Inside Chancellor House, whic h is now a museum. (Image: Sout h African Tourism)
Life in Johannesburg After Fort Hare Tambo went on to teach maths at St Peter’s School in Johannesburg. Like Fort Hare, it was eventually shut down by the Nationalist government because it gave its black students a quality education. “From this school, killed by the government in later years because it refused to bow its head to government-dictated principles of a special education for ‘inferior’ Africans,” Tambo wrote, “graduated successive series of young men drawn inexorably into the African National Congress, because it was the head of our patriotic, national movement for our rights.” Mandela, meanwhile, fled to Johannesburg from his Transkei home to escape an arranged marriage. In the city, Tambo wrote, Mandela “had his first encounter with the lot of the urban African in a teeming African township: overcrowding, incessant raids for passes, arrests, poverty, the pinpricks and frustrations of the white rule”. In Johannesburg both joined the
“From the start, I saw that Tambo’s intelligence was diamond-edged. It was easy to see that he was destined for great things.”
alised unless it stirred itself and took up new methods.” The ANC Youth League was formed in 1944 with Lembede as president and Tambo as secretary. Sisulu became the treasurer and Mandela formed part of the executive committee.
The Defiance Campaign
ANC. They became part of a group of
The National Party victory in the white
young ANC members who increasingly
elections of 1948 came as a surprise to
thought the organisation was not taking strong enough
many – including Mandela. The stated election manifesto
action to fight white rule.
was overtly apartheid: cementing, legislating and extending black repression and white minority rule.
The Youth League
“The victory was a shock,” Mandela wrote. “I was stunned
Mandela wrote: “Many felt, perhaps unfairly, that the
and dismayed, but Oliver took a more considered line.
ANC as a whole had become the preserve of a tired,
‘I like this,’ he said. ‘I like this.’ I could not imagine why. He
unmilitant, privileged African elite more concerned with
explained, ‘Now we will know exactly who our enemies are
protecting their own rights than those of the masses.” They
and where we stand.’”
proposed forming a youth league “as a way of lighting a fire under the leadership of the ANC”. In 1943 a delegation including Mandela, Tambo, Anton
The battle lines were drawn. The softer policies of negotiation and compliance with white leadership had achieved nothing. The next year, 1949, the ANC saw a
Lembede, Peter Mda and Walter Sisulu visited AB Xuma,
jump in its membership, which previously had lingered
the head of the ANC.
at around 5 000. It began to establish a firm presence in
“At our meeting, we told him that we intended to organise a youth league and a campaign of action designed
South African society. In 1952 Mandela and Tambo were key in organising the
to mobilise mass support,” Mandela wrote. “We told Dr
Defiance Campaign. The ANC joined other anti-apartheid
Xuma that the ANC was in danger of becoming margin-
organisations in defiance against the restriction of
Public Sector Manager • July 2017
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