The South African police spent seventeen months failing to find Nelson Mandela, and when they stopped his car outside Howick he was dressed as another man's chauffeur and using a name that was not his; who told them where to wait has never been settled

Nelson Mandela had spent seventeen months making himself hard to find. He had a false name and an employer in the back seat who could account for it. What he did not have was any idea that somebody already knew which road he would be on.

The car was an Austin Westminster, and it belonged to Cecil Williams, a Johannesburg theater director who was also a secret communist and an ANC supporter. The arrangement was a good one. A white man of standing drives around the country on theatrical business; nobody looks twice at the Black man at the wheel. On the morning of 5 August 1962 the two of them set out from Durban for Johannesburg.

They got a few miles past Howick.

Why Mandela was living underground

He had gone under in March 1961, straight out of the Treason Trial, which ended in acquittal after more than four years and left him certain that the state would simply charge him with something else.

The months that followed were not hiding in the ordinary sense of the word. He ran the national stay-at-home at the end of May 1961, which kept more than forty percent of the Rand's labor force away from work. In June he gave a press statement from wherever he was that included the line everybody now quotes: "The struggle is my life." On 16 December 1961 Umkhonto we Sizwe announced its existence by bombing government offices, with Mandela as its first commander-in-chief.

Then he left the country, which was itself a crime for a man under a banning order. He reached Dar es Salaam on 21 January 1962, addressed the Pan-African Freedom Movement conference in Addis Ababa eight days later, spent part of May in Britain under a pseudonym, and went back to Ethiopia in June for military training. He crossed the border home on 24 July.

Twelve days later they had him.

What the Black Pimpernel actually did

The newspapers named him for the aristocrat in Baroness Orczy's novels who slipped through every cordon, and the nickname stuck because it kept being earned. The disguises were menial by design: a chauffeur, a gardener, a cook. Nobody in South Africa in 1961 looked closely at a Black man doing a job.

What happened on the road outside Howick

He had come down to Natal to report to Chief Albert Luthuli, the ANC president, on everything he had seen abroad. In Durban he met the local leadership, including a man named Bruno Mtolo whose name is worth holding on to. He spent the evening of 4 August with Ismail and Fatima Meer, Monty Naicker and J.N. Singh.

The next morning he and Williams took the main Durban–Johannesburg road north.

Mandela noticed the railway line running beside it and thought, professionally, that it would be a convenient place to sabotage the track. A Ford V-8 full of white men came up behind them, with two more cars behind that, and waved them onto the shoulder. There was nowhere to run; the police had picked their spot carefully.

A sergeant of the Pietermaritzburg police leaned into the window and named them both. (Accounts differ on the sergeant: some give his name as Vorster, others as Wessels.) In the moments before he got out of the car, Mandela managed to push his notebook and his pistol out of sight. He gave the name David Motsamayi. It did not last long.

He was driven to the Loop Street police station in Pietermaritzburg and held apart from Williams.

Who told the police where to wait

Here the record thins out, and it has stayed thin for sixty years.

In 2016 the British filmmaker John Irvin published an interview with Donald Rickard, a retired American who had worked in Durban as a State Department vice-consul and was, in fact, a CIA officer. Rickard said the tip had been his. He described the car with an accuracy that is hard to dismiss: a black limousine, a man sitting in the back as the passenger, and the target himself at the wheel. He died shortly after the interview.

That claim did not come out of nowhere. A 1986 story in the Johannesburg Star quoted a retired police officer to the same effect, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution report in 1990 quoted former intelligence officials, and a 2018 biography of the mercenary Mike Hoare has Rickard boasting about it, drunk, at a party in Hoare's Durban apartment in 1963. The CIA has never confirmed or denied any of it, including under freedom-of-information requests.

There is a second explanation, and it does not compete with the first. Mandela spent years wondering who had given him up, and when Bruno Mtolo appeared as a witness for the prosecution at the Rivonia Trial, he thought he had his answer.

Both can be true. A foreign intelligence officer passing on a travel itinerary and a comrade talking to the security police are different failures, and the police were perfectly capable of running two sources at once. What the episode really shows is how narrow the margin was: seventeen months of careful work undone by somebody, somewhere, who knew which road.

From five years to life

He was tried that autumn for incitement and for leaving the country without a passport. On the opening day, 15 October 1962, he walked into court in a Thembu kaross of leopard skin and beadwork rather than a suit, and later explained the choice plainly: he wanted the room to see "a black African walking into a white man's court." The authorities, alarmed by the effect on the gallery, forbade him from wearing it outside the courtroom. On 7 November he got five years.

That should have been the end of the story, and the police made it the beginning of a much longer one. On 11 July 1963 they raided Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, north of Johannesburg, and took most of the MK leadership along with a quantity of documents. Mandela was already in a cell. The documents put him back in the dock.

The Rivonia Trial ran into the following year, with Percy Yutar prosecuting, Quartus de Wet on the bench, and a defense team that included Bram Fischer and George Bizos. On 20 April 1964 Mandela spoke from the dock for something over four hours and finished with the ideal for which he was prepared to die. On 12 June, de Wet gave eight of them life. Denis Goldberg, the only white man convicted, went to Pretoria Central; the rest went to Robben Island, where Mandela stayed eighteen years.

What is at the spot now

For a long time, nothing. The spot is on the old road, long since bypassed by the N3, and for decades a driver would have passed it without knowing.

In 2012, on the fiftieth anniversary, the artist Marco Cianfanelli put fifty steel columns into the hillside there, between twenty and thirty-three feet tall. Up close they read as scrap: rusted uprights with no arrangement to them. From the footpath about a hundred and fifteen feet back they line up into Mandela's profile, looking west. Cianfanelli has said the fifty columns stand for the fifty years and also for "the many making the whole."

It is a good joke on the subject of perspective, and the arrest deserves one. From nine miles outside Howick in 1962 this was a man's career ending in the back of a police van. From the right distance it is the beginning of the part everyone remembers.

The distance that has not yet produced a picture is the one the CIA is standing at. Rickard is dead, Irvin's tape exists, and the agency's files on a 1962 tip-off in Durban remain closed. Somebody will ask again.

Sources

• The Heritage Portal, "'I knew in that instant that my life on the run was over' — The capture of Nelson Mandela 5 August 1962"
• South African History Online, "Nelson Mandela Timeline 1960–1969"
• Time, "Did the CIA Betray Nelson Mandela?"
• Wikipedia, "Rivonia Trial"
• Mail & Guardian, "When Mandela donned skins of tradition" (2014)