South Africa: death of Denis Goldberg, traveling companion of Nelson Mandela

Text by: Nicolas Champeaux

Denis Goldberg died at the age of 87 on Wednesday April 29, 2020 in Hout Bay, Cape Town, South Africa. This anti-apartheid activist was the penultimate survivor of the Rivonia trial, at the end of which Nelson Mandela and his comrades were sentenced to life in prison in 1964.

Publicity

Denis Goldberg was above all a logistician. In 1963, he was entrusted with a project for an underground arms factory. He was a member of the regional command of Umkhonto We Siswe, the armed branch of the ANC, in the Cape region. Several executives of the movement argued for a changeover in the armed insurrection: the famous Mayibuye plan.

This plan had aroused very little enthusiasm within the movement. Walter Sisulu, Denis Goldberg, Rusty Bernstein, Ahmed Kathrada and other anti-apartheid activists, most of whom went underground, nevertheless met on July 11, 1963 to discuss it at a secret meeting when the police accompanied by dogs have landed. It was the famous Rivonia raid . They were all arrested and handcuffed.

Police have got hold of important compromising documents, particularly for Denis Goldberg, then 31 years old. The investigators went to the cache where he slept and found his notebooks. With an engineering degree, Goldberg carefully documented information on ammonium nitrate, the price of detonators, and delivery times. There were also sketches of mines.

On instructions from the Communist Party, he had tried to escape a few weeks after his arrest, but was immediately arrested. Fifty years later, he still jumped when he spoke to high school students and the school siren sounded. "  It reminds me of the deafening sirens of the prison during my attempt to escape from Vereeniging prison  ," Denis Goldberg explained in January 2017 to black high school students in the township of Langa.

Denis Golberg and the others were then charged with nearly 200 acts of sabotage committed between 1961 and 1963. When the accused met for the first consultation with their lawyers, Goldberg made them a proposal. "  He told Mandela and the others that he was ready to wear the hat for them, to tell the judge that he himself had taken the initiative to learn about the weapons without informing the hierarchy  ", explained the lawyer Joël Joffe, witness of the scene, and died in June 2017. His comrades, sensitive to the offer, declined: they preferred that the accused collectively confront the justice of apartheid during this political trial.

"Life is wonderful"

In June 1964, after the Rivonia trial, Goldberg had little illusion about his fate. He was sure he was sentenced to death. “  On the day of the sentence, my mother was there. Judge Quartus de Wet whispered the sentence, there was too much noise in the courtroom, and my mother heard nothing. With a frightened look, she shouted across the room and asked me : " Denis, then ? What did the judge say ?" And I said, "Life! [ Life in prison] . Life is wonderful [life is wonderful]  !"  "

Denis Goldberg was a bon vivant. In his favorite restaurant in Cape Town, he first covered his slice of butter before spreading a second layer of fish terrine. Willingly joking and close to people, he preferred white t-shirts and his khaki pocket jacket in a three-piece suit. However, he did not try to hide his extreme sensitivity. Of all the cadres of the anti-apartheid movement, it is undoubtedly the one who has opened the most to the suffering endured in prison. He said he went through phases of depression.

Segregation also applied to the prison world. Denis Goldberg was not in the penal colony with Nelson Mandela and Ahmed Kathrada at Robben Island. He was detained with other white political prisoners in a prison in Pretoria. For the man who had bathed all his youth in a progressive and multiracial atmosphere, it was a double punishment. The inhumanity of the jailers above all led him to mad rage. He alerted the prison authorities in vain to the declining health of his comrade Bram Fischer. This Communist Afrikaner cadre, who was also one of the lawyers for the defendants in Rivonia, contracted prostate cancer which eventually prevailed.

After twenty-two years in prison, Goldberg agreed to be released four years before his other comrades in the Rivonia trial. ANC leaders in exile in Zambia asked him to account before sending him to London where he mobilized tirelessly in the international campaign for the release of his comrades.

After the first non-racial elections in 1994, Denis Goldberg chose to continue his commitment through social works for the poor South African blacks, through his organization HEART He ended up returning to his native country in 2002, skimming the roads and walking through conference rooms and high schools to teach the younger generations the history of their country.

He also spoke enthusiastically of the performances in which he had taken part in Europe with German musicians. They had asked him to read on stage extracts from his autobiography on symphonic music. "  The people behind the project waste a lot of time negotiating broadcast contracts, it's silly, I told them to put it on YouTube for free so that everyone can benefit from it,  " complained Goldberg a few months before. to go out.

His little architect's house in Hout Bay in the Cape peninsula, offered a plunging view of the sea and the world in its diversity: there was a football field below where young people had fun, some plush villas, collective housing units and old fishermen's huts.

Whites in the anti-apartheid struggle

Denis Goldberg, Rusty Bernstein, Bram Fischer and even Joe Slovo, who are now deceased, are among those South Africans who have chosen to give up their privileges as whites to espouse the cause of the fight against segregation.

In his soft voice with a slightly higher tone, Goldberg explained in simple terms to Judge Quartus de Wet the basic reasons for his engagement. “  In my daily life, it was enough for me to look around me to see a total denial of social justice against the non-white populations. This injustice is based solely on questions of color. All racial groups should have the right to vote, and people should have the right to organize to claim and, above all, obtain this right to vote . ”

A member of the Communist Party, he participated in the founding of the Congress of Democrats, a progressive organization of white politicians involved in the fight against apartheid. Soft and sensitive to human contact, Denis Goldberg was a lover of people. He and his wife Esme entertained a lot at the weekend in their house in Cape Town: white people, mestizos, Indians, blacks. These multiracial assemblies intended sometimes to party sometimes to collect donations for the fight, were viewed with a negative eye by its neighbors who regularly alerted the police.

As the tightening grip tightened, his engagement became more radical. Denis Goldberg had organized military training camps for young recruits, with more or less discretion. Activities which had resulted in increased police surveillance: he had also received death threats, his car had been covered with paint insults, and a bomb had exploded in his garden.

In 1963, when Parliament passed a law authorizing the incarceration of inmates in solitary confinement for renewable periods of 90 days, it chose to go underground. In his autobiography, Goldberg explains that before his departure, he returned to his house at night through the back garden, stepping over the perforated fence. He kissed his wife Esme and hugged one of his children who had woken up.

Goldberg's parents were Communist Jews who emigrated from London in the 1920s. His mother was particularly involved in the fight against apartheid. “  When my mother first came to visit me in prison, she told me that I was very proud of her. She spoke to me not like a son, but like a wrestling friend.  For Denis Goldberg, it was the most beautiful recognition.

Denis Goldberg was one of the last two survivors of the Rivonia Trial of 1963. Today, only one of Nelson Madela's comrades is still alive. This is activist Andrew Mlangeni, 94 years old ...

Newsletter With the Daily Newsletter, find the headlines directly in your mailbox

Follow all international news by downloading the RFI application

• South Africa
• Nelson Mandela

On the same subject

South Africa

South Africa: for Denis Goldberg, close to Mandela, Jacob Zuma must change

South Africa

Denis Goldberg: "The Rivonia trial was a strategic error by the apartheid government"

Africa guest

Denis Goldberg, one of the defendants in the Rivonia trial