Palace of Justice

13

After the lunch break we rushed back to give Labuschagne a final briefing. We had half an hour before the Court was due to re-assemble. The cell below Court C was damp and uncomfortable. The sergeant in charge of the cells locked us in the cell with Labuschagne and went off to have his lunch.

‘Will you please take him through his statement?’ I asked Wierda.

I tried to make myself comfortable on one of the wooden benches. For a while I listened as Wierda took Labuschagne through the timeline we had prepared for his evidence. The walls were covered in graffiti. I craned my neck to read some. I quickly dropped any pretence at indifference. A crude gibbet was drawn on the wall above my head, the noose around the letters ANC. A snake-like appendage hanging from the third letter dripped blood onto the floor. Above the noose was a name.

WITKOMMANDO

Adjacent to it a defiant member of Umkhonto we Sizwe had scribbled a manifesto on the wall in imperfect English:

M.K. MANUFESTO

THERE COMES A TIME IN THE LIFE OF EVERY

NATION, WHERE THERE REMAINS ONLY TWO CHOICES,

SUBMIT OR FIGHT, AND THAT TIME HAS COME TO S.A.

WE SHALL NOT SUBMIT, AND WE HAVE NO CHOICE, BUT TO

HIT BACK WITH ALL MEANS WE HAVE IN OUR POWER, IN DEFFENCE OF OUR PEOPLE, OUR FREEDOM AND OUR FUTURE.

AMANDLA! O’ POVU

I walked around to another wall. The names of the accused in a 1977 case were listed under the heading:

NC TERRORIST TRIAL 17/7/77

MOSIMA SEXWALE

NALEDI TSIKI

JACOB MOTAUNG

SIMON MOHLANYANE

There were other names I had never heard. Some names had been partly obliterated by the moss feeding in the damp; others had been defaced by other occupants of the cell. I walked from wall to wall, reading messages from the past. It was plain that a political battle was also being fought here in the cell, mostly by anonymous participants.

More subtle in its power and universal in its application was a passage from the Bible, St James edition. The damp had destroyed the text at the edges.

PSALM 94

SHALL THE THRONE OF INIQUITY HAVE …

WHICH FRAMETH MISCHIEF BY A LAW

THEY GATHER THEMSELVES TOGETHER …

THE RIGHTEOUS AND CONDEMN THE INNOCENT …

It was a wall of political protest and defiance, mostly by black prisoners raging against the white regime, with the odd riposte by a white prisoner. Some light relief was provided by the career criminals, for whom a stay in the cells was merely part of the job, an occupational risk, so to speak, and thus to be endured with fortitude, a bit of cheek and some good humour.

One inmate had taken a sly dig at his lawyer:

GULZMAR

EBRAHIM

WAS HIER VIR ROOF

EN KAR DIEFSTAL EN

HET AGTER SY ADWORKAT

GEGAAN EN SKELDEG GEPLYT

SY VONNIS WAS 9-15 JAAR

TRONKSTRAF SHALOET

Wierda and Labuschagne were working at the table, poring over the papers and concentrating on the job at hand. I studied our client for a moment. A rather serious young man, but given the circumstances, that could be forgiven. The question was, would he let us down when he got into the witness box? Clients always do; that is just one of the hazards of the job. Somehow cases always seemed to go well until the client steps into the witness box; then all the careful stitches in the cloth holding the case together are unravelled one by one.

I wished I was far away from there, perhaps in a nice shipping case with lots of documentary exhibits and fees paid in pounds sterling or US dollars. There was a sobering message for me on another part of the wall, however:

DON’T TALK ABOUT

SHIPS OR SHIPPING

When Wierda had completed the briefing, I called for the cell sergeant. Our brief sojourn in the cell confronted me yet again with the claustrophobia of life in prison. The sergeant followed us into the courtroom through the steps leading up into the dock.

The most difficult and unpredictable part of the trial was about to begin.