The Rivonia Trial, 1963€“1964
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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. Percy Yutar, who led the prosecution team, strayed far from the terms of the indictment in order to portray the accused in lurid terms as evil conspirators inspired by communism. The defence team was led by Bram Fischer and included Vernon Berrange, Joel Joffe, Arthur Chaskalson, and George Bizos. They conceded that some of the facts asserted by the state were correct, and focused their strategy on saving the accused from the gallows by proving that MK’s high command, although pondering the option of guerrilla war, had not actually adopted any plans that would go beyond sabotage directed solely at property. They also sought to protect other underground members of the ANC by proving that MK and the ANC were separate, albeit overlapping, organisations. To further this strategy, it was decided that Mandela would lead off the defence by making a statement from the dock, rather than testifying and opening himself to cross-examination. For five hours on 20 April 1964, Mandela read in a flat, deliberate voice what was to become one of the most famous speeches in South African history. All the other accused gave testimony in their own defence except Kantor, who was released at the end of the prosecution case for lack of evidence. On 11 June 1964, Judge Quartus de Wet delivered his verdict. All the accused were found guilty except Bernstein, against whom the evidence was insufficient. Conceding to the defence their two primary arguments, de Wet pronounced sentence the following day on the eight men convicted: life imprisonment. Within hours, the six Africans and Ahmed Kathrada were on their way to Robben Island, and Dennis Goldberg, the only white, to Pretoria Local Prison. For the Congress movement, a period of fear and dormancy had begun. There is an extensive literature on the Rivonia trial. Of particular value are the following: Hilda Bernstein, The World That Was Ours (1967, 1989), Rusty (Lionel) Bernstein, Memory Against Forgetting (1999), Stephen Clingman, Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary (1998), Glenn Frankel, Rivonia’s Children (1999), Joel Joffe, The Rivonia Story (1995), James Kantor, A Healthy Grave (1967), Thomas Karis et al., From Protest to Challenge, vol. 3 (1977), Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (1994), Bruno Mtolo, Umkonto we Sizwe: The Road to the Left (1966), Anthony Sampson, Mandela (1999), Elinor Sisulu, Walter and Albertina Sisulu: In Our Lifetime (2002), and AnnMarie Wolpe, The Long Way Home (1994). Gail M. Gerhart, May 2007.