We didn’t know what would happen. But the feeling was, ‘They can never kill 156 people.’
BLANCHE LA GUMA, South African Communist
In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela recalled how ‘just after dawn on the morning of 5 December 1956, I was woken by a loud knocking at my door. No neighbour or friend ever knocks in such a peremptory way, and I knew immediately that it was the security police.’ Three officers had come to search Mandela’s house. As his worried children looked on, they rifled through drawers and cabinets, combing the entire dwelling in an attempt to find incriminating material. After about forty-five minutes, the officer in charge of the search turned to Mandela and told him that ‘we have a warrant for your arrest. Come with me.’ The charge on the warrant read ‘HOOGVERRAAD’, or high treason – a capital offence.1 Escorted from his home, Mandela was driven along a stretch of ‘desolate highway’ before heading into downtown Johannesburg and the offices of his law practice, where a second search was undertaken. Eventually, several hours after the police had made their early morning call, Mandela was taken to Marshall Square, the ‘rambling red-brick’ police station in the city centre.2
As the thirty-eight-year-old lawyer and influential ANC leader soon discovered, he was not the only one arrested that morning. In fact, a series of nationwide raids had seen 140 anti-apartheid activists rounded up (sixteen more were seized a week later). All were charged with treason. The scale of the operation was impressive, with those arrested hundreds of miles away in Port Elizabeth and Cape Town flown into Johannesburg’s military airfield aboard Dakota transport planes.3 Within days, virtually the entire leadership of the freedom movement had been corralled inside Johannesburg’s main prison – a ‘bleak, castle-like structure located on a hill in the heart of the city’, known as the Fort. Mandela described how, upon arrival, he, along with the other non-white men, was ‘taken to an outdoor quadrangle and ordered to strip completely and line up against the wall. We were forced to stand there for more than an hour, shivering in the breeze and feeling awkward . . .’ Despite the humiliating circumstances, Mandela was unable to ‘suppress a laugh’ as he looked at his naked comrades: ‘For the first time the truth of the aphorism “clothes make the man” came home to me.’ ‘If fine bodies and impressive physiques were essential to being a leader’, he wrote, ‘I saw that few among us would have qualified.’4
Among those confined behind the prison’s imposing walls were Albert Luthuli – a Zulu chief, Methodist lay preacher, future Nobel Peace Prize winner, and the ANC’s widely respected president; two founders of the organisation’s Youth League, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo (who was also Mandela’s law partner); Yusuf Dadoo and Ahmed Kathrada of the Indian Congress; the Communist leader Joe Slovo and his wife, the campaigning journalist Ruth First; E. S. ‘Solly’ Sachs, a Lithuanian immigrant and legendary trade union organiser; Lilian Ngoyi, president of the Federation of South African Women, and Helen Joseph, the group’s national secretary. One of a handful of white women to be arrested, Joseph – born in Sussex in 1905 and educated at King’s College, London – had worked as a governess in India before settling in South Africa during the 1930s. A long-time supporter of racial equality and human rights, she had, in October 1953, helped to found the Congress of Democrats, which provided a home for white opponents of apartheid.5
Life inside the Fort was grim. Washing facilities were limited and basic, prisoners had to leap over the puddles of urine that flowed from the perennially blocked drain as they made their way to the food hall, and the bland, unappetising meals were eaten squatting in the yard – a paved cement enclosure with a net of barbed wire overhead. The prison itself was, of course, arranged on racial lines as well as segregated by gender. Whereas the white male detainees were placed two to a cell (measuring nine feet by nine feet) and provided with blankets, a pillow and a mattress, their non-white comrades were herded into cramped, dormitory-style cells and issued with lice-ridden blankets and thin straw mats that were rolled out on the cold, hard floor. Meanwhile the six white women – all from comfortable, middle-class homes – endured several sleepless nights thanks to an infestation of mice.6
The treason trial detainees were subjected to the regular prison routine: lights were switched on at five thirty in the morning, and cell doors unlocked at six fifteen, at which point the prisoners joined the long queues for the lavatory and washing facilities. After breakfast and the ritual cell inspection, the inmates were permitted to exercise in the prison yard until lunch at eleven thirty, before being confined once more until another yard break, at two thirty. The prisoners were required to return to their cells after supper, which was served at four, with lights out at eight. Although they were allowed to receive visitors, most of the treason trial inmates found the experience far from pleasant. In their celebrated account of the trial, Lionel Forman and Solly Sachs explained how ‘five or six prisoners’ would be lined up in a row ‘behind a wire mesh, like monkeys in a cage’. In front of the mesh was a small passageway and a metal grille, behind which stood the visitors. ‘Each man talks to his visitor. Each visitor talks to his man. Nobody can hear what anyone is saying. So each man shouts to his visitor and each visitor shouts to his man.’ Soon all six prisoners would be screaming at the visitors, and the visitors screaming back.7 It proved to be a humiliating and nerve-shredding experience.
The dramatic arrests of 5 December were, as Albert Luthuli later wrote, ‘deliberately calculated to strike terror into hesitant minds and impress upon the entire nation the determination of the governing clique to stifle all opposition’.8 But if the authorities in Pretoria hoped that the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement would be cowed, or that dissent would quickly dissipate, they were to be disappointed. Indeed, by bringing the country’s leading freedom fighters together, the apartheid regime – entirely unintentionally – actually helped to reinforce a sense of solidarity. As Mandela explained, ‘Many of us had been living under severe restrictions, making it illegal for us to meet and talk. Now, our enemy had gathered us all under one roof for what became the largest and longest unbanned meeting of the [movement] in years . . .’ Now, ‘We revelled in the opportunity to exchange ideas and experiences for two weeks while we awaited trial.’9
The detainees, in fact, quickly improvised a programme of activities that drew on their collective knowledge, experience and interests. There were games, debates, talks on black history and discussions of African music and culture, all interspersed with the regular singing of freedom songs.10 On one occasion, Chief Luthuli’s electrifying performance as Shaka, the legendary Zulu warrior, prompted mass participation in the traditional indlamu war dance. Mandela recalled (perhaps rather idealistically) how ‘some moved gracefully, others resembled frozen mountaineers trying to shake off the cold, but all danced with enthusiasm and emotion’ and, as they did so, racial, ethnic, class and political distinctions seemed to temporarily dissolve. In that moment, Mandela explained, ‘We were all . . . bound together by a love of our common history, our culture, our country and our people . . . something stirred deep inside us, something strong and intimate, that bound us to one another . . . the power of the great cause that linked us all together.’11
The treason trial detainees were also buoyed by demonstrations of support from the outside. A National Defence Fund – sponsored by such notables as the Archbishop of Cape Town, the Chancellor of Witwatersrand University, Liberal and Labour members of the South African parliament, a former High Commissioner and a retired Supreme Court judge – was established immediately, as was a ‘Stand By Our Leaders Committee’. During the weekend of 8–9 December a number of activists, holding placards, took up positions at bus stops and other public places to demonstrate their support.12 Taking advantage of the fact that remand prisoners were permitted to receive food and other gifts, supporters rallied to provide newspapers, books, clothes and food – including fruit, vegetables and meat. From the suburb of Fordsburg, a group of Indian women prepared regular shipments of curried eggs, meat and fish, while others sent sandwiches, fresh coffee and even wrapped parcels of fish and chips.13
Public support was also on show on Wednesday 19 December when the accused were taken to the Army Drill Hall – a ‘large cheerless barn with a galvanised iron roof’ – for the first day of the ‘preparatory examination’, a series of hearings presided over by a magistrate who would decide whether there was a case to answer. The prisoners were driven to the improvised court in police vans, sirens blaring, accompanied by an armed military escort. As they approached the Union Grounds, a ‘dreary patch of baked red earth enclosed by utilitarian iron railings’ opposite the Drill Hall, they were greeted by enormous crowds of cheering, singing supporters. Their presence transformed the grim military convoy into a triumphal cavalcade and the festive spirit spilled over into the Drill Hall itself: as they entered, the accused exchanged freedom salutes with hundreds of supporters in the public gallery and, just as the proceedings began, the room shook to the roar of ‘Mayibuye I Afrika’ from the crowds outside.14
Almost immediately, the legal proceedings themselves descended into farce, with adjournments first to install loudspeakers (the prosecuting counsel was inaudible) and then to locate interpreters for those defendants who were not proficient in English. On day two, though, events took a more sombre turn. As the hearings began, the defendants were forced into a specially constructed cage (one of the accused quickly scribbled a sign, ‘Dangerous. Please Do Not Feed’, and attached it to the outside). The defence counsel was apoplectic, and Maurice Franks QC insisted that the structure be removed, otherwise the entire defence team would walk out in protest.16 Meanwhile, outside the Drill Hall, another large crowd had gathered, and many were pressed up against the metal gates, hoping to gain admission to the court. As the police attempted to push the crowd back, one officer suddenly ordered a baton charge. As the police raised their truncheons and began swinging – clubbing elderly protesters, women and watching journalists – a number of young men retaliated by throwing stones. This prompted the police to draw their weapons and begin firing indiscriminately into the crowds. They continued shooting even as the stragglers attempted to flee. No one was safe from the violence; one journalist noted that among those running for cover was ‘a pregnant African woman who, stumbling . . . fell on her hands and knees. The policeman caught up with her, stopped and kicked her three times in the side.’ Fortuitously, no one was killed, although twenty people were injured.17
The heart of the prosecution case – which drew on speeches, documents and published writings, including the Freedom Charter and the anti-pass petitions that had been left in Prime Minister Strijdom’s office back in August – was that the accused, working in concert with the agents of international Communism, had sought to overthrow the South African state and install in its place a so-called ‘people’s democracy’. As the chief prosecutor, J. C. van Niekerk, put it at the end of his lengthy opening address, the accused ‘not only advocated that the revolutionary change-over is desirable, inevitable or imminent, but also actively created unrest among the people of the Union of South Africa, encouraging hostility between the European and non-European races, and inciting members to revolt against the existing authority by way of insurrection and rebellion, by force and violence . . .’18
On 20 December all of the defendants were finally granted bail, set at £250 for Europeans, £100 for Indians and £25 for Africans and Coloreds, but they were subjected to severe restrictions that limited their movement and prohibited political activism. They also remained embroiled in a complex legal fight that would continue for four long years.19 While charges against sixty-five of the accused were dropped, without explanation, in January 1958, ninety-one of the original defendants were brought before a special court in Pretoria that August. Two months later, the state summarily withdrew its original indictment and drew up fresh charges against thirty of the defendants. Following further legal wrangling, the trial proper finally began in August 1959. It ended on 29 March 1961 with a unanimous verdict of ‘not guilty’ against all of the defendants.20
While the leaders of the freedom struggle in South Africa were facing a possible death sentence, black activists in the United States were savouring the fruits of a hard-won victory. On 17 December 1956, the US Supreme Court dismissed a final appeal by the Montgomery city authorities, thereby consigning segregated seating on the city’s buses to the history books.21 African Americans, who had endured many months of hardship, were understandably elated. Georgia Gilmore, who had been in her kitchen listening to gospel music on the radio when the news of the ruling came through, was ‘just so excited, I just didn’t believe it . . . and I ran outside, and there’s my neighbor, and she said yes, and we were so happy. We felt that we had accomplished something that no one ever thought would happen.’ Jo Ann Robinson, who had done so much to make the victory possible, recalled that she and many of the city’s activists ‘just rejoiced together. We had won self-respect . . . we felt that we were somebody . . . we had forced the white man to give what we knew was a part of our own citizenship.’22
Martin Luther King and the MIA had been preparing for this moment for weeks, and a series of nonviolent training workshops had been held to ready activists for integration.23 King took an important lead by preaching a message of reconciliation, emphasising that the purpose of the boycott was to achieve the ‘creation of the beloved community’ in which all people – black and white – would be treated with dignity and equality. At two MIA mass meetings, held the night before the integration order was due to come into force on 21 December, the crowds were reminded to greet bus desegregation calmly and with dignity. Specific instructions issued to African Americans included: ‘Do not deliberately sit by a white person unless there is no other seat’ and ‘If cursed, do not curse back. If pushed, do not push back. If struck, do not strike back, but evidence love and goodwill at all times.’ They were also reminded that the victory was ‘not for Negroes alone, but for all Montgomery and the South’.24
At a quarter to six the next morning, the white pacifist Glenn Smiley joined E. D. Nixon, Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy and the MIA president at the King family home. A few minutes later, the group boarded the first bus of the day at a nearby corner. As news photographers snapped away, King paid his fare and took a seat towards the front, in a section previously reserved for whites. Smiley took the seat next to him. After 382 days of extraordinary sacrifice and discipline, Montgomery’s African American citizens had won a famous victory.25