Foundation receives 1962 Mandela photos – Nelson Mandela Foundation

April 21, 2008 – At the conclusion of the Treason Trial in early 1961, the ANC decided that Nelson Mandela would go underground. About nine months later, on January 11, 1962, he left South Africa, without a passport, via what was then Bechuanaland, on his way to attend a meeting of the Pan-African Freedom Movement for East, Central and Southern Africa (PAFMECSA) in Ethiopia.

After five months of travelling and many meetings with African heads of state and others, Mr Mandela and his long-time comrade Oliver (OR) Tambo flew to London (on BOAC, as he notes in his diary) on Thursday, June 7, 1962.

On Friday, June 8 he met senior ANC members in exile, Yusuf Dadoo and Vela Pillay, and the following Sunday he met Milton Obote, the Prime Minister of Uganda. More meetings then followed in quick succession – with David Astor, the editor of The Observer, Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the UK Labour Party, and Joe Grimmond, leader of the British Liberal Party, among others.

Nelson Mandela’s diary records his meetings with comrades in London.

(Image: Michael Peto Photographic Collection)

A scan of Mandela’s diary from 1962.

(Image: Michael Peto Photographic Collection)

In his autobiography Mr Mandela says, “In London I resumed my old underground ways, not wanting word to leak back to South Africa that I was there. But I was not a recluse; my ten days there were divided between ANC business, seeing old friends and occasional jaunts as a conventional tourist. With Mary Benson, a Pretoria-born friend who had written about our struggle, Oliver and I saw the sights of the city that had once commanded nearly two-thirds of the globe.”

On Monday, June 18, he and Tambo flew, again with BOAC, to Khartoum in the Sudan, after just 10 days in the British capital. Mr Mandela wasn’t to visit London again for almost 30 years.

Some photographs of the visit are already well known – Mr Mandela with Mary Benson, Mr Mandela at the River Thames with Freda Levson and Mr Mandela in Parliament Square outside Westminster Abbey.

During his five months of travel in Africa, he was very meticulous about recording where he stayed, but there is no record in the diary of where he stayed in London.

However, on a recent visit to Scotland, Verne Harris, Programme Manager, Nelson Mandela Foundation Centre of Memory and Dialogue, was presented with more than a dozen photographs taken by British-Hungarian photographer Michael Peto, in what appears to be Tambo’s home in North London.

The pictures form part of a much larger collection of Peto’s photos archived at the University of Dundee.

The pictures published here show Mr Mandela and Tambo seated together in Tambo’s study. In one of the pictures, Tambo’s young son Dali sits on his father’s knee. Adelaide Tambo can be seen standing at the door with Dali in one of the pictures.