Young Mandela

by David James Smith

  It was about 3:15 when Hepple and the others head a vehicle coming down the drive. Mbeki got up and went to the window. “It’s a dry cleaning van, I’ve never seen it before.”

  Bernstein got up and looked too. “My God, I saw that van outside the police station on the way here.”

  Hepple got up and went to the door. The side panel of the van read, as he remembered, Trade Steam Pressers. There was a man in a white coat, hat and glasses in the front seat.

  At that moment, Thomas, the farm manager, was coming towards the cottage with a parcel. “Go and see what that van wants!” someone yelled. Hepple closed the front door.

  The rear door of the van opened and policemen got out. Dogs began barking.

  “It’s the cops,” yelled Bernstein. “They’re heading here.”

  Mbeki grabbed the copy of “Operation Mayibuye” and some other papers and thrust them into the chimney of the stove. If the stove had been alight they would have burned. But it wasn’t.

  The back window was open. Hepple helped Sisulu and Kathrada as they scrambled out of it to escape. The front door flew open and a Special Branch officer named Kennedy entered. Hepple had cross-examined him in a trial earlier that year.

  “Stay where you are! You’re all under arrest!” Hepple remembered that Kennedy came up to him with an excited sneer. “You’re Advocate Hepple, aren’t you?”

  Kathrada and Sisulu began running but were soon stopped by officers with guns.

  Another officer Hepple knew, whom they all knew, was there too. Warrant Officer Dirker was an unpleasant character. “Oh Heppie ! Now we have you all,” he said. He searched Sisulu. They were gradually handcuffed and put into the dry cleaning van. The officers did not at first recognize Kathrada.

  Other officers had gone to the main house, interrupting Goldberg’s reading. He grabbed his jacket, which had incriminating notes about landmine manufacturing in the pocket, shot out of his seat and tried to reach the loo to flush away the evidence. He was stopped and asked his name. He gave a pseudonym, Charles Barnard, but was not believed. They initially thought he was Arthur Goldreich but eventually an officer from Cape Town recognized him.

  They could hear the officers’ excitement as they realized what they had stumbled into.

  “Look at this!”

  “Jesus! Look what’s here!”

  Outside, an officer said to Hepple, “I’m surprised to find you mixed up with these dangerous communists.”

  The officer in charge, Willie van Wyk, phoned his bosses and told them, “We’ve hit the jackpot.”

  Goldreich saw the police before they saw him, as he drove into Liliesleaf, but there was no chance to turn around. Before he could stop, they jumped forward and put a pistol to his head. He turned off the engine and got out with his hands in the air. He could see the police were everywhere and knew his wife and children would soon be coming home to Liliesleaf at the close of the school day. It was the end of everything.

  Goldreich was not the only one to experience some relief. The pressure of the existence was immense. One simply could not keep up the subterfuge, and mistakes were bound to be made. Goldberg had meant to go out and buy a forge that day, but was so tired he hadn’t bothered. Tired? “Shit, the tension of living underground.” His theory was that revolutionaries often almost wanted to get caught, because the stress became too great. He had only been in Johannesburg six weeks but, Christ, had he worked.

  According to Goldreich, the head of Special Branch, Van Den Bergh, came out later that day, after Hazel and the children had returned. Hazel had with her a friend’s child who was coming for a sleepover. The police were everywhere but she did her best to ignore them as she made supper and put the children to bed. She told Nicholas, aged nine, the men had come for a meeting.

  “Well, they look like police to me,” he said.

  She gave him all the money she could find and told him to hide it under his pillow.

  Both Arthur and Hazel recalled Van Den Bergh telling them their children were going to end up in an orphanage or an asylum. The officer claimed he had lost a child too, a daughter who had died, so knew how it felt. He seemed sad, Goldreich recalled. There was a silence. Some officers had entered and were searching a cupboard. Then he said, “See these okies, here? They are professionals, they do this every day. Not like you,” he pointed at Goldreich. “The trouble with you, Goldreich, the trouble with all of you is you are amateurs. You always have and you always will underestimate your enemy and that’s why you’re in the shit.”

  If he didn’t already know it, Goldreich quickly came to believe that there were nasty racists and anti-Semitic assumptions behind the cockiness of Special Branch.

  As long days of interrogation began, he was warned that he would pray to talk and was constantly abused as jou fokken jood. All the whites were fokken jude. Goldreich was convinced that the police never believed that black people could do anything for themselves and that behind a black person there had to be a white person pushing them forward.

  Nonetheless, was it not true that the ANC had struggled to achieve a degree of separation from its white communist colleagues?

  Hazel Goldreich spent eighty-seven days in prison, a term that was extended after her husband, Arthur, made a spectacular escape from Marshall Square, exactly a month after the Rivonia arrests, on August 11, 1963. With him went the white lawyer, Harold Wolpe, the husband of AnnMarie, and the Indian activists Mosie Moolla and Abdullah Jassat. They had bribed a young warder, Johannes Greef, who left doors open for them in return for payment. He went to prison himself while the escapees got clean away.

  Wolpe’s legal partner was his wife’s brother, James Kantor, a wealthy, carefree character who was almost entirely apolitical. He was arrested after the escape and became a defendant at the Rivonia Trial. Special Branch suspected he was deeply involved, or claimed they did, but they were mistaken. He suffered a breakdown during detention and never fully recovered, remaining resentful of his sister, AnnMarie, and her husband, and eventually dying of a heart attack at the age of forty-seven.

  It was the escape of his brother-in-law, Harold Wolpe, that made Kantor’s own arrest inevitable. The prison break was approved by Bram Fischer who took a central role in trying to control the chaos that ensued after the Rivonia arrests. He attempted to restore the high command of MK, organized a committee to get people out of the country and tried to support those who were arrested. Ruth First was soon picked up. Bram feared arrest himself. Much of his calm, urbane surface was stripped away as he was affected by insomnia, becoming short-tempered and impatient with legal juniors and other around him, and often flushed red in the face with anger. When he was asked to join the defense legal team for the forthcoming trial, he at first refused, but later changed his mind and accepted.

  Part of the difficulty was that, as with the arrest of Mandela, no one knew who had betrayed Liliesleaf. They would never know. Kathrada and others speculated that it might have been the anxious dentist, the cousin of Goldreich, who had visited that morning. It could have been the bed-wetting Mtolo, though supposedly he turned state witness only after the Rivonia arrests. Patrick Mthembu was a possibility. So too was George Mellis, the small boy who had once written down the registration numbers of all the cars he could find and handed in the list at the Rivonia police station.

  Wolfie Kodesh was in the UK when Oliver Tambo told him that he had been identified as a possible traitor. Some people accused Winnie Mandela, mainly because of her association with Brian Somana who was suspected of being an informer. A wide net was cast, which was just what the police must have hoped for. Spreading fear, suspicion and paranoia was part of the game that the police were now winning.

  The men who had been arrested at Rivonia were held in solitary confinement for most of the next three months. They were brought out in early October to be fingerprinted and charged. They were now “awaiting trial prisoners” and no longer confined. They could talk again with visitors as well as with one another.r />
  The state had let it be known that the trial was being moved from Johannesburg to the Palace of Justice in Pretoria, which meant they intended it to be a show trial, for the world to watch. Bram called together George Bizos and a younger advocate, Arthur Chaskalson. The attorney was Joel Joffe, who had been about to emigrate to Australia. Vernon Berrange would join them too, when he returned from abroad. Just as he had been reluctant to take part in the trial at all—he was lucky not to be in it as a defendant—so Bram was equally resistant to the idea of leading the defense. The other lawyers did not then know of his primary role in the underground movement and insisted he was the best man to take on the state.

  Although they were not yet sure exactly whom they would be defending, they were told the day before that there was to be a hearing on October 8, 1963. With Bram busy on another case, Bizos, Joffe and Chaskalson were sent on a merry dance around the courts, prisons and law offices of the state, trying to find out whom they would be representing and to have a consultation with their clients. There was no hearing and at first they were told they could not have both black and white clients in a consulting room together.

  Finally, that day, they were shown into a prison room and the defendants were brought in: Sisulu, Mbeki, Mhlaba, Kathrada, Goldberg, Bernstein, Hepple and three others who had not been arrested at Rivonia—James Kantor and two ANC members, Elias Motsoaledi and Andrew Mlangeni. They had all half expected Ruth First to be among them, but she was in fact never put on trial. The best guess of the defense was that the state would be seeking to execute the accused and that would be harder if there was a woman among them.

  There was an unexpected final guest. In came Mandela, in short pants, sandals and a prison-issue khaki shirt. His appearance was both surprising and shocking. Joffe had met him in the past but he looked different now, withered by his fourteen months in prison, looking thin and “miserably underweight” with pale skin, hollow cheeks and bags under his eyes. His manner, however, was unchanged and he still seemed confident and easygoing.

  Soon after his conviction and five-year sentence in November 1962, Mandela had begun studying for his unfinished LLB law exams in a correspondence course with the University of London. At the end of May 1963, only three weeks before his first exams, he had been transferred suddenly out of Pretoria prison to Robben Island. He had written to the commander of Robben Island, complaining of the interruption to his studies. Two weeks later, on June 13, again without warning or explanation, he had been transferred back again to Pretoria.

  It seemed at first like an excited reunion, said Joffe, but Hepple soon put a dampener on that with his announcement that he had been “asked” to give evidence against the others and was still considering what to do.

  I sensed Hepple’s discomfort, forty-five years later, as we discussed these events at his rooms in Clare College, Cambridge, where he is an emeritus master and emeritus professor of law. He has threatened to sue over the years when the subject has been discussed and I think he is sensitive to being judged, especially by his comrades.

  George Bizos later said that he thought of Hepple as a tragic figure and, especially, a disappointment to Bram Fischer for whom, to some extent, he had been a protégé. Goldberg remembered asking Hepple why he was going to give evidence and he replied, according to Goldberg, because they are going to hang me. Goldberg said, you mean it’s OK to hang the rest of us? Hepple himself said he did not recall this exchange with Goldberg.

  Others were more considerate of his position. Who could say how they might fare under torture and interrogation? And who would want to sit in judgment of those who broke “like eggshells”? Hepple was made to stand on the spot over three days and nights. He was also subjected to a game of Russian roulette by the infamously cruel Swanepoel, who spun the cylinder of his gun, pointed it at Hepple and asked, “What’s it going to be, the rope or the bullet?”

  Hepple could not cope with the pressure and made an eight-page statement. Although it did not make any significant admissions about the role of others, it enabled the prosecutor, Percy Yutar, to rise up triumphantly one day and proclaim that Hepple would be his first witness. Hepple felt badly about that, and about the fact that, when granted bail, he had then escaped, with the help of Bram Fischer. Perhaps he ought to have stayed, faced down Yutar and refused to testify, but he hadn’t and that was a regret.

  He remembered talking to Mandela about it at the trial.

  They stood by a window to avoid being bugged as Mandela expressed his sympathy for Hepple’s predicament but said if he testified it might be used politically against the ANC. Mandela told him, “You realize that if you give evidence you’re finished?” There was also a chance that Hepple could have been assassinated, like Patrick Mthembu.

  “So if you get the opportunity to escape that would be good, but it’s got to be your decision. I’m not going to tell you what to do.”

  Hepple actually wanted someone to tell him what to do after three months in solitary.

  But Mandela didn’t tell him. None of them did.

  Hepple hoped he could still persuade Percy Yutar to release him unconditionally, and asked Mandela how he would feel if that happened.

  “That would be excellent,” said Mandela.

  They shook hands and parted.

  Nineteen

  THE PEOPLE WHO assembled in the public gallery for the opening hearings of the Rivonia Trial were shocked to see Mandela emerge wearing shorts. When she first saw him, Hilda Bernstein, Rusty’s wife, wondered, have they so easily reduced this proud and sophisticated man to the dress and status of a boy? But then he smiled and raised his clenched fist. He called, Amandla! The crowd’s response was, Ngawethu!

  There was a false start when the initial indictment was challenged by the defense and quashed by the judge. By December 1963, the trial proper was ready to begin again, with four charges constructed around the broad allegations that the accused had carried out some 200 acts of sabotage and had adopted a plan to embark on guerrilla warfare. Perhaps mindful of the debacle of the five-year Treason Trial, the state never charged the Rivonia accused with treason.

  In his own memoir of the trial, Joel Joffe has great fun, characterizing Percy Yutar—Percy-Cutor, as he was known—as a malicious, incompetent buffoon who relied on sarcasm and accusation as substitutes for hard evidence and cogent oratory. His greatest gift, you might think from reading Joffe’s book, was his presentation of his case in elegant, bound volumes of papers.

  Yutar was a right-wing Jewish state lawyer who appeared to hate the Jewish communists on trial. Bob Hepple had not been raised a Jew but his mother was Jewish. Before Hepple’s flight, Yutar had appealed to him to give evidence against his fellow accused and “save the Jews of South Africa.” That, apparently, was Yutar’s mission. He was convinced of his case and believed they all deserved to hang.

  Operation Mayibuye—had it been adopted? Was it being acted on by the accused?—was central to the case. While he kept his own feelings to himself at the time, Bram Fischer later called it “an entirely unrealistic brainchild of some youthful and adventurous imagination.”

  Bram was living on a knife-edge during the trial. Yutar once handed him a prosecution exhibit, supposedly a document written by Harold Wolpe, which Bram recognized as in his own handwriting. He cross-examined Patrick Mthembu, both of them knowing Bram had been at some of the same meetings Mthembu had attended at Liliesleaf. Mthembu never gave him away and only once, in an apparent fit of pique over a minor grievance, did Yutar try to expose his other life as the leader of the underground. Fischer believed the state had, for some reason, allowed him indemnity for the duration of the trial.

  Undeterred, Bram took prosecution papers from the court—maps, plans for sabotage targets—and showed them to members of the re-formed MK, which he himself had helped to shape, with Wilton Mkwayi, Dave Kitson and others. The new MK, already keen to punish Mthembu and all traitors, had formed a hit squad to make an example of them. Bram was sure the
accused’s fate would be sealed if a state witness was killed in revenge in the middle of the trial, so implored the hit squad to hold their fire.

  Although all the accused, including Mandela, had pleaded not guilty—“the government should be in the dock, not me”—Mandela had no intention of dissembling to save his neck. He said he could not believe his eyes when Bruno Mtolo appeared as the mysterious Witness X, but conceded the truth of much of Mtolo’s detailed evidence.

  Mandela insisted, however, on having his defense team challenge Mtolo over his claim that Mandela was a communist and that he had told his recruits to deny they were communists when they went abroad. That was simply not true and if he had to admit he was involved in MK to nail the lie, that would not stop him. In any event, if the notes he had left at Rivonia made it likely he would be convicted, then Mtolo’s evidence made it a certainty.

  In discussions with the legal team, he said he wanted to explain “to the country and the world where Umkhonto we Sizwe stood, and why; to clarify its aims and policy, to reveal the true facts from the half-truths and distortions of the state case.” He was prepared to put his life at stake to do it.

  It seemed to Joel Joffe, after Mtolo’s evidence, that Accused No. 1, Mandela, would bear the main burden of the charges. The entirely innocent James Kantor, whose wife was pregnant, was granted bail over Christmas 1963 and went home with an affectionate message for his wife. “Tell Barbara I apologize,” said Mandela.

  “What for?” Kantor asked.

  “Because you are here.”

  That January, Kantor—Accused No. 10—passed a note all the way down the row to Accused No. 1, asking him whether he would be a godfather to his unborn child, and saying it would be an honor to the child.

  Mandela’s note of reply went back down the line just before the afternoon break. “I would be more than delighted, and the honor is mine, not the baby’s.” Mandela hung back at the break and spoke briefly to Kantor. “Now they dare not hang me,” he said, with a smile.