If stating our beliefs meant we would hang, then so be it
Fifty years after the Rivonia treason trial, Chris Barron talks to Ahmed Kathrada, right, about his days as a young revolutionary prepared to go to the gallows
‘IHOPE you’re not going to do a Gerrie Nel on me,” says Ahmed Kathrada with a twinkle in the eye when we settle down in his Killarney flat in Johannesburg to talk about what happened at the Palace of Justice in Pretoria 50 years ago.
His Gerrie Nel back then was state prosecutor Percy Yutar. Kathrada, 34 at the time and a master of the dry, sarcastic barb, dealt with him so effectively that Judge Quartus de Wet, who clearly loathed Yutar, could not hide his amusement.
Yutar: “Are you sometimes referred to as ‘K’?”
Kathrada: “I am not referred to as ‘K’. I don’t know anybody who refers to me as ‘K’.”
Yutar: “Do you know anybody else who goes under the initial of ‘K’?”
Kathrada: “Yes, Mr [Nikita] Khrushchev.”
But it was no laughing matter for Kathrada and his fellow Rivonia trialists.
On April 20 1964, they watched as Nelson Mandela read from the dock what would come to be regarded as one of the greatest political speeches of all time, the one that ended after some four hours with Mandela telling the judge that he had dedicated his life to the struggle for a democratic and free society and, “if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die”.
An experienced advocate consulted by the leader of their defence team, Bram Fischer, had warned in no uncertain terms that the speech would send them to the gallows.
But Kathrada felt only pride as he listened to it. There was no inner voice urging “please God, tone it down”, no unease that Mandela was signing their death warrant.
“Not at all, because we knew what was in his speech before he gave it. And we okayed it. We thought we were going to hang anyway, no matter what he said.”
Why does he think it didn’t send them to the gallows?
“Advocate George Bizos [a member of the defence team] still thinks the one sentence he added was very crucial. When Madiba said ‘for this I am prepared to die’, George had added ‘if needs be’.”
Did those three words save them?
“I don’t know. Of course, if you ask George that you will get an hour’s explanation. That’s what he thinks. In my mind, the crucial thing was he [Mandela] was prepared to die. This thing may have lessened the impact, I don’t know. That’s a lawyer’s argument.”
And what may or may not have been wise from a legal point of view was of secondary concern to the accused.
Mandela argued that they ought to be guided by what would work from a political point of view, regardless of the legal consequences.
“Right from the start, the decision was to conduct it as a political trial and not as an ordinary criminal trial,” says Kathrada.
In this context, whether Mandela’s speech might be fatally provocative or not was largely irrelevant to them.
It is known now that just before the ANC was banned in 1960, the leadership decided that the liberation movement needed a martyr — and Mandela accepted the role.
Did the thought, no matter how quickly banished, ever cross Kathrada’s mind that when he made this speech Mandela was seeking martyrdom at their expense?
“Absolutely not. He may have initiated a certain approach, but in the end it was agreed by the collective. We supported his statement unanimously, whatever the consequences for us would be.”
It was agreed that those, like Kathrada, who went into the witness box after Mandela would adopt the same uncompromising tone.
“The approach that Mandela took was that you proclaim your political beliefs, you don’t apologise, you don’t ask for mercy.”
They were not there to save their lives, he says. They were there to state their beliefs. Uncompromisingly. If this meant they would hang, then so be it.
“All the lawyers agreed it should be a political trial. Until the very last day the expectation was death.”
They had prepared individual responses to the question they were convinced the judge would soon be putting to each of them: “Have you got anything to say before I sentence you to death?”
“That was our expectation until the very last day.”
He says he must have pre-
I did not want to do anything that would separate me from my fellow accused, especially the leadership
pared something but “can’t think” what it was.
Was he scared? “It is easy to say now that I was not scared, but I am sure that at that time I must have weighed all the possibilities.”
They had agreed that whatever their sentences, they would not appeal them.
“We decided that no matter what we did, if they decided to hang us they were going to hang us and there was no way we were going to avoid it. I remember clearly when we were talking about it, Madiba saying: ‘No apartheid court is going to upset what happens here.’ So there would be no point appealing. It would just be a sign of weakness.”
Although Kathrada was sentenced to life along with Mandela and most of the other accused, the state’s case against him was so weak that his lawyers told him he had “a reasonable prospect of being acquitted on appeal or of having my sentence substantially reduced”. So why didn’t he? “I did not want to do anything that would separate me from my fellow accused, especially the leadership. I didn’t want to act in any way that would set me apart from them.”
The Rivonia defence team made no attempt to change his mind.
“They did not advise me to appeal, but they put it to me that because the case against me was not so strong, this was a possibility — that this is what can happen if you decide to appeal.”
The late Chief Justice Ismail Mohamed, who was privately advising him, also did not think he should appeal, but for a different reason.
“There was the question of me being an Indian. There would be mischief-makers and other genuine people who would say: ‘Look at this Indian. He made speeches for the ANC, but when the time came he deserted the party.” These are his [Mohamed’s] words, but it is what I felt as well.”
And so he went to jail for 26 years because it seemed the right thing to do. No bitterness, no recriminations, no self-pity.
What sent them to jail for life and nearly got them hanged was the issue of armed struggle.
Kathrada says he never disagreed with the escalation of the struggle from passive to armed resistance, but he was “frightened” when talk turned to “the next phase” — that of “armed combat”, known as Operation Mayibuye. “I was very frightened about that because the document outlining Mayibuye was unworkable.”
Fischer likened it in court to the work of “schoolchildren”.
These schoolchildren were Joe Slovo and Govan Mbeki, top leaders of the South African Communist Party, the ANC and the newly formed Umkhonto weSizwe. Kathrada, who did most of the administrative work for the movement, was familiar with the document.
“I must have typed it out,” he says. What he saw “terrified” him.
“The comrades who drew up that document were living on another planet.”
They were only saved from the gallows because the defence persuaded the court that Mayibuye had not yet been officially approved by the leadership.
“There wasn’t time,” says Kathrada. The arrests at Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia intervened. Otherwise he would not be talking to me now? “Quite likely.”
Kathrada disagrees with speculation that the police raid on Liliesleaf resulted from a tipoff by the CIA and/or other foreign intelligence agencies.
The ANC and SACP had only themselves to blame. “There was a complete flouting of security at Liliesleaf, as if the revolution was around the corner. People just stopped believing in security.”
A controversial sequel to the Rivonia trial was the decision by Mandela when he was president to meet Yutar. Nobody has quite been able to explain it.
Kathrada says “the real purpose” of the meeting was to persuade Yutar to hand over the Rivonia trial records.
“That is what we wanted from him. That is why we said let Madiba invite him for lunch.”
It didn’t work. Yutar “half promised” the records, but then he sold them to the Oppenheimers’ Brenthurst collection and Mandela’s insurance tycoon friend, Douw Steyn.
Kathrada says he forgave Yutar and they were talking “nicely” at the launch party for a book about lawyer Isie Maisels when “Helen Suzman grabbed my arm and said: ‘Why are you talking to this man?’ ”
Kathrada has been back to Robben Island 267 times. But of all the kings, queens, presidents, leaders and Hollywood stars he has shown around, “the biggest impact” on him was made by a young white Afrikaans girl from Secunda who saw him on the island and asked for his autograph.
She was terminally ill with
Yutar ‘half promised’ the trial records to Mandela but then sold them to the Oppenheimers and Douw Steyn
leukaemia and had two dying wishes: to go to Robben Island and to meet then-president Mandela.
When Kathrada asked Mandela whether he could bring the girl to meet him, “Madiba said ‘no, let’s rather go to her’.”
Which he did. The dying girl flung her arms around Mandela.
Kathrada shows me a framed photograph of the girl, which he keeps on his desk.
It is the only time during the interview he sounds emotional.