Up yours to tyranny
A freedom fighter sometimes called the forgotten man of the Rivonia trial, Denis Goldberg has died after a lifetime spent working against racism and oppression at huge personal cost. Chris Barron looks at his life
Denis Goldberg, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 87, spent 22 years in prison after being sentenced at the Rivonia trial on June 12 1964 to four life terms under the Sabotage and Suppression of Communism Acts for “campaigning to overthrow the government by violent revolution and for assisting an armed invasion of the country by foreign troops”.
Goldman was 31 at the time, the youngest of the Rivonia triallists. He fully expected to be hanged, especially after hearing Nelson Mandela’s “I am prepared to die” speech (“daring the judge to hang us”) from the dock.
When judge Quartus de Wet handed down the sentence, Goldberg’s mother, who couldn’t hear very well, shouted: “Denis, Denis, what is it?”
Goldberg, still his mother’s little boy, yelled back joyously: “It’s life! And life is wonderful!”
He described himself as an eternal optimist, and his response to even the grimmest predicaments was invariably humour.
Mandela, who called him “Boy” because he was so young (Goldberg called him “Nel”), remembered his “irrepressible” humour during the court proceedings, which “often had us laughing when we should not have been”.
Goldberg said he laughed after receiving four life sentences “because I knew I would be free one day”.
His relief was not widely shared among the white community in SA, which by the time the treason trial ended regarded him as the most dangerous white person in the country.
“I was the hated white man betraying the white society, which wanted me hanged,” he said.
Seven of his fellow triallists, led by Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki, were sent to Robben Island, but Goldberg served his sentence at the whites-only Pretoria Central Prison, being abused by the white warders and prisoners who branded him a traitor.
As the only white member of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) to be sentenced, and the only white political activist in SA ever to get life, he felt an especially acute sense of isolation, he recalled. “Being black and involved in the struggle meant you had the support of many people, and it meant you got to be part of a community. Being white and involved meant being isolated,” Goldberg said.
He taught himself the recorder and guitar and played freedom songs to black prisoners in their death-row cells, which were near his own.
In 1966 he was joined by his defence counsel and South African Communist Party leader Bram Fischer. Goldberg moved into his cell to nurse him after Fischer was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Shortly after Fischer’s death in 1975, Goldberg’s mother was allowed a non-contact visit — at the end of which she climbed on a stool and kissed him through a small gap in the window. It was the last time he saw her.
In 1967 Goldberg had been allowed five 30-minute visits from his wife, Esme, followed by another three visits four years later. The next time he saw her was when he was released in 1985, after agreeing to give up the armed struggle.
Mandela and the other Rivonia lifers had refused the government’s offer, and Goldberg feared that his comrades would reject him for betraying the struggle as a white person.
But “I reckoned I had been in prison long enough”, he wrote in his autobiography. “I would continue the political struggle in a non-violent way and not allow
Mandela, who called him ‘Boy’ because he was so young (Goldberg called him ‘Nel’), remembered his ‘irrepressible’ humour during the court proceedings, which ‘often had us laughing when we should not have been’
myself to be imprisoned again.”
Goldberg was born in the working-class suburb of Observatory in Cape Town on April 11 1933.
His parents, Sam and Annie, who’d come to SA from England, were Jews and communists and warned him he would suffer the consequences of their convictions, which he duly did.
He began school at Observatory Boys shortly after Hitler’s invasion of Poland and was taunted by teachers and pupils for his parents’ politics and for being a Jew.
He remembered the local butcher, who had a Hitler-style haircut and moustache, calling him a Jew boy and chasing him with a meat cleaver.
Precociously bright and growing up in an intellectual environment, Goldberg developed an early awareness of national and international politics as well as a keen sense of injustice and revulsion for racism of any kind.
He saw that racism in SA was “like the racism in Nazi Germany that we were supposed to be fighting against”.
The lesson he learnt from his parents was that “you have to be involved in one way or another”.
He said he came from a generation prepared to put their lives on the line for freedom. He grew up believing that
“freedom is more important than your own life”.
‘A guy who made weapons’
At the age of 16, Goldberg started as an engineering student at the University of Cape Town, where he was an enthusiastic rugby player who “could kick the hell out of a rugby ball”, he said in a UCT film made about him when he was awarded an honorary doctorate for his role in the antiapartheid struggle, something that touched him deeply.
“I like what it means that my alma mater is at last recognising that a guy who made weapons to put an end to the state violence needs recognition,” he said.
He graduated with a BSc in civil engineering in 1955. Meanwhile, he’d fallen in love with Esme Bodenstein, a physiotherapist who massaged a shoulder injury he’d picked up in rugby.
They found they were on the same page politically and she introduced him to the nonracial Modern Youth Society, a discussion group that helped sell the leftall wing Guardian newspaper.
They married in 1954 and became involved in political activism together.
Goldberg joined the white Congress of Democrats and helped organise the 1955 People’s Congress in Kliptown, Soweto, where the Freedom Charter was signed, demanding democracy and equal rights for South Africans.
Two years later he joined the banned Communist Party.
During the state of emergency following the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, he and his mother were detained for four months. After his release he was dismissed from his engineering job on the railways and worked full time for the party.
He argued for armed struggle against apartheid, and in 1961 was recruited into
MK.
“Nelson Mandela said he’s setting up an illegal army,” Goldberg recounted.
“He said, Denis, you’ve got the technical training. You know how to build bridges.
Can you blow them up? Will you join? And I said, Yes, of course.”
He became MK’s technical officer, whose task was to devise weapons and explosive materials that could be used to damage railways, power lines and phone lines. He was also to identify and teach young MK recruits to carry out these operations.
He was urged to go to Johannesburg. In an interview he recounted how he kissed his sleeping son and daughter goodbye, believing he’d be sent out of the country for training and not be able to take his young family with him.
Instead, the MK high command asked him to stay and be the weapons maker for Operation Mayibuye, MK’s resistance plan.
He was involved in this work when police raided Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, in northern Johannesburg, on July 11 1963.
He made a dash for the toilet with his notebook containing information about making hand grenades and landmines, which he was trying to flush down the loo when he realised there was a policeman at the door.
“You go to the toilet often enough, someone is eventually going to catch you with your pants down,” he recounted in a classic example of his often extremely funny, bittersweet humour.
Outspoken Zuma critic
He was tortured in detention, a traumatising experience that came back to haunt him “at odd times” and could reduce him to tears, he confessed.
After his release in 1985 at the age of 52 he rejoined Esme (whom he’d seen for five hours in the previous 22 years) and their two children in London, where he worked as spokesperson for the ANC.
He also represented the organisation on the UN’s anti-apartheid committee.
In 1995 he founded Community HEART, a
London-based charity that raised millions of rands for the Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust, and donated more than 3-million books for underprivileged children, among other things.
Goldberg returned to SA after Esme’s death from a stroke in 2000 and the death of his daughter Hilary from a blood clot, and worked as an adviser to water affairs & forestry minister Ronnie Kasrils from 2002 to 2004.
He became one of President Jacob Zuma’s most outspoken critics, condemned the patronage system in the party — which he said was so entrenched it threatened SA’s democracy — and in 2015 called for leadership “renewal”.
But he said he could never bring himself to vote against the ANC.
Goldberg generally avoided the spotlight. He didn’t make a meal of his contributions to the struggle, which were overshadowed by his more famous Rivonia comrades. Relatively few people remembered his name, which even his own party, the ANC — which gave him its top award, Isithwalandwe, in 2019 — only belatedly learnt to spell correctly.
In spite of honorary doctorates and international awards, culminating in being granted the Freedom of the City of London in 2016, he was correctly dubbed “the forgotten Rivonia man”.
Goldberg, who was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2017, spent the last years of his life setting up the Denis Goldberg Legacy Foundation Trust and working for human rights in Hout Bay, Cape Town, where he lived till he died.
He is survived by his son David. His second wife, Edelgard Nkobi, a German journalist, died of cancer in 2006.
The lesson he learnt from his parents was that ‘you have to be involved in one way or another’
Mandela said: ‘You know how to build bridges. Can you blow them up? Will you join?’