Later the four prisoners were taken to a more spacious cell, where after supper Mandela heard a tapping at the window, and a whisper of “Nelson, come here.” It was a Coloured warder, who brought news from Winnie and offered to bring him tobacco and sandwiches, which he did almost every night. It reassured Mandela that even on the dreaded Robben Island, the warders could vary as much as other human beings.8
After a few weeks on the island he was told to pack his belongings again, and was taken back to solitary confinement in Pretoria. There was no explanation, while the government told the press, quite untruthfully, that he had been moved to protect him from being attacked by PAC prisoners.9 It did not take long for him to learn the real reason.
Early in July Mandela heard that one of the ANC’s lawyers, Harold Wolpe, had been detained; then in the prison corridor he was greeted by Thomas Mashefane, who had been the foreman at Lilliesleaf Farm. Several days later, in the prison office, he found himself face-to-face with the ANC leaders who had been hiding in Rivonia. During Mandela’s eight months of incarceration Verwoerd’s government had begun cracking down much more effectively on the black opposition, particularly after the secret terrorist offspring of the PAC, Poqo, had begun assassinating whites, first in the Transkei and then in Paarl, near Cape Town. On May 1, 1963, the government rushed through its most drastic legislation yet, again supported by the United Party. It included the notorious “ninety-day law” which enabled the police to hold anyone for three months incommunicado without trial, thus giving the security police virtually free hands for interrogation and torture.10 Ten days later the first arrests were made under the law. These were aimed not so much at Poqo as at discovering the whereabouts of the ANC leaders in hiding—including Sisulu, Kathrada and Govan Mbeki, who had all broken their house arrests and disappeared. “We had not anticipated where and how they would start,” wrote Hilda Bernstein, whose husband, Rusty, was soon detained, “and in that we showed our ignorance.”11
The ANC leaders and their allies were still moving in and out of Rivonia in disguise, discussing plans for sabotage and guerrilla warfare which would be launched with the help of selected MK recruits who had already been smuggled out of the country to be trained in Algeria, Ethiopia or the Soviet Union.12 The high command of MK remained defiant, and on June 26 Sisulu made the first broadcast on Radio Freedom from a secret hideout, promising listeners that he would remain underground in South Africa—thus challenging the police to track him down.
Bruno Mtolo, the saboteur from Durban who was soon to betray his colleagues, described how he once saw the leaders assembled in the thatched house on Lilliesleaf Farm: Sisulu, with a trimmed mustache, wearing a green pullover and jeans, busy drafting a leaflet on a typewriter; Kathrada in sports shirt and sandals, with his ginger hair; Govan Mbeki in a workman’s blue overalls.13 They were preparing a highly ambitious plan called Operation Mayibuye, which had been drafted by Joe Slovo and Govan Mbeki. The document began: “The white state has thrown overboard every pretence of rule by democratic process. Armed to the teeth it has presented the people with only one choice, and that is its overthrow by force and violence.”14 It went on to propose establishing guerrilla warfare groups throughout South Africa, to be eventually supported by an armed invasion including foreign troops landed by submarines and aircraft.
It was a reckless and unrealistic scheme. Its main proponents in the MK high command were Mbeki, Slovo and Arthur Goldreich. Sisulu and others had strong reservations, and the plan was still being argued over in July. Luthuli, while still recognized as the ANC President, was confined to his home district in Natal, and was out of touch with both the Rivonia group and the ANC abroad: “He is just not kept informed at all directly about activities outside,” Winnie Mandela wrote to Adelaide Tambo in London after visiting Luthuli. “This is one of the greatest worries he is having.”15 But some of the high command of MK were impatient for action, particularly after learning via Mandela of offers of foreign military training. Joe Slovo impulsively wanted to take the plan to Dar-es-Salaam to discuss it with Oliver Tambo and the ANC in exile; his colleagues consented, on the understanding that the document’s final form was not yet agreed.16 But by the time Slovo arrived in Tanzania the whole plot had been uncovered, in all its rashness. “We had a completely euphoric view of what black independent Africa could do and not do,” Slovo admitted later. The plan “probably was more than unrealistic.”17
By early July 1963 the police interrogations were already yielding information. One of the many people being held—the ANC still does not know who—revealed that Sisulu and his friends sometimes hid in Rivonia, then another gave more precise details of the farm. The bright young investigating officer, Lieutenant Van Wyk, located Lilliesleaf Farm. On July 11 a dry cleaner’s van arrived, and a mass of policemen and dogs rushed out to surround the farm buildings. Sisulu, Mbeki and Kathrada jumped out of a back window, but were quickly caught with the rest. The police collected hundreds of documents, including papers about Operation Mayibuye, and picked up another saboteur, Dennis Goldberg, in the main house.18
This was the news that Mandela heard from his colleagues in Pretoria jail. He himself had not been at Rivonia since the previous year, just before his arrest, so he could not have authorized Operation Mayibuye. But he had been the commander of MK, and had left scores of documents in his own handwriting at Lilliesleaf—like so many other revolutionaries, he felt compelled to record his thoughts. He had asked Joe Slovo via Sisulu to destroy these papers, but they were still there, waiting to incriminate him.19 He was bound to be a chief target of any prosecution, and under the Sabotage Bill of July 1962, he could face the death penalty. Mandela became the First Accused.
The imprisoned leaders all realized that this trial would be more serious and more historic than the Treason Trials, whose basic charge had been flawed. The Rivonia conspirators were clearly guilty of planning sabotage, if not guerrilla warfare, and knew that they had to assemble the best possible defense team. Mandela looked once again to Bram Fischer to lead them, with his combination of legal mastery and commitment: in fact Fischer himself had been in and out of Rivonia, as Mandela and the other accused knew, though the public did not. During the trial he was already planning his own disappearance into the underground.
As a lawyer, Fischer maintained his professional calm. He was shocked by the naïveté and rashness of Operation Mayibuye—“an entirely unrealistic brainchild of some youthful and adventurous imagination,” he called it later during his own trial—but he was determined to give the conspirators the best possible defense, and assembled an even more formidable group of lawyers than before, all of whom would become close colleagues of Mandela. They included Vernon Berrangé, the “Diviner,” whom Fischer persuaded to return from London; and a brilliant young barrister, Arthur Chaskalson, who though not at all communist admired Fischer and offered his services. Chaskalson in turn brought in a university friend, Joel Joffe, who had been planning to emigrate to Australia.20 Joffe, a thin, self-effacing man with a long face, agreed to become the chief attorney, “the general behind the scenes,” as Mandela and the others called him. Another recruit was to become Mandela’s special confidant. George Bizos, a big, bushy-haired Greek with an earthy peasant style, had emigrated from Greece as a boy to escape the Nazis. He had first met Mandela at Wits University, and had come to specialize in political trials, in which he gained Fischer’s trust.
Joel Joffe had already met Mandela on social occasions, where Mandela looked fifteen years younger than he really was. Now, in his prison garb of short trousers and khaki shirt, Joffe found him “thin and miserably underweight.” His face was “hollow-cheeked, a sickly pale yellowish colour. The skin hung in bags under his eyes.” But Joffe found him still easygoing, jovial and confident, and his morale appeared higher than ever.21 “It was almost unnatural,” said George Bizos, “that he was at peace with himself.”22 Mandela was still kept separately, as a convicted prisoner, the lowest of the low. He already, as he pu
t it, “lived in a pervading atmosphere of the death sentence: one head warder came into his cell at night and woke him, to say, ‘You are going to sleep for a long, long time.’ ”23 When Mandela eventually met with his lawyers, Fischer warned him that the prosecution would ask for death sentences. As Mandela said: “We lived in the shadow of the gallows.”24
The trial opened in Pretoria in October 1963 in a frenzy of public excitement whipped up by the newspapers, which told of revolutionary conspiracies leaked by the police. The Supreme Court, the Palace of Justice, was surrounded inside and out by uniformed and plainclothes police, taking careful note of the identities of spectators.
When Mandela appeared in the courtroom from the cells below, some old friends were shocked by how much thinner and paler he had become. “Have they so easily reduced this proud and sophisticated man,” wondered Hilda Bernstein, “to the dress and status of the African tolerable to whites—to a ‘boy’?”25 But then he flashed his smile, clenched his right fist and boomed “Amandla!,” to which the blacks in the audience shouted “Ngawethu!”—causing panic among the army of security police.26
The judge was a respected and rigorous Afrikaner, Quartus de Wet, but the prosecutor, Percy Yutar, a small man with a grandiose, theatrical style, was a right-wing Jewish lawyer, close to the government, who relished confronting Jewish and black enemies. He would later claim that he refused to charge Mandela with high treason: “I exercised my discretion and charged him only with sabotage.”27 But he was a merciless prosecutor.
The defense team was convinced from the beginning that, as Joel Joffe put it, “The heart and kernel of this case was not in this courtroom but in the world outside.”28 Western governments were certainly watching the trial intently. They were now more aware of Mandela’s leadership, and concerned about the possible consequences of a death sentence; but they continued to be constrained by their diplomatic links and investments. The British government was the most likely to influence Verwoerd’s government, but was also the most fearful of offending it.
Sir John Maud, the smooth British Ambassador, wrote in his valedictory dispatch in April 1963 that he was worried that the well-disciplined ANC was being outbid by the more primitive and violent PAC. He thought the black resistance, with help from new African nations, would probably develop eventually into “an organised guerrilla movement backed by the majority of world opinion.” He warned London that “it will become increasingly difficult to continue treating South Africa as half-ally and half-untouchable at the same time,” and suggested, with prescience, that “Christianity was a much more serious threat than communism to white supremacy.” But he remained noncommittal, concluding: “We shall need frequently and critically to reconsider where our balance of interest lies.”29
The new Ambassador, Sir Hugh Stephenson, was more conservative and ineffectual than Maud. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Home, warned him beforehand not to risk damaging Britain’s economic and defense interests, but advised him never to appear to condone apartheid, which would prejudice relations with Africa and the UN. Home advised him to take into account the possibility that South Africa would pass into the hands of African nationalists “within the foreseeable future,” and commended Maud’s policy of “reinsurance” through “discreet personal contacts with the non-European intelligentsia.”30 But Sir Hugh was not a man for bold initiatives: a former Indian civil servant who was fond of gin, he never really grasped the realities of Africa, and confused Cape Town with Cairo, and Bechuanaland with Baluchistan. He dreaded offending Afrikaners. Before he presented his credentials to the State President he was reluctantly persuaded to make reference to “points of view on which my government differs profoundly from yours,” but when the South African Foreign Ministry objected, he removed the words.31
After the preliminary Rivonia trial had begun, the UN General Assembly passed on October 11 the sensational Resolution 1881, by which every nation except South Africa called for the release of political prisoners.32 “They daren’t hang them after this!” Fischer told Bizos.33 But the British Embassy was still reluctant to exert any pressure. The Foreign Office advised Sir Hugh Stephenson to warn Pretoria about the strength of British public opinion. Sir Hugh, after some resistance, eventually did tell the Foreign Minister, Dr. Muller, about Britain’s concern, while stressing to London that he “always had my doubts about the value of such approaches.” He also quoted John Arnold, the British barrister representing the International Commission of Jurists at the trial, telling him that the principal accused were “either communists or heavily communist-influenced,” and “as guilty as hell.”34 He did not mention Arnold’s serious reservations about the trial.35
The prosecutor, Percy Yutar, had botched the first indictment, which the judge impatiently quashed, and it was not until December 3 that the full trial began in Pretoria. Mandela remained defiant. When asked how he would plead, he replied simply: “It is not I, but the government, that should be in the dock. I plead not guilty.”36 Yutar, with bravura, then presented the revised indictment, which included the sensational central charge:
The accused deliberately and maliciously plotted and engineered the commission of acts of violence and destruction throughout the country, directed against the offices and homes of municipal officials as well as against all lines and manner of communications. The planned purpose thereof was to bring about in the Republic of South Africa chaos, disorder and turmoil which would be aggravated, according to their plan, by the operation of thousands of trained guerrilla warfare units deployed throughout the country at various vantage points.
He concluded dramatically: “[They] had so planned their campaign that the present year—1963—was to be the year of their liberation from the so-called yoke of the white man’s domination.” As Yutar unfolded the details of the charges, the defense team was enveloped in gloom: “Was there any hope whatever,” Joffe wondered, “that any of the accused would escape the death sentence?”37 Yutar called a succession of witnesses, many of whom had been broken by interrogation, who fairly accurately described the movements of Mandela and others. Worse still, Yutar could refer to hundreds of documents picked up by the police at Lilliesleaf and elsewhere, which gave details of the ANC’s secret operations. The defense lawyers soon came to dread the proliferation of handwritten notes, with “some thoughts on” various subjects, which the accused had felt impelled to preserve. Govan Mbeki, who acted as coordinator at Rivonia, and told the others to burn their secret notes, had kept his own.38 One secret directive about leafleting an antipass campaign was headed “STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL,” and ended with the instruction: “This document should not fall into wrong hands. Study and understand it. Then destroy it in the presence of, at least, two other comrades.” It was still there, for the police to pick up.
The cache of documents gave a vivid insight into the limitations of the banned ANC. “Ort” (Oliver Tambo) exchanged messages in simplistic code with “Thunder” (Duma Nokwe—Duma means “thunder” or “be famous” in Xhosa). They discussed plans to airlift freedom fighters—referred to as “parcels” or “matric students”—out of Botswana; but the writers became confused by the code words, and were frustrated by incompetence on the ground. One message from Lusaka reported: “Of nineteen parcels you sent me twelve confiscated by excise, seven captured.” There was frequent confusion about money: “We have received moneys from certain countries. Could you please let us know which countries have been helpful so far since the return home of Madiba [Mandela].”39 The Rivonia documents showed a huge gap between the concept of the armed struggle and its execution, and the lack of what Lenin called “decisions verified.”
Some of the most damaging documents were in Mandela’s handwriting. “He kept every bit of incriminating paper at Rivonia,” recalled George Bizos. “It was a tremendous mistake. They gave it to the prosecution on a plate. He never suggested it was the fault of anyone else. He was very magnanimous.”40 But the documents also give a fascinating picture of Mandela’s th
inking. There were his handwritten plans to escape from Pretoria jail, showing a dotted line from his cell through the exercise yard: “I need not mention the disastrous effects politically of any abortive attempt.” There were notes about other revolutionary movements, and the techniques of guerrilla fighting: “Guerrillas never wage professional warfare and they do not fight decisive battles.” There were quotations from a book about Irgun, the Israeli terrorist group: “The world does not pity the slaughtered. It only respects those who fight.… Capacity for sacrifice is the measure of revolt and the father of victory.… A fighting underground is a veritable state in miniature.” There were notes about the Philippine revolutionary army Hukbalahap: “People had to be convinced that their destiny was in their own hands.”
There were also more general quotations about politics and leadership, including some from a biography of the brilliant Boer War guerrilla leader General Christiaan de Wet: “I would rather stand among my own people on a manure heap, than live in a palace among strangers.” There were extracts from a biography of General J. M. Hertzog by Oswald Pirow: “Hertzog has become too much of a statesman and too little of a politician.” There were notes about Frederick the Great: “He had in his army two mules who had been through forty campaigns, but they were still mules.” There were tidbits from Field Marshal Montgomery: “Total war demands total fitness”; and even from President Truman: “A leader is a man who has the ability to get other people to do what they don’t want to do, and like it.”
But the most apparently incriminating notes were sixty-two pages on a writing pad about communism, in Mandela’s handwriting. They were in four parts, including one on Stalin’s The Foundation of Leninism. The most embarrassing was the first part, mostly based on a pamphlet by the Chinese communist Liu Shao-chi on “How to Be a Good Communist,” but including Mandela’s comment: “Under a CP government South Africa will become a land of milk and honey.… There will be no unemployment, starvation and disease.”41 It was very awkward for the defense lawyers, but Mandela explained it by recalling that he was merely paraphrasing the Chinese document, as part of an argument to show how turgid Marxist writing could be.42 Rusty Bernstein later confirmed that he had lent Mandela the pamphlet, together with many others.43 And Mandela’s copious notes from Rivonia showed him as a tireless copier of documents from all kinds of sources.
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