Background to the Treason Trial
25 and 26 June 1955. Five thousand people gathered together under the blue skies of South Africa at the Congress of the People. They had come from the four corners of the land, by train, by lorry, by car, driving hundreds of kilometres, evading police blocks, determined to be there, to make the Freedom Charter their own, to declare for all the world to know the South Africa they wanted for themselves and their children. Despite police intimidation, ugly and sinister, the people had come – people of all colours, all ages, all races. There was a simple dignity and homeliness about it all. Although this was a gathering of the people’s representatives, fully conscious of their great responsibility, it was not a formal, highly organised convention: 2800 delegates in all, listening to the speeches, debating earnestly every clause of the Charter, which had been born out of their hopes and their heartaches, out of their poverty and the denial to them of fundamental human rights. Every clause of the Charter, mirrored the conditions in which the non-white people live in South Africa.
Can this be treason? To meet together, to embody your needs and your rights in a Charter? Yes! said the police, and there they came, marching as to war, fully armed with Sten guns and assegais; marching into this peaceful gathering, throwing a cordon around the delegates, searching until long after dark. Their warrant? To investigate high treason.
At dawn on 5 December 1956 came the next act of this strange mixture of comedy and high tragedy, when the Special Branch of the police raided homes throughout the length and breadth of the country and arrested 140 men and women of all races on a charge of high treason, a capital offence under South African law. Those from other centres were flown in military Dakota aeroplanes to Johannesburg under police escort. Sixteen more persons were arrested a week later. Only on 21 December, sixteen days after the first arrests, were the accused released on bail.
A Preparatory Examination lasting more than twelve months was held in the Johannesburg Drill Hall, there being no law court large enough for 150. The story of the arrests, the sixteen days during which the accused were held without bail, the police shooting at the crowds at the beginning of the proceedings; all this has already been told in the first book on the Treason Trial. At the end of this long Preparatory Examination, the charge against 64 of the accused was withdrawn. Ninety-one were indicted on a charge of high treason, with alternative charges under the Suppression of Communism Act, and were brought to the Special Criminal Court in Pretoria, 57 kilometres away from Johannesburg, in August 1958.
After a lengthy battle on the indictment, lasting until October 1958, it was suddenly and dramatically withdrawn by Mr Oswald Pirow, the leader of the Crown team. But within two months a new indictment was framed, this time for high treason only, and was issued against the remaining accused in three batches. When the first batch appeared in court in January 1959, the trial of the other 61 was set down for the same court for 20 April. Could the Crown really have believed that the trial of the first 30 would be over by then?
The attack on the indictment for high treason was renewed, and in March 1959 the court adjourned pending an interlocutory appeal to the Appellate Division in Bloemfontein. Yet on 20 April, the remaining 61 were brought to Court on the same indictment. It was quashed on technical grounds, but these 61 men and women were still not free. The sword of Damocles hung over their heads for yet another two years, for it was only in May 1961, after the inglorious collapse of the trial of the first batch of 30, that the attorney-general finally announced that the Crown would not proceed against the 61.
Why was this abortive trial ever staged? Why was it pursued so relentlessly until almost the very end, when the Court itself brought the proceedings to a close? Why were the arrests carried out in such a dramatic, spectacular fashion? The answer to some of these questions can be found in the challenging address to the Court by Defence Counsel Vernon Berrangé at the beginning of the Preparatory Examination.
The accused do not propose merely to defend themselves against the allegation made by the Crown. The accused will not only endeavour to establish their innocence, but will assert and in due course ask the court to hold that they are the victims of political kite-flying on the part of those responsible for these prosecutions. We will endeavour to show that these prosecutions and the manner of their presentation, are for the purpose of testing the political breezes in order to ascertain how far the originators thereof can go in their endeavours to stifle free speech, criticism of the government and in fact, all that the accused believe is implicit in their definition of the oft-misused word “democracy”.
That this is no ordinary trial can be gathered from the fact that the accused are in themselves no ordinary persons. They constitute a cross-section of the members of our population. In their ranks are to be found a Member of Parliament, clergymen, lawyers, journalists, students, clerical workers and labourers. They come from all races, but all of them hold one thing in common, despite the fact that they have different and differing political affiliations, and that is a belief in the brotherhood of man and a desire to work for his betterment and toward his ultimate freedom.
This is no ordinary trial if one has regard to the crude and jack-boot manner in which the arrests were effected.
That this is no ordinary trial is shown by the manner in which it has been set in motion. Many months ago the Minister for Justice in a debate in the House of Assembly was prophesying the arrest of 200 persons on charges of treason.
We will establish that before even the Freedom Charter was drafted or the Congress of the People was held, the then Chief of Police, Brigadier Rademeyer, was reported as saying the idea of a Freedom Charter was treasonable. But he and the newspaper which published his remarks retracted quickly when a demand for damages was made by some of my clients.
We will show that as a prelude to these proceedings and that for the purpose of creating favourable conditions, the Security Police set out deliberately to create a fantastic atmosphere of treason around everything that the accused have worked for. They did this by endeavouring to intimidate the public with their attendance at open and legitimate meetings, by conducting mass raids and country-wide searches and by flourishing Sten guns, fixed bayonets and truncheons.
The most fantastic allegations of plots to poison water supplies and to bomb power stations have been made by Ministers of the Crown which, we will allege, were made to provide a certain justification for the activities of the police and to quieten the public alarm aroused thereby.
A battle of ideas has indeed been started in our country; a battle in which on the one side – the accused will allege – are poised those ideas which seek equal opportunities for, and freedom of thought and expression by, all races and creeds and, on the other side, those which deny all but a few the riches of life, both material and spiritual, which the accused aver should be common to all.
The Defence will allege that this trial has been instituted in an attempt to silence and outlaw the ideas held by the accused and the thousands whom they represent.
The Defence will also show that the political activities of the accused, the views they hold and the ideas they have expressed are matters of public record, and that no attempt has ever been made to conceal their aims from the world or the manner in which they hope to achieve them.
The Defence will therefore contend that this case is a political plot of the type which characterised the period of the Inquisition and the Reichstag Fire Trial. We believe that in the result this trial will be answered in the right way of history.
Over three years later the trial ended in triumph for the accused and their organisations, for the Crown eventually foundered on its own rock of “violence against the State”. “Wedded to violence” was how Mr Justice Bekker described the Crown case. The court finally rejected the Crown allegations.
On all the evidence presented to this Court and on our findings of fact, it is impossible for this Court to come to the conclusion that the African National Congress had acquired or adopted a policy to overthrow the State by violence, that is in the sense that the masses had to be prepared or conditioned to commit direct acts of violence against the State.
Now the trial is over, but it is not the end of the story, for