Mandela, Nelson (b. 1918)

Becoming a Freedom Fighter

In Johannesburg Mandela was exposed to the African National Congress (ANC), a group formed in 1912 to advocate for the political rights of black South Africans under white minority rule. He joined the ANC in 1944 and was elected to its National Executive Committee in 1949. In 1951, he was elected president of the ANC Youth League, which was dedicated to pushing the organization in a more militant direction.

The Youth Leaguers were highly suspicious of whites, feeling they would try to control the movement. At the time the Youth League was formed, Mandela was firmly opposed to joining forces with other races: “While I was not prepared to hurl the white man into the sea, I would have been perfectly happy if he had climbed aboard his steamships and left the continent of his own volition” (Meredith 1998, 66–67).

The Youth League drafted a Program of Action calling for peaceful but nevertheless illegal boycotts, strikes, stay-at-home protests, and demonstrations to replace the polite and fruitless deputations and petitions the ANC typically employed. By 1950, Mandela was finding it more difficult to justify his prejudice against the mainly white members of the [Page 954]Communist Party of South Africa. Not only were there communists whom he admired, but also his reading of Marx, Engels, and Lenin convinced him that a classless society would have much in common with traditional African culture, which cared for the needs of all.

It took a while longer for Mandela to alter his view on Indians; many African supporters viewed them as a merchant class of exploiters of black labor. When the ANC decided to embark on a Defiance Campaign against unjust laws in 1952, Mandela was opposed to allowing the Indians to join it—but he was voted down by the other members of the ANC executive committee. Mandela biographer Martin Meredith notes his personal transformation as a result of the Defiance Campaign: “For practical reasons, Mandela had come to accept that a multiracial strategy was necessary in dealing with the government, abandoning the Africanist notions that he had held for so long. In time, his support for a multiracial strategy developed into a unshakeable conviction about the importance of a multiracial approach in striving for non-racial democracy which never wavered, even under the greatest pressure the government could inflict.” (Meredith 1998, 98).

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