The Long Walk to Freedom (43 page)

On the morning of October 11, as we were preparing to go to court, we heard an announcement on the radio that the prosecutor, Oswald Pirow, had died suddenly from a stroke. His death was a severe setback to the government, and the effectiveness and aggressiveness of the Crown team diminished from that point on. In court that day, Judge Rumpff gave an emotional eulogy to Pirow, and praised his legal acumen and thoroughness. Although we would benefit from his absence, we did not rejoice at his death. We had developed a certain affection for our opponent, for despite Pirow’s noxious political views, he was a humane man without the virulent personal racism of the government he was acting for. His habitual polite reference to us as “Africans” (even one of our own attorneys occasionally slipped and referred to us as “natives”) contrasted with his supremacist political leanings. In a curious way, our small world inside the Old Synagogue seemed balanced when, each morning, we observed Pirow reading the right-wing
Nuwe Order
at his table and Bram Fischer reading the left-wing
New Age
at ours. His donation to us of the more than one hundred volumes of the preparatory examination free of charge was a generous gesture that saved the defense a great deal of money. Advocate De Vos became the new leader of the Crown’s team and could not match the eloquence or acuity of his predecessor.

Shortly after Pirow’s death, the prosecution concluded its submission of evidence. It was then that the prosecution began its examination of expert witnesses commencing with the long-suffering Professor Murray, its supposed expert in communism who had proved so inept in his subject during the preparatory examination. In a relentless cross-examination by Maisels, Murray admitted that the charter was in fact a humanitarian document that might well represent the natural reaction and aspirations of nonwhites to the harsh conditions in South Africa.

Murray was not the only Crown witness who did little to advance the state’s case. Despite the voluminous amount of Crown evidence and the pages and pages of testimony from their expert witnesses, the prosecution had not managed to produce any valid evidence that the ANC plotted violence, and they knew it. Then, in March, the prosecution displayed a new burst of confidence. They were about to release their most damning evidence. With great fanfare and a long drumroll in the press, the state played for the court a secretly recorded speech of Robert Resha’s. The speech was given in his capacity as Transvaal Volunteer-in-Chief to a roomful of Freedom Volunteers in 1956, a few weeks before we were all to be arrested. The courtroom was very quiet, and despite the static of the recording and the background din, one could make out Robert’s words very clearly.

When you are disciplined and you are told by the organization not to be violent, you must not be violent . . . but if you are a true volunteer and you are called upon to be violent, you must be absolutely violent, you must murder! Murder! That is all.

The prosecution believed it had sealed its case. Newspapers prominently featured Resha’s words and echoed the sensibilities of the state. To the Crown, the speech revealed the ANC’s true and secret intent, unmasking the ANC’s public pretense of nonviolence. But in fact, Resha’s words were an anomaly. Robert was an excellent if rather excitable platform speaker, and his choice of analogy was unfortunate. But as the defense would show, he was merely emphasizing the importance of discipline and that the volunteer must do whatever he is ordered, however unsavory. Over and over, our witnesses would show that Resha’s speech was not only taken out of context but did not represent ANC policy.

The prosecution concluded its case on March 10, 1960, and we were to call our first witness for the defense four days later. We had been in the doldrums for months, but as we started to prepare ourselves for our testimony, we were eager to go on the offensive. We had been parrying the enemy’s attacks for too long.

There had been much speculation in the press that our first witness would be Chief Luthuli. The Crown apparently believed that as well, for there was great consternation among the prosecution when, on March 14, our first witness was not Luthuli but Dr. Wilson Conco.

Conco was the son of a Zulu cattle farmer from the beautiful Ixopo district of Natal. In addition to being a practicing physician, he had been one of the founders of the Youth League, an active participant in the Defiance Campaign, and the treasurer of the ANC. As a preparation for his testimony, he was asked about his brilliant academic record at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he graduated first in his medical school class, ahead of all the sons and daughters of white privilege. As Conco’s credentials were cited, I got the distinct impression that Justice Kennedy, who was also from Natal, seemed proud. Natalians are noted for their loyalty to their region, and these peculiar bonds of attachment can sometimes even transcend color. Indeed, many Natalians thought of themselves as white Zulus. Justice Kennedy had always seemed to be a fair-minded man, and I sensed that through Wilson Conco’s example, he began to see us not as heedless rabble-rousers but men of worthy ambitions who could help their country if their country would only help them. At the end of Conco’s testimony, when Conco was cited for some medical achievement, Kennedy said in Zulu, a language in which he was fluent,
“Sinjalo thina maZulu,”
which means, “We Zulus are like that.” Dr. Conco proved a calm and articulate witness who reaffirmed the ANC’s commitment to nonviolence.

Chief Luthuli was next. With his dignity and sincerity, he made a deep impression on the court. He was suffering from high blood pressure, and the court agreed to sit only in the mornings while he gave evidence. His evidence-in-chief lasted several days and he was cross-examined for nearly three weeks. He carefully outlined the evolution of the ANC’s policy, putting things simply and clearly, and his former positions as teacher and chief imparted an added gravity and authority to his words. As a devout Christian, he was the perfect person to discuss how the ANC had sincerely strived for racial harmony.

The chief testified to his belief in the innate goodness of man and how moral persuasion plus economic pressure could well lead to a change of heart on the part of white South Africans. In discussing the ANC’s policy of nonviolence, he emphasized that there was a difference between nonviolence and pacifism. Pacifists refused to defend themselves even when violently attacked, but that was not necessarily the case with those who espoused nonviolence. Sometimes men and nations, even when nonviolent, had to defend themselves when they were attacked.

As I listened to Conco and Luthuli, I thought that here, probably for the first time in their lives, the judges were listening not to their domestic servants who said only what they knew their masters would like to hear, but to independent and articulate Africans spelling out their political beliefs and how they hoped to realize them.

The chief was cross-examined by Advocate Trengove, who doggedly attempted to get him to say the ANC was dominated by Communists and had a dual policy of nonviolence intended for the public and a secret plan of waging violent revolution. The chief steadfastly refuted the implications of what Trengove was suggesting. He himself was the soul of moderation, particularly as Trengove seemed to lose control. At one point, Trengove accused the chief of hypocrisy. The chief ignored Trengove’s aspersion and calmly remarked to the bench, “My Lord, I think the Crown is running wild.”

But on March 21, the chief’s testimony was interrupted by a shattering event outside the courtroom. On that day, the country was rocked by an occurrence of such magnitude that when Chief Luthuli returned to testify a month later, the courtroom — and all of South Africa — was a different place.

THE DECEMBER 1959 ANC annual conference was held in Durban during that city’s dynamic antipass demonstrations. The conference unanimously voted to initiate a massive countrywide antipass campaign beginning March 31 and climaxing on June 26 with a great bonfire of passes.

The planning began immediately. On March 31, deputations were sent to local authorities. ANC officials toured the country, talking to the branches about the campaign. ANC field-workers spread the word in townships and factories. Leaflets, stickers, and posters were printed and circulated and posted in trains and buses.

The mood of the country was grim. The state was threatening to ban the organization, with cabinet ministers warning the ANC that it would soon be battered with “an ungloved fist.” Elsewhere in Africa, the freedom struggle was marching on: the emergence of the independent republic of Ghana in 1957 and its pan-Africanist, anti-apartheid leader, Kwame Nkrumah, had alarmed the Nationalists and made them even more intent on clamping down on dissent at home. In 1960, seventeen former colonies in Africa were scheduled to become independent states. In February, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan visited South Africa and gave a speech before Parliament in which he talked of “winds of change” sweeping Africa.

The PAC at the time appeared lost; they were a leadership in search of followers, and they had yet to initiate any action that put them on the political map. They knew of the ANC’s antipass campaign and had been invited to join, but instead of linking arms with the Congress movement, they sought to sabotage us. The PAC announced that it was launching its own antipass campaign on March 21, ten days before ours was to begin. No conference had been held by them to discuss the date, no organizational work of any significance had been undertaken. It was a blatant case of opportunism. Their actions were motivated more by a desire to eclipse the ANC than to defeat the enemy.

Four days before the scheduled demonstration, Sobukwe invited us to join with the PAC. Sobukwe’s offer was not a gesture of unity but a tactical move to prevent the PAC from being criticized for not including us. He made the offer at the eleventh hour, and we declined to participate. On the morning of March 21, Sobukwe and his executive walked to the Orlando police station to turn themselves in for arrest. The tens of thousands of people going to work ignored the PAC men. In the magistrate’s court, Sobukwe announced the PAC would not attempt to defend itself, in accordance with their slogan “No bail, no defense, no fine.” They believed the defiers would receive sentences of a few weeks. But Sobukwe was sentenced not to three weeks’ but to three years’ imprisonment without the option of a fine.

The response to the PAC’s call in Johannesburg was minimal. No demonstrations at all took place in Durban, Port Elizabeth, or East London. But in Evaton, Z. B. Molete, ably assisted by Joe Molefi and Vusumuzi Make, mustered the support of the entire township as several hundred men presented themselves for arrest without passes. Cape Town saw one of the biggest antipass demonstrations in the history of the city. In Langa township, outside Cape Town, some thirty thousand people, led by the young student Philip Kgosana, gathered and were spurred to rioting by a police baton-charge. Two people were killed. But the last of the areas where demonstrations took place was the most calamitous and the one whose name still echoes with tragedy: Sharpeville.

Sharpeville was a small township about thirty-five miles south of Johannesburg in the grim industrial complex around Vereeniging. PAC activists had done an excellent job of organizing the area. In the early afternoon, a crowd of several thousand surrounded the police station. The demonstrators were controlled and unarmed. The police force of seventy-five was greatly outnumbered and panicky. No one heard warning shots or an order to shoot, but suddenly, the police opened fire on the crowd and continued to shoot as the demonstrators turned and ran in fear. When the area had cleared, sixty-nine Africans lay dead, most of them shot in the back as they were fleeing. All told, more than seven hundred shots had been fired into the crowd, wounding more than four hundred people, including dozens of women and children. It was a massacre, and the next day press photos displayed the savagery on front pages around the world.