The Rivonia Trial was a trial that took place in apartheid-era South Africa between 9 October 1963 and 12 June 1964, after a group of anti-apartheid activists were arrested on Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia. The farm had been the secret location for meetings of uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the newly-formed armed wing of the African National Congress. The trial took place in Pretoria at the Palace of Justice and the Old Synagogue.
Men who were convicted and sentenced to prison for their activities included Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, Denis Goldberg, Raymond Mhlaba, Elias Motsoaledi, Andrew Mlangeni.Church Square, the Old Synagogue and the Old Government Printing Work, Three historic places for testing strategic intervention, University of Pretoria. 2015Fran Buntman & Barbara Buntman (2010) ‘Old Synagogue’ and Apartheid Court: Constructing a South African Heritage Site, South African Historical Journal, 62:1, 183-201, DOI: 10.1080/02582471003778441 Many were convicted of sabotage and sentenced to life.
Origins
The Rivonia Trial took its name from Rivonia, a suburb of Johannesburg. Various people and groups, including the African National Congress and Communist Party of South Africa, had been using Liliesleaf Farm, owned by Arthur Goldreich, as a hideout. Nelson Mandela moved onto the farm in October 1961 and evaded security police while masquerading as a gardener and cook named David Motsamayi. He was arrested on 5 August 1962 without the farm having been discovered.
On 11 July 1963, the farm was raided by the South African Police. Lionel Bernstein, Denis Goldberg, Arthur Goldreich, Bob Hepple, Abdulhay Jassat, Ahmed Kathrada, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni, Moosa Moolla, Elias Motsoaledi, Walter Sisulu and Harold Wolpe were all arrested. They were detained under the General Law Amendment Act No 37 of 1963, which allowed for detention of up to ninety days. Other key leaders such as Oliver Tambo, Moses Kotane, Joe Slovo, Moses Mabhida, Stephen Dlamini, Joe Modise, Alfred Nzo, Wilton Mkwayi and others were not at the farm at the time of these arrests.
The arrest of the MK high command members resulted in their being sentenced to life imprisonment. The actions led to other activists being arrested, and others going into exile.
Those arrested and those who stood trial Arrested were (in alphabetical order): Lionel Bernstein, architect and member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) Denis Goldberg, a Cape Town engineer and leader of the Congress of Democrats Arthur Goldreich Bob Hepple Abdulhay Jassat James Kantor, brother-in-law of Harold Wolpe Ahmed Kathrada Nelson Mandela Govan Mbeki Raymond Mhlaba Andrew Mlangeni Moosa Moolla Elias Motsoaledi, trade union and ANC member Walter Sisulu Harold Wolpe, prominent attorney and activist
Goldberg, Bernstein, Wolpe, Kantor, and Goldreich were white Jewish South Africans; Hepple was of English descent on his father's side and Dutch and Jewish on his mother's. Jassat, Kathrada, Moolla were Indian Muslims. Mandela, Mbeki and Mhlaba were indigenous Xhosa; Motsoaledi and Mlangeni were Sotho, and Sisulu was Xhosa (he had an English father and a Xhosa mother).
Leaders prosecuted in the Rivonia Trial included Mandela, who was already being held in Pretoria Local prison, where he was serving a five-year sentence for inciting workers to striketrade unions were illegal for black workersand leaving the country illegally.
The government took advantage of legal provisions allowing for accused persons to be held for 90 days without trial, and held the defendants incommunicado. Withstanding beatings and torture, Goldreich, Jassat, Moolla, and Wolpe escaped from jail on 11 August. Their escape infuriated the prosecutors and police, who considered Goldreich to be "the arch-conspirator".
The chief prosecutor was Percy Yutar, deputy attorney-general of the Transvaal. The presiding judge was Quartus de Wet, judge-president of the Transvaal. The first trial indictment document listed 11 names as the accused. The trial began on the 6 October 1963 til 12 June 1964.
Counsel for the accused successfully challenged the legal sufficiency of the document, with the result that Justice de Wet quashed it. Prior to dismissal of the first indictment, the state withdrew all charges against Bob Hepple. He subsequently fled the country, without testifying. He stated "that he never had any intention of testifying".
The second indictment listed 10 of the original 11 names, referring to them as Accused 1 through 10: Nelson Mandela (Accused No. 1) Walter Sisulu (Accused No. 2) Denis Goldberg (Accused No. 3) Govan Mbeki (Accused No. 4) Ahmed Kathrada (Accused No. 5) Lionel Bernstein (Accused No. 6) Raymond Mhlaba (Accused No. 7) James Kantor (Accused No. 8) Elias Motsoaledi (Accused No. 9) Andrew Mlangeni (Accused No. 10); he was the last to testify on trial Bob Hepple (Accused No. 11); he never testified.
Mlangeni, who died on 21 July 2020, was the last surviving Rivonia defendant following the death of Goldberg on 29 April that same year.
Defence lawyers
Nat Levy was attorney of record in Pretoria for Mandela and the other accused, with the exception of Kantor, "who had no connection with the other defendants and was seemingly charged only as a proxy for his brother-in-law and law partner, Harold Wolpe."
The defence team comprised Joel Joffe, who was the instructing attorney, Bram Fischer, Vernon Berrangé, Arthur Chaskalson and George Bizos. Hilda Bernstein (wife of Rusty Bernstein) had approached Joffe after being rebuffed by other lawyers who claimed to be too busy or afraid to act for her husband. Joffe was subsequently also approached by Albertina Sisulu (wife of Walter Sisulu), Annie Goldberg (mother of Dennis Goldberg), and Winnie Mandela (wife of Nelson Mandela). Joffe agreed to act as attorney for all of the accused except Kantor, who would require separate counsel, and Bob Hepple.
Joffe initially secured the services of advocates Arthur Chaskalson and George Bizos; he persuaded Bram Fischer to act as lead counsel. Vernon Berrangé was also later recruited to join the team of advocates. The defence line-up for the majority of the accused was: Joel Joffe (instructing attorney) Bram Fischer (advocate, lead counsel) Vernon Berrangé (advocate) George Bizos (advocate) Arthur Chaskalson (advocate) Harold Hanson (advocate)
The accused all agreed that Kantor's defence could share nothing in common with the rest of the accused. He arranged a separate defence team. Denis Kuny (later counsel in the Bram Fischer trial), was involved at the beginning of the trial defending Kantor. After State Prosecutor Yutar accused him of having been on the mailing list of the Communist Party, Kuny was debriefed and forced to withdraw. While Harold Hanson primarily represented Kantor, he was also invited to deliver the plea for mitigation for the other 9 accused. The defence line-up for Kantor was:
John Coaker (advocate) Harold Hanson (advocate) George Lowen (advocate) H. C. Nicholas (advocate) Harry Schwarz (advocate)
Charges
Charges were:
recruiting persons for training in the preparation and use of explosives and in guerrilla warfare for the purpose of violent revolution and committing acts of sabotage conspiring to commit the aforementioned acts and to aid foreign military units when they invaded the Republic acting in these ways to further the objectives of communism soliciting and receiving money for these purposes from sympathizers in Uganda, Algeria, Ethiopia, Liberia, Nigeria, Tunisia, and elsewhere.
"Production requirements" for munitions for a six-month period were sufficient, the prosecutor Percy Yutar said in his opening address, to blow up a city the size of Johannesburg.
Kantor was discharged at the end of the prosecution's case.
The trial was condemned by the United Nations Security Council and nations around the world. Some nations instituted international sanctions against the South African government.
Escapes
In August 11, a month later after their arrest; Arthur Goldreich, Abdulhay Jassat, Moosa Moolla, and Harold Wolpe escaped from The Fort prison in Johannesburg while on remand after bribing a prison guard. After hiding in various safe houses for two months, Goldreich and Wolpe escaped to Swaziland, smuggled through the border in the boot of a car driven by Euan Crawford Annmarie Wolpe "The Long Road Home" pg 215. From Swaziland, Vernon Berrangé was to charter a plane to take the men to Lobatse, a small town in south-eastern Botswana.From there, dressed as a priests the pair, aided by Mannie Brown, made their way into Tanzania and eventually to the UK. Brown later helped to set up tour operator Africa Hinterland as a cover to deliver weapons to the ANC. Jassat and Moolla escaped into exile in India.
After Wolpe escaped, his brother-in-law James Kantor, who had been serving as a member of the defence team, was arrested and charged with the same crimes as Mandela and his co-accused. Harry Schwarz, a close friend and a politician, acted as his defence. After being dealt with aggressively by the prosecutor Percy Yutar, who sought to portray him as a vital cog of MK, Kantor was discharged by Judge Quartus de Wet. He ruled that Kantor had no case to answer. Following his release, Kantor fled the country. He died in 1974 of a heart attack.
Mandela's speech
At the beginning of the defence's proceedings, Nelson Mandela gave a three-hour speech from the defendant's dock, in which he explained and defended the ANC's key political positions. He justified the movement's decision, in view of the increasing restrictions on permitted political activity on the part of non-White Africans, to go beyond its earlier use of constitutional methods and Gandhian non-violent opposition to the state, embracing a campaign of sabotage against property (designed to minimize risks of injury and death), while also starting to train a military wing for possible future use. He also discussed in some detail the relationship between the ANC and the SACP, explaining that, while the two shared a commitment to action against the apartheid system, he was wedded to a model of constitutional democracy for South Africa (he singled out the British political model for particular praise), and also supported a market economy rather than a communist economic model. The speech is considered one of the founding moments of South African democracy.
Mandela's closing words have been much quoted. His statement that he was prepared to die for the cause was strongly resisted by his lawyers, who feared it might provoke a death sentence. In a concession to their concerns, Mandela inserted the words "if needs be".
Speaking in the dock of the court on 20 April 1964, he said:
Results
Although the prosecution did not formally request the death penalty, close observers of the trial considered such a sentence to be implicit in the prosecutor's presentation of his case. Opposition to the death penalty included both public campaigns internationally, the United Nations, and the defence's arguments within the courtroom. Harold Hanson was called upon to argue in mitigation. He compared the African struggle for rights to the earlier Afrikaner's struggle, citing precedents for temperate sentencing, even in cases of treason. On 12 June 1964, eight defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment; Lionel Bernstein was acquitted. Unsubstantiated evidence suggests that Hanson, in a private hearing with de Wet, persuaded him to commute the death sentence for high treason to life imprisonment.