This FORBES AFRICA photojournalist reflects on that moment when the late struggle hero recounted to him what turned him into a South African revolutionary.



It was in 2017 that I, a 29-year-old FORBES AFRICA photojournalist from Dobsonville, in the sprawling Soweto township of Johannesburg, landed in Cape Town, The Mother City, for the first time.



There were more firsts in store: my first trip to the infamous Long Street in the city for beer and banter with the locals. It was a long night, to be followed the next morning, with my meeting, for the first time, with the legendary Denis Goldberg of the 1963 Rivonia Trial.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



The apartheid struggle veteran and hero had escaped the death sentence, along with former South African President, Nelson Mandela. Goldberg was the man who had excitedly shouted, “It’s life, life is wonderful”, after receiving his life sentence verdict.



I was to meet Goldberg at the Castle of Good Hope to speak about his then lawyer, Bram Fischer. It was a windy morning and sprinting towards the castle, I couldn’t keep a South African veteran waiting. 



I was on time, and as he walked towards me, I remember asking myself, ‘why wasn’t this man smoking a pipe and talking to us from his veranda at his home in Hout Bay’?



Our conversation lasted longer than expected; his stories were captivating as they took me to that time and space in my country before democracy.



And then, he took me to his childhood when he recalled vividly, his teacher, Miss Cook.



“Miss Cook was blonde, brilliant, and beautiful, with lovely perfume. I was madly in love at the age of six. But we had a kid in the class that looked different and spoke funny. One morning, Miss Cook’s watch had disappeared from her desk and she was very upset, but she used it to educate us because we blamed Noelen. She got us to understand that we were blaming Noelen not because we saw him [take the watch], but because he was different. He was an outcast, his clothes were dirty; it was a school for white boys in 1939,” recalled Goldberg.



That incident changed his life; it helped turn him into a revolutionary, he said.



Goldberg was in prison for over two decades.



Sadly, the veteran, aged 87, died in South Africa last week. That windy morning in Cape Town will forever be etched on my mental camera.

Denis Goldberg 918

‘My First Time Meeting Denis Goldberg’

Every morning, as the sun rises over the deep blue of Hout Bay near Cape Town, you can catch a glimpse of one of the last survivors of the men who faced death with Nelson Mandela at the Rivonia Trial in 1964.
Denis Goldberg retired to the light and air of Hout Bay, maybe to banish the dark of his stinking Pretoria prison cell where he was incarcerated for 22 years. Here he learned a few sad notes to feed sad souls. As condemned men waited to hang, they would sing their last song. Goldberg taught himself to play along on guitar and recorder.
“I was never good enough to play by ear, but somehow when those men sang, the chords just came to me. When I left, I felt sad that no one was going to hear those notes from my recorder again,” he says.
Fast forward 50 years to a lighter world above the crashing surf of Hout Bay and yet there is no escape from the ills of South Africa.
“I read the negativity, day after day, because scandals sell newspapers; the newspapers which used to be a place of solid analysis for developing ideas and finding solutions to problems. What you read is the absurdity that South Africa is worse today, than what it was under apartheid. How can that be?”
On the walls around him is African art; an unspoken statement against the bleak walls of prison. Goldberg points to a portrait of an elegant black man writing in a book.
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“He’s not protesting; he’s not toyi-toying; he’s not at a political rally. It turns out that the artist is an anaesthetist and has presumably done a portrait of a colleague in a hospital, writing his diary at the end of the day. A white artist is painting an intellectual activity of a black South African. That for me reflects everything we fought for,” says Goldberg.
These pictures of hope contrast with the less hopeful picture of leadership in Africa.
“Perceptions are important in politics. I have to say President (Jacob) Zuma has played a heroic role in developing the country. He was a herd boy, who gained an education, one way or another, school education, by reading and reading. If you talk to him and speak to him off the cuff, he really is an extremely well-read person in politics. In a discussion, he is fluent and his ideas are fluent. His role in the ANC intelligence apparatus, it was enormous. Creating peace in KwaZulu-Natal, negotiating with leaders brought peace. Mandela started negotiations in Rwanda, Zuma brought them to a climax. That’s his ability. Now, I believe sadly, this circle around him is stealing the democracy of our people.”
Despite misgivings, Goldberg believes that the ANC is the only hope of closing the gap between the rich and poor.
“To oppose the crony economy we have allowed to develop; it’s not going to happen overnight, but we have to start.”
Goldberg says it’s high time to root out corruption.
“[In 1994], one of the first things that happened was new ANC members of Parliament demanded of Nelson Mandela a salary increase&#8230;When I said to leading members, ‘why are you looking for this huge increase in salaries, which puts you at the level of white management?’ Their answer was ‘do you think we are not worthy of it because we are black?’”
In the days when Goldberg fought for education, he never dreamed he would see students wreck universities.
“It angers me that students, who are supposed to be the intellectual leaders of the future, don’t think and don’t know our history. Don’t they understand the history of South Africa, don’t they understand how far we’ve come in only 20 years?&#8230; Students who throw excrement over a statue think they have solved a problem. Does that solve the problem of accommodation or worker’s wages? What does it create&#8230; disgust, and I hope they get charged.”
The protests at Parliament?
“We have serious problems and we reduce them to petty insults, its outrageous behavior. The politics in the media and in Parliament has become politics of personality and not issues.”
Amid the turmoil of politics, Goldberg has a silver lining of his own. He wants to build a center where children can dance, play music and paint in the sea breezes of Hout Bay
“When I watch kids out of the townships, with their patched best clothes, walking up and down with their violins, it’s a joy. Even if they don’t play the damned instrument properly, they had the opportunity to find themselves.”
A search he knew all too well, 50 years ago, when he played along to sad, condemned, voices.

Lament For A Stolen Dream

Denis Goldberg, who faced death with Nelson Mandela in the 1964 Rivonia Trial, was in a TV studio in London commenting on the great man’s release from prison.
Goldberg was released before the others after 22 years.
“I was absolutely confident that I was the start of a process. I wanted to be out to play a role in the liberation of South Africa. I was tired of being a symbol locked up in prison and I thought the time had come to move things along. There was the offer of releases and unconditionally releases, I decided to accept because I didn’t want PW Botha’s offer in 1985 just to evaporate into thin air, he made the offer out of weakness not strength, that’s the important part,” says Goldberg.
“I was able to tell the story of how the day we were sentenced, the head of the prison security said we should have been hanged and will never walk out of prison on our own two feet; they’d carry us out in a coffin. And then Nelson Mandela stopped the car he was in and he and his then wife Winnie Mandela walked out holding their hands into freedom, and the rest is history. I was able to tell that story. We survived and the old security colonel had passed away.”
Goldberg has many memories of Mandela but one that sticks in the mind is their first encounter after prison.
“He said to me, ‘hello boy it’s been a long time. He always called me boy because I was so much younger then he was. It was very sweet and touching. I also remember a bit later when we met again in Sweden, my wife and my daughter had to meet him. He greeted my wife rather stiffly not knowing who she is and when I introduced her, he bent down from his great height and whispered to her, ‘the boy is looking good you must be looking after him very well.’”
Zakhe Khuzwayo, Group CFO of InnoVent, was 14 years old and at boarding school at Hilton College in Pietermaritzburg. The school was dismissed early so they could watch Mandela’s first walk as a free man.
“The man was an enigma, I think I had seen a photograph of him when I was younger, I didn’t know what to expect. I guess it was more exciting and anxiety to see who this guy is and see what he actually looks like,” says Khuzwayo.
Twenty five years later, Khuzwayo runs his own company and enjoys much of the freedom ushered in by the release of Mandela.
“His role was instrumental in what this country actually became,”
says Khuzwayo.
Political analyst Thapelo Tselapedi was four years old in 1990 and remembers the humble Toyota Cressida that Mandela rode through Cape Town in. He also remembers seeing the man in the flesh four years later.
“In 1994, when I was eight, we went to the Mafikeng stadium where he was speaking. After he spoke, my sister ran to him to him to try and get an autograph. Nelson Mandela was surrounded by his bodyguards and my brother and I tried to go in and get an autograph but we couldn’t. My sister was the only one who managed to get one. She got in, got her autograph, he shook her hand and then she got out. I was sad that I couldn’t break through, but my sister always kept that autograph in her room, it was very nice,” recalls Tselapedi.
A quarter of a century later, his feelings are bittersweet.
“Sweet because he has to do the impossible to calm down black people but at the same it seemed to not have been enough as it was limited by the interests that the white people had also wanted, he had to find a home for everyone and that meant compromise. The bittersweet part is characterized by where black people are now versus where white people are.”
Like Tselapedi, Goldberg has his opinions.
“I am still optimistic but I am also distressed. I am optimistic because we have achieved so much despite our weakness, despite the legacy of apartheid leaving us with an inadequate civil service, with half the population illiterate, half the population unemployed and we’ve come a long way since then and the conditions of people have undoubtedly improved. My sadness is the corruption and what I call the patronage society,” says Goldberg.
The man who stared down death with Mandela feels his country has a long way
to go.

‘I Am Still Optimistic But  I Am Also Distressed’

When the music pumped, Andrew Mlangeni jived onto the dance floor – carrying with him the spirit of the men with whom he faced death half a century ago. Fiery and defiant, dancing with the female vocalist of the band. Everyone stood and cheered.
“Mlangeni, wherever your fellow Rivonia peers are, they are proud of you,” says Sipho ‘Hotstix’ Mabuse, one of the men who played music.
For a moment, you could almost imagine a fortune teller putting his hand on Mlangeni’s shoulder, as he faced the death penalty for sabotage on that cold winter’s morning in April 1964, in Pretoria.
“Don’t worry young man, you will live, see your country free, and 50 years later you will dance in celebration with a woman a third of your age.”
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You couldn’t make up a story like that; a story of Mlangeni, Nelson Mandela and the Rivonia Trial. Indeed, Mlangeni was unlucky to be arrested at all, on that gloomy winter night in July 1963, and even luckier to survive. Mlangeni was asleep at his home in Dube, Soweto, where he lives to this day, when police came to arrest him. They had already picked up his late friend Elias Motsoaledi, who was in the back of the police car. Because the detectives had been brought in from outside Johannesburg, to clamp down on dissent, they didn’t know Soweto and drove past Mlangeni’s home several times.
“Motsoaledi told me that he was saying to himself ‘can’t this man wake up and run?’” says Mlangeni nearly half a century later.
Police eventually found Mlangeni’s back door, for which they had a key, and woke him in bed to tell him he was under 90-day arrest. It was 26 years before he set foot in his home again.
In Johannesburg Fort, that night, special branch officers put a cloth bag over Mlangeni’s head and poured water through it. The water seeped into his lungs and soon he was drowning. Close to the moment of death a special branch officer punched Mlangeni in the stomach. The force of it blew the water from his lungs and saved Mlangeni’s life.
This was the spirit Mlangeni brought to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Rivonia Trial at Liliesleaf Farm on April 20. Mlangeni is one of the three survivors of the Rivonia trial &#8211; so called because that is where the arrests were made. Ahmed Kathrada and Denis Goldberg are other survivors of the 10 accused. Kathrada and Goldberg were traveling overseas, so Mlangeni held the fort on the dance floor.
The festivities were to commemorate the famous three-hour speech Mandela read from the dock before sentencing. On behalf of his co-accused, Mandela declared he was prepared to die for freedom.
“Comrade Mandela’s job was to make a political statement, about our struggle, about the suffering of our people, about the regime killing our people, banning our people, sending our leaders to exile. He spoke on our behalf when he said those words ‘If it need be, I am prepared to die’. It was a speech that affected the feelings of everybody in the country and abroad,” says Mlangeni.
“When the Rivonia trialists were arrested, I must have been 12 years old. My father walked into the house angry, I knew something was wrong. And this something that remained in our minds for many years… We celebrated it and, at some stage, I felt that that particular speech should resonate with what we do. We should be guided as musicians by those activities,” says Mabuse.
Mlangeni had the crowd in stitches as he recalled how he and his late friend Motsoaledi, father of the health minister Aaron Motsoaledi, could have been easily hanged. The two were responsible for a number of Umkhonto we Sizwe operations, the armed wing of the African National Congress. They took advice not to give evidence.
“All of the other accused took to the witness box, but in the case of comrade Motsoaledi and I, we were not to go to the witness stand. It was felt that if we went to the witness stand, the prosecutor would slaughter us, he would really cut us to pieces.”
Mlangeni is living proof that you cannot suppress a good man forever.

The Spirited Survivor Jive

For days, it had been tense in the cells beneath the Palace of Justice in Pretoria, in an eight-month trial punctuated by fear, loathing and laughter. For Nelson Mandela and his co-defendants, it was to prove a harrowing dance with the death penalty. Mandela was convinced he was going to die, according to his fellow defendants, and had started passing on his wishes to his fellow accused Denis Goldberg.
“He thought he was going to hang,” says Goldberg.
There was a good chance that they were going to hang. All were charged with sabotage against the apartheid regime. It was an accusation so serious that, if the prosecution proved a case to answer, the onus was on the accused to prove innocence—rather than being innocent until proven guilty.
The ambitious prosecutor, Percy Yutar, laid on the evidence with a shovel. He painted Mandela and co as desperate terrorists who had enough explosives to blow up Johannesburg. In giving evidence, Yutar would occasionally turn and smile to the special branch men in the gallery. Goldberg recalls how the special branch men would look at him and draw a finger across their throats in a threat of death. Goldberg gestured back with a jerk of the middle finger.
The antagonism worsened. Yutar ventured to the calm intellectual, Walter Sisulu, that life for the black man in 1960s South Africa was not all that bad.
“I wish you could live for just one day as we are forced to do and you would not make such a remark,” flashed back an angry Sisulu.
There was laughter when Ahmed Kathrada, one of the three survivors of the trial, gave evidence in the witness box. He was asked about a man, clearly him, referred to in evidence merely as ‘K’. He was asked did he know anyone with a name beginning with the initial K?
“Khrushchev,” replied Kathrada, referring mischievously to the Soviet premier of the day to the laughter of his fellow accused.
It all led to one moment that was to transform the public perception of those in the dock from terrorists to freedom fighters—the Benjamin Franklins of Africa in the eyes of the world press, in the words of defence team member George Bizos. To kick off the defence, the accused had opted for a statement from the dock. Mandela led the way with a speech that took six hours and went down in history.
&#8220;I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to see realized. But my Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.&#8221;
The late Arthur Chaskalson, then a young member of the defence team, told me in 2010: “There was a dramatic silence you could almost hear the silence in the court, you could feel it. It was absolutely quiet, not a sound.”
When the accused came up the steps to the court on June 12, 1964, they still thought they were going to hang. What they didn’t know was that a combination of the prosecution’s failure to press the case, diplomatic pressure and reluctance by the authorities to make martyrs out of them, was to save the necks of the Rivonia trialists.
When the judge almost whispered a life sentence, instead of death, the relieved trialists looked at each other and laughed out loud.
“Life and life is wonderful,” Goldberg says to his mother in the gallery.
More than 30 years later, Mandela, in one of his many shining acts of reconciliation, invited Yutar, the man who tried to hang him, to tea.
A few years later, Mandela opened the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, on February 14, 1995, that was to be led by Chaskalson. The next day, the court was to debate the death penalty and Mandela knew this was a moment for his impeccable timing.
&#8220;The last time I appeared in court was to hear whether or not I was going to be sentenced to death. Fortunately for myself and my colleagues we were not,” says Mandela.
“If he had been executed what would have happened?” asks Chaskalson in 2010.
I dread to think.

Death, Life  And Laughter

On a clear winter’s evening at Liliesleaf in Rivonia, Johannesburg, Denis Goldberg and Bob Hepple walked towards each other.
“Long time,” says Goldberg holding out his hand.
The two men embraced near the spot where they were chained together by police, left to the mercy of a snapping dog nearly half a century before. The two anti-apartheid activists were in Johannesburg with another survivor of the Rivonia Raid, which occurred on July 11, 1963, Ahmed Kathrada. They were there to celebrate the raids 50th anniversary—when police drove hidden in the back of a delivery van to arrest the entire leadership of the South African underground including: Walter Sisulu; Govan Mbeki and Raymond Mhlaba. The decisive raid paralyzed dissent for nearly a decade and saw the trial that sent Nelson Mandela to prison.
In the wake of the trial, Goldberg served 22 years in prison before being deported into exile. Hepple, who suffered under interrogation, was freed by the prosecution in the hope that he would turn state witness. He skipped the country to England, where he became a professor at Cambridge University and a knight.
At the time, Goldberg, now retired in Hout Bay near Cape Town, feared Hepple may give information about his comrades in the dock.
“That’s a long time ago, I am always happy to greet another comrade,” says Goldberg after the brief reunion.
Hepple, who will retire in England, retains his sense of humor about South Africa and his exile from the land of his birth.
“It was very difficult to talk to people about Nelson Mandela in the early days. Margaret Thatcher used to call him a terrorist.  Now, he is very popular and a hero, it is a lot easier,” says Hepple with a chuckle.

Healing The Rift

On a winter’s afternoon in July two men—born in the same country and infused with the same revolutionary fervor—will shake hands at the spot that changed their lives, to bury a 50-year-old grudge.
The men were among those arrested in the raid on Rivonia on July 11, 1963. Armed police with dogs used a delivery van, as a Trojan horse, to sneak into Liliesleaf Farm, in Rivonia; they arrested the entire leadership of the underground movement. The raid dealt a body blow to the South African liberation movement, not long after it had launched an armed struggle. In the resultant Rivonia Trial, Nelson Mandela, who had been in prison since his arrest in August 1962, was sentenced to life, along with his comrades.
The arrest at Liliesleaf was to send the lives of comrades Bob Hepple and Denis Goldberg spinning in opposite directions.
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Eighty-year-old Denis Goldberg—the bomb maker—who had returned from a trip to procure hand grenades, was arrested as he sat reading in the lounge. All were chained in a circle outside the thatched cottage, while the police encouraged their dogs to snap at them. He spent 22 years in prison after the judge handed him four life sentences.
“They gave me a 75% discount and I served only one,” laughs Goldberg, who often salves pain with humor.
It was a hard time in prison for Goldberg, who nursed the leader of his defense counsel, Bram Fischer, through his final days as he died of cancer. After the Rivonia Trial, Fischer had been charged with conspiracy to overthrow the state and sentenced to nine years.
In the other direction: Hepple suffered under interrogation; agreed to turn state witness; had charges withdrawn; skipped South Africa, via Botswana and Tanzania, for London; enrolled at Cambridge University, where he became a professor and a knight of the British realm.
Back in 1963, Hepple, the son of a former Johannesburg member of Parliament who was a meat wholesaler, Alex Hepple, was an underground activist, who had the misfortune of being at Liliesleaf on the day of the raid. Police had also caught the entire leadership of the underground as they held a meeting in a thatched cottage at the back of Liliesleaf: Govan Mbeki; Ahmed Kathrada; Andrew Mlangeni and Walter Sisulu. Behind bars, all were interrogated. The severity of the situation dawned on Hepple.
“The prosecutor told me all of us could expect to be sentenced to death,” says Hepple.
“This was not the reason for my decision. I never intended to give evidence for the state, but saw the prosecution’s offer to release me as an opportunity to escape. I discussed this possibility beforehand with Mandela, who said I had to take a personal decision, but if I could get the prosecution to release me: ‘That would be excellent.’ Had they not released me, I would have refused to testify against the other defendants, when called to the witness box.”
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In the cells, the other defendants were not so comfortable, especially Goldberg.
“At the time it was very distressing, because he might give information about us. His father told him that the minister of police, B.J. Vorster, had said they have enough evidence to hang Bob. And that if he wanted to get out he had to give evidence. I’m very relieved that he left the country and did not give evidence. At the time, it was hard to swallow. Now that I look back over the years, it’s a long time ago and I know, from my own experience, that people can be broken under pressure. And I had to draw the distinction between those who were broken and gave evidence and those who simply stopped and did not give evidence. Bob didn’t give evidence in court anyway.”
Nearly half a century on, Hepple, accused number 11, recalls the moment he walked free from the Palace of Justice in Pretoria.
“As I left the dock, Mlangeni said: ‘I am glad you are getting out of this,’” he says.
A sour taste lingered. Years later, Goldberg says that Hepple sent him a birthday card to the Pretoria prison. Goldberg remembers this with a smile.
“I told my wife that I never want to hear from him ever again,” he says.
Goldberg, who is now retired in Hout Bay, near Cape Town, was released in 1985 and escorted onto a plane to Israel, where his daughter was living. He spent the rest of his struggle days organizing for the ANC in London.
In the early days of freedom, Goldberg went to a party in London where Hepple was also a guest. The host said he didn’t want any trouble and Goldberg assured him there would be none.
“I saw Bob at the party, I held out my hand, but he walked straight past me,” says Goldberg.
Hepple remembers it differently.
“I admire and respect Denis and the other trialists and am always happy to meet them. Denis may have forgotten that we shook hands at a party in London, sometime after his release.”
Hepple thrived in the United Kingdom and enjoyed a distinguished legal career culminating in becoming a Professor of Law at Cambridge University between 1995 and 2001. He was knighted by Prince Charles, who was deputizing for the Queen, in 2004. The irony of a former wild-eyed terrorist being knighted by one of the heads of the British establishment, surely could not have escaped him as he knelt with the sword on his shoulder.
“I honestly can’t remember what was going through my mind. I may have been remembering Mandela’s parting words to me that I will not be judged by the past, but rather how I conduct myself in the future,” says Hepple.
Goldberg could have heeded the same words. He travels the world speaking and raising money for health and education and is at peace with the past.
“It is fifty years ago, I don’t have any anger about it anymore and too many people did too many worse things of betraying us, killing our own people and yet they were accepted back into society. So I have no bitterness against Bob at all. I believe he says we did shake hands, but I don’t remember,” he says.
When the two men shake hands on July 8, at Liliesleaf, near the spot where they were arrested, at a ceremony to commemorate 50 years since the raid; it will be a fitting place to close a circle born of struggle and strife.

Tag: Denis Goldberg

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

‘My First Time Meeting Denis Goldberg’

Lament For A Stolen Dream

‘I Am Still Optimistic But I Am Also Distressed’

The Spirited Survivor Jive

Death, Life And Laughter

Healing The Rift

The Healing Of Handshakes