AFTERMATH

Tomorrow’s midnight . . . will remorselessly arrive, and so will the pain, the hope, the fear, the ecstasy that years bring. But whether what comes . . . after . . . is a new dawn or a polar darkness we cannot yet know: all we can do is to summon up our courage and our wisdom and go forward.

New York Times, 30 December 1956

The New Yorker that hit the news-stands in the last week of December informed its readers that, among other things, ‘1956 was the year in which . . . the rental of top hats was authorized in East Germany for the first time since the war.’¹ Such trivia doubtless provided some welcome relief at the end of a tumultuous twelve months that had seen global tensions smouldering from the satellite states of Eastern Europe to the Sierra Maestra, and from the Suez Canal Zone to the American South.² It had, by any reckoning, been a quite remarkable year.

1956 marked a fateful moment in the history of international Communism. In the words of the Marxist historian and lifelong Communist Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The October Revolution created a world communist movement, the Twentieth Congress destroyed it.’³ Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin triggered a lasting rift with Beijing and plunged the Communist Parties of the West into an existential crisis. Amidst bitter feuding between Stalinists and reformers, thousands of members, typically the younger and more educated ones, deserted the Party.⁴ While many abandoned political organising altogether, others, working with left-wing intellectuals and activists, attempted to build a ‘New Left’ free from the stain of Stalinism. As they did so, they took their inspiration from a new generation of thinkers, such as the American sociologist C. Wright Mills, whose searing attack on the ‘Power Elite’ (an interlocking set of military, corporate and political interests) had itself been published in 1956. Rather than lionising the traditional working class, this New Left would place its hopes for revolutionary change in an alliance of students and intellectuals.5

Although shaken by the outpouring of dissent that had followed the Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev would press on with his attempts to liberalise the USSR (the effort would end only after he was ousted in 1964). Over the next few years the Party’s internal structures were opened up, writers and artists were permitted to operate a little more freely, a new criminal code strengthening the rights of Soviet citizens was introduced, educational reforms were enacted, significant progress was made in meeting the chronic housing shortage and living standards rose. The new freedoms were somewhat precarious and the reforms did not always succeed – Khrushchev’s agricultural policies, for instance, proved disastrous – but his attempt to relaunch the Soviet project was a qualified success. (As Mikhail Gorbachev and his fellow ‘children of the Twentieth Congress’ discovered in the 1980s, implementing major reforms without bringing the entire USSR crashing down was an exceptionally difficult task.) When, in the summer of 1959, a chortling Khrushchev boasted to Richard Nixon that the USSR would soon catch up with the Americans and then ‘wave bye-bye’, more than one Western commentator wondered if he might turn out to be right.⁶

In the People’s Republic of China, in contrast, the promise of reform quickly soured. To begin with, the so-called Hundred Flowers campaign, which ran through to 1957, had been viewed, both inside and outside China, as a genuine attempt at liberalisation. During the Hungarian uprising, for instance, there had been excited talk on the streets of Budapest that ‘the Chinese are with us’ (in fact, behind the scenes Mao, after some initial hesitation, had urged the Soviets to crack down hard).7 Within China, few were initially prepared to speak up, but after repeated encouragement and exhortation, intellectuals, artists, scientists, government employees, students and workers began to voice their ideas – and their criticisms of the Party – with growing confidence. Then, in the summer of 1957, Mao abruptly changed course, denouncing ‘Rightists’ and ‘reactionaries’ and initiating a series of purges.⁸ While his original intent is hard to discern, it does seem that, alarmed by the outbreak of serious dissent in the Eastern Bloc, Mao came to regard the Hundred Flowers campaign primarily as a useful tool for exposing his own internal ‘enemies’. As he put it to his inner circle, ‘How can we catch the snakes if we don’t let them out of their lairs? We wanted those sons of turtles [i.e. bastards] to wriggle out and sing and fart . . . that way we can catch them.’⁹ According to some estimates, up to 750,000 Party members were sent for ‘re-education’ in remote labour camps, with some languishing in the Chinese gulag for twenty years. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the miserable dénouement to the Hundred Flowers campaign was an indicator of the brutal repression that lay at the heart of Maoism; it also augured the much greater and more terrible disasters to come.¹⁰

In neighbouring North Vietnam, the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh had initially followed Mao’s lead in easing restrictions on political and artistic expression and encouraging dissent. However, at the end of 1956, following months of fierce criticisms, the policy of liberalisation was thrown into reverse: journals were shut down, some prominent intellectuals ‘disappeared’ and others were sent off to brutal labour camps. An uprising that gripped the coastal province of Nghe An (150 miles south of Hanoi) that November had caused particular alarm. At the start of the month, several thousand of the region’s predominantly Catholic peasants had marched on the district capital, Quynh Luu, armed with farm implements and basic weapons, to voice their anger at a botched land reform programme, which had been characterised by violent and indiscriminate reprisals. In clashes with Communist forces, a number of protesters were killed. A full army division was quickly despatched to crush the insurgency: its ringleaders were hunted down and killed, and thousands more were forcibly deported.11 As Ho was cracking down on internal dissent, Ngo Dinh Diem, his South Vietnamese counterpart, embarked on a vicious anti-Communist campaign to root out his enemies: banning labour unions, sending suspected ‘subversives’ to ‘re-education centres’ or ordering their execution, and launching a major propaganda offensive. Having summarily cancelled the national elections that, under the terms of the 1954 Geneva Accords, were supposed to lead to Vietnamese reunification, Diem’s grip on power was further fortified by military support from the United States. In April 1956 the US had assumed complete responsibility for the training of the South Vietnamese army, and President Eisenhower quickly doubled the number of US military advisers on the ground, taking the total to just under seven hundred.¹² It was an early step on a journey that would lead the United States to disaster.

As we have seen, Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ also fuelled a series of rebellions across the ‘people’s democracies’ of Eastern Europe. Indeed, for a few extraordinary days, the Hungarian revolutionaries had appeared to be on the brink of a historic triumph. Although the Red Army crushed the uprising, for millions of ordinary Hungarians the years that followed were actually a good deal better than many had feared. The harsh repression that accompanied the restoration of Communist rule proved temporary, and János Kádár’s government offered a number of reforms, unprecedented in the Soviet bloc, to try and win over the population (or, at least, gain their grudging acceptance). Access to higher education was opened up, the Party’s monopoly on technical and administrative posts was eased, a greater degree of religious and cultural freedom was permitted and Hungarians were allowed to travel to the West (in 1954, fewer than one hundred private citizens had done so; by 1962, the figure was 120,000). There were changes, too, in agricultural and economic policy that made space for private enterprise and rewarded individual talent and effort. The economy also did well: in the decade that followed the revolution, real wages increased by 47 per cent, and Hungarians enjoyed greater access to consumer goods and a higher standard of living than their contemporaries in East Germany, Poland and Romania. Moreover, Hungarians were no longer expected to attend compulsory political meetings, enthusiastically applaud the Party line or make public demonstrations of allegiance to Communism: in Kádár’s famously cynical phrase, ‘He who is not against us is with us.’

This ‘goulash Communism’, though, came at a price: there could be no questioning of one-party rule or the country’s alliance with the Soviet Union, nor was it permitted to challenge the official line that the 1956 uprising was the work of fascist counter-revolutionaries. Kádár’s Hungary may have been the ‘happiest barracks in Eastern Europe’, but the ideals for which the revolution had been fought – national independence, a free press and a more democratic politics – remained out of reach until the summer of 1989, when demands for ‘freedom’ and the withdrawal of Soviet troops once again echoed around Heroes’ Square.13

Crude military force enabled the USSR to maintain its Eastern European empire (a stark reality that was underlined again in 1968 when Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s reactionary successor, sent tanks to crush the Prague Spring).¹⁴ But the price was a heavy one: the brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolution destroyed Moscow’s claims to represent an idealistic, global revolutionary movement that both sought to meet the needs of the people and commanded genuine popular support. During the 1960s, leftwing idealists would look not to Moscow but to the Cuba of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara for inspiration.

Indeed, the Cuban revolution reverberated far beyond the Caribbean – and not just because for thirteen days in October 1962 the world teetered on the brink of nuclear annihilation during the tense standoff over the presence of Soviet missiles on the island. Revolutionary Cuba, under Castro’s leadership, helped to inspire (and sometimes actively exported) socialism throughout Latin America, and also played a major role in the global struggles against imperialism, racism and capitalism. Castro provided military support to leftist revolutionaries in Algeria and Angola, for example, and launched a massive civil aid programme – training (for free) more than forty thousand health professionals from the third world and sending tens of thousands of Cuban health workers and physicians overseas.15 In the late 1950s and early 1960s many African Americans, attracted by its unequivocal stance on behalf of racial equality, glimpsed in Castro’s revolution the possibilities for a new world. As the journalist Ralph Matthews wrote in the Baltimore Afro-American in 1959: ‘Every white man who cuffs, deprives, and abuses even the lowest colored person, simply because he is white and the other colored, should have seared upon his consciousness the fact that it is possible for the tables to be turned. Castro has proved it in our time.’ During a visit to New York in September 1960 to address the UN General Assembly, Castro, enraged by demands that his delegation pay their bill up front and in cash, famously stormed out of the Shelburne Hotel in Manhattan’s Midtown and took up residence at the Hotel Theresa, in the heart of Harlem, where he was afforded a rapturous reception. And when, a year later, the US government launched an abortive attempt to topple him, numerous black leaders, activists and intellectuals spoke out in opposition. A bitter critic of South African apartheid, Castro’s revolutionary government also proved a vital source of support and inspiration to Nelson Mandela’s ANC.¹⁶

Although its lustre would eventually fade (not least because of Castro’s own terrible human rights record), the Cuban revolution’s apparent success also re-energised leftist movements across Europe and in the United States, many of which had struggled to find their moorings in the aftermath of the Twentieth Party Congress and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Interestingly, given Castro’s later loyalty to Moscow, Cuban revolutionaries and their allies had sought to exploit Western sympathy for the doomed freedom fighters of Budapest by drawing a direct parallel between the two struggles. Cuban-American supporters of the 26 July Movement, for instance, marched with placards denouncing Batista’s Cuba as ‘the Hungary of the Americas’, while Castro himself asked, ‘Why be afraid of freeing the people, whether Hungarians or Cubans?’ In the spring of 1957, sensational news broke that three young Americans – all the sons of US navy personnel at Guantánamo Bay – had actually taken up arms for Castro. One of the recruits explained how revelations about Batista’s ‘cruel . . . dictatorship’ and the inspiring example of Hungary’s ‘freedom fighters’ had motivated them to ‘do our part for the freedom of the world’. It was a taste of what was to come: Fidel and his compañeros (above all, Che Guevara) would be revolutionary icons for a generation of Sixties radicals.17 As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, a historian and former adviser to President Kennedy, put it, the students saw Castro as ‘the hipster who in the era of the Organization Man had joyfully defied the system, summoned a dozen good friends and overturned a government of wicked old men’. Certainly the 26 July Movement’s use of revolutionary violence and guerrilla warfare proved influential, not least on white leftists’ own drift toward armed struggle at the end of the 1960s, while Che’s ruminations about the need to create a ‘new man’ and to fight not just economic exploitation but the forces of ‘alienation’ chimed strongly with a generation of students who fretted about the consequences of automation and uniformity, and who sought, almost above all else, a politics of ‘authenticity’.¹⁸

*

Writing in the South African anti-apartheid monthly Fighting Talk at the start of the year, the campaigning journalist Ruth First declared that ‘this is the year 1956. The colonial people have learnt the science of the struggle for liberty. And the weapons of the past are proving ineffective against the movements of the present.’19 While colonialism still had some life left in it, 1956 was a watershed in the erosion of the old European empires. Sudan, Tunisia and Morocco took their place among the family of independent nations; in Trinidad, the People’s National Movement swept to power under the leadership of Eric Williams, who became the island’s first black chief minister (he would lead the country to full independence in 1962), and a final agreement was reached for an end to colonial rule in what would become Ghana.²⁰

The reality of independence in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana would, like elsewhere in the post-colonial world, prove somewhat sobering. Socialist economic planning was ruinous, living standards fell and senior government officials amassed fortunes through bribes and kickbacks.²¹ In February 1966 an increasingly autocratic Nkrumah was swept from power in a military coup, and genuine multi-party democracy would not return until the century’s end.²² Nevertheless, Ghanaian independence – the first surrender of European colonial power in sub-Saharan Africa – was a genuinely transformative moment that energised anti-colonial nationalists and their supporters across Africa and the Caribbean.²³ In the East African territory of Tanganyika, for instance, the nationalist leader Julius Nyerere was fired up by Kwame Nkrumah’s historic triumph. Nyerere, hitherto regarded as a gradualist, now pressed London to set a firm date for independence, appealed for international support, threatened a campaign of mass civil disobedience and intimated that if substantive concessions were not forthcoming, he – like Nkrumah – might demand ‘Self-government Now!’²⁴ In Nigeria, meanwhile, Ghanaian independence precipitated a rare outburst of ethnic and regional unity: on 26 March 1957, the Federal House of Representatives unanimously endorsed a motion, submitted by the nationalist politician Samuel Akintola, demanding self-government by 1959. In the event, Nigeria would win her independence in 1960, Tanganyika a year later.25 As Indonesia’s President Sukarno put it, Ghanaian independence had ‘opened the gate’; within a decade, most of Britain’s formal empire was consigned to history.²⁶

In his seminal 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, the Martinique-born psychiatrist, intellectual and FLN medical officer Frantz Fanon wrote that ‘the violence of the colonial regime and the counter-violence of the native balance each other out and respond to each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity’.²⁷ By late 1956, as the French fought fiercely to maintain their position in Algeria, this pattern seemed set firm. On the morning of 28 December, for example, the seventy-four-year-old president of the Federation of Algerian Mayors was gunned down in broad daylight on the rue Michelet, in the commercial heart of French Algiers. The next day, thousands of pieds noirs lined the streets to pay their respects as the funeral cortège passed by. When a bomb, designed to explode while the mourners were at the graveside, detonated early, it sparked an outpouring of anger. A mob, ten thousand strong, ran wild through the streets, smashing windows and ‘yanking Moslems from their cars and lynching them’. Some ‘young thugs’ used iron bars to ‘smash in the heads of veiled women’. The riot left eight Muslims dead and forty-eight injured.²⁸

The terrible acts of violence that engulfed the Algerian capital during the second half of 1956 were the opening skirmishes in the Battle of Algiers. This military encounter – the subject of Gillo Pontecorvo’s iconic film and the defining moment of the war – saw the FLN routed. But France’s victory was pyrrhic. The routine torture of FLN suspects, together with the use of mass detention and harsh, repressive measures, had destroyed France’s moral claim to remain in Algeria.²⁹ With the French public, shocked by revelations of torture and other war crimes, abandoning support for the war, and with the treasury in Paris running dry, it became increasingly clear that continued French rule was untenable. Moreover, the growing alliance between pied noir ultras and sympathetic elements of the military came to threaten French democracy itself. Amidst a major political crisis, precipitated by an attempted military coup, Charles de Gaulle returned to power in the summer of 1958 and quickly inaugurated a new constitution to replace the weak and ineffective Fourth Republic. Convinced that the war in Algeria was placing an intolerable strain on France – sapping its military, political, economic and diplomatic strength, undermining its efforts to act as a counterweight to the Anglo-Saxon powers and distracting it from playing a major role in shaping a new Europe – he sought a negotiated settlement. His determination to end the war was only strengthened by further challenges to civilian rule by settlers and dissident army officers. Following protracted negotiations, France reached an agreement with the FLN on 18 March 1962, and Algeria became an independent, sovereign state on 1 July. The bitter conflict had cost the lives of an estimated eighteen thousand French troops, several thousand European civilians and at least three hundred thousand Algerian Muslims.30 It also marked the decisive end of ‘European’ Algeria, as almost the entire settler population abandoned the country: seven hundred thousand fled to mainland France between April and August 1962 alone.³¹

1956 had also seen Britain get sucked into a bloody colonial conflict, as she sought to defend her strategic interests in Cyprus in the face of EOKA’s campaign to secure enosis – political union – with Greece. In fact, 1956 would prove to be the most intense year of the war, with 2,500 separate acts of violence that left 210 people dead.³² Moreover, in a portent of the island’s divided future, worsening relations between the Greek and Turkish communities erupted into serious intercommunal violence.³³ In March 1957 a truce, announced by Colonel Grivas, effectively signalled the end of EOKA’s campaign of terror and, following painstaking negotiations that took place against a backdrop of intensifying sectarian conflict, the outlines of a final settlement were finally reached in February 1959: Britain lifted the state of emergency, granted most EOKA fighters an amnesty and, with the exception of two military bases that covered ninety-nine square miles of territory, agreed to relinquish sovereignty over the island. Cypriot independence was to be guaranteed by Britain, Greece and Turkey. Both enosis and the partition of the island were expressly prohibited, although this did not prevent the de facto partition of the country in 1974 when, in response to a Greek-sponsored coup, Turkish military forces occupied the north-eastern part of the island. A new constitution established a presidential system consisting of a Greek president and a Turkish vice-president, with the Turkish minority also allocated 30 per cent of seats in the Council of Ministers and the House of Representatives.34 On 16 August 1960 the Republic of Cyprus, led by Makarios III, its newly elected president, was born.

During 1956, however, the declining fortunes and diminished status of the major European powers were best captured by Suez – a crisis which would have profound consequences for all the major protagonists.

For Israel, the short conflict brought an end to the blockade of the Straits of Tiran and a decade of peace, thanks to the several thousand UN troops who, under the ceasefire agreement, were stationed along its frontier with Egypt. Over the medium term, though, the regional perception that Israel had acted aggressively only exacerbated the wider Arab–Israeli conflict, which erupted in another war, pitting the Jewish state against Egypt, Jordan and Syria, in June 1967. As in 1956, the IDF demonstrated its overwhelming military superiority, but this time Israel also secured substantial territorial gains – notably Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank of the River Jordan – with fateful consequences for the region and the world.³⁵

The French had been livid with the British for calling off Operation Musketeer at the very moment when, they believed, a decisive victory was within reach (Mollet had begged Eden to hold out for two or three more days), and the abandonment convinced French commanders that it was imperative to obtain the amphibious vessels and long-range aircraft that would give them the capability to act unilaterally in the future, potentially outside NATO’s integrated command structure (which they would leave a decade later). Mistrustful of Britain, France also moved to make West Germany her major international partner, thereby laying the foundations for the powerful Franco-German axis that would continue to define the political and economic landscape of western Europe well into the twenty-first century.36

For the two central figures in the drama, the Suez Crisis had very different results. In Egypt, Nasser was unassailable (his colleagues now referred to him as al-ra’ s – ‘the boss’), and he emerged from the crisis as a genuine hero of the Arab world and an icon of anti-colonial resistance. For the next decade Nasser would be at the heart of efforts to promote anti-imperialism, socialism and Arab unity across the Middle East and North Africa (his most striking, if ultimately short-lived, success was the 1958 merger between Egypt and Syria that created the United Arab Republic).³⁷ For Sir Anthony Eden, however, Suez proved ruinous. On 23 November 1956, an exhausted Eden and his wife, Clarissa, left for a vacation at Ian Fleming’s Jamaican estate, Goldeneye. Although the prime minister returned to London on 14 December looking tanned and relaxed, his doctors advised that his health was no longer strong enough to enable him to ‘sustain the heavy burdens’ of high office. On 9 January 1957, after informing the cabinet of his intentions, Eden was driven to Buckingham Palace, where he handed his letter of resignation to the Queen.³⁸ A long and distinguished career of public service had ended in failure.

As for the wider significance for Britain, historians are – sixty years on – still arguing the odds. One certainly should not overstate the case. Suez did not lead to the collapse of British influence in the Middle East, nor did it prevent London from using its military muscle to defend what it believed to be vital national interests in the region (between 1957 and 1961, for instance, the British intervened in Oman, Jordan, Kuwait and Aden). It is also worth noting that British imperial power had been in decline long before the Suez debacle: the end of colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent, independence for the Sudan and advanced planning for an end to colonialism in the Gold Coast and Malaya – as well as the original decision to evacuate the Suez Canal Zone – had all testified to that. As Eden noted, somewhat ruefully, the crisis had ‘not so much changed our fortunes as revealed realities’.39

But Suez was a watershed nonetheless. Above all, it symbolised the striking contrast between the country’s old imperial mindset and the harsh geopolitical truths of the post-war world. Britain had attempted to act independently of the United States and the United Nations to protect what it believed were its vital interests, and it had failed. Worse, the limits on British power had been exposed before the entire world, damaging both its international prestige and reputation. Britain’s evident weakness may well have emboldened the forces of anti-colonial nationalism and, perhaps, hastened the end of empire. When it came to relations with the United States, meanwhile, the transatlantic alliance was quickly restored, thanks to the assiduous efforts of Eden’s successor, Harold Macmillan. But the price was, effectively, subservience to Washington. Certainly in Whitehall it became an article of faith that no significant gap could ever be allowed to open up between the British and the Americans on a major foreign policy question.⁴⁰

Suez was a domestic turning point too, helping to undermine the authority of the British establishment and its stifling culture of deference. As the historian Ronald Hyam has argued, Suez ‘completely shattered the automatic trust and confidence of younger generations – and some older ones as well – in the good faith and honesty of their governments’. It thus, wholly unintentionally, helped to usher in the irreverent, liberal and anti-authoritarian spirit that characterised ‘the Sixties’.41

Finally, faced with the apparent decline of Britain’s position in the Middle East, the United States moved quickly to fill the vacuum. In a major speech to a joint session of Congress on 5 January 1957, President Eisenhower (who had been re-elected in a landslide two months earlier) declared that the United States would, if necessary, act unilaterally to assist any nation in the Middle East against the ‘menace of International Communism’.⁴² The ‘Eisenhower doctrine’ marked a major shift in American foreign policy that, for better or worse, committed the United States to the goal of ensuring security and stability in this most volatile region. It is a mission that continues to pose the stiffest of tests.⁴³

1956 also marked a major turning point in the global struggle against white supremacy. Opponents of segregation, for instance, were quick to declare the Montgomery bus boycott a historic triumph, with the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins proclaiming that it had demonstrated before the whole world that black people possessed the ‘capacity for sustained collective action’ and that ‘non-violent resistance to racial tyranny’ could succeed. He even described Montgomery as the ‘peace capital of a new liberation movement’.⁴⁴ But, as the segregationist mobs that had taken to the streets of Tuscaloosa, Mansfield and Clinton had shown, the path to racial equality would not be a smooth one. Even the victory in Montgomery would have a nasty sting in the tail, as the turn of the year witnessed a spate of shootings and bombings, an ugly campaign of intimidation that silenced white moderates and a tightening of the city’s other segregation laws.⁴⁵ In March 1957, for instance, the City Commission declared it ‘unlawful for white and colored persons to play together, or, in company with each other . . . in any game of cards, dice, dominoes, checkers, pool, billiards, softball, basketball, baseball, football, golf, track, and at swimming pools, beaches, lakes or ponds or any other game or games or athletic contests, either indoors or outdoors’. When the MIA filed suit to desegregate the municipal parks the following year, the city commission promptly closed them all; they would not reopen until February 1965.46 In August 1957, eight months after the boycott that she had inspired had ended, Rosa Parks – unable to find regular work, worn down by constant death threats and in poor health – abandoned Montgomery (though not her commitment to political activism) for Detroit.⁴⁷ But the bus boycott was a defining moment in the African American freedom struggle nonetheless. Although there would be a few false steps on the way (the ‘Crusade for Citizenship’ and a ‘Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom’, both launched by King in 1957, proved underwhelming), the boycott contained the key ingredients of the movement’s later success: strong local leadership, mass direct action, a clear commitment to nonviolence (at least in public), the framing of desegregation as a patriotic Cold War weapon, and, of course, the charismatic leadership of Martin Luther King himself. King and his organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (which was founded in the immediate aftermath of the boycott), would be at the heart of the civil rights movement’s iconic campaigns in Birmingham in 1963 and Selma in 1965, which saw African Americans and their allies mobilise on a massive scale to bring segregation crashing down.⁴⁸

The success of the bus boycott also raised the spirits of Z. K. Matthews, the distinguished black South African anthropologist, activist and treason trial defendant, who had spent several years studying and working in the United States. Writing in New York’s Liberation magazine, Matthews declared that ‘all the world over lovers of freedom have been thrilled by the magnificent way in which the people of Montgomery . . . have stood up and fought for [their] rights’. Their example had, he said, ‘been an inspiration to others faced with similar problems in other parts of the world.’49 But, when it came to his beloved South Africa, Matthews’s own hopes for nonviolent change would go unrealised.

The treason trial did not bring an immediate end to nonviolent resistance to apartheid. During the early months of 1957, for instance, there was a visible and highly effective bus boycott in Alexandria, on the Eastern Cape. Sparked by a one-penny fare increase, the boycott – which was supported by tens of thousands of local residents – tapped into long-standing resentments over overcrowded buses, rude drivers, inadequate or inconvenient routes and schedules, and the dangers that black women faced at unsheltered or unlit terminals.⁵⁰ Black women, both in townships and in the countryside, continued to resist the pass laws, and between June 1958 and June 1959 some twenty thousand women across Natal protested against forced removals, pass regulations, low wages and the loss of farmlands.⁵¹ Nor did the trial crush the movement’s leaders. Indeed, by bringing them together for such an extended period of time, it served to solidify and deepen individual relationships and provided a forum in which strategy could be hammered out collectively. As the architect and Communist Rusty Bernstein recalled, the Johannesburg Drill Hall fostered a ‘collegiate spirit’ that transformed a ‘company of strangers into something more like an extended family’. The result was a leadership, previously ‘a loose assemblage of people from different places and different organizations . . . separated by differences of race, culture, class and ideology’, that was now ‘more united and effective’ than ever.⁵² Indeed, according to one historian, the treason trial was the moment when the ‘struggle became genuinely national’.⁵³

The dramatic trial also helped to mobilise international opposition to apartheid. In London, for example, Canon John Collins of St Paul’s Cathedral founded British Defence and Aid to raise money for the treason trial defendants; over the following decades, as International Defence and Aid, it would furnish the families of jailed activists with vital legal and material support and would campaign tirelessly against the evils of the apartheid regime.54 Meanwhile in the United States, the American Committee on Africa, which had been founded in 1953 by a small number of pacifists and civil rights pioneers, raised $75,000 for the treason trial defendants.⁵⁵

Despite these positives, the treason trial dealt the movement a grievous blow, sucking up time, energy and resources that could otherwise have been deployed in the fight against apartheid, placing strains on family relationships and finances, and immobilising many of the movement’s most talented and effective leaders, strategists and organisers.⁵⁶ The trial was an unmistakable signal of the South African government’s determination to crush all dissent, a stance that was underlined further on 21 March 1960, when sixty-nine people were shot dead in the black township of Sharpeville during a protest against the pass laws. By the time that the treason trial itself had concluded, the ANC had been banned and the limitations of using mass direct action and nonviolent civil disobedience to try and topple apartheid had been exposed. With key figures within the freedom struggle now preparing to adopt armed resistance, a new, and more violent era in South Africa’s troubled history was about to begin.⁵⁷

During 1956, many of those who took to the streets or called for change, as well as those who defended the status quo, were aware of the global context in which they were acting; indeed, some sensed that they were part of a larger, interconnected story.⁵⁸ In August, for example, fearing that the federal government might use troops to enforce the Brown decision, segregationists conjured up a dystopian vision of the South as a Soviet-style police state. ‘What would the troops do?’ demanded the Citizens’ Council; ‘Send tanks and shoot into the crowds as the Russians did in Pozna?’⁵⁹ Meanwhile both the French government in Paris and the pied noir leadership in Algiers argued that Soviet repression in Hungary and FLN terrorism in Algeria were two faces of the same Communistic monster.60

Elsewhere, international parallels were drawn and foreign struggles invoked to challenge the existing order. Some Poles, for instance, wondered whether the uprising in Pozna was really any different from the liberation struggles being waged against the British in Cyprus or the French in North Africa (struggles that, as good Communists, they were expected to support), while the revolutionaries who had taken to the streets of Budapest in October had done so at first with loud proclamations of Polish–Hungarian friendship.⁶¹ In South Africa the ANC, which viewed its own struggle against apartheid as part of the wider revolt against European colonialism, cheered on the progress of nationalists in the Gold Coast, Nigeria and Algeria, and sided with Nasser in his struggle against Britain and France.⁶² Anti-apartheid campaigners were also increasingly interested in the burgeoning freedom struggle in the United States. In May, for instance, the ANC’s Alfred Hutchinson had written to Autherine Lucy, expressing admiration for her courage and urging ‘the youth of the United States to take up the fight for equality with redoubled efforts’. Claiming that the ‘brave wind of freedom’ was ‘blowing’, Hutchinson pledged solidarity with his American ‘comrades-in-arms’, declaring that ‘We are with you every inch of the road – thorny though it be.’⁶³

But it was Martin Luther King who best captured the notion of 1956 as a year of global revolution. Looking back on the remarkable events of the previous twelve months, he saw that ‘all over the world men are in revolt . . . Africa’s present ferment for independence, Hungary’s death struggle against Communism, and the determined drive of Negro Americans to become first class citizens are inextricably bound together.’⁶⁴ King was perceptive. During 1956, people all across the globe – from Montgomery to Budapest, Johannesburg to Warsaw, and Havana to Cairo – had taken to the streets, spoken out and risen up to demand their freedom. Their exhilarating triumphs and shattering defeats transformed their world – and ours.