The Rivonia Trial, 1963€“1964
The Rivonia Trial, 1963–1964 After the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress were outlawed in April 1960, opponents of the apartheid government increasingly turned to violent resistance. The underground ANC and its ally, the illegal Communist Party, formed Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) and began a campaign of sabotage in late 1961. Nelson Mandela secretly left South Africa to seek support in independent Africa for training a guerrilla army. He was captured after his return and jailed for five years on charges of incitement and leaving the country without a passport. On a wintry day in July 1963, police raided the secret headquarters of MK in the Rivonia suburb of northern Johannesburg. They arrested 17 people, including several members of the MK high command, and seized a large number of documents. Those captured were jailed incommunicado under the new 90-day detention law. In October, seven of those captured at Rivonia (Walter Sisulu, Raymond Mhlaba, Govan Mbeki, Dennis Goldberg, Ahmed Kathrada, Lionel Bernstein, and Bob Hepple) and four others (Mandela, James Kantor, Andrew Mlangeni, and Elias Motsoaledi) were charged with crimes under the 1962 Sabotage Act, which carried the death penalty. Two others who would have been charged, Arthur Goldreich and Harold Wolpe, escaped from custody at the Marshall Square police station in August by bribing a young warder. Hepple was pressured by the police to become a state witness, to which he feigned agreement and then fled the country. Although the case of S v. Nelson Mandela and Others, popularly known as the Rivonia trial, attracted international criticism, South Africa’s police, prosecutors, and white media saw the trial as a triumph for the government in its attempts to crush revolutionary violence.
[Show full text]