Rivonia Trial
[1] The trial took place in Pretoria at the Palace of Justice and the Old Synagogue and led to the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, Denis Goldberg, Raymond Mhlaba, Elias Motsoaledi, Andrew Mlangeni.
Various people and groups, including the African National Congress and Communist Party of South Africa, had been using Liliesleaf Farm, owned by Arthur Goldreich, as a hideout.
Nelson Mandela moved onto the farm in October 1961 and evaded security police while masquerading as a gardener and cook called David Motsamayi.
Lionel Bernstein, Denis Goldberg, Arthur Goldreich, Bob Hepple, Abdulhay Jassat, Ahmed Kathrada, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni, Moosa Moolla, Elias Motsoaledi, Walter Sisulu and Harold Wolpe were all arrested.
[5][14][17] The second indictment thus only listed 10 out of the original 11 names, referring to them as Accused 1 through 10: Mlangeni, who died on 21 July 2020, was the last surviving Rivonia defendant following the death of Goldberg on 29 April same year.
[19] Nat Levy was attorney of record in Pretoria for Mandela and the other accused, with the exception of Kantor,[20] "who had no connection with the other defendants and was seemingly charged only as a proxy for his brother-in-law and law partner, Harold Wolpe.
"[21] The defence team comprised Joel Joffe, who was the instructing attorney, Bram Fischer, Vernon Berrangé, Arthur Chaskalson and George Bizos.
[23][24] Joffe initially secured the services of advocates Arthur Chaskalson and George Bizos, then persuaded Bram Fischer to act as lead counsel.
[28] The defence line-up for Kantor was: Charges were: "Production requirements" for munitions for a six-month period were sufficient, the prosecutor Percy Yutar said in his opening address, to blow up a city the size of Johannesburg.
He justified the movement's decision, in view of the increasing restrictions on permitted political activity on the part of non-White Africans, to go beyond its earlier use of constitutional methods and Gandhian non-violent opposition to the state, embracing a campaign of sabotage against property (designed to minimize risks of injury and death), while also starting to train a military wing for possible future use.
But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.Although the prosecution did not formally request the death penalty, close observers of the trial considered such a sentence to be implicit in the prosecutor's presentation of his case.
Unsubstantiated evidence suggests that Hanson, in a private hearing with de Wet, persuaded him to commute the death sentence for high treason to life imprisonment.
The digitised recordings were officially returned to South Africa, in 2018, as part of Nelson Mandela's Centenary, a one-day international colloquium "Listening to the Rivonia Trial : Courts, Archives and Liberation Movements" was organised to commemorate, discussing issues relating to the act of collecting, mapping, digitising and restoring archives and raising ethical questions that, in turn, become historical questions.
