's First Citizens

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Alternative title Notes and Documents - United Nations Centre Against ApartheidNo. 19/69 Author/Creator United Nations Centre against ; Benson, Mary Publisher Department of Political and Security Council Affairs Date 1969-11-00 Resource type Reports Language English Subject Coverage (spatial) South Africa Coverage (temporal) 1969 Source Northwestern University Libraries Description In resolution 2396 (XXIIl) of 2 December 1968, the General Assembly requested the Secretary-General to establish and publicize a "register of persons executed, imprisoned, placed under house arrest or banning orders or deported for their opposition to apartheid." In response to this provision and related requests by the Special Committee on Apartheid, the Unit has initiated a series of "Notes and Documents" giving particulars concerning such persons. This issue contains an article prepared by Miss Mary Benson, at the request of the Unit on Apartheid, on some of the political prisoners in South Africa. Format extent 8 page(s) (length/size)

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http://www.aluka.org UNIT ON APARTHEID

UNIT ON APARTHEID DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL AND SECURITY COUNCIL AFFAIRS No. 19/69 November 1969 NOTES AND DOCUMENTS* SOUTH AFRICA'S FINEST CITIZENS by Mary Benson (In resolution 2396 (XXIII) of 2 December 1968, the General Assembly requested the Secretary-General to establish and publicize a "register of persons executed, imprisoned, placed under house arrest or banning orders or deported for their opposition to Uartheid." In response to this provision and related requests by the Special Committee on Anartbeid, the Unit has initiated a series of "Notes and Documents" giving particulars concerning such persons. This issue contains an article prepared by Miss Mary Benson, at the request of the Unit on Apartheid, on some of the political prisoners in South Africa. Miss Benson, a journalist and author born in South written numerous books and articles on the movement against Africa and its leaders. She has appeared thrice before the Special Committee on Apartheid. Africa, has apartheid in South United Nations The South African Government withdrew her passport in 1962. In February 1966, the Government placed her under house arrest in Jchannesburg and prohibited her from writing. The te..t of the banning order was reproduced in No. 18/69 of the "Notes and Documents". She left South Africa later in 1966 on an exit permit which prohibits her return.) 69-26061 *All material in these notes and documents may be freely reprinted. Acknowledgement, together with a copy of the publication containing the reprint, would be appreciated.

SOUTH A',ICA'S FINEST CITIZENS by Mary Benson Robben Island: In the South African Government's glossy brochure on prisons, the Island appears smothered in yellow daisies with a romantic view of Table Mountain in the distance; only by chance does one notice the grey mass of the maximum security jail in a corner of the picture. Indeed, another photograph is entirely devoted to deer alert among the daisies. Fauna and flora are cherished by the South African authorities. And what of the hundreds of men - the Black Indian and Coloured political prisoners incarcerated there? Men who have stiuggled for ideals which the United Nations regards as the noblest a man can serve, men that any civilized country would be proud to have as its citizens. These men are driven forth each weekday in work gangs as if they were spans of o):en, men such as Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada and the other fLivonia trialists, as well as the Pan Africanist schoolboys from , who have heard a Jurdge declare: "I sentence you to hard labour fo:' the rest of your na ;ural life..." Men who were lawyers, teachers, garage attendants, trade uxiioiists, shop workers, messengers. Now, as they break stone and rock in the quarries or along the shore, the squeak of wheelbarrows can be heard, the yells aid cu -ces cf -ward-rs, the cry of sea gulls, and sometimes - tantalizingly - the hooters of passing ships. Nelson Mandela, leader of Umkonto We Sizwe ("Spear of the Nation"), the underground movement, might, as one of the royal family of the Tembu people, have gone along with his cousin, Kaiser Matanzima, the "Prime Minister" of the Transkei, and been a puppet of the Government, with an assured incone, high- powered motorcars, and sycophantic followers. Or he might simply have remained a successful lawyer, content to function within the framework of apartheid, living in a black middleclass home and finding an outlet for humiliation in sport or jazz, religion or drink. He might have - but for his strong character, his independence of mind and his responsiveness to people's sufferings and to the imperative need for justice. And so, after studying in Johannesburg where he learned the bitter facts of life for Africans in the overcrowded, poverty-stricken townships of the 1940's, he joined with other intensely nationalist young men and galvanized the African National Congress into militant action. Undeterred by repeated arrests and police harassment, he was National Volunteer-in-Chief of the of 1952, when 8,500 volunteers went cheerfully to jail; he was one of the accused in the Treason Trial of 1956-60, when all were found "not guilty"; he was underground Organizer of the countrywide protest stay-at-home in 1961; and, in 1962, he left South Africa illegally to address the PAFMECSA Conference, and to make an historic tour of Africa during which he met ERperor Haile Sellassie and Presidents Nyerere, Bourguiba, Senghor, Sekou Tour4, Tubman, Obote and Ben Bella. On his return to South Africa, he was betrayed, arrested, and sentenced to five years' imprisonment. It was while in prison that he was again brought to court in the Rivonia Trial. After decades of non-violent action had proved ineffectual in face of Government

-2- violence, but "as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that >tad arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the Whites." Whilst abroad, he underwent a course in military training because if there were to be guerrilla warfare, he wanted to be able to fight with his people and share the hazards of war with them. He had studied various authorities, from the Fast and from the West, from Clausewitz to Mao Tse-Tung and Che Guevara, even writings on the A3.o--Boer war. He concluded his moving statement to the court: "During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against White domination, and I have fought against Black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." Mandela was 46 years old when he began to serve the life sentence. He is now 51. Recently, he suffered three grievous personal blows: his mother died in the Transkei, his eldest son was killed in an accident in Cape Town and his wife, Winnie, in Johannesburg, was arrested and imprisoned in solitary confinement. Walter Sisulu, Mandela's friend and comrade, throughout nearly thirty years of ANC activity, labours alongside him on the Island. Dogged, determined from his childhood in the Transkei, Sisulu had a grain of rebelliousness, of refusing to lie down and accept injustice, which made him an indomitable fighter. Yet he was the most unassuming of leaders, and probably knew better than any other just what it means to be a "native", for he was a miner, and a kitchenboy, and when he was a baker's assistant he led a modest strike and was promptly fired. He was first imprisoned when he protested against a white railway ticket-collector bullying an African child. Thus he found our early in life that most of the whites Africans encounter are the policemen raiding locations for passes or tax receipts, or officials dealing with queues of so-called "boys" like cattle, or jailers who beat up prisoners, and all these things aroused in him not fear, but contempt. For all that, he was no racialist, though, as with Mandela, it was his experience of working with Indians in organizing the Defiance Campaign in 1952 - when he was Secretary-General of the AUC - which enabled him to outgrow exclusiveness. In 1953 Sisulu briefly visited Israel and London, and spent five months in Communist countries. China affected him most because the peasants - their lives and needs - reminded him of African peasants, and when he saw the rapid metamorphosis of slums, he thought of the shanties and poverty around Johannesburg. He returned to South Africa with the knowledge that the greater part of the world was on the side of his people. At the &ge of 41, for the first time in his life he had been consistently treated as a dignified human being instead of as a native.

-3- Ahmed Kathrada, now 40 years old, though frequently arrested, banned and persecuted, carried on with total dedication ever since he went to prison in the Indian passive resistance to the ghetto laws of 1946. In Johannesburg he helped to establish the Central Indian High School and was President of the Indian Youth Congress. A man with a practical vision of what the Transkei and the long neglected and over-crowded rural areas could become is Govan Mbeki. In the early 1940's hp was a member of the Transkelan Territorial General Council and Secretary of the Transkeian African Voters' Association. Detained for five months in 1960, he kept a jail diary distinguished for its humanity and fresh observation. Arrested again in 1961, tried, acquitted, then house arrested, he eventually went underground. Captured as a member of the High Command of Umkonto. he is also serving a life sentence. Nearly sixty, he has aged pllysically on the Island but his spirit remains young. He represents the many thousands of Xhosa in the Eastern Cape who through the 1950's provided .iiitant and united resistance and whose leaders had a deep sense of being part of tile ,ople. Teacher, (Bachelor of Arts and Economics), writer, Communist, when he vias brought ft.'om jail to give evidence for the defence in certain trials in the Easteru Cape in 2965, the State was so frightened of his influence that the press - in an unprecedented and arbitrary manner - was barred from the courts. Then there is Elias Motsoaledi, now 44 years old, who grew up in Sekukuniland, in a family of ten which l!,;ed on four acres of land while thousands of acres belonging to white 'ime-s went unused. In the Rivonia trial he told the court: "I came to Johanr-,:sourg to earn a living to help my family.I earned 24 shillings in a boot factory. When workers asked for better wages, I was sacked." In time he became chairman of the Furniture, Mattress and Bedding Workers Union and Chairman of the Transvaal Non-European Trade Union, only to be banned and, on occasion, arrested or detained. Hiw wife, Caroline, was arrested during the Rivonia trial, to be released five and a half months later with no charge ever brought, and then heard that her husband had been sentenced to life imprisonment. She is but one of the many wives with children (six sons and a daughter, of whom the youngest was a small baby when both parents were arrested), who struggle desperately to maintain a home and who rarely can afford to visit their husbands on the Island; a thousand or five hundred miles' journey there, a half hour visit, then the long and expensive journey home. Supposing the wife manages one journey every three months, after twenty years she and her husband will have seen each other, in all, for less than two days! It was of these and other men in the Rivonia trial that Chief Albert Luthuli, Nobel Peace Prize winner, said: "...they tried to create an organized force in order to ultimately establish peace and racial harmony. For this, they are sentenced to be shut away for long years in the brutal and degrading prisons of South Africa... They represent the highest in morality and ethics in the South African

-4- political struggle; this morality and ethics have been sentenced to an imprisonmert it may noer survive.. .Without their leadership, brotherhood and humanit; may be blasted out of existence in South Africa for long decades to come." A friend of Eddie Daniels describes him as a "great-hearted person, whose love of humanity, courage and sense of duty cou.ld, in South Africa, only land him in Jail." Now 35 years old, Daniels is the Coloured photographer who had unique experirnmce across the colour line: when he was quite young and apolitical he unwittingly got a hite man's job as a foreman in the alluvial diamond fields of South West Africa, (Namibia), where he witnessed the indignity and brutality to which the black Ovambo, workers were subjected. He treated these men as men, and returned to Cape Town determined to do something about the hardships endured by non-whites. He joined the multi-racial Liberal Party, soon was on the National Committee and even after the police shootings at Sharpeville in 1960, worked ardently through constitutional channels when he canvassed all- white voters for the Liberal candidate in a general election. He was one of the many Liberals banned under the Suppression of Communism Act. Only after the Government crushed the Coloured Peoples' Convention which he helped found, did he face the hopelessness of such activity and join young white liberals in the African Resistance Movement's sabotage. Eddie Daniels is now serving a fifteen- year sentence while his fellow accused, David de Keller, who was sentenced to ten years, was released after only two years. What other conclusion can one draw than that de Keller is white, with an affluent father, while Daniels is Coloured? In a reasonable country the great provocation endured by a member of the deprived group would have been taken into account. While on trial, it was chadrateristic that'he sent word that he bore no malice against those who had betrayed him, and now, on Robben Island, despite a hernia which has made hard labour exhausting and weakening, reports are that his spirits have not flagged. And he has studied hard in prison, passed matriculation, and gone on to a university course. A contemporary of his, and also one of the Coloured people,Neville Alexander, must be particularly frustrated by the State's restrictions on what may be studied: a political prisoner is not alloved to study for any degree higher than a bachelor's no matter how long his sentence. And Alexander is a brilliant intellectural - the first non-white from South Africa to be honoured with an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship at Tubingen University in West Germany, where he took his doctorate in philosophy, and where his book on the German dramatist, Gerhart Hauptmann, was published. Alexander cared so much for his own country that he returned there; it was just after the Sharpeville shootings. With his sister and friends who were also Coloured intellectuals and with an African law student, he formed a group to study revolutionary philosophies and tactics. Like the Rivonia trialists, Eddie Daniels and more than a thousand others, he was detained in solitary confinement. Protests, petitions, and funds for his defence came from students and faculty in West Germany. He was among those sentenced to ten years' imprisonment. Meanwhile, his mother strives to keep the home going, with two minor children; his father lost a leg in the 1939-45 war and in 1964 had to have the other leg amputated Alexander himself is said to have been so badly beaten by prison guards in June 1964 that his ear was seriously injured.

-5- There are so many other valuable citizens in Robben Island prison; Wilton Mkwayi, there for life; Billy Nair, a young Indian trade unionist, and Cernick Ndhlovu, sentenced to 20 years; Andrew Mashaba and Peter Mogano, one of them a waiter, both from Pretoria, for 15 years; Michael Mgubeni, for 12 years...it was his wife who, on hearing the sentence, rose in court and cried: "I am proud of you, my husband! Twelve years, its nothing!" And Indres Naidoo, badly tortured in detention, who had been shot by police when they captured him, is serving ten years. His father was Mahatma Gandhi's adopted son. And his sister, Shanti, is the young Indian woman now h. 1d in Pretoria prison in solitary confinement, along with Mrs. Vinnie Maidela and some forty others. They are undergoing interrogation by members of the Security Police who have driven a dozen men to suicide. It is a measure of Bran Fischer's long identification with the Africans that many people think he also is on Robben Is2and. In fact he is among the remaining white political prisoners - all men - 1ho are confined in a newly well-appointed wing of Pretoria local jail. Their physical ondition is much improved but they continue to be utterly isolated fron. any fiareout of news about the world outside. Whereas criminal prisoners recei-ve nE-,r1-pers and can hear radio news services, the political prisoners are - as one of t'hm has rut it - mentally castrated. And Abram Fischer and Denis Goldberg are 1there for life; David Kitson for twenty years; others for fifteen years or less. There was a time when one indulwcd in fantasy: what South Africa - so rich and beautiful and spacious a land - c ni d be like if all races were allowed equal opportunity and if Brain Fischer Lere fiee to give the leadership of which he is capable; but the fantasy - in the face of the very real tyranny - has become too painful. Fischer, grandson of an Afrikaner Prime Minister of the Orange River Colony, and himself an Afrikaner Nationalist for twenty years, T:on a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University and became a Communist during the turbulent 1930's. A distinguished advocate and Queen's Counsellor, he led the defence in the Treason Trial of 1956-60 and in the Rivonia trial of 1965-64. And when he himself was on trial as a Communist in 1965, he elected to go underground to continue to .oopose the "monstrous policy of apartheid", particularly in face of the organized torture of ninety-day detention. "I can no longer serve justice in the way I have attempted to do during the past thirty years" he said in a letter to the court. Besides, as an Afrikaner,he felt an additional duty in face of the deep- rooted hatred for Afrikaners that had been bred in Africans. These Africans were subjected to deprivations which, if applied to whites, would horrify all. After ten months of eluding a strenous police search, he was captured, and faced fifteen charges instead of the original four. In court, during a frank statement of his political beliefs and appraisal of the courses upen to anyone faced with immoral laws, he said: "It was to keep faith with all those dispossessed by apartheid that I broke my undertaking to the court (over bail), separated myself from my family, pretended I was someone else, and accepted the life of a fugitive. I owed it to the political prisoners, to the banished, to the silenced and those under house arrest, not to remain a spectator, but to act.. .I felt responsible, not to those who are indifferent to the sufferings of others, but to those who are concerned."

-6- If one day his conduct helped to establish a bridge between white leaders and the real leaders of the non-whites, then, he said, "I shall be able to bear with fortitude any sentence..." In conclusion he quoted President Kruger's words in 1881: freedom shall arise as the sun shines from the morning's clouds. Bram Fischer is now 61, imprisoned for the rest of his "natural life". With the other white politicals he works in the jail's new carpentry shop and in "off-hours" studies or grows flowers in the small garden. Many Afrikaners have been brave patriots -ut Fischer has additional, rare qualities. He is humane and generous. Fischer's people were the first tribe in Africa to fight for freedom; will they ever have the mercy to grant it to others? During the 1914-18 War Afrikaner freedom fighters killed many comrades in an internal rebellion, yet were mercifully treated: sentenced to seven years imprisonment, all were released within two years. It is their descendants who rule South Africa today. David Kitson, born in South Africa in 1920, is a mechanical engineer who studied and worked in England where he had a Draughtsmans' and Allied Technicians' scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford. Like Fischer, he is a Communist and one of those unusual human beings: a white man who sacrificed himself, his family life and career to aid the Africans in fighting injustice. The Sharpeville shootings were the turning point in his life; he could have left the country but he chose to stay, and joined with Mandela and others of all races in Umkonto sabotage. To his children - Steven, aged seven and Mandy, aged two - he wrote: "If I am sent to jail it will be because I was trying to make a better South Africa for you to live in. I hope that you will always be proud of me and always remember that however hard things may be for you, I love you both very much and look forward to the day when we can be together again." He now serves a twenty year sentence in Pretoria local jail. Perhaps the most unexpected among the white political prisoners in Hugh Lewin, now 28, son of an Anglican clergyman, whose boyhood was spent in a quiet Transvaal vicarage and at St. John's school - a leading church school in Johannesburg. While there, Hugh did social work in the African townships, was headboy and an English literature scholar. Later, as a student at Rhodes University and a member of the Liberal Party, he had frequent meetings with black students from Fort Hare College - meetings that sometimes had to be held secretly in the long grass outside the tribal college campus, because of police harassment. Visits to Ghana and Nigeria in the early 1960's made a deep impression but for Lewin as for so many others, police violence at Sharpeville proved traumatic. Teacher, features editor of a newspaper widely read by non- whites, he was one of the young Liberals who formed the ARM sabotage group. Though he had a chance to leave the country before his involvement was known to the police, he chose to remain. He was seriously assaulted while held under ninety day detention. He has now served five of his seven year sentence. In court he said simply that he felt it his Christian duty to act as he had in protesting against the evil of apartheid; he had no regrets. The Weinbergs must be the only family with the distinction of having all been in jail: Eli Weinberg, orphaned refugee from Latvia who came to South Africa in 1929 and whose mother and youngest sister were gassed to death at Auschwitz in 1943, is serving five years for being a Communist; his wife Violet, former national vice-president of the multi-racial Federation of South African Women, was recently released after serving six months in solitary under the 180- day detention law followed by nearly two years for being a Communist; while their daughter, Sheila, after being detained for 55 days under the ninety day law, was imprisoned for six months for supporting the outlawed ANC. The victimization of political prisoners takes many forms; none of the remission or parole facilities that criminal prisoners have, petty obstacles placed in the way of studying which is their most cherished activity; and, above all - after a sentence has been served - the additional arbitrary punishment of being house arrested and placed under bans so restrictive that some men and women have been unable to get jobs. Scores of people have been thus treated, among them Mrs. Violet Weinberg; Zeph Mothopeng, the ebullient Pan Africanist leader; Mrs. Frances Baard, the inspirin women's lca,ur in ; William Bock, Coloured leader from Cape Town; and Robert Sobukwe. Robert Mangaliso Sobuk'.re, former President of the Pan Africanist Congress, is the only person in South Africa to haove a law passed exclusively for him: After he had served a three year sentence for leading the pre-Sharpeville protests against the , he was detained in solitude on Robben Island under this law which was renewed annually for six yea_-3. Sc' he, who is a man of great talent and powers of leadership, came from a pjor Ec,3tern Cape family and, largely through scholarships, achieved a lectureship at the University of Uitwatersrand where he remained until he resigned to lead the PAC. Though granted certain comforts on Robben Island, including relatively relaxed visits from his wife and children, he suffered considerable psychological strain from the long isolation. And when, in April 1969, he was finally released, it was not to freedom. He now lives under restriction in Kimberley location. So many wonderful South Africans in jail or existing under bitter restrictions... Nana Sita, the valiant, gentle, seventy year old Gandhian who, time after time, had endured imprisonment for his passive resistance to injustice.. Helen Joseph, eixty-four year old former social worker, the only white woman accused throughout the full four years of the Treason Trial and the first person to be placed under house arrest. A woman of superb faith, she is inspired by her love for the people of all races whom she will not abandon, and she in turn inspires them as she now faces her eighth year of house arrest and harsh bans. And there are the men and women, for so long leaders of the struggle, who have died during these harrowing years, among them Chief Albert Luthuli and Mrs. . There are the thirteen men driven to death by their interrogators. Essentially,all these men and women have stood for the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Indeed, in their variety of racial descent, they could be a United Nations in miniature. Mr.Albert Camus wrote:"We must tell them that they are not alone, their action is not futile, there always comes a day when the palaces of oppression crumble, when imprisonment and exile come to an end, when liberty catches fire..."