Our appearance in the Cape Town Supreme Court on the 1st of June was a bit of an anticlimax.
We’d had our best clothes sent in, geared ourselves mentally for the start of the trial, and then nothing happened. No charges were read out, we were not asked to plead and the case was postponed to the 6th of June. Why, we never found out. The judge mumbled something, our advocates acknowledged him in some kind of bookies’ code and we were led off to the cells below the court and then driven back to Pollsmoor. Quite clearly we were still remanded in custody.
On the 6th of June the same thing happened, but the court had an altogether different appearance. The spectator gallery was packed with people, many of them friends. At least 15 senior security police were present and at the front of the court a mountain of exhibits: the recovered leaflet bombs, the banner, piles of leaflets and envelopes all neatly tied together with string, steel trunks, toolboxes, banned ‘communist’ books, cardboard boxes, typewriters, the duplicator, and sundry items of furniture, bedding and kitchenware. A toaster took pride of place on top of the trunks.
Our parents were allowed to sit on the benches immediately in front of the dock, enabling us to chat to them before the trial started. My mother eyed the piles of exhibits and said: ‘What’s my bedspread doing there? And my kitchen chair? And my...? So that’s where my other toaster got to.’ She had forgotten that she had lent me the items or thought I had been using them in my
‘above-ground’ flat.
A fat charge sheet with two detailed schedules was made available. It listed the activities that comprised the ‘offences’ we had allegedly committed as well as each incidence of dissemination of leaflets – by post and leaflet bomb. Ten different leaflets distributed by post and seven spread by leaflet bomb were mentioned. Twenty-six leaflet bombs were listed as well as one banner.
Again the charges were not put and we were not asked to plead. The State Prosecutor, Tielman Louw, applied for a postponement to the next day because, he said, there were matters to be
‘straightened out’ between the State and the defence. The defence agreed to the postponement.
We were never told what these ‘matters’ were but the easy agreement between the two sides made us feel uneasy, as if they were colluding in our prosecution. The court was dismissed after a few minutes and we were taken back to Pollsmoor.
In London meanwhile – although not to our knowledge at the time – a picket organised by our Defence Committee was being held outside the South African Embassy to demand our release and the release of all South African political prisoners. Hundreds of leaflets were handed out to passers-by giving details of our case.
Such actions are widely appreciated by political trialists and prisoners. When they get to hear of them morale is raised to a high level as they are reminded that they are not forgotten and that people far away are concerned with their plight and fighting for them.
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After breakfast on the 7th, as happened the previous times, they marched us out of the awaiting- trial section to a sort of internal garage in the prison where several armoured prison vans were parked ready to take the prisoners to court. The two of us were locked in a special compartment toward the front of a van and separately from the other prisoners – we were not to be allowed to contaminate the black prisoners.
At the court the procedure was the reverse. The van passed through a set of very solid gates into a yard at the side of the court. First the black prisoners were removed and then we were briskly led through a couple of sets of heavily barred grilles and into a small cell below the courtrooms.
The cell was without windows and a weak yellow light lit the room that was empty save for a slop bucket and a narrow bench along one wall. The walls reminded us of the interior of an Egyptian tomb, covered from floor to ceiling in graffiti, drawings, verse and nonsense. Since there was nothing else to do we scanned the walls: ‘Fifteen years for rape – Mogamoet’...‘I was here for shit’...‘Sweet Lord have mercy’...‘I love you Mary, I didn’t mean it’... As we read this pitiful record left behind by countless victims of the racist legal system we spotted in a hole in the wall a tiny stub of a pencil. A trap! we thought. They must want us to write revolutionary slogans on the walls so they can charge us with more offences – we’re not falling for that one, oh no! But what the hell! If they want to charge us further, that’s OK. We’re going to escape so it doesn’t matter! Stephen extracted the pencil and with much delight drew a huge hammer and sickle above the door, urging the workers of the world to unite! Wherever else there were gaps we boldly wrote in ANC slogans.
After an hour in the dungeon we were driven upstairs and seated in the dock. When the judge entered an orderly shouted ‘Staan in die hof!’ – ‘Stand up in court!’ – but we had decided that there would be no standing for us: standing meant recognising the legitimacy of the court. Our tardy arousal was met with agitated prods in the back and angry shouts from another orderly:
‘Staan op!, Staan op!’ – ‘Stand up!, Stand up!’ Slowly we lifted ourselves, realising that it would not be productive to refuse to stand each time.
Along with the judge, Acting Justice Nel, entered two assessors – the South African equivalent of a jury. There is no trial by jury in South Africa and in most cases only a judge is present.
Assessors are obliged to be present when the death sentence might be imposed. In our case this was a possibility and provided for under the Terrorism Act. At that time when assessors were present they were not allowed to decide on any questions of law but final judgements were based on a majority decision. This has now changed slightly. The reason that has been given for not holding jury trials is that in South Africa the bias of the jurors is so clear cut that the system does not ensure justice. In cases involving a black accused, white jurors would be more likely to judge against the person irrespective of the evidence, and if the jurors were black they would always judge the accused not guilty. There is probably some truth in this explanation, as blacks know that the judicial system is loaded against them and is part of the machinery of their oppression.
We looked at these honourable gentlemen as they occupied their positions on the bench and could not help wondering where South African courts had got their reputation for being impartial and independent? Here were three so-called legal experts about to interpret what we had done in terms of a law which was so obviously political and partisan and which overturned the normal legal principle that you are innocent until proved guilty. The onus was going to be on us to prove that our actions were not intended to have any of the effects of ‘terrorism’ (i.e. virtually any anti- state activity) – we were guilty and had to prove that we were innocent. By willingly sitting there
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these gentlemen were saying that they agreed with the law they were to apply, that they believed they were about to dispense ‘justice’.
The prosecution read out the charges and we were asked to plead. Before either of us could respond to the judge’s call our ‘defence’ leapt to their respective feet and declared that they would be doing the pleading for us. This seemed out of order to us, but how were we to know?
My advocate managed to get the first word in, telling the court that the defence was ‘purely technical’ in that there had been an improper duplication of charges etc., and that therefore I was guilty on count one, namely, of ‘taking part in terrorist activities’, but not guilty on count two, which alleged contravention of the Internal Security Act. Stephen’s advocate pleaded for him in much the same way. So that was it: we had no say. We looked at each other in disbelief but not knowing what we could do just shrugged our shoulders.
State Prosecutor Louw handed in a list of exhibits to the judge – ‘because there were a rather large number of them’ – and announced that he would be calling five policemen and a ‘Mr X’ for the State. Mr X was a person whose name ‘for security reasons’ should not be published.
Spyker van Wyk was the first state witness to be called. He told the court that his investigations began on 10 December 1975, being on that first occasion an investigation into the distribution of subversive pamphlets through the post. He went on to detail each pamphlet intercepted and each leaflet bomb his team had to investigate. He gave the number of pamphlets intercepted in the post each time and the number of leaflets recovered after each leaflet bomb.
This was of great interest to us as it gave some indication of the effectiveness of our distributions and of their counter-actions. Of the first three mailings only a handful of pamphlets ended up in their hands – in one case no more than two. Most of these were probably ones they had intercepted on the way to several banned people who were on our mailing list; others were handed in by people who had received them. Admittedly our mailing list held only a few hundred names on those first mailings but it showed that the police had no regular methods of detecting or intercepting the posted matter. After the first three mailings the number that they intercepted increased more and more rapidly until the last one, of which they intercepted about 80 per cent. Our conclusion was that our failure regularly to change our addressing system had made it easy for them to identify the envelopes and our failure to post from other centres permitted them to keep a small number of sorting offices in one area permanently on the alert.
The details also belied police claims that they had recovered most of the leaflets after leaflet bombings. The most that were ever recovered was 272; on average they only found about eighty.
An ‘expert’ who later appeared told the court that a leaflet bomb – or ‘ideological bombs’ as they called them – could only lift 300 leaflets. We were sorry to disappoint them, but the number was always 500 – one ream.
Spyker claimed that the police had kept us under observation from 22 February 1978, the date of our last posting. This was highly unlikely as it would have been too much of a coincidence that they just happened to start watching us on the day we decided to do a posting. Our suspicion was that they had been watching us for much longer – what about all the strange phone calls and suspicious characters? – and knew when we were about to do the posting. How otherwise could they have intercepted practically all the pamphlets of that posting?
Our defence responded to Spyker’s testimony with some pathetic cross-questioning about the nature of ‘real terrorists’. The point they were trying to get across to the court was that we were not ‘terrorists’ in the normal sense of the word and that our cell did not have the usual aim of
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‘terrorist cells’, which is sabotage. Spyker responded that our activities during a period of unrest would, in his opinion, have had ‘a helluva effect’.
The next day a police ‘explosives expert’, a Major J G van Tonder of the police bomb disposal unit, gave details of the components, construction and working of the leaflet bombs. The 26
‘ideological bombs’ were ‘neatly built, the work of a perfectionist’ and made by someone
‘obviously proud of his work’. In a cool and informed manner he held up one of the ‘bombs’ and described to the court how the parts fitted together, how the timing mechanism worked and how the platform shot the leaflets into the air when the explosive was detonated. Anyone in the spectator gallery would have been sufficiently informed to go home and make their own. Van Tonder spoke about the books on explosives that had been found in our trunks. He was convinced, he said, that our knowledge of explosives and detonators had been obtained from these books. Why then had they interrogated us about our training, we wondered.
In characteristic manner our defence attempted to get the court to view the leaflet bombs not as
‘real bombs’ but rather as harmless little ‘leaflet launchers’ – kind of Jacks-in-the-boxes. Under cross-examination Van Tonder had to concede that the ‘bombs’ would not have damaged property or harmed anyone. One of the assessors awoke from his slumbers at this point and commented with raised finger that as far as he could see the leaflet bombs were not much more dangerous than a large firecracker. My advocate thought he had scored a major victory; we were not impressed.
And so it went on for several days. One state witness, a Lieutenant Deon Greyling of the police bomb disposal unit, told how one of the ‘bombs’ had gone off in his hands while he was attempting to defuse it. Unfortunately the point he was trying to make – that the leaflet bombs were dangerous and unpredictable devices – backfired on him as he was forced to admit to the judge that he had not been harmed. The monster Van Aggenbagh displayed to the court the mailing lists and addressing equipment that we had used. The police had printed out all the names using our addressing machine to confirm that they corresponded to the envelopes they had intercepted in the post. Sure enough they did. He proudly demonstrated the piles of letters that had been intercepted, intimating that he personally was responsible for stopping the material from spreading to its unsuspecting victims and thereby had prevented a revolutionary situation from developing.
On one of the mornings my parents brought my prison food parcel to the court and it was handed to me in the cell below the court before the day’s proceedings started. The bottle of laced orange squash was there as usual so we thought we’d have a little swig before being called up. Of course the swig turned into a drinking party and in no time the entire bottle was polished off. Everyone must have wondered why we sat in court that day with contented smiles on our faces!
As the morning dragged on nature had its revenge, pressurising us to ask one of the court orderlies standing behind us for permission to visit the toilet. He reminded us that the accused had to be present in court and that if we wanted to leave the room the trial would have to be adjourned. Being too embarrassed to expose our simultaneous need before all those people, there was nothing we could do but cross our legs and hope they would not carry on for too long.
A big-shot from security police headquarters in Pretoria, a Colonel Broodryk, testified on publications of the ANC and South African Communist Party. He was the ‘expert’ on
‘communism’ and banned organisations such as the ANC and SACP, one of whom always appears in South African political trials. The racists are of the opinion, at least at the propaganda
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level, that every manifestation of resistance against apartheid is the result of a communist plot.
Basically, they believe, blacks are happy with their lot and if they raise their voices against apartheid it is only because the Kremlin has sent its dupes to incite them for extraneous political purposes. Colonel Broodryk went to pains to stress the point that we were either witting or unwitting agents of ‘Russia’ – they've not heard of the Soviet Union – and that the ANC was no more than a front for the Communist Party.
He explained that our activities, most of which took place during the period of the ‘Soweto uprisings’ starting on June 16th 1976, could only have served to fan the fires of revolt. The implication was almost that we had been responsible for the events of that time and were a major factor behind the ‘riots’. Our defence objected that he was exaggerating the consequences of our activities because the number of pamphlets we had disseminated increased many fold after 1976 and had in fact corresponded to a decrease in unrest.
Colonel Broodryk was called again by the State to support an application for the identity of the next witness, Mr X, not to be revealed. He said that in the past state witnesses testifying in similar trials had been threatened and in some cases assassinated. A quotation was read from one of our leaflets which supported his point: ‘Smash the traitors and stooges – we shall harass the enemy, its police and its spies.’ At least they were admitting that Mr X was a traitor and stooge.
Stephen’s advocate, surprisingly, opposed the application but mine, in his usual collaborating way, said: ‘I just wish to say at this stage that I do not oppose the application nor have I ever done so.'
The courtroom was cleared of spectators, the press and our parents before Mr X was brought through a back door of the court to the witness stand. He eyed the court like a frightened dog to make sure no one would recognise him and then stood to attention to obey his masters’
instructions. He began his pitiful tale of how he had gone to Maputo to seek work. There he had been press-ganged by the ANC to join its ‘terrorist wing’ (Umkhonto we Sizwe). From Maputo he was sent to Tanzania where he claimed he had fraternised with the ANC leadership. Oliver Tambo, the President of the ANC, and Joe Slovo, the alleged mastermind behind all communist plots against South Africa, he knew well. So far Mr X had got his lines right.
From Tanzania he claimed to have been sent to Russia where he was taught ‘terrorism’: how to make bombs and shoot with an AK-47 rifle. In Russia he had also learnt to speak Russian. We were surprised when he did not reveal that he was mates with Brezhnev. Next he was sent to Angola where he was given explosives, guns and money. From there he was infiltrated back into South Africa through Botswana, but as soon as he got into the country he realised that what he was doing was futile and that he could not beat the police. He suddenly ‘saw the light’ and as a responsible citizen gave himself up and handed in his weapons. Now he was working for the police and making life better for his people that way!
The story was so transparent and close to the usual propaganda tale that it was doubtful whether the judge and assessors took Mr X seriously. It was no wonder that his testimony was given in camera, as the press would have made mincemeat of it. However, the point of the appearance was merely to emphasise to the court the State’s contention that the ANC was really just a gang of nasties and that all its operatives were acting in the interests of Russia and not in the interests of South Africa’s black population.
I wrote on a slip of paper the words ‘I do not understand Russian’ in Russian and handed it to my advocate with a note asking him to give it to Mr X to test whether he could actually speak and read Russian as he’d claimed. But he was not prepared to co-operate. He felt that such a step would not be necessary, as he believed the judge did not accept Mr X’s story. This was probably