassailable position. In 1961, the party held 105 of the 156 seats in the House of Assembly the purified, all-white chamber that ruled the nation. Its domination would increase. The fanaticism of Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd was reaching its peak, and Balthazar Johannes Vorster' s reputation of cool kragdadigheid (untrammelled power) had become his key to fame. At that moment, when the National Party was about to crush almost all white-Establishment opposition, it turned to deal with the potency of black nationalism.
Mandela's organisation was banned and had not yet spread its militant underground roots. He and his colleagues were about to be forbidden every public platform in the country. He had no access to state radio or to much of the media. To whom could Mandela turn to deliver his message? He turned instinctively to the English-language opposition press, the only free channel left in South Africa and almost the only public voice available to all ungagged citizens for the next quarter of a century.
As the chief organiser of the anti-republican demonstrations and as secretary of the African Action Council, Mandela addressed two audiences through The Star.
To all Africans who were opposed to a change in the Constitution without consultation, and to all African National Congress supporters, he said: 'They must not gather or hold processions likely to result in a clash with the police. '
And to all whites, he said: 'I want to give this assurance to the Europeans of South Africa. They have nothing to fear from these demonstrations. We have insisted. to our people that they must stay quietly at home as a protest against the establishment of a republic in which we have no say. '
Asked whether workers would be intimidated to stay away, he denied that any intimidation would occur. Some people behaved badly in a campaign, but that applied to all sections of the community.
'Our emphasis is on discipline,' he said. 'We can never hope to get anywhere with the use of strong-arm tactics and intimidation. The people are free to make their own choice about taking part in a stay-at-home protest. No force or threats of force will be used in any quarter.’
He was saying the same thing, in almost the same words, more than 30 years later. He could not know while he was the dashing, active 'Black Pimpernel' (They seek him here, they seek him there...') that he was soon to be captured and to become the world's most famous prisoner. He could not know that he would need to be the most patient national leader since Gandhi.
***
Black resistance was not the first target of white nationalism. First the courts had to be circumvented; then Parliament corrupted; and finally the press controlled. The courts and Parliament - with some spectacular exceptions - were brought into line within the first decade, long before effective black protest manifested itself. The attack on the press was constant and ferocious. Whole government departments were dedicated to the task, and Cabinet Ministers devoted up to a quarter of almost every political speech to the issue. Eventually, the government succeeded in damaging the press in two ways: it turned most of the white electorate against the opposition newspapers, although they continued to read them, and it finally killed press freedom. But the apartheid rulers failed ever to subjugate, let alone control, the newspapers.
As a journalist who observed the creation of the apartheid state in 1948, and watched the apartheid government fall on its sword in 1990, I am left with one overall personal impression of those 43 years.
This chapter goes on to describe how the Press fought some of its battles to stay free and counter the war waged on it by the apartheid authorities.
It tells, through their own words, the stories of some journalists who were arrested and interrogated. Or held in solitary confinement without being charged. Or put under threat of indeterminate detention for withholding the names of their sources.
Chapter One concludes by summing up the role of the Opposition Press in South Africa from the day Apartheid was formally adopted as a government policy, until the day Mandela was released from jail.
“The fight between the government and the press lasted long after most other democratic institutions in the country had been invaded, corrupted or conquered. The siege of the press lasted more than 40 years.”
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