lawyer seeking to prove an assertion must at some point explicitly ‘put’ that assertion to the witness and give the witness the opportunity to deny and refute it directly. One can imagine moments of great forensic drama, as an advocate righteously proclaims, ‘I put it to you, sir, that you beat my client and forced him to sign a false confession.’ Arthur does not do this, though there were many moments when he could have. Instead, he tends to put points to witnesses much more gently, as in this passage where he is probing Warrant Officer Weyers’s explanation of the reasons why Napoleon Letsoko was so helpful to the police when they didn’t have much evidence with which to pressure him into cooperating:
So although there was at that stage no direct evidence against him, he became helpful – that is so isn’t it? – [Weyers]: This is correct.
And you can’t give any explanation as to why this happened? – [Weyers]: No, Your Honour.
You see accused No. 1 says that the reason why he pointed out people and gave statements was because he had been assaulted? – [Weyers]: I deny any assault on him.
Are you speaking of yourself only? – [Weyers]: Yes, I did not assault him. You didn’t assault him. Because he says that you did assault him? – [Weyers]: I deny this.35
Perhaps Arthur’s seeming reluctance to say flatly, or to proclaim aggressively, the points he is putting to Weyers is an expression of his personal desire to treat each person with courtesy, a disposition that only prolonged police evasions could defeat. But it is also possible that his hesitation was always strategic. As Arthur gently put assertions on his clients’ behalf to the police, perhaps he hoped that they would not be as wary of his questions as logic said they should be – and that this would leave room for his devastating logic to sweep the ground from underneath them.
In all of this, Arthur fought, and fought hard, for his clients. No one watching the trial could have doubted Arthur’s commitment to his clients’ defence. It is striking, though, that in the course of the trial lawyers for both sides, and the judge, address African witnesses by their first names. For example, in his judgment in the case, the trial judge refers at one point to ‘Samson’ (Samson Radebe, an African) and then two lines later to ‘Middleton’ (Leonard Middleton, a white).36 When Joel questions Napoleon Letsoko on direct examination, his first question begins, ‘Napoleon, you are accused No. 1 in this case …?’ Similarly, in the course of his cross-examination of a state witness named Samson Radebe, Arthur at one point says, ‘All right. Tell me, Samson, did the police say what would happen if you gave evidence here?’ Perhaps this was strategic – Arthur and Joel Joffe may have felt that using these witnesses’ first names in one way or another was more likely to elicit their cooperation than referring to them as ‘Mr Letsoko’ or ‘Mr Radebe’. (At another point Arthur, questioning a white witness who has used the word ‘boy’ to refer to blacks, refers to ‘these two boys’; presumably his reason for doing so was to avoid a tangential clash with the witness.) But I think it is more likely inadvertent – that is, this is the behaviour of young white men still emerging from an upbringing in which addressing African adults by their first names would have been taken for granted. Arthur and his friend Joel Joffe were still relatively new to the practice of law; perhaps in a sense they were even newer, long ago in 1963, to the practice of egalitarianism.37
It is also important to place these moments in the context of the trial and the behaviour of the prosecuting counsel. The original prosecutor, Masters, says to the second accused, Michael Maimane, who has forgotten the name of the movie that he says he saw at a theatre on the crucial evening for the case, ‘You must be more stupid than I put to you in the beginning …’38 When Masters withdrew from the trial, advocate Krog took over the prosecution. Krog cross-examined the first accused, Napoleon Letsoko, and often quite aggressively. At one point they clash over which language Letsoko speaks better, English or Afrikaans:
Krog: Yes, and your Afrikaans is very equivalent to your English? – Letsoko: I cannot say.
Krog: Well which of the two languages do you speak better? – Letsoko: Well in the office where I worked mostly in English and there only English was used.
Krog: Napoleon, once again, please don’t waste the Court’s time, I didn’t ask you what language you speak in the office, I asked you whether your Afrikaans was up to the same standard as your English? – Letsoko: I think I am better in English, my lord.
Krog: But you have a good knowledge of Afrikaans? – Letsoko: I have. Krog: You see it has taken me 3, 4 questions to get one answer out of you.39
Even Arthur, the most polite of courtroom lawyers, is capable of sharp impatience directed against a witness. But it is hard not to read the hostile personal tone of this particular passage as being, fundamentally, about race.
Because of an illness among the police witnesses, and because of the sheer bulk of this case, it ran for quite a long time. Proceedings began on 3 June 1963; after conviction, the accused were granted leave to appeal on 7 November 1963. Well before this trial ended, Arthur would join the Rivonia defence team; the police raid on Rivonia took place on 11 July 1963, and the lawyers who would represent the accused had assembled by late September of that year.40 That case would be tried to judgment, and much in Arthur’s life would change, before he would argue the Letsoko appeal in September 1964.
While Arthur’s career was taking off and taking shape, his personal life was also being transformed. He had joined the Bar on his return from a trip to Europe with his friend Sydney Lipschitz, in the course of which Sydney had met the love of his life. Now Arthur returned home, to his mother’s house. At this point, in early 1956, Arthur was 24 years old. It may not have been unusual for the young men in his set to live in their parents’ houses well into young adulthood – Rusty Rostowsky, for example, lived in his family’s home until his marriage – but it is worth observing that Arthur did not have to remain at home. He had an inheritance of his own, and if that did not suffice he soon came to have an income from his quickly expanding law practice.
In any case, he did move out, but not at once. He made this move three years after his return to South Africa, in 1959, at the age of 27. It is hard not to think that his moving out either marked, or achieved, some personal transition. His friend Hillary Kuny (later Hillary Hamburger) recalled that Arthur’s mother almost had a nervous breakdown when he left.1 His mother was a strong and even domineering woman; Arthur’s move out of her house may have been many things, but it surely was in part a declaration of independence from his mother.
*
What followed came quite quickly – so quickly that it is hard not to conclude that indeed Arthur had turned a corner in his personal life and was now ready to take on the personal responsibilities and pleasures of maturity in addition to the challenges of law practice that he was already mastering. Once Arthur moved out of his mother’s house, he rented a flat in Hillbrow, in the same building where his friends Denis and Hillary Kuny had once lived; they were no longer there, however, because they had decided to emigrate to England (a decision that proved short-lived, as they returned to South Africa within a year). Perhaps because Arthur was lonely on his own, he soon invited a young attorney named Julian Block to join him as a roommate. Arthur and Julian would become lifelong friends, and Julian would later remember that it was from Arthur that he first came to feel genuinely interested in the law (in which he would make
