Did Nelson Mandela Deserve to Be In Jail?

You have been told, particularly by teachers and politicians, that Nelson Mandela was a Civil Rights Movement-style hero who was committed to peace, desired nothing more than equal rights for all South Africans, and was in jail purely because the apartheid South African government was racist and horrified by equality. That is a lie. 

Nelson Mandela was not an unjustly imprisoned hero. Nelson Mandela was not even committed to peace. In reality, Nelson Mandela was a communist-backed terrorist involved in the killing of civilians. He was found guilty in a fair trial, with voluminous evidence brought to show his obvious guilt. He then remained in prison until 1990 because he refused to renounce violence. This article will show exactly what happened.

Did Nelson Mandela Have Communist Roots?

Mandela began his political life as a radical. Like many anti-colonial figures, he developed his far-left, radical views when he was a student. Particularly, he had the opportunity to study law at South Africa’s prestigious University of the Witwatersrand, and while there, befriended Lithuanian communist Joe Slovo, a fellow student. 

Gradually adopting the views of Slovo and others, Mandela turned to increasingly radical politics, and started marching in protest of the South African government in August of 1943. From there, he went on to join the ANC and push for it to sever ties with whites who agreed with it, desiring that it should become a purely black movement despite the South African government, in those years, not having adopted an apartheid policy yet.

Then came the 1948 election and the Boer-dominated National Party’s win, which led to the adoption of apartheid. Mandela started showing his radical colors. Disagreeing with the then-somewhat moderate ANC’s police of peacefully working to push back against apartheid, Mandela and his ANC allies began advocating a policy of “direct action” against apartheid and its supporters. At first, this meant boycotts, strikes, and the like. Within a decade, it came to mean terrorism.

Meanwhile, Mandela threw himself into radical politics and failed out of law school. Instead of obtaining his degree, he became a prominent force pushing for a blacks-only political strategy inside the ANC, a matter he lost decisively on in 1951. As a result of that humiliating defeat, he began pushing for a multi-racial, communist friendly approach to overcoming apartheid.

It was at this time, in the mid-1950s, that Mandela started investigating communism more closely and, eventually, embracing it. As he wrote in Volume I of his Long Walk to Freedom memoir, he "found [himself] strongly drawn to the idea of a classless society which, to [his] mind, was similar to traditional African culture where life was shared and communal." 

During this period, Mandela was also thrown in prison for the first time, getting locked up in the mid-summer of 1952 for giving a speech at a large political rally in Durban, with authorities finding he had violated the Suppression of Communism Act alongside 20 other radicals. Though sentenced to nine months of hard labor, that sentence was suspended for two years, and so Mandela was able to avoid it. Still, he was increasingly communistic and committed to “direct action” against the state, which soon meant violence.

When Did Mandela Become a Violent Radical?

Up until 1955, Mandela might have been a communist-minded radical, but he wasn’t necessarily a terrorist. That changed in February of 1955, when chaos resulted after the South African government relocated those living in the Sophiatown township outside Johannesburg, at which point Mandela became convinced that “direct action” would necessarily mean violence against the South African government.

As such, Mandela convinced the ANC to request weaponry from the People’s Republic of China. The PRC, then only two years on from having fought America to a bloody standstill in Korea, refused the request, believing that the ANC wasn’t yet ready to wage a guerrilla campaign against the government.

Mandela had been arrested again within a year: a leader of the ANC who had pushed for violent regime change, he was arrested in December of 1956 and charged with having committed “high treason” by calling for violent revolution, which he had obviously done. However, by milking the appellate process for all it was worth, battling things out in the court for years, until six years later in 1961, when judges in the treason trial found that Mandela and the others had not technically committed high treason.

That ruling put Mandela out of prison right when he decided to commit to outright terrorism.

When Did Nelson Mandela Become a Terrorist?

By 1960, Mandela had been inspired by communist successes abroad, particularly the victory of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in Cuba. Dreaming of replicating their terroristic, guerrilla warfare success in his country, Mandela convinced then-ANC leader Albert Luthuli to let him create an armed division of the ANC. 

That was a sea change in ANC policy for two reasons. For one, the ANC was the main form of black political activity in South Africa, and so its tactical decisions were what determined how resistance to apartheid was conducted; if it was peaceful, so was the movement, but if it was violent, so went the movement too. Second, Mandela’s turn represented a shift for the group, as Luthuli was predisposed against violence and in favor of a peaceful solution, but Mandela’s push for terrorism totally changed that over the long term. 

Thus, Mandela turned the anti-apartheid movement from what had been a relatively peaceful focus on rights into a war of terror.

Luthuli bowed to Mandela’s violent whims because of a riot that turned bloody. That was the Sharpesville riot, in which a 20,000-member mob connected to the ANC started protesting against apartheid by getting violent and pelting officers with rocks. Heavily outnumbered and unable to disperse the crowd, the police responded to the rocks with gunfire and killed a few dozen rioters while wounding a few hundred more. Mandela used the incident to pressure Luthuli into supporting violence and to goad his fellow Africans into rage against the South African government.

What Was Mandela’s Spear of the Nation Terror Group?

Luthuli gave Mandela a free hand to create a network of ANC-connected terror cells, which Mandela did alongside his old friend from law school, Joe Slovo the Soviet-trained communist. Together, they patched together a group of similarly terrorist-minded ANC members called  Umkhonto we Sizwe (often abbreviated to “MK”). The name of the group, which became widely regarded as the military wing of the ANC, means Spear of the Nation, and so Mandela had clearly violent ends in mind when he created and named it.

Those violent impulses were quickly acted upon. Mandela, who by that point had obtained a leadership role inside the South African Communist Party in addition to the ANC, unleashed a terror bombing campaign across South Africa. The MK attacks on the country began in mid-December of 1961, shortly after Mandela was found “not guilty” of advocating for violent revolution and around the same time that Luthuli was given the Nobel Peace Prize. 57 bombings carried out by MK occurred on Dingane's Day (December 16) alone, with dozens of similar bombings following. 200 such bombings had been committed by the small group by 1963.

Though the attacks did not explicitly target the lives of civilians, they did target civilian infrastructure, blowing up power plants and destroying farms in addition to targeting government posts and buildings. The South African government cracked down in the wake of those attacks, and had managed to locate and arrest Mandela by late 1962, just after a year after he had initially escaped justice and avoided prison.

What Was The Rivonia Trial?

This time, the South African government was ready to ensure he was held accountable. Particularly, it did so with the high-profile Rivonia Trial. That lengthy court battle, which lasted from December 1963 until February 1964, saw the parties bring nearly 175 witnesses and thousands upon thousands of documents and other exhibits to show that Mandela had fought an  “armed struggle” against the government. Mandela was found guilty on all four counts of sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government.

However, though Mandela was found guilty, he was not executed. Instead, Judge Quartus de Wet sentenced Mandela to life imprisonment. 

So, in 1964, Mandela was transferred to Robben Island, where he would remain for the next 18 years. Hence why Mandela was in jail, at least after the relatively minor cases in the 1950s: he was a communist terrorist who killed civilians while trying to overthrow the South African government.

Why Mandela Remained in Prison 

But it wasn’t just that Mandela was imprisoned. That had happened before, when he led rabble-rousing protests and indicated his communist leanings, and the South African government had released him in an attempt to cultivate international goodwill. So what made the Rivona Trial and his time on Robben Island different?

For one, it was the seriousness of the charges. Before, he had just been a charismatic rabble-rouser, even if darker things were suspected. In this case, he had been found guilty of treason and attacked civilians, a far worse series of crimes. 

However, Mandela was offered a chance at release: the South African government, when beset by sanctions, offered to let Mandela out of prison if only he would renounce violence and instead embrace peaceful political reform. Mandela refused to renounce violence in exchange for an early release. Instead, he stood by MK and violent struggle against the government.

In fact, Mandela’s insistence upon armed revolution came even as MK began deliberately bombing civilians in the terror campaign of the 1970s and ‘80s that saw hundreds killed and thousands wounded. As MK carried out those attacks, Mandela remained committed to MK’s goals and helped consult the terror group’s leaders on tactics and planning. As one South African historian put it, “Once he had committed himself to armed struggle, he did not waver until the onset of political negotiations in 1990.” 

So, while Mandela could have been released from prison early, he chose to remain locked up on Robben Island because he preferred violence to freedom. That is why Mandela was in jail.