Bob Hepple: Rivonia triallist and Nelson Mandela’s legal adviser
1934-2015
KNIGHTED: Rivonia triallist Bob Hepple, who was arrested with Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu BOB Hepple, who has died in England at the age of 81, was Nelson Mandela’s legal adviser and fellow Rivonia triallist who was released after agreeing to testify against Mandela and the other Rivonia accused.
His testimony would have had devastating, possibly fatal, consequences for his coaccused, but Bram Fischer, the leader of the defence team and a leader of the SACP, made sure Hepple was smuggled out of the country before he could be called to the witness box.
Hepple went to England, where he became a judge and law professor at Cambridge University. He was knighted in 2004.
A lawyer from the University of the Witwatersrand and a member of the SACP’s central committee, Hepple became part of Mandela’s support team when he went underground in 1961 to plan for the armed struggle, sparking a national police hunt.
Hepple would fetch Mandela from his hideout at Liliesleaf farm in Rivonia and drive him to meetings at safe houses. Mandela, in a cap and coat, pretended to be his chauffeur and they would sit in the front singing together from Todd Matshikiza’s jazz opera King Kong.
When Mandela was finally arrested, near Howick in KwaZulu-Natal in 1962, he asked Hepple to be his legal adviser after his attorney, Joe Slovo, was banned from the trial in Pretoria because of a restriction order confining him to Johannesburg.
After Mandela was given a five-year sentence, Hepple continued to be involved in organising the armed struggle from Liliesleaf farm.
He had just arrived at the farm in 1963 when police raided it in a dry-cleaning van and arrested him while he was trying frantically to light a match to set fire to incriminating documents. These included an outline of the plan to overthrow the state — Operation Mayibuye — which he had stuffed in a small coalburning stove.
Thrown into solitary confinement for three months, he was left in no doubt by, among others, chief prosecutor Percy Yutar that he would hang for treason.
He said his darkest moment was when a policeman came into his cell and told him they had found all Mandela’s di- FLED SOUTH AFRICA: Bob Hepple in his youth aries and notes hidden in a coal cellar at Liliesleaf.
He was “shattered”. Mandela had asked him to ensure that these papers were destroyed — but Hepple said he had been assured that this had happened.
If Mandela had hanged, these are the documents that would have sent him to the gallows.
Hepple was convinced that the others would hang, and decided to do whatever it took to escape this fate himself.
He wrote a statement which he insisted afterwards contained nothing the police didn’t know already. Certain- ly it persuaded Yutar that Hepple would make a devastating witness for the prosecution, and he offered to have him released on condition that he would testify.
Hepple said he never had any intention of testifying, but when Yutar announced triumphantly on the first day of the trial that Hepple would be giving evidence to support the state’s case, it sent shock waves around the court. He stood up, mumbled “Good luck” to his comrades, and left. Mandela never seemed to hold it against him.
He was in the receiving line at Buckingham Palace when the then president of South Africa visited the queen. According to Hepple, Mandela could barely contain himself, and embraced him with such prolonged warmth that the queen didn’t quite know what to do with herself.
Hepple was born in Kensington, Johannesburg, on August 11 1934. His father, Alex, was a wholesale butcher and South African Labour Party MP and leader.
Hepple matriculated at Jeppe High School for Boys — which he hated.
The teachers were “bigots and racists”, he wrote in his 2013 autobiography, Young Man with a Red Tie.
While studying law at Wits, he got involved in anti-apartheid politics. In 1952, he was arrested and tried under the Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act for organising a political meeting in Orlando. In 1954, he represented the National Union of South African Students at a conference in Moscow, organised by the International Union of Students. When he got back, he said he’d been duped by the “communist peace movement”.
He was best law graduate in 1957. He lectured in law at Wits and in 1962 became an advocate. He joined the communist-aligned Congress of Democrats and so became involved with the ANC.
He first saw Mandela at a protest meeting in Sophiatown in 1953. The police stormed the stage and pandemonium ensued until Mandela began singing a protest song. Everyone joined in and a probable riot with shooting and bodies was avoided.
Hepple is survived by his second wife, Mary, two children and two stepchildren.
He and his first wife, Shirley, with whom he escaped South Africa, divorced. — Chris Barron