must have crossed Justice De Wet’s mind that Bernstein had already been in prison for over nine months. A smile crossed his face, as he added: ‘I don’t [suppose] that will make much difference to you under present circumstances.’
Bernstein replied: ‘No, sir. I am afraid not.’ And that was where the matter ended.34
Meanwhile, Yutar once again ‘lost sight of his case’ and at the end of his cross-examination ‘none of the evidence against Bernstein had been so much as mentioned’.35
*
There is one more element to this story, however. Joel Joffe writes that ‘whatever else happened, it was essential that our witnesses should be believed’.36 But it did not follow that it was crucial for the accused to tell the truth in every detail. If they could lie and get away with it, then their credibility and their cause would not be harmed – and the scope of their proven guilt might be reduced. If this seems shocking to readers in the twenty-first century, it should not. The accused were a noble group of men, who paid dearly for their principles. Moreover, as a group they did not shrink from taking responsibility for the ANC’s campaign of sabotage; instead, they used the trial to tell South Africa why their acts were justified. They admitted a great deal. But they were not playing cricket. They were, and very consciously were, revolutionaries. Revolutionaries violate many laws; if the cause requires violating the law against perjury, they may well feel that is not too great a price to pay. In fact, of the nine ANC accused, it appears that at least six, and possibly all nine, gave false testimony. (Not all of this false testimony was perjury, since three of the accused made unsworn statements from the dock, but even unsworn statements can be false.)
Given the impact of his testimony, it seems appropriate to begin with Rusty Bernstein. Here is Glenn Frankel’s account of the moments where Bernstein departed from the truth:
On three … matters, Rusty was not truthful. He flatly denied knowing that Rivonia was being used for work in connection with Umkhonto. ‘No, sir, I never knew until I heard the evidence in this case.’
Nor, he said, did he participate at any stage in the sabotage campaign. ‘My lord, I never had anything to do, either directly or indirectly, with acts of sabotage.’
Finally, he told the court he had never heard of Operation Mayibuye before his arrest. ‘I did not know of the existence of such a document,’ he said. Which was, of course, a lie.37
Frankel tells the true story of Bernstein’s involvement in Rivonia’s Children, but Bernstein himself made the relevant facts clear in his memoir, Memory against Forgetting. Bernstein had in fact himself participated in an Umkhonto bombing. Though he was not a member of Umkhonto himself, he ‘was meeting Mandela and other members of the High Command constantly at Rivonia and elsewhere, and we discussed things together freely. I probably knew as much as anyone outside the High Command of what it was doing and planning, and from time to time lent a hand in some small way.’ Bernstein himself was a member of the Communist Party Central Committee, and was deeply involved in the debate over Operation Mayibuye, which he strongly opposed. And he was at Rivonia on the day of the arrests precisely because it had been decided – over his objection – that Lilliesleaf farm would be the site of one last meeting to discuss Operation Mayibuye.38
No less a source than Nelson Mandela attests to perjury by a second of the accused, Raymond Mhlaba. Mandela writes in his autobiography: ‘Raymond Mhlaba was one of the leading ANC and MK figures in the eastern Cape, but because the state did not have much evidence against him, he denied he was a member of MK and that he knew anything about sabotage.’39
Mandela also discusses the two other accused (besides himself) who gave unsworn statements from the dock. This discussion appears in the unpublished version of his autobiography, which is quite different from the published book. In the unpublished version, Mandela gives a brief biography of Elias Motsoaledi, accused number 9, pointing out that despite his difficult health, he successfully endured being beaten up and tortured while in 90-day detention. Mandela also mentions that all of the accused prepared biographical sketches which Nadine Gordimer reviewed for them, and notes that ‘in spite of his humble educational background’, Gordimer considered Motsoaledi’s writing the best among them all.40 As to what he said in court, Mandela writes in terms that imply that Motsoaledi had deliberately left out critical facts (which, in the context of an unsworn statement from the dock, might fairly be described as a form of falsity):
In his unsworn statement to the court he [Motsoaledi] admitted he was a member of MK, that he served on the Technical Committee of the Johannesburg region of that organisation, that he knew about the acts of sabotage committed by the MK units and assisted in accommodating recruits in transit. In fact he was a full time employee of MK and a key figure in its activities in the Transvaal. Almost every recruit who left the country passed through his hands and he also gave instructions on sabotage operations.41
Mandela’s comments about Andrew Mlangeni, who also gave an unsworn statement, are somewhat more ambiguous. After mentioning that Mlangeni worked closely in MK with Motsoaledi and others, and accompanied Raymond Mhlaba for military training in China, Mandela writes:
He [Mlangeni] also made an unsworn statement in which he admitted that he carried messages and instructions for MK, assisted Bruno Mtolo, a State witness, to contact Joe Modise, another key figure in the Transvaal Regional Command and that he disguised himself as a priest to facilitate his travels. But he denied that he made arrangements for the transport of trainees.42
Mlangeni’s statement very likely was incomplete – I have not found a copy of the full text, but he did say in it that he was not testifying because ‘I do not want to be cross-examined about people I have worked with and places I have visited in case I might give these people away’.43 Incomplete is not the same as false, though, and Mandela seems not to come as close to saying that Mlangeni deliberately omitted important facts as he did in his summary of Motsoaledi’s statement. Mandela does report, however, that Mlangeni denied arranging for the transport of trainees, an activity he would seemingly have been likely to take part in as someone working closely with Motsoaledi, since ‘almost every recruit who left the country passed through [Motsoaledi’s] hands’. It is worth adding that a state witness named English Mashiloane had testified that Motsoaledi and Mlangeni ‘supervised these operations’ involving recruits, and while Joffe makes it clear that much of this witness’s testimony was false, he doesn’t suggest that this point was.44
Ahmed Kathrada discusses his testimony in his own Memoirs. After explaining that ‘Advocate Ismail Mahomed, a friend since the early 1950s and someone I trusted without reservation, had been asked by our defence team to help me prepare my evidence’, he writes:
Within the parameters of our defence strategy, I had to grapple with the question: Exactly how much do I disclose to him [Mahomed]? Knowing what scant evidence the state had against me, the omission of certain incriminating information could be not only personally advantageous, but crucial to the outcome of my case. My colleagues knew my position vis-à-vis MK and agreed that I should abide by the group strategy, namely not to volunteer any information that the state did not already have. But I still had to decide whether this non-disclosure should extend to my own advocate or not. Was this an ethical or a political problem, or both? And which consideration should take precedence?45
Though Kathrada affirms in his Memoirs that he in fact was not a member of MK – so that his denial of membership was truthful – he also confirms that ‘I cannot claim that everything I said in my evidence was true’.46
Denis Goldberg, like Kathrada, worried about this issue, but he too decided not to tell the truth in certain respects. The defence team had
