Eddie Daniels: saboteur with a plan to spring Mandela from jail 1928-2017
Activist found Alan Paton’s Liberal Party not militant enough
Eddie Daniels, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 89, was a member of the African Resistance Movement who was sentenced to 15 years on Robben Island for sabotage.
Although a member of the Liberal Party and not the ANC, he and Nelson Mandela became close friends on the island.
Before his release in 1979, the quiet, unassuming Daniels devised a daring plan to rescue Mandela and Walter Sisulu in a helicopter.
He got the idea while watching helicopters fly over the island with supplies for passing oil tankers in large baskets attached to their underbellies.
He chose New Year’s Day in 1981 for the so-called “Daniels Plan” because, being a public holiday, there would be fewer guards around and they would be less alert.
While prisoners were in the exercise yard a helicopter with Daniels on board to guide it to the right spot would hover overhead and lower a basket. Mandela and Sisulu would hop inside and be flown to the roof of the nearest foreign embassy, where they would ask for political asylum.
He discussed it with the two leaders, telling them it had an 80% chance of success. Sisulu opted out but Mandela was all for it. It was approved by the ANC’s high command on the island but then had to be approved by the high command in exile.
Plans were made for Daniels to meet ANC president OR Tambo in Botswana after his release and explain the plan to him. But he was served with three banning orders and could not go.
So he smuggled a postcard to Tambo in London, outlining the plan. He heard nothing and assumed it had been rejected.
In the ’90s he heard it had been sent to the high command in Lusaka. But before they could consider it, it vanished amid fears of an impending raid by South African special forces. It turned out that Dutch antiapartheid activist Conny Braam had taken it to Holland for safekeeping. It was returned in 1993 and shown in a Robben Island exhibition at the South African Museum.
District Six
Daniels was born in District Six on October 25 1928. His father, a World War 1 veteran and parking attendant on the Grand
Parade, was white. His mother, a cleaner at Stuttafords department store, was coloured.
Daniels left school after Standard 6 and worked in a shoe factory after failing to get a job on a cargo ship.
His political awakening started when he attended the meetings and marches of the anti-apartheid Torch Commando in the early 1950s and heard the famous Battle of Britain flying ace Sailor Malan likening the National Party government to the Nazis.
He worked on trawlers and whalers in the Antarctic, then as a scoop operator and crane driver for the Anglo American subsidiary Consolidated Diamond Mines in Oranjemund, Namibia.
After a few years he left because of apartheid practices on the mines, especially job reservation, which prevented the local Ovambos from doing better-paid jobs they were qualified for.
Back in Cape Town he worked in a photographic studio and was struck by how many African people came in to have their ID photos lightened so they could be classified as coloured and would not have to carry the hated “dompas”.
Coloured people would come in wanting their ID pictures lightened so that they could pass as white.
Liberal Party
All these experiences made him an increasingly bitter opponent of apartheid.
He joined the Liberal Party led by Alan Paton. He was attracted by its uncompromising opposition to the apartheid government, and the fact that it was nonracial and militant.
It soon became obvious to him it was not militant enough.
In 1961, disillusioned with marches and protest meetings, he became a founding member of the National Committee of Liberation, afterwards known as the African Resistance Movement (ARM), which was established to blow up government installations such as electricity pylons and radio masts.
It launched its first operation in September 1961, three months before the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto weSizwe, went into action.
He collected and stored explosives and detonators and helped prepare timing devices and charges in a workshop in Cape Town.
He was involved in an abortive attempt to blow up the radio mast on top of Constantiaberg. Three days later the security police found the charges that ARM members had attached to it.
He was arrested in 1964 after the security police raided the flat of ARM leader Adrian Leftwich and found a notebook with members’ names in it.
While Daniels was in detention, ARM member John Harris exploded a bomb at Johannesburg’s Park Station which killed a woman and maimed her granddaughter.
Daniels was told he would get the death penalty but could save himself by becoming a witness for the state and giving evidence against his colleagues. He refused.
Leftwich did not. He testified against
He chose New Year’s Day in 1981 for the so-called ‘Daniels Plan’
Daniels, which helped put him away for 15 years.
Daniels said he bore him no grudge as Leftwich did what he felt he had to do to save himself.
Solitary confinement
While on Robben Island he completed his matric and a BA degree in sociology and economics through Unisa, interrupted by a six-month spell of solitary confinement with his study rights revoked.
He then completed a BCom in business economics, industrial psychology and economics.
On his release he failed to recognise his 16-year-old son Donovan, whom he had not seen since the age of one because prisoners were not allowed visitors aged under 16.
After his release Daniels worked for the Urban Foundation.
In 1983 his banning orders were lifted. He and a white woman he’d fallen in love with while working on the diamond mines were secretly married. It was against the law and he knew he would be arrested again if the police found out about it.
They had to wait until the Mixed Marriages Act was repealed in 1990 before they could get married legally.
Daniels is survived by two sons. His wife, Eleanor, died 10 years ago.