Rivonia's Children

RIVONIA'S CHILDREN By Glenn Frankel 20 Weidenfeld & Nicolson ISBN 0-297-841 55-6

on 11 July 1963, a 14-man team of the South African special branch security police raided a remote property, known as Lillesleaf Farm, just north of Johannesburg. It was the culmination of an intensive search

The special branch's political masters were convinced that they were facing a dia- ', bolical conspiracy of revolution, engineered by white communist fanatics who had brain- ', washed and manipulated a handful of black Africans to serve as cannon-fodder.

After weeks of fruitless searching, the police had little to show for their efforts until they picked up a group of Africans near the Botswana border. One of those arrested claimed that he had visited the headquarters of Umkhonto We Sizwe - the group responsible for the sabotage - and for his Freedom and a large payment, he was willing to lead the police to its location.

Umkhonto high command

While the special branch were sceptical of this informer they nevertheless agreed to his terms. The informer led the police to Rietfontein Road claiming that he had spotted a sign reading `Ivon' just before the turnoff for a large house. The police had been on this road at least twice before and were beginning to think the informer was stringing them along when they came across a weathered sign for the town of Rivonia but with the letters R and IA faded and almost illegible.

The police had found the house. The next day they raided the farm and captured 18 people, including most of the Umkhonto's high command and a huge trove of bomb-making components (but no firearms). There were also incriminating documents including a six page outline of a guerrilla campaign to spark a general uprising which was titled Operation Mayibuye (The Return).

This document called for military units totalling 7,000 men in four regional opera- tional areas and listed huge amounts of weaponry and supplies required and the mill- tary targets to be attacked.

Among those captured in the police raid were Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki (father of Thabo Mbeki, the current South African President), Raymond Mhlaba, Ahmed Kathrada, Rusty Bernstein, Bob Hepple, Dennis Goldberg and Arthur and Hazel Goldreich, who arrived at the farm while the raid was in progress.

Eight farmworkers and servants were also arrested and detained for interrogation with one of their number escaping in the confusion, The trial that resulted from the raid became known as the Rivonia Trial.

Wide cast of personalities

Glenn Frankel chooses to focus on three families caught up in this watershed event. They are Ruth First, wife of Joe Slovo, who endured months of solitary confinement without charge before leaving South Africa (only to be assassinated in 1982 by South Africa's Bureau of State Security in Maputo Mozambique, by means of a parcel bomb); Hilda and Rusty Bernstein, committed com- munists and activists and AnnMarie Wolpe, initially an innocent bystander but wife of the activist Harold Wolpe. She later risked her own freedom and the life of her sick infant in effecting a daring prison escape for her husband.

Through the stories of these three families, a wider cast of personalities and their contributions unfold, principally those of the white community, like the veteran Liberal MP Helen Suzman and the novelist Alan Paton, who for various reasons allied them- selves to the cause of African liberation.

Two others of this group were lawyers, Jimmy Kantor - the apolitical, high-living brother of AnnMarie Wolpe who was targeted by the state after Harold Wolpe's escape from jail and was one of the 11 defendants at the Rivonia trial - and Bram Fischer, Afrikaner leader of the (banned) South African Communist Party. Fischer was the lead lawyer for the Rivonia defence team.

Bram Fischer's story was particularly moving. Throughout the trial his brilliant legal skills ran circles around the prosecution lead by Perry Yutar and it is perhaps thanks to him that the defendants all escaped the death penalty with life sentences.

Following the trial, Bram Fischer's life took a tragic turn He was at the wheel of a car that veered off the road to avoid a cow. The car plunged into a river and although Dram escaped, his wife Molly was drowned. It was a terrible blow and he attempted to come to terms with it by throwing himself into both legal work and political activities. Many of his close friends and colleagues considered that he had lost control and was behaving with a reckless self destructive abandon.

Profound sacrifices

When the state finally charged him with membership of a banned political organisation, he Fled underground and managed to elude capture for some 10 months. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1966. In 1971, his brother had to tell him of the death of his son Paul, This came as a cruel blow and he probably lost his will to live after.

In 1974 he succumbed to cancer and died without ever regaining his freedom. While these are stories of the white participants of South Africa's liberation struggle, less important to the eventual victory than the heroes of the black leadership, the book's importance lies in revealing the contributions made by a small group of political activists who could have enjoyed the many privileges that their white skin bestowed on them in South Africa's perverse society, but instead made a moral choice to ally with a non-racist movement demanding change.

In common with their black African comrades, they shared, initially, an extraordinary naivety in their methods for countering apartheid. The profound sacrifices they were prepared to make in the face of an unyielding state's brutal repression were remarkable and it is probably thanks to their selfless contributions that the dream of a multiracial democratic society was kept alive during the long hard years of the freedom struggle.

Author Glenn Frankel, bureau chief for The Washington Post in South Africa in the 1980s, went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his international reporting. He is now editor of The Washington Post magazine.