‘Betrayer of white society’ spent 22 years in prison as Mandela co-conspirator
On June 12, 1964, the infamous Rivonia trial ended. Nelson Mandela and seven other members of the African National Congress were convicted of armed insurrection against the South African state. They expected the death penalty. Mandela, in a celebrated speech from the dock, had expressed his willingness to die for the cause, but the judge imposed life sentences instead. Unable to hear the verdict amid the commotion, the mother of Denis Goldberg, the only white defendant, shouted: ‘‘Denis, what is it?’’ Goldberg yelled back: ‘‘It’s life – and life is wonderful!’’
Goldberg, who has died of cancer aged 87, always had an irrepressible zest for life. A funny, gregarious character, he would spend 22 years in prison, scarcely seeing his wife and two children. Yet his spirit never broke and, like Mandela, he became a potent symbol of the struggle against apartheid.
After his release, Goldberg swiftly resumed that struggle. From his new base in London he travelled the world as a spokesman for the ANC, denouncing apartheid to anyone who would listen. After the regime’s collapse, he went home to build the new South Africa that he had always dreamt of.
Denis Theodore Goldberg was born to Jewish parents, Sam and Annie, who had recently emigrated from London to Cape Town. Both were fervent communists. ‘‘By the age of six I knew about surplus value, I knew about the poverty of workers in general, but black workers in particular in South Africa, the mixture of national oppression, exploitation and unemployment,’’ he said.
He studied civil engineering at the University of Cape Town because, he said, he wanted to ‘‘build roads and bridges, dams and pipelines for people’’. There he joined a nonsegregated organisation called the Modern Youth Society and met Esme Bodenstein, a physiotherapist and fellow activist, whom he married in 1954. They had two children.
Goldberg became a prominent member of the Congress of Democrats, a radical, white anti-apartheid organisation, which cost him his job as a technician on the railways. He also joined the proscribed South African Communist Party, and during the emergency imposed after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 he was imprisoned for four months. He again lost his job, with a construction company building a power station.
In 1961 Goldberg was recruited by Umkhonto we Sizwe (‘‘Spear of the Nation’’), the new underground armed wing of the African National Congress. He became its technical officer in Cape Town, learning to build bombs, as well as tearing down telephone lines and severing power cables.
In 1963 the government passed legislation permitting the detention of suspects for 90 days, incommunicado and without trial. The law was, Goldberg asserted, ‘‘a licence to torture’’. Fearing arrest, he fled to Johannesburg. There he became a weaponsmaker for a putative nationwide armed insurrection named Operation Mayibuye, and began working on the manufacture of landmines and grenades.
The operation was quickly betrayed. On July 11, 1963, he and others were arrested at Liliesleaf Farm, their hideout in a semi-rural Johannesburg suburb called Rivonia. Goldberg made an unsuccessful escape attempt while awaiting trial and narrowly missed being shot. He fully expected to be hanged at the end of his trial. ‘‘I was the hated white man, betraying white society,’’ he said. He was instead given life sentences.
‘‘I was overjoyed to live even though it was life behind bars for a very long time,’’ he wrote in his autobiography, The Mission. ‘‘I was only 31 years old and did not believe that my life was over.’’
‘‘I was overjoyed to live even though it was life behind bars for a very long time.’’ Denis Goldberg in his autobiography
Imprisonment was, nevertheless, tough. He was held not on Robben Island, with Mandela and his co-conspirators, but in the whites-only Pretoria central prison. His wife fled to England with their children. She was allowed to visit him after four years and eight years, but never again. When his father died Goldberg did not seek permission to attend his funeral because ‘‘I wasn’t going to give them the pleasure of refusing me’’.
Goldberg was finally released in 1985 after agreeing to renounce violence. ‘‘It was not an apology for having been involved in taking up arms against the state,’’ he insisted. ‘‘Nor was I saying the armed struggle was wrong. I was simply saying that I would not be a soldier any more.’’ He was 52
He was allowed a visit to his father’s grave, then put on a plane to Tel Aviv, where his daughter was working on a kibbutz. Though Israel had helped to secure his release, Goldberg denounced its close ties to South Africa’s apartheid regime. He very soon joined his family in north London, where he resumed work for the ANC.
The story of his later life reads like a Greek tragedy. His wife, with whom his relationship had never fully recovered from their long separation, died in 2000. In 2002 he married his second wife, Edelgard Nkobi, a German journalist and widowed daughter-in-law of an ANC luminary, with whom he had been having an affair for some years. Days after the wedding his daughter died of a heart attack. His son is now retired and fundraises for the Denis Goldberg Legacy Foundation.
With his new wife, Goldberg returned to South Africa as an adviser to Ronnie Kasrils, then minister of water affairs, in Pretoria, the city of his previous imprisonment. ‘‘I have the desire to go home. The time is right and I need a breather,’’ he said.
He retired in 2006, and the man who had spent so long staring at walls moved to a hilltop home near Cape Town with a spectacular view across Hout Bay. Later that year his second wife died of cancer.
Goldberg never lost faith in the ANC, though he was dismayed by the corruption that engulfed the party during Jacob Zuma’s presidency. Its members needed to ‘‘renew the leadership from top to bottom’’, he said.
In 2017 he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, but he never lost his humour or idealism. He spent his last years racing to raise funds for his final project, House of Hope, an arts and education centre for deprived children around Hout Bay. He was determined to see the building work start before he died, and so he did. –