By R.W. Johnson
This week’s Financial Mail carries a fine tribute to Bram Fischer, a brave and honourable man. But it also credits him with having managed to save the accused at the Rivonia trial from suffering the death penalty. This is quite wrong and it is disturbing that, more than sixty years later, the usually astute Financial Mail still hasn’t woken up to the truth about South Africa’s most famous trial.
A key moment in the trial came when Fischer rose to contest two key allegations by the prosecution, that guerrilla warfare had actually been undertaken and that effectively Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) and the ANC were the same thing. To the delight and astonishment of both Fischer and the accused, Justice Quartus de Wet interrupted Fischer in order to flatly concede the defence’s view on both points.
De Wet then added that while the accused had effectively been convicted of high treason, “the state has decided not to charge the crime in this form. Bearing this in mind … I have decided not to impose the supreme penalty which in a case like this would usually be the proper penalty”. So instead the Rivonia accused got life imprisonment. In other words the state decided to pull its punches. The accused, utterly delighted, turned to one another and joyfully exclaimed “we got life !”
Anthony Sampson, in his biography of Mandela, records that there was substantial support in Britain for Mandela and the other Rivonia accused. The Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas Home, thought that any form of open pressure on Verwoerd over the trial would be counterproductive – but offered instead to send a private message to Verwoerd. Which he apparently did.
Almost certainly in response to that Major-General Hendrik van den Bergh, later the head of BOSS, told the British Embassy in Pretoria in advance that there would not be death sentences in the trial and that the prosecutor, Percy Yutar, would not even ask for them. And a week before the trial verdict was given the British consul-general in Johannesburg, Leslie Minford – a man with reputed intelligence links – told the defence lawyer, George Bizos, “George, there won’t be a death sentence.” In other words the trial was fixed. Long before Fischer had made his arguments for the defence, the verdict was already known to those in intelligence circles.
The background to this was that – under threat of expulsion – South Africa had left the Commonwealth in 1961. Verwoerd was very conscious that the Macmillan government had fought hard to keep South Africa a member and that Macmillan himself had been very distressed to see South Africa leave. Since then Britain and the US had been using their positions on the Security Council to head off anti-South African majorities in the UN General Assembly, while simultaneously urging South Africa to reform. Verwoerd was grateful for this and was receptive to their urgings over the Rivonia trial.
The Kennedy administration in Washington had been elected with black votes and knew that if Mandela and Co. were executed there would be a strong black reaction. Similarly, Macmillan knew that such an event would lead to a major explosion of anger in the Commonwealth from African nations, India and others. And Macmillan was shrewd enough to know that the day might come when Pretoria would need to negotiate with Mandela. After all, Britain had plenty of form with such situations: it had jailed Nkrumah and Kenyatta but had released them, negotiated with them and they had each become president of their countries.
A key part of the Rivonia Trial was the question of whether Mandela was a Communist, for that alone would bring heavy penalties. The truth was that Mandela was not only a Communist but was on the Party’s Central Committee, as the SACP proudly confirmed when Mandela died. There was oral evidence from Bruno Mtolo that Mandela was indeed a Communist and, most embarrassingly, there was Mandela’s own essay on “How to be a Good Communist” (“Under a Communist Party government South Africa will become a land of milk and honey….There will be no unemployment, starvation or disease …”). But, of course, Mandela and his lawyers tried passionately to claim that Mandela was not a Communist – a somewhat ironic situation since Bram Fischer himself was the leader of the SACP.
Mandela spoke with great eloquence, arguing that his relationship with the Communists was like Churchill’s alliance with Stalin during the War, and he praised both the British and American political systems. He also made reference to Magna Carta, to the Petition of Right and to Bertrand Russell’s recent conviction in Britain for his anti-nuclear activities. All of this was intended to impress liberal opinion worldwide – and it did. Indeed, in the liberal re-telling of the Rivonia Trial it was Mandela’s magnificent oratory and Bram Fischer’s brilliant legal defence which explained the verdict.
This was, of course, a lot of malarkey. Not only was the trial’s verdict settled far in advance and not only was Mandela lying about his Communist Party membership, but, as Mandela admitted, he had quite a bit of “help” with his speech. It is most unlikely that he knew much about Churchill’s relationship with Stalin or about the British and American political systems, let alone Magna Carta and the Petition of Right. In those days – unlike now – the SACP included a number of well-read intellectuals and they had cobbled together Mandela’s speech – which was, of course, calculated to make him sound more like a liberal than a Communist.
The fact that the British and Americans both knew well before the trial that there would be no death sentences was because they had received assurance of this – which must, ultimately, have come from Verwoerd. And this in turn means that both Percy Yutar and Justice de Wet were under political control. This helps explain several key points in the trial. There is no doubt that Yutar on his own would have been predisposed to ask for the death penalty. The fact that he didn’t can only have been because he was ordered not to do so.
Secondly, Yutar was busily explaining to the court how the accused had planned to launch guerrilla warfare when De Wet broke in to say that Yutar had failed to prove that they had taken any actual decision to engage in guerrilla warfare – in itself a dubious assertion. Yutar was flabbergasted: why were the accused making all these plans if they didn’t intend to carry them out ? But De Wet then ruled pre-emptively that since Yutar could not point to any actual decision to launch guerrilla warfare, the defence’s assertions must be accepted as true. Both Fischer and Mandela were astonished – but hugely gratified – by this.
On top of that the court accepted that Mandela was not a Communist – though the Security Police must have been well aware that he was. Even a court spectator as sympathetic to Mandela as Joel Joffe thought that the case against him was damning and that he would be extremely lucky to escape without a death penalty. To be fair, Justice de Wet had been appointed under the Smuts government and might have been in favour of clemency anyway, but he betrayed signs of nervousness at the end of the trial which may well have been because he knew his verdict might cause a strong political reaction on the Right.
Verwoerd had doubtless thought about that too. For years National Party propaganda had inveighed against the Red menace and tried to discredit any form of liberal opposition by grouping it together with the Communists as the ultimate threat. So Verwoerd knew that if Mandela and his co-accused were indeed found to be Communists the National Party caucus in Parliament would certainly expect – and demand – death sentences for them all. In the NP’s book there was simply nothing worse than black Communists plotting violent revolution against white rule.
And indeed, it was because the accused all knew this that they too were expecting the death penalty. But precisely because of this situation it was important to Verwoerd that Mandela and his comrades should not be found guilty of being Communists. Had they (correctly) been found to be Communists and guilty of plotting revolution, Verwoerd would have had enormous trouble with the NP caucus in the event of no death sentences being given. As it was the verdicts were accepted by white opinion with virtually no trouble.
Thus the myth of the Rivonia Trial conceals a far more complicated reality. And South Africans need to think a whole lot harder about their own history which contains all manner of truths that they have forgotten or never learned. It was, for example, only a few years ago that Charles van Onselen showed that the Jameson Raid was a largely American enterprise which Cecil Rhodes got pulled into only as a side-player late in the day. That changes the picture of the whole build-up to the Anglo-Boer War but very few have taken that fact on board.
Rhodes had plenty of faults but amidst all the tumult over “Rhodes must fall” no one pointed out that his slogan of “equal rights for all civilised men” was the most liberal adopted by any major white politician in South Africa until the formation of the Progressives in 1959. Amazingly, “Rhodes must fall” – a wholly anti-intellectual movement – is now celebrated by our brainless universities. Yet had South Africa followed the path charted by Rhodes it could have skipped almost a century of wrong turns.
Verwoerd had a well-deserved reputation as a ruthless authoritarian, but he was also a clever man, and in connection with the Rivonia Trial he acted with considerable subtlety and finesse. Really, the Rivonia Trial was more of a monument to Verwoerd’s careful stage management than to any of the “liberation” myths about it. Verwoerd thus managed to keep the British and Americans on side, keep the NP caucus happy and still consign Mandela and his comrades to life sentences on Robben Island. But, of course, the well-laid plans of mice and men “gang aft agley” (often go wrong), as Robert Burns put it. Three years later Verwoerd was dead while Mandela, Sisulu and the rest all lived not only to fight another day but to emerge triumphant.
FEATURED IMAGE: The Palace of Justice, Church Square, Pretoria, site of the famous Rivonia Trial. Wikimedia Commons.