Nelson and Evelyn: Marriage, Children, and the ANC

At the home of his friend Walter Sisulu, Mandela met a young woman named

Evelyn Mase, who was training to be a nurse. Just a few months later, Mandela

proposed to her, and they were married in October 1944. While Evelyn had no

political inclinations of her own, she was happy to create a serene and

harmonious household for family. They lived for a time with relatives, and then

in their own small house in a relatively salubrious township for blacks called

Orlando. Within a year of marriage, the couple had a baby boy, Thembi, and

then in 1947 a girl, Makaziwe, but the girl died at just nine months old.

Mandela was an affectionate father who participated enthusiastically in childcare

and family life, but politics and his social activism had begun taking up

more and more of his time. Throughout his life, he constantly felt torn between

his family and the bigger world, and he said often that he had failed to be the

kind of father and husband, brother, and son he would have liked to be.

In 1944 he became a member of the ANC, and he and some 60 other members

started the ANC Youth League. Their goal was to energize the ANC, which they

thought had become weak and too compliant with the small proportion of white

liberals who supported it. As a leader of the Youth League, Mandela was taking

an ever-greater part in ANC activities, spurring the somewhat conservative ANC

to become more radical. He did not consider the enemy to be white people but

“racialism” itself, and he felt that Africans must be the ones to end apartheid.

After World War Two ended, black South Africans hoped for an end to

oppression and racial discrimination at home, but in fact conditions became

worse. Mandela’s friend, Gaur Radebe, organized a strike of some 70,000 black

miners, but it ended in bloodshed and death. In the 1948 election—in which only
white people were allowed to vote—the “National Party,” supported by many

Afrikaners (whites of Dutch descent), came into power. The new government

and Prime Minister Daniel Malan introduced oppressive laws that enforced

stricter segregation, making conditions for blacks even worse. Black men had to

carry identification at all times; different racial groups had to live in different

areas, with the best areas set aside for whites; and education was even more

strictly segregated.

The ANC was not alone in opposing the unfair conditions imposed by the

undemocratic government. Members of the Communist Party and various

organizations of “Coloured” (mixed race) Africans and Indians were also

battling for democracy and justice. Mandela approved of those efforts by other

groups, and he had many white communist friends with whom he would discuss

social issues, but he did not want to see the ANC join forces with the

communists or even with the Indians, in part because he feared that the

Communist Party would come to dominate the ANC and use it for its own ends.

Also, unlike the Marxists, Mandela did not think that the problem in Africa was

based upon social or economic inequality. He felt that the Africans needed to

gain their freedom through a sense of nationalism that was not “diluted” by

communism or by other cultures. Elected to the Transvaal Provincial Executive

of the ANC in 1947, he attempted to have communists removed from the ANC,

but he was unsuccessful since other members thought the two groups would be

more effective working together.

Mandela was elected to the ANC National Executive Committee in 1950. In

1951, he was still speaking in favor of an “undiluted” ANC, but his fellow ANC

members and executives outvoted him. Mandela accepted the opinions of the
others in the ANC leadership and abided by the group’s decision. And despite

Mandela’s initial opposition to it, the cooperation of ANC with other

organizations resulted in energetic and often successful actions, such as ones

organized jointly by the ANC, the APO (African People’s Organization, a

Coloured group) and the Communist Party.

On May Day, 1950, more than half of Johannesburg’s black workers engaged in

a one-day strike. By the next day, 18 blacks had been killed by police. The ANC

proposed a second strike on a day of mourning, June 26, 1950, but it was not

widely observed.

At the same time, the Suppression of Communism Act was passed, giving the

government broad powers to prevent not just the Communist Party but also any

political group of which it didn’t approve from meeting or organizing. Many

communists then moved into the ANC, and Mandela took it upon himself to

learn more about communism. He educated himself about the ideas and ideals of

communism and about dialectical materialism by reading the essential texts by

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong. In time, his

attitude toward the communists changed, and he agreed that they should be part

of the ANC.

To what extent and at which stages of his political development Mandela

ultimately agreed with communism may never be completely clear. After

reading Marxist texts, and in the course of his long struggle for freedom, he had

many friends and associates who embraced communist ideas, but Mandela most

often spoke in favor of scientific socialism, primarily identifying himself simply

as a freedom fighter. Under questioning in the Treason Trial, Mandela claimed

that he was not a member of the South African Communist Party, but several
historians have disputed that, and there is evidence that he was a CP member for

at least a few years. Biographers have speculated that his disavowal of the party

was motivated by political reasons.