time, Bram Fischer. Bram was to go on to become notorious when he disappeared in 1964 and went underground to lead the South African Communist Party. His subsequent arrest and inhuman treatment is one of the great stains on South Africa’s vulgar apartheid history.
Subsequent to that trial, Bram was to be a member of the defence team in our treason trial. The instructing attorney was Michael Parkington, a master tactician, a larger-than-life figure who was adored by all of us, including the very eminent legal minds whom he instructed. His decision to leave South Africa in the sixties and live out his life in the UK was a great loss. In that 1952 trial we were all found guilty but received suspended sentences.
The amount of support we received when news of our arrests became public was quite astonishing, certainly far beyond our wildest expectations. What is more, that support came from every quarter, black and white, worker and businessman, local and international. Altogether, between 5 December and 12 December 1956, 156 people were arrested. A fund was set up immediately to raise bail for the accused and one of the great liberal churchmen of that time, Bishop Ambrose Reeves, then Bishop of Johannesburg, headed the fund. A Treason Trial Committee was set up in Johannesburg to provide legal aid and welfare assistance and its efforts extended around the country. Under Canon Collins of St Paul’s Cathedral, a similar fund was started in Great Britain and this was to become known as the Defence and Aid Fund.
In those days, preparatory examinations were held to establish the State’s case and a preparatory examination for the treason trial accused began on 19 December. The late Isie Maisels, who was to lead our defence team, has himself recounted how, on the second day of the preparatory examination, he arrived at the court to find that the accused had been put in a cage with tubular scaffolding and wire netting. Maisels was outraged and, of course, was not prepared to participate in court proceedings that denigrated the accused in this way. He immediately went and told the magistrate, a Mr Wessel if my memory serves me correctly, that he and his colleagues would walk out if the cage was not removed. By this time the eyes of the international press were on us and it was very quickly removed.
I should add that among those who stood bail for us was the late Dr Ellen Hellman, a distinguished anthropologist, who was later to become the president of the Institute of Race Relations, and the late Walter Pollack, a leading member of the Bar and a great lawyer.
At the end of the Preparatory Examination, which only concluded in January 1958, 92 of the 156 originally arrested, were committed for trial. I should add that the defence team at that time was completely mystified as to why it was that some had to stand trial after the Preparatory Examination and not others.
It is strange to think that while, in the South Africa of those times, black and white were so strictly segregated, the benches of the treason trial on which the accused sat were one of the few spaces where black and white could mingle freely.
I remember throughout that time we were always at pains to conduct ourselves in a disciplined manner, no matter how rudely or roughly we were treated, or how abusive, difficult or tedious the conditions of the trial proceedings became. We had given our lives to the struggle and we saw it as a sacred duty that standards be kept high. I had given myself to the movement ten years earlier, when I was elected secretary-general in 1949. I remember that when I began in this position, the organisation at first could give me nothing and even when it was able to pay me, I received £5 per month. The hardship that I imposed on my family through my commitment and the burden placed on my wife was enormous, but they never begrudged it because they knew I was completely devoted to the struggle for the liberation of our people.
One of the things that really kept our spirits up was music. Choirs were constantly being organised and you will read later in Helen’s diary of the singing that took place every day in the police van when, for a period, we were held without trial during the State of Emergency in 1960. There were some fine singers in that group and, to this day, those who lived through it can well remember the songs that were sung then.
I should add an explanatory note about the trial itself. It really went along in three stages. The first was the Preparatory Examination when 156 of us, as I have said before, stood trial. Then the trial itself began on 1 August 1958. This was known as the first indictment. This trial lasted a very brief time. A brilliant defence team ran a bus through the holes in the phrasing of the charges and the State was ordered to give particulars on the charges by 15 September 1958. It was effectively unable to do so and the first indictment was withdrawn in October. We had a party to celebrate the quashing of the first indictment.
However, the State was not to give up so easily and it redrafted the charges, paying greater attention the second time to the specifics and a second trial accordingly commenced in January 1959. The number of the accused had been reduced again and only 30 faced the charges for high treason.
All this took place against a background of growing unrest and political instability in the country at large. There was the Alexandra bus boycott in 1957 when, for a few months, men and women sometimes walked as much as 30 kilometres a day to and from work to voice their protest. This was followed by the campaign for a £1 a day. There was also in 1959 a potato boycott, which was launched to demonstrate the complete abhorrence that we, as blacks, felt about the inhuman treatment of so-called convict labour on white-owned farms in the OFS. Then in 1960, Sharpeville, I think, finally convinced the world that the Nationalist government could not be dealt with according to conventional principles of diplomacy. It was in that year that the momentum for an international boycott of South African goods first began; passes were burned and the spirit of defiance was strong throughout the country. At the end of March 1960, a State of Emergency was declared and we, all 30 of us, were detained while the trial went on. Together with our lawyers, we took the decision that, if our lawyers were to be refused access to us, which was the case during our detention, then they would no longer participate. This lasted until August 1960 when our defence team returned after the State of Emergency was withdrawn and we were permitted to consult with them.
Throughout that time the lawyers who defended us were the very best that South Africa could have provided. Isie Maisels, the leader of the defence team, often said that it was, without doubt, the finest assemblage of legal talent ever banded together in one place. Apart from Maisels, there was Bram Fischer, HC Nicholas, Rex Welsh, Sidney Kentridge, Tony O’Dowd, John Coaker, Chris Plewman and David Osborn. Some of these men are no longer with us. I can think of Maisels, Welsh and Fischer. Others served the Bench with distinction, among them Chris Plewman who is a judge of Appeal. Some left the country to enrich other jurisdictions with their wisdom and judgement, and others have remained at the Bar as leaders of their profession. Without doubt, they embodied not only the best in legal competence that it was possible to find, but they also – all of them – represented the very best in liberal thinking. They were, if you like, the “dream team”. The cross examinations and arguments of Maisels, Fischer and Kentridge were breath-taking, so much so that overseas observers were highly impressed.
The 30 accused who faced the last charges did not include all African leaders of importance at the time, but they were distinguished from those already acquitted by their more active and militant rhetoric. The State really wanted, in the ultimate analysis, to show that merely to think about the downfall of the State was to commit high treason. Throughout the period of our trial, Isie Maisels insisted, initially against opposition, that our trial was not going to be fought on the rights and wrongs of the system we opposed; he preferred that it be dealt with only on matters of law because he was absolutely confident in his own mind that a legal basis for the charges was not present in order to establish a guilty verdict.
The State wanted to show that the ANC was violent in nature, that inflammatory speeches by its office-bearers reflected the intentions of the organisation. Furthermore, the State wanted to show that the ANC was a Communist organisation and that the Freedom Charter envisaged a Communist state.
The trial turned out to be a unifying factor, strengthening the ties of friendship between the accused and providing the impetus for the movement thereafter to change from a party that sought to transform the State through peaceful means, to one that thought the only chance of freedom for black people was through armed struggle.
After the trial, some of us went abroad, some went underground, and others remained