The Mandela story
Richard West
The Editor and several readers of the Spectator have remarked on the ever- increasing number of streets, parks, junior common rooms, bars and racehorses nam- ed after Nelson Mandela, the black Sbuth African prisoner. He has been given an honorary law degree by the University of Lesotho; he was given the Nehru Award by the Indian government; he is a freeman of several towns and boroughs. In May 1973, three scientists at Leeds University discovered a new nuclear particle and called it the 'Mandela Particle', inviting perhaps confusion with mandelic acid, derived from Mandel, the German word for an almond. The name of Mandela is so familiar that many of us no longer remember who he is was or why he is kept for life on Robben Island, the dreaded prison off Capetown. I found that my own memory of the case was sketchy, even although I try to keep up with affairs in South Africa; even though I was actually in Johannesburg during that southern winter of 1964, when Mandela was sentenced, along with others, at the Rivonia trial.
The Rivonia trial was so called because the accused had plotted at a house in the Rivonia suburb of Johannesburg, where some of them were arrested during a raid on 11 July, 1963. It occurred in between the Treason trials of 1956-60, in which all the accused were acquitted, and the trial in 1965 of Bram Fischer, an Afrikaner and head of the South African Communist Par- ty, who had been the defending counsel in both the Treason and the Rivonia trials.
Nelson Mandela was born in 1918 in the Transkei, which now is recognised by South Africa, but nobody else, as an independent state. He is a relative of the Transkei Chief Minister Kaiser Mantazima, now execrated by African nationalists as a stooge of Pretoria. He started work as a mines policeman, then went on to take an external arts degree and to study law at the Universi- ty of Witwatersrand, which was until recently a hotbed of left-wing sentiment, comparable to our own London School of Economics. In 1944, Mandela joined the National Congress Youth League.
When the National Party came to power in 1948, and started to introduce or tighten up the practices of apartheid, the African National Congress became increasingly desperate. More and more channels of pro- test, like demonstrations and strikes, were closed; more and more political activists were imprisoned. A split appeared between the ANC, which favoured a multi-racial struggle, and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) which wanted 'Africa for the Africans! and, by implication, the driving out of the whites, Asians and coloureds, or people of mixed race. However, the ANC re- tained the backing of the Left and in par- ticular of the South African Communist Party.
The Rivonia plotters, both those who were tried and those who escaped, included African ANC members and white com- munists; though most of the whites escaped and most of the blacks went to Robben Island. Most of the white Communists were East European Jews who tended to think at that time that the Afrikaners were Nazis.
The raid on Lilliesleaf, the farmhouse in Rivonia, discovered some 250 documents concerned with a plot to destroy the govern- ment by a campaign of violence, first using sabotage, then by an armed insurrection backed by an outside force. Among the documents was one detailing, 'Production requirements: 210,000 hand-grenades; 48,000 anti-personnel mines; 1,500 time devices for bombs; 144 tons of ammonium nitrate; 21.6 tons of aluminium powder and 15 tons of black powder'.
Nelson Mandela and most of his co- defendants pleaded guilty to planning sabotage, though he always maintained that human beings were not to become targets, or not until other means failed. He had, however, trained in weaponry and had studied the revolutions in Indonesia, Malaysia and Algeria. In his long statement to the court he said: 'I acknowledge that I made these studies to equip myself for the role which I might have to play if the strug- gle drifted into guerrilla warfare. I also made arrangements for our recruits to undergo military training.'
The prosecution and later apologists for the South African government tried in vain to prove that Mandela was a communist. He himself said: 'It is perhaps difficult for white South Africans with an ingrained pre- judice against communists to understand why experienced African politicians so readily accept communists as their friends, But to us the reason is obvious. Theoretical differences amongst those fighting against oppression is a luxury we cannot afford at this stage. What is more, for many decades communists were the only political group in South Africa who were prepared to treat Africans as human beings and their equals; who were prepared to eat with us, talk with us, live with us and work with us.'
The London Sunday Times suggested beforehand (6 October 1963) that the South African state was going to use the Rivonia trial as a propaganda exercise and rely on
faked documents. The Sunday Times was, as usual, wrong. No defendant at the trial denied the validity of the documents that implicated them. All except one man, who was cleared, admitted to charges of plan- ning, or having already committed, sabot- age. The only criticism of the trial came from government supporters such as a judge, H, H. W. de Villiers, (Rivonia, Afrikaanse Pers-Boekhandel, Johan- nesburg 1964) who said the defendants should have been charged with the more serious crime of high treason.
The Rand Daily Mail, which then as now was the main voice of resistance to apar- theid, said in an editorial (17 June 1964): 'The sentences pronounced by Mr Justice De Wet in Pretoria yesterday at the conclu- sion of the Pretoria trial were both wise and just. The law is seen at its best when there is firmness tinged with mercy, and this was the case yesterday. The sentences could not have been less severe than those passed. The men found guilty had organised sabotage on a wide scale and had plotted armed revolution. As the Judge pointed out, the crime of which they were found guilty was essentially high treason.' Public feeling turned still more against the Rivonia defen- dants when, a few weeks later, a left-wing white exploded a fire-bomb at the Johan- nesburg central station.
Mandela and the other blacks were sentenced to life, plus, in his case, five years for sentences he was already serving. Con- ditions at Robben Island are, by most ac- 'counts, worse than at Alcatraz if not quite as bad as Devil's Island. There is no heating in winter; beatings are common, though probably not for famous inmates like Mandela; the much vanted library is com- posed mostly of books of women's roman- tic literature, like Daphne du Maurier and Ethel M. Dell, which shows that the Afrikaners have either a finely developed sense of humour, or none.
Reading about the Rivonia trial, one comes away with a feeling of sadness that someone as brave and decent as Nelson Mandela should be in prison while most of the white communists have escaped, in- cluding Joe Slovo, believed to be an officer in the KGB, who is now in Angola. His estranged wife, Ruth First, whom I knew and rather admired, was murdered by letter-bomb in Mozambique, perhaps by the South African intelligence service. She was a diehard Stalinist but a brave woman. The Rivonia plotters and Bram Fischer were all betrayed by other white communists who had been bullied or blackmailed by the policemen of General van den Bergh. Perhaps the PAC were wiser than their rivals in ANC in not collaborating with the whites.
With reference to Richard West's article last week, Lord Longford wishes us to point out that he cannot recall having made the remark attributed to him and that, in any event, he has never in his life felt or ex- pressed anti-semitic sentiments.
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