was especially intent on impugning him, in part because Goldberg – like Yutar – was Jewish. They also feared that Goldberg’s ‘tendency to wise-crack’ meant ‘that in the witness box he could well annoy the judge [and] bring down some heavy retribution on his own head’.47
We put all these fears to Denis, but he was quite adamant. If he was going to be hanged he wanted to have his say first. He made only one proviso – that there should be no danger that his testimony might affect the others adversely. We felt, after thinking about it carefully, that in fact there was no such danger, and … we called him to the witness stand.
As it turned out, in Joffe’s eyes Goldberg was ‘an outstanding witness, articulate and clear’.48
The case against Goldberg was that he had been investigating the technical and logistical requirements for producing munitions for the ANC. Joffe commented:
as it was not a legitimate enterprise, he left behind him a trail so wide, so fully documented, so completely covered in every detail by both his own and other people’s written records, including his own pocket book found on him at the time of his arrest that I must say that in my view his skill as an engineer was not matched by his ability as a conspirator. The evidence was overwhelming, and we had a great deal of difficulty in deciding whether Denis should give evidence or not.49
But Goldberg explains in his memoir that he had a possible defence, based on a case George Bizos had found – a case involving Nazi supporters in World War II – which established that ‘preparation was not an offence or not a serious offence, unless a decision had been taken to go ahead with an armed uprising’.
My task, I said in evidence, was to investigate as an engineer the possibilities of producing our own weapons ‘if they should be needed’. A decision to go ahead would be influenced by whether we could produce the arms we needed. Therefore my activity was merely that of a technical adviser to responsible political leaders who needed facts on which to base their decisions. That was my role and I did not feel it necessary to inform the court that the Logistics Committee of our High Command had decided that, even if Operation Mayibuye was not adopted, weapons would be required for ongoing sabotage, and we would make them. I also did not feel it necessary to inform the court that I was a member of the MK Western Cape Regional Command. Nor did I feel it necessary to admit that the camp at Mamre in December 1962 [a focus of the prosecution’s attention] was indeed the first MK training camp inside South Africa. They inferred the nature of the camp but I would not concede the point. They could not prove these things and I did not think the judge needed me to confirm their inferences. My conscience has troubled me ever since. But only a little.50
Many years after the trial, in a speech at the opening of Lilliesleaf Museum in 2008, Goldberg repeated the list of points he had not admitted at trial, and said: ‘I have to apologise to our lawyers who are here tonight, Arthur Chaskalson, George Bizos and Joel Joffe, that I kept this information from them. It might have troubled them to know these facts!’51
Two other members of the group, Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela, both denied that they were, or had been, members of the Communist Party.52 (Mandela’s denial came in his statement from the dock, and so was not under oath.) It now appears to be settled that Walter Sisulu was in fact a secret member of the Communist Party; his membership is affirmed in his biography, written by his daughter-in-law Elinor.53
As to Nelson Mandela, the question whether he was ever a Communist was controversial during his lifetime and perhaps still is. George Bizos, who knew Mandela well, is convinced that he was not a Communist and believes Mandela would not have lied to him about this. He also emphasises that Mandela had a lot of respect for Albert Luthuli, the ANC President from 1952 to 1967, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and a devout Christian, and for other ANC leaders. To have joined the Communist Party, Bizos believes, would have been an insult to these leaders. It would also have been inconsistent with Mandela’s pride in his Xhosa background and the history of his ancestors.54
On the other hand, the evidence that Mandela was a Communist, probably just for a brief period of time, is quite substantial. It is clear that Mandela was capable of disagreeing with people he respected, such as Luthuli – he was, in particular, more ready to adopt violent tactics than Luthuli55 – and so the ties formed in Mandela’s earlier life can’t be assumed to have put Communist Party membership absolutely off limits for him. Both the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP), in statements after Mandela’s death, affirmed that he had been a Communist and a member of the Party’s Central Committee. The historian Stephen Ellis points to a range of evidence of Mandela’s ‘brief’ membership, including the statements of eight ‘prominent members of the SACP’, as well as denials of membership by Mandela that seem deliberately elusive, including his assertion in 1966 that he was not a member of the ‘CPSA’, the earlier incarnation of the Communist Party that dissolved itself in 1950.56 The commentator James Myburgh has pointed out, in addition, that the accounts Mandela and Sisulu gave of their political affiliation ‘both laid emphasis on the attainment of political rights for black Africans (and underplayed any socialist objectives); and both said they would try and borrow the “best of both” from the political systems of East and West.’57 This similarity, as Myburgh indicates, suggests that Mandela and Sisulu were acting together, and that in turn suggests that the picture both painted was drawn precisely so as to further the aims of these two brave political leaders. This is not the place to try to resolve this complex debate, but in the end it is only tangential to the question of whether Mandela was committed to telling the truth in this trial, for, as we will see shortly, he himself made it clear that truth was not the touchstone of his and his colleagues’ defence.
In short, the revolutionaries who were before the court in the Rivonia trial acted as revolutionaries do – they did not feel bound by the laws of the unjust state that they confronted, and in certain respects they chose not to be bound by the laws of perjury in particular. Whether the points they obscured or denied made a difference to their ultimate sentence cannot be known. Whether these false statements made a difference to their being found guilty or innocent can be known – all of them except Bernstein were convicted.
As to whether their lawyers knew that their clients were committing perjury, there are very good reasons to believe that, except for Bram Fischer, they did not know. Two of the accused specifically state that they did not tell their lawyers. Joel Joffe, in his detailed account of the case, makes it clear that the lawyers were uneasy at times about whether their clients were telling them the truth (a condition in which lawyers often find themselves), and also that their response to this anxiety was to investigate as fully as possible. Joffe’s account confirms as well that the accused held meetings to which the lawyers were not party, and then communicated the results – their collective decisions – to their lawyers.
Bram Fischer is a different matter. Fischer was himself a member of the Communist Party Central Committee; in fact, while Rivonia was being used by the ANC as its safe house, he was ‘acting chairman of the central committee’.58 He was himself part of the debate over whether or not to implement Operation Mayibuye. He undoubtedly knew, from his own recollection, that Rusty Bernstein was fully familiar with the Operation Mayibuye document, and he may similarly have known when the other witnesses were testifying falsely. He may even have communicated advice to his political comrades about what to say in some clandestine or implicit manner.
But it seems very unlikely that Fischer told the others. They did not know of the extent of his own involvement and he could hardly have addressed details about the testimony of the accused without involving himself in a much more personal act of self-disclosure. Joffe’s book indicates more than once that the lawyers as a team were uneasy about whether they were being told the complete truth by their clients, and that they responded to that anxiety by investigating the facts on their own.59 It was, in the end, not in the interest of the accused, or of
