No Easy Walk to Freedom

The essays in Chapters 3-5 elaborate on the government policies that perpetuated white supremacy, demonstrating that these policies aimed to place Black South Africans in a perpetual state of servitude to the white population and to repress the anti-apartheid movement by preventing mass organization. While his articulation of the policies and their impact on the people are of central importance, Mandela also makes clear that the people of South Africa did not readily accept these white supremacist policies, contributing to his theme of mass mobilization and unity. 

Chapter 3 suggests that the primary purpose of Nationalist government policy was to maintain Black servitude and prevent mass struggle:

All these misdemeanors are weapons resorted to by the mining and farming cliques of this country to protect their interests and to prevent the rise of an all-powerful organized mass struggle. To them, the end justifies the means, and that end is the creation of a vast market of cheap labour for mine magnates and farmers (23).

Chapters 4 and 5 underscore this point through more detailed analysis of the government’s policies and how they functioned to ensure cheap Black labor. In Chapter 4’s essay, Mandela identifies coercive measures used to create and perpetuate this labor force. Mandela calls the rehabilitation scheme, which later came to be known as Bantustan, “the trump card of both the mining and the farming industries” (26). After sharing the purported purpose of the rehabilitation scheme (as articulated by Secretary for Native Affairs D.L. Smit), Mandela explains how the scheme functioned to undermine the freedom struggle and secure Black Africans’ place as servants to the ruling class:

By enclosing them in compounds at the centres of work and housing them in rural locations when they return home, it is hoped to prevent the emergence of a closely knit, powerful, militant, and articulate African industrial proletariat who might acquire the rudiments of political agitation and struggle. What is wanted by the ruling circles is a docile, spineless, unorganized, and inarticulate army of workers (27). 

In addition, he emphasizes that the general tax exists for the primary purpose of creating a labor force:

In the Reserves, chiefs, headmen, mounted police, and court messengers comb the countryside daily for tax defaulters and, fearing arrests, thousands of Africans are forced to trek to the mines and surrounding farms in search of work. Around the jails in several parts of the country, queues of farmers are to be observed waiting for convicts (27).

Mandela’s earlier speeches and writings had already discussed the mounting poverty of the Black South African community, so this discussion of the general tax suggests that the government took advantage of the impoverished conditions they had created to coerce people into working for the elite out of fear of repercussions and to make a labor force out of those who couldn’t find the means to pay the tax.

Mandela demonstrates that the rehabilitation scheme and the general tax worked alongside the imposition of tribal rule on the people in the reserves. Discussing the implications of the Transkeian Bunga’s acceptance of the Bantu Authorities Act, he writes:

Here we need only reiterate that reversion to tribal rule might isolate the democratic leadership from the masses and bring about the destruction of that leadership as well as the liberation organizations. It will also act as a delaying tactic. In course of time the wrath of the people will be directed, it is hoped, not at the oppressor but at Bantu Authorities who will be burdened with the dirty work of manipulating the detestable rehabilitation scheme, the collection of taxes, and the other measures which are designed to keep down the people (28). 

By explicating the links between the rehabilitation scheme, the general tax, and the imposition of tribal rule, Mandela illustrates how the relationship between various policies produced compounding effects on the people. Not only did isolating the people from their land, homes, families, and other Africans decrease the possibility of unity among the masses through ethnic separatism and hostility, but the government ensured that there would also be tension between the masses and those who were supposed to represent them. The imposition of tribal rule created division between the tribal authorities and the ordinary population because the authorities were the ones enforcing the government’s oppressive laws. As Mandela explains, the division between Black leadership and the Black general population was a tactic to divert attention away from the government as the actual enemy and the enforcer of Black oppression. 

Chapter 5 illustrates that Bantu education policy also contributed to the compounding effects of white supremacist law and to the aims of preventing mass struggle and perpetuating a cheap Black labor face. Mandela explains Verwoerd’s justification for Bantu education policy:

He declared that racial relations could not improve if the wrong type of education was given to Africans. They could not improve if the result of African education was the creation of a frustrated people who, as a result of education they received, had expectations in life which circumstances in South Africa did not allow to be fulfilled; when it created people who were trained for professions not open to them; when there were people amongst them who had received a form of cultural training which strengthened their desire for white-collar occupations (31). 

With this explanation, Mandela makes it clear that the purpose of Bantu education, including its extension to higher education, was to keep Black Africans confined to menial labor that would perpetuate the sense of inferiority and dejection fostered by oppressive schooling. The government’s education policy thus exemplified its efforts to crush any opposition to the white supremacist regime. In Chapter 3, Mandela asserts that educated African youth were “a serious threat to the governing circles” because proper education encouraged aspirations beyond mining and farming labor and thus increased youth resistance to being funneled into those forms of labor (23). In Chapter 5, he writes, “The friendship and inter-racial harmony that is forged through the admixture and association of various racial groups at mixed universities constitute a direct threat to the policy of apartheid” (32). Thus, segregated education not only served to pipeline the Black population into specific forms of labor but also to impede mass mobilization and unity in an attempt to crush the resistance movement. 

However, each essay reveals that despite the government’s repressive tactics, the masses remained steadfast in their opposition to apartheid and were willing to solidify and organize their efforts against the government regime. For example, Mandela states in Chapter 3 that “[t]he people are increasingly becoming alive to the necessity of the solidarity of all democratic forces” and that “the people’s organizations have embarked on a broad programme of mutual cooperation” (23), including the adoption of the Freedom Charter by “people of all races and from all walks of life” (23). In Chapter 4, he notes the indignation and sporadic insurrections of the people of the Transkei as a launching point for the possibility of more coordination and more impactful resistance (28). Chapter 5 includes attention to the protests and indignation that Bantu education policies aroused:

The attack on university freedom is a matter of vital importance and constitutes a grave challenge to all South Africans. It is perhaps because they fully appreciate this essential fact that more people are participating in the campaign against the introduction of academic segregation. Students in different parts of the country are staging mammoth demonstrations and protest meetings. Heads of universities, lecturers, men and women of all shades of opinion, have in speeches and articles violently denounced the action of the Government (34).

Thus, Mandela illustrates that not only did government tactics fail to fully repress the movement among the Black population but that the government undermined itself by attacking all sectors of the population, encouraging them to join the Black-led struggle against apartheid.