Activist who fought oppression
Denis Goldberg Anti-apartheid campaigner BORN APRIL 11, 1933 – DIED APRIL 29, 2020, AGED 87
DENIS Goldberg was the only white man to be sentenced to life imprisonment alongside Nelson Mandela in the 1964 Rivonia Trial.
The campaigner spent 22 years in prison after being found guilty of treason.
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, he was a lifelong supporter of the anti-apartheid African National Congress (ANC), joining its armed wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe, in 1961.
The group detonated a series of bombs in the 1980s to challenge the country’s segregated society, in which the black majority was oppressed by whites.
Its targets included the exterior of magistrates courts, bars and army headquarters.
Goldberg was caught along with other ANC officials at a farmhouse hideout in northern Johannesburg on July 11, 1963.
He was sent to Pretoria Central Prison because he was white, unlike the black prisoners incarcerated on Robben Island. In a 2019 interview with the University of Cape Town, he said: “I understood that what was happening in South Africa with its racism was like the racism of Nazi Germany in Europe.You have to be involved one way or another.”
His parents were London-born Jews of Lithuanian descent who were politically active communists.
They moved to Cape Town where Goldberg attended Observatory high school before studying civil engineering at the city’s university.
In prison he was a respected and popular inmate with a verve that could not be repressed. In
December 1979, he helped political prisoners Tim Jenkins, Stephen Lee and Alex Moumbaris escape from Pretoria but was not released himself until 1985.
He was diagnosed with lung cancer last July and is survived by his son David. His daughter Hilary died of a blood clot in 2002.