in exile. Arthur too remained connected with Mandela, and represented his wife Winnie in an important stage of her fierce struggle against the authorities, as we will see. By the time Nelson Mandela was released, he was no longer on Robben Island but instead was living in a cottage inside the confines of Victor Verster Prison near Paarl, his meals cooked for him by a prison guard who had come to idolise him, and receiving visitors from the state and from the anti-apartheid movement. He and his comrades were gradually released as the state fumbled its way towards negotiations: Govan Mbeki, by then in ill health, in 1987; Ahmed Kathrada, Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni and Walter Sisulu, in October, 1989; and finally, triumphantly, Mandela himself on 11 February 1990. Mandela would lead the ANC in negotiations and become the first President of a democratic South Africa, and many of his Rivonia comrades would also play a part in shaping the new, post-apartheid South Africa.
When Mandela came out of prison, he at once turned to the task of reaching out to the people who had supported him, and whose support and trust he would need in the delicate negotiations to come. Just days after his release, the ANC held a ‘welcome back’ rally in Soweto. Among the people welcomed to the stage that day were Arthur Chaskalson and George Bizos. George recalls that the crowd cheered, ‘Viva, Arthur Chaskalson, viva! Viva, George Bizos, viva!’5 Three years later, as President of post-apartheid South Africa, Mandela would select his former lawyer Arthur Chaskalson to be the President of the new Constitutional Court.
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By then three decades had passed since the end of the Rivonia trial. When Mandela spoke at the inauguration of the Constitutional Court in 1994, he observed that he had last been in court to find out whether he would be sentenced to death. Over those decades, decades of both despair and gradually increasing hope, Arthur would resume his successful commercial practice, and become a leader of the Bar. But he would also represent a range of clients who were in various ways the heirs or successors to the Rivonia accused: from another set of saboteurs, part of the African Resistance Movement, to Winnie Mandela, to anti-apartheid students and ANC guerrillas. And Arthur’s relationships with the other Rivonia lawyers would be deeply important to him. The year that they worked together was arduous and, as his wife Lorraine recalled, exhilarating; the bonds that grew between Arthur and the others were very strong and lifelong.
Vernon Berrangé and Arthur’s friendship began during the Rivonia trial. Berrangé was a complex man. A one-time Communist, he had fought with his fellow members and then left the party; he had ‘a penchant for high living, hunting and fast cars’; in truth, he loved a fight, and ‘revelled in danger and fighting’.6 He was a man who acquired nicknames: the ‘Diviner’ or ‘Isangoma (a diviner or healer who exorcises an illness’).7 His ferocious cross-examinations no doubt reflected all that. Arthur might have seemed almost Berrangé’s opposite, a man always careful and restrained, intellectual rather than combative. But the difference between them was by no means as great as that. During a break in the trial, Arthur and Lorraine went to the Berrangés’ farm in Swaziland so that Arthur could work with Berrangé on the cross-examination of the turncoat state witness Mtolo that Berrangé would soon undertake. While they were there, Lorraine became very ill with tonsillitis, and Berrangé’s wife Yolanda took care of her. After that, Arthur recalled, they became very good friends. After Yolanda died, they continued to see Vernon, and he visited them at their Johannesburg home.8 The Chaskalsons, including their sons, also visited the Berrangé farm; Matthew was terrified because he was told that there were a couple of crocodiles lurking there.9
George Bizos and Arthur had known each other since Arthur’s first year as a student at Wits. But they were quite different people, George outgoing while Arthur was reserved, and they did not become close friends until Rivonia bound them together. After the case was over, they went somewhat different ways: George continued to maintain a practice heavy in political cases, while Arthur resumed his mostly commercial practice. But the two men remained close friends – so close that George could hook Arthur into a major trial, the Delmas treason trial of the 1980s, by introducing him to the clients as the leader of the defence team (without having told Arthur in advance; Arthur glared but said nothing);10 and so close that Arthur would help launch George’s autobiography by saying at the launch party that ‘George has such an incredible memory for detail, that he even can remember things that never happened’.11 They would work together on some important cases over the years, and they would also speak out together when they saw the independence of the bench and the Bar jeopardised in the new South Africa.
Joel Joffe continued to handle political cases as an attorney, but decided to leave South Africa. As he and his wife Vanetta prepared to move to Australia in 1965, however, Arthur and Lorraine told them, ‘We’ve got a house in Cape Town for a month; why don’t you join us?’ The Joffes said yes, but at the end of that month the South African government seized Joel’s passport – apparently out of sheer spite. That meant that if and when Joel left South Africa he wouldn’t be able to go back to South Africa, and it also caused Australia to consider him undesirable. So he and his family wound up moving instead to England.12
Joel was leaving South Africa with little except his training and ability to enable him to get started in England. His family had promised him £2,500, but something went wrong and his father decided he couldn’t do it. Joel perhaps mentioned this to Arthur – and a few days before Joel was to leave, Arthur arrived with a cheque for the full amount and gave it to Joel. Then Arthur forgot about it, and never mentioned it again over the following decades – another instance of Arthur’s generosity.
Meanwhile, Joel landed on his feet in England. He had with him a letter of recommendation from Bram Fischer to a law firm that represented the Trades Union Congress in Britain; they offered him a job on the strength of this letter, but told him that they were a small firm and wanted to keep the profits for the present partners. So at that point he hesitantly went to see Mark Weinberg, another member of the circle of friends that Arthur and Joel had been part of at Wits, at the insurance company which Weinberg now managed. Weinberg hired him – because, Joel claims, he misunderstood the instructions on a psychological test he had to take and answered all the questions in the opposite way from what he was supposed to. Joffe, Weinberg and Sydney Lipschitz, another of Arthur’s friend from Wits, would go on to co-found the insurance company Hambro, which became a great success. It also became a place where a number of left-wing South Africans in exile found employment. For their achievements, both Weinberg and Lipschitz were knighted, and Joel, who had gone on to public service as the president of Oxfam, became Lord Joffe.
In 2010, Joffe told his interviewer Adrian Friedman that just a few years earlier he had reminded Arthur of the £2,500. Joffe had never spent it; instead, he had invested it, without Arthur’s knowledge. By this time, Arthur’s generous gift had grown to around £75,000 and Joel said, ‘Can I please give it back to you?’ Arthur refused – but eventually they did a deal in which Joel gave the money to charities that Arthur selected.
Joel did take one other thing with him when he emigrated: a trove of papers from the Rivonia trial and from Nelson Mandela, which he had acquired because of his role as the attorney in the trial. He consulted them as he wrote his book about the trial in 1965 (‘While looking for a job I had some free time,’ he explained.13) Then he handed the papers to a library, and asked that they hold on to the papers until freedom came. Then 1994 dawned. Joel explained in 2010 that it wasn’t entirely clear who owned these papers, Mandela or Joffe, but they arrived at a happy resolution. Mandela was to speak at a memorial lecture; Joel would present the papers to him, and he would present them in turn to the Legal Resources Centre (the public interest law organisation that Arthur co-founded in 1979), and specifically to the LRC’s director, Geoff Budlender. At the lecture, Mandela took the papers and handed them not to Geoff but to Arthur, who was also on the stage. When Arthur corrected him, Mandela said to the audience, ‘You now know why I appointed Arthur as President of the Constitutional Court, because he always gives me the right advice.’ When I talked with Joel in 2016, negotiations were almost complete that would enable the LRC to sell these papers for a very large sum of
