Nelson Mandela enjoyed a close relationship with both Moses Kotane and JB Marks, the struggle heroes whose remains have been returned to South Africa for reburial.
The two Communist Party leaders, who played significant roles in the anti-apartheid struggle, both died in exile in Russia in the 1970s and were buried in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery. Their remains were repatriated to South Africa on 1 March 2015.
Mandela once described them as “men of great intellect and confidence who taught us through force of example that mere formal education was not the real test of political leadership”.
In 1952, the apartheid government ordered Kotane and Marks, as well as Yusuf Dadoo, Johnson Ngwevela and David Bopape, to resign from their organisations and banned them from attending political gatherings. When he was forced to resign from the ANC, Marks recommended that Mandela take his place as President of the ANC in the then Transvaal. This was despite the fact, Mandela said, that he was “one of those rabid nationalists, anti-Communists”.
When the African National Congress and the South African Indian Congress were beginning the Defiance Campaign against unjust laws in 1952, they asked Kotane and Marks, among others, to defy their banning orders ahead of its launch on 26 June 1952. They were arrested days before thousands of volunteers, led by Mandela, courted arrest by defying six apartheid laws. These were the Group Areas Act; the pass laws; the Separate Representation of Voters’ Act; the Suppression of Communism Act; stock limitation regulations; and the Bantu Authorities Act.
Then a fierce critic of Communism, Mandela nevertheless read widely on the subject and debated it vigorously with Kotane and Marks. He said leaders such as they “were very astute in never criticising in public” the likes of himself. Instead they invited him home for discussions.
One of these discussions led Mandela to write a document that became an exhibit in the Rivonia Trial. He wrote How to be a Good Communist as a response to a debate with Kotane.
Mandela later recalled the conversation with Kotane: “I said to him, ‘Unless you take into account our local conditions, it’s going to be very difficult for you to make an impact.’ He said, ‘Well, can you give this to me in writing to indicate, you know, precisely how we should structure our organisation in order to make an impact.’”
The document was Mandela’s response to Kotane but was later dredged up as evidence against him in the Rivonia Trial.
“The essence of that document,” said Mandela, “was that I was critical of how the Communist Party has not adapted to the South African situation and that therefore it would never make an impact to intellectuals because it was too rooted in a foreign environment.”
He said, however, that Kotane had “helped moderate my attitude towards the [Communist] Party”.
After the Defiance Campaign, Kotane and Marks joined Mandela and 17 others in the dock accused of violating the1950 Suppression of Communism Act. They were all convicted in December 1952 and handed suspended sentences of nine months with hard labour.
Kotane was also an accused with Mandela and 154 others in the 1956 Treason Trial, which resulted in the acquittal of all the accused by 29 March 1961. Just over four years later, Mandela and seven of his comrades were sentenced to life imprisonment for sabotage in the Rivonia Trial.
The only surviving accused of all three trials is Ahmed Kathrada, who remembers Kotane and Marks fondly.
The Defiance Campaign Trial was a watershed in that it broadened the definition of Communists. “It brought into being ‘Statutory Communists’, said Kathrada. Even those who were not Communist and even anti-Communist earned themselves the label of ‘Communist’ and could therefore be listed by the apartheid regime as Communists throughout the ensuing decades.
The two stalwarts are scheduled to be reburied in South Africa’s North West province later in March. Marks on 14 March in Ventersdorp and Kotane on 22 March in Pella.