In 1939, South Africa, a member of the British Commonwealth, had declared war on Nazi Germany. The country was supplying men and goods to the war effort. Demand for labor was high, and Johannesburg became a magnet for Africans from the countryside seeking work. Between 1941, when I arrived, and 1946, the number of Africans in the city would double. Every morning, the township felt larger than it had the day before. Men found jobs in factories and housing in the “non-European townships” of Newclare, Martindale, George Goch, Alexandra, Sophiatown, and the Western Native Township, a prisonlike compound of a few thousand matchbox houses on treeless ground.

Garlick and I sat in the estate agent’s waiting room while a pretty African receptionist announced our presence to her boss in the inner office. After she relayed the message, her nimble fingers danced across the keyboard as she typed a letter. I had never in my life seen an African typist before, much less a female one. In the few public and business offices that I had visited in Umtata and Fort Hare, the typists had always been white and male. I was particularly impressed with this young woman because those white male typists had only used two slow-moving fingers to peck out their letters.

She soon ushered us into the inner office, where I was introduced to a man who looked to be in his late twenties, with an intelligent and kindly face, light in complexion, and dressed in a double-breasted suit. Despite his youth, he seemed to me an experienced man of the world. He was from the Transkei, but spoke English with a rapid urban fluency. To judge from his well-populated waiting room and his desk piled high with papers, he was a busy and successful man. But he did not rush us and seemed genuinely interested in our errand. His name was Walter Sisulu.

Sisulu ran a real estate office that specialized in properties for Africans. In the 1940s, there were still quite a few areas where freehold properties could be purchased by Africans, small holdings located in such places as Alexandra and Sophiatown. In some of these areas, Africans had owned their own homes for several generations. The rest of the African areas were municipal townships containing matchbox houses for which the residents paid rent to the Johannesburg City Council.

Sisulu’s name was becoming prominent as both a businessman and a local leader. He was already a force in the community. He paid close attention as I explained about my difficulties at Fort Hare, my ambition to be a lawyer, and how I intended to register at the University of South Africa to finish my degree by correspondence course. I neglected to tell him the circumstances of my arrival in Johannesburg. When I had finished, he leaned back in his chair and pondered what I had said. Then, he looked me over one more time, and said that there was a white lawyer with whom he worked named Lazar Sidelsky, who he believed to be a decent and progressive fellow. Sidelsky, he said, was interested in African education. He would talk to Sidelsky about taking me on as an articled clerk.

In those days, I believed that proficiency in English and success in business were the direct result of high academic achievements and I assumed as a matter of course that Sisulu was a university graduate. I was greatly surprised to learn from my cousin after I left the office that Walter Sisulu had never gone past Standard VI. It was another lesson from Fort Hare that I had to unlearn in Johannesburg. I had been taught that to have a B.A. meant to be a leader, and to be a leader one needed a B.A. But in Johannesburg I found that many of the most outstanding leaders had never been to university at all.