25 and 26 June 1955. Five thousand people gathered together under the blue skies of South Africa at the Congress of the People. They had come from the four corners of the land, by train, by lorry, by car, driving hundreds of kilometres, evading police blocks, determined to be there, to make the Freedom Charter their own, to declare for all the world to know the South Africa they wanted for themselves and their children. Despite police intimidation, ugly and sinister, the people had come – people of all colours, all ages, all races. There was a simple dignity and homeliness about it all. Although this was a gathering of the people’s representatives, fully conscious of their great responsibility, it was not a formal, highly organised convention: 2800 delegates in all, listening to the speeches, debating earnestly every clause of the Charter, which had been born out of their hopes and their heartaches, out of their poverty and the denial to them of fundamental human rights. Every clause of the Charter, mirrored the conditions in which the non-white people live in South Africa.
At dawn on 5 December 1956 came the next act of this strange mixture of comedy and high tragedy, when the Special Branch of the police raided homes throughout the length and breadth of the country and arrested 140 men and women of all races on a charge of high treason, a capital offence under South African law. Those from other centres were flown in military Dakota aeroplanes to Johannesburg under police escort. Sixteen more persons were arrested a week later. Only on 21 December, sixteen days after the first arrests, were the accused released on bail.
The accused do not propose merely to defend themselves against the allegation made by the Crown. The accused will not only endeavour to establish their innocence, but will assert and in due course ask the court to hold that they are the victims of political kite-flying on the part of those responsible for these prosecutions. We will endeavour to show that these prosecutions and the manner of their presentation, are for the purpose of testing the political breezes in order to ascertain how far the originators thereof can go in their endeavours to stifle free speech, criticism of the government and in fact, all that the accused believe is implicit in their definition of the oft-misused word “democracy”.
That this is no ordinary trial can be gathered from the fact that the accused are in themselves no ordinary persons. They constitute a cross-section of the members of our population. In their ranks are to be found a Member of Parliament, clergymen, lawyers, journalists, students, clerical workers and labourers. They come from all races, but all of them hold one thing in common, despite the fact that they have different and differing political affiliations, and that is a belief in the brotherhood of man and a desire to work for his betterment and toward his ultimate freedom.
This is no ordinary trial if one has regard to the crude and jack-boot manner in which the arrests were effected.
That this is no ordinary trial is shown by the manner in which it has been set in motion. Many months ago the Minister for Justice in a debate in the House of Assembly was prophesying the arrest of 200 persons on charges of treason.
We will establish that before even the Freedom Charter was drafted or the Congress of the People was held, the then Chief of Police, Brigadier Rademeyer, was reported as saying the idea of a Freedom Charter was treasonable. But he and the newspaper which published his remarks retracted quickly when a demand for damages was made by some of my clients.
We will show that as a prelude to these proceedings and that for the purpose of creating favourable conditions, the Security Police set out deliberately to create a fantastic atmosphere of treason around everything that the accused have worked for. They did this by endeavouring to intimidate the public with their attendance at open and legitimate meetings, by conducting mass raids and country-wide searches and by flourishing Sten guns, fixed bayonets and truncheons.
The most fantastic allegations of plots to poison water supplies and to bomb power stations have been made by Ministers of the Crown which, we will allege, were made to provide a certain justification for the activities of the police and to quieten the public alarm aroused thereby.
A battle of ideas has indeed been started in our country; a battle in which on the one side – the accused will allege – are poised those ideas which seek equal opportunities for, and freedom of thought and expression by, all races and creeds and, on the other side, those which deny all but a few the riches of life, both material and spiritual, which the accused aver should be common to all.
The Defence will allege that this trial has been instituted in an attempt to silence and outlaw the ideas held by the accused and the thousands whom they represent.
The Defence will also show that the political activities of the accused, the views they hold and the ideas they have expressed are matters of public record, and that no attempt has ever been made to conceal their aims from the world or the manner in which they hope to achieve them.
The Defence will therefore contend that this case is a political plot of the type which characterised the period of the Inquisition and the Reichstag Fire Trial. We believe that in the result this trial will be answered in the right way of history.
Over three years later the trial ended in triumph for the accused and their organisations, for the Crown eventually foundered on its own rock of “violence against the State”. “Wedded to violence” was how Mr Justice Bekker described the Crown case. The court finally rejected the Crown allegations.
On all the evidence presented to this Court and on our findings of fact, it is impossible for this Court to come to the conclusion that the African National Congress had acquired or adopted a policy to overthrow the State by violence, that is in the sense that the masses had to be prepared or conditioned to commit direct acts of violence against the State.
Now the trial is over, but it is not the end of the story, for the struggle of the people still continues. “The trial which has been hanging over my head,” said Robert Resha, “is now over. But that does not mean that we have achieved our freedom. We still have to struggle as we did before to bring about peace and harmony between all people in South Africa.”
Undaunted by the failure of the treason charge, the Nationalist government seeks new ways, new powers to crush its opponents. Each year brings new repressive legislation, each year the patience and discipline of the non-white people is stretched almost to breaking point. The African National Congress was cleared of the charge of high treason; it was proved that it had a non-violent policy; yet a year before the end of the trial it was declared an unlawful organisation by a Special Act of Parliament. Threats are still being uttered, from time to time, that other Congress organisations will be outlawed.
The Treason Trial was only one part of the whole pattern of repression, and it was a part that came adrift. Instead of destroying 156 men and women, and turning them from their chosen path of struggle for the freedom of their people and their country, it resulted only in the strengthening of their resolve and drew the limelight of world opinion onto this bitter farce played out upon the South African stage.