Era of sacrifice and solidarity

By Fiona Forde

In 1952, thousands upon thousands of South Africans stood up to the harsh laws of apartheid in the Defiance Campaign. Four years later, 156 people were brought to task in the infamous Treason Trial. In 1963, a number of men were arrested at Liliesleaf Farm for sabotage and conspiring to overthrow the government of Hendrik Verwoerd. They stood in the dock for 11 months as the Rivonia Trial court deliberated on their fate.

Much water has passed under the bridge since then and many of the trialists have passed away. But on Friday morning, 22 of the survivors were to gather in Johannesburg for a historic reunion with Nelson Mandela as one of the many celebrations that have been planned to mark Madiba's 90th birthday later this year.

Among them is Ahmed Kathrada and Bertha Gxowa. Billy Nair has made the trip from Durban. So has Ayesha "Bibi" Dawood from Worcester. And Dennis Goldberg from Cape Town.

At 86, Durban-based Jackie Arenstein feels too frail to travel. But like her former comrades, she has spoken openly to Independent Newspapers in the past few days about the trials that helped shape South Africa.

Each of them is in their twilight years, yet they talk about the 1950s and '60s as if it was yesterday. Their recollection of detail is astounding. Their stories are heart-warming, humbling words that describe a bygone era of sacrifice and solidarity that ended in satisfaction.

Bertha Gxowa, now 74, was 18 when she got caught up in the Defiance Campaign.

She and her family lived in Germiston, on the outskirts of Johannesburg at the time. It was 1952 and she had begun to follow in her father's footsteps, organising black workers who endured harsh conditions in the labour force. She would regularly roll up her sleeves and rally the community behind her, mobilising her black brothers and sisters, imprinting in them a sense of pride, and an understanding that black did not have to be synonymous with underclass. Her people did not have to buckle under white rule, she believed.

The restrictive pass laws were in full swing by then and she recalls one incident when a heavily pregnant woman was bundled into the back of a patrolling police van, purely because she hadn't obtained the appropriate piece of paper to visit a family relative. "That was the limit for me," Bertha says. "So I joined the movement."

It was also in 1952 that she heeded Nelson Mandela's call for nationwide civil disobedience. The time for defiance had come, he said. It was time to stand up to the laws that were keeping people down. It was to be peaceful. But it was all or nothing now.

Black South Africans would defy the pass regulations. They would occupy whites-only compartments on trains, sit on whites-only benches, enter whites-only public areas and walk where they pleased without the woeful permits.

Bertha duly organised a group of locals to occupy the European-only seats on the platform of her local station in Johannesburg. Bibi gathered a group together in Worcester to march into the local post office. As the organisers in both jurisdictions that June morning, they were co-ordinating from their respective bases and evaded arrest. But their day would come later.

Billy Nair was not so lucky. Then a member of the National Indian Congress, he was arrested for defying the segregated seating at Berea Station. "There were tens of thousands of people who marched with us on our way," he recalls, now at the age of 78.

"But only 21 of us entered the station and sat on the seats that were reserved only for whites." For that, at the age of 23, he landed his first of many prison sentences and served 26 days. If he were to step out of line a second time, the sentence would not be so light, he was warned. He did. And it was not.

It didn't faze Billy. He had many years of activism under his belt by then and had seen too much to turn back. He had been through the Passive Resistance Campaign.

Under the tutelage of Communist Party activist Dr Dado, he began to "put up a bit of a fight" against what he recalls as "terrible, terrible conditions in Durban back then". In 1950 he landed himself a job as a dispatch clerk at the Durban Dairies, "earning the princely sum of 26 pounds a month".

But he was no sooner in the door than he was hit by the miserable conditions of the African workers who delivered milk in the Natal city practically round the clock for two or three pounds a month.

"Really, I was unable to tolerate it," he says. He started a union and six months later he was shown the door.

But that did not stop him from becoming one of the country's leading trade unionists.

When he was released from prison for his part in the Defiance Campaign, he began to work full-time at the Indian Congress, taking home the less princely sum of six pounds a month. Perhaps not for nothing Ahmed Kathrada calls him the classic unsung hero.

Living on that meagre amount was no joke, he recalls. His daily diet of bunny chow, a cup of tea and a small cake used to set him back a shilling at the canteen.

"You would get tuppence change if you didn't have the cake," he explains. That would pay his bus fare home to Sydenham.

In his spare time, he used to sell the Guardian newspaper. But selling the weekly communist publication saved him a further tuppence. Every penny mattered then.

The struggle gained momentum and the years passed. The apartheid regime was unrelenting, but it only toughened the stance of the comrades and swelled the ranks of the NIC and the ANC alike.

Then on the morning of December 5 1956, as most of them lay asleep in their beds all over the country, the police came knocking on their doors. They were taken from their beds and arrested for high treason, a capital offence. They were accused of plotting a violent revolution that would overthrow the government in favour of communism. Billy didn't put up a fight.

Raids on homes were two a penny in those days and he went along with the officers and accompanied them to the local police station.

Not far away Rowley Arenstein opened the doors of his Durban home to three police officers who were looking for his wife, Jackie. She was under arrest for high treason, they explained. Rowley, who was banned at the time, laughed and laughed at the absurdity of this latest move. But it was no laughing matter.

Jackie left and did not return home for more than a year. She was flown to Johannesburg that dawn, along with Billy and many others on "an old war plane, a terrible plane. It rattled and you didn't know if the floor was going to fall out", as she remembers it.

Bertha tells a similar tale. She too was awoken from her sleep and taken from her Katlehong home as her husband and two daughters looked on. She didn't quite understand the charge of high treason, but did as she was told and got into the back of the van.

But Bibi was completely in the dark. "They came at 4 o'clock and raided the house until 7," she recalls, "searching everything they could lay their hands on."

At the end of the ordeal they arrested her. "But they wouldn't tell me why." She was driven to Cape Town where she and 21 others boarded two military planes bound for Johannesburg, still none the wiser as to where they were headed that hour of the morning or why. But as they were driven through the streets of Joburg in an army truck, Bibi spotted a newspaper poster on a street corner.

"Swoop," it read, "150 people arrested in dawn raids."

"And that's when we knew this was something big." By the end of that week, six people were added to the ranks of the treason trialists.

Down at the old Fort, Bibi was assigned to a single cell where she was held in isolation for 22 days. "But the cell next door to me was very big, there was about 20 people in it. So I shouted, 'I'm Ayesah Dawoo from Worcester. Who are you?' And then they started singing freedom songs and that's when I knew they were ANC people."

Lilian Ngoyi was in that cell. As were Helen Joseph and many more iconic women of the struggle. Elsewhere in the prison was Chief Albert Luthuli, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, OR Tambo, Joe Slovo and Govan Mbeki. Locked behind those bars were generations of the struggle and years of invaluable experience.

The proceedings began at the Johannesburg Magistrate's Court a fortnight later.

They ended in Pretoria four years later on the 29 March 1961, when Justice Rumpff read aloud the verdict: "You are found not guilty and discharged. You may go."

In the intervening years, many of the trialists had been acquitted, while 91 were accused and kept on trial. They were divided into three groups, the first of which were tried for the duration. Had they been convicted, the remaining 60 would have been subsequently tried.

Hundreds of witnesses were called to testify while reams of documents were presented as evidence. A Professor Murray from Cape Town was called upon to interpret the evidence. It was all the same to the professor. Everything was classic communism. "Straight off the shoulder of communism, he used to say," as Billy remembers.

"Out and out communism," was another of his favourite pronouncements, according to Ahmed Kathrada. "The professor had a lot of gas," Billy recalls. "If he were alive today, there wouldn't be any petroleum crisis," he chuckles.

Day in, day out they sat for hours on those hard benches, listening to each detail of evidence brought forward, most of it ludicrous, they recall. Although Jackie, Bertha and Bibi were discharged after a year, Billy and Ahmed endured the full marathon trial.

Shortly after her release, Jackie Arenstein was put under house arrest, joining her husband in their Durban home to where they were confined for many years.

Bibi went into exile in India after she refused to become a spy and turn on her own comrades. Billy was arrested for his role in Umkhonto weSizwe and banished to Robben Island where he would spend the next 20 years of his life.

In 1964 Ahmed was back in the dock during the Rivonia Trial after he and members of Umkhonto, the ANC and the Communist party were arrested at Liliesleaf Farm as they poured over the details of the clandestine Operation Mayibuye.

Dennis wasn't privy to that meeting. He had been assigned the role of weapons manufacturer, and would lend his hand wherever he was needed.

That day he had ferried Govan Mbeki and Walter Sisulu to the farm, and was duly biding his time in the living room, leafing through a notebook full of juicy information, "things like where I would get the casting for the hand grenades, or where I would buy the chemicals for the explosives, where I would cut the wood for the boxes for the landmines."

Suddenly a number of police officers descended on the room. Dennis bolted for the toilet to try and flush away the incriminating evidence. "But they got there before me."

Dennis and his fellow captives were taken to the Fort in Johannesburg. From there they were transferred to Pretoria to stand trial. Mandela, who was by then behind bars, was taken from prison to face the death penalty along side them.

Eleven months later, on June 12 1965, Justice de Wet delivered his verdict. It was not death, but life. Blacks were taken to Robben Island where they would remain for many years to follow. True to form, the colour bar was respected and Dennis was to be sent to Pretoria Central Prison.

He was released 22 years later in 1985. "It was a long, long time," he says. "Living so close to these people, you become closer than a married coupe. You're never apart. You don't leave each other each day to go to work. Every sneeze, every sniffle, every fart, you know. You hear every story and joke over and over again."

He was the first of the Rivonia trialists to be released. "And there was vilification," he recalls. People felt he had taken the easy way out. "Dennis, you accepted release. You shouldn't have," they used to say. Nelson didn't, they reminded him.

But as he reflects on it all from his Hout Bay home, Dennis reminds me that 8 030 days is a lot of days. "A lot of lonely days." And for that he offers no apology.

And nor should he, Ahmed argues. "He served his time", he says. "And it was not easy being a white prisoner then."

Indeed it was not easy being a prisoner of any colour in apartheid South Africa.

Billy Nair walked free in 1984 after 20 years behind bars. But he was arrested twice in the two years that followed and went into hiding in 1986 until the ANC was unbanned in 1990. "For as long as there is apartheid, I will continue to fight," he used to think. And he did. He endured his fair share of torture and a lifetime of hardship in one guise or another.

But as he looks back on it all as we chat in his Durban home, there is not a trace of regret in the old man's voice. Ever the gentleman, he is also ever the politician and talks endlessly about the new South Africa.

Bibi greeted me at her Worcester home, a humble abode which she shares with her children. She's 80 now. "Eighty", she repeats, for fear I don't appreciate her longevity. She returned to South Africa in the 1990s and to this day continues "to enjoy the freedom that we fought for".

Jackie Arenstein gave generously of her time as we chatted in her Durban home. Rowley passed away in 1996 and she lives alone now. At 86, she's incredibly nimble in her movements and articulate in her thoughts. She appears to carry a burden on her shoulders, her face etched with frown.

But she assures she's content with life today. If there's only one regret, it's that she didn't continue her early art work.

"Because that is where I could have achieved perfection."

Bertha suffered kidney failure a few years ago. Yet between her thrice weekly sessions of dialysis she still jets between Parliament in Cape Town and Luthuli House in Johannesburg, fulfilling her role as chair of the Independent Electoral Commission.

• This article was originally published on page 15 of The Star on March 14, 2008