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George Bizos passed away among his family yesterday afternoon, in the small house that he built himself, along with his famous vegetable garden at the back. He was 62. He trained as a lawyer where he befriended fellow pupil Nelson Mandela. A few years later Bizos was defending Mandela in court against charges of treason and sabotage. Bizos defended Mandela in the so called Rivonia trial of 1963 and 1964 that saw South Africa&#8217;s future president face the death penalty. Liliesleaf Trust CEO, Nicholas Wolpe joins CNBC Africa for more.

Remembering George Bizos: A pillar of SA’s democracy

It says a lot about the character of Andrew Mlangeni that when he was released from prison in 1989 – for crimes he didn’t commit, by the way – he returned to his humble abode in Dube, in Soweto, near Johannesburg; the very family home where police burst into his bedroom in the middle of a cold winter’s night in 1963 to arrest him.



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This home was as humble and wholesome as the man’s approach to life. Sure, Mlangeni enjoyed a convivial party and the golf course, but not for him sipping Chivas Regal in a polo club, nor huge flashy houses, nor the latest luxury cars; never greed, nor vast wealth, for Andrew Mlangeni. For what? He would have said. During all those murky years of the President Jacob Zuma, when did anyone ever see the name of Mlangeni come up? Never.



“He was a principled man, of note,” says former finance minister and parliamentary colleague Nhlanlha Nene.



Principle that cost Mlangeni &nbsp;more than a quarter of his life behind bars for something he didn’t do. He told me that the police merely transferred the charges of sabotage levelled at his comrade, the late former defence minister Joe Modise, to him.



“I didn’t do anything!” Mlangeni told me half a century later. He pleaded guilty with Nelson Mandela &nbsp;and his comrades in a show of solidarity intended to put the apartheid government on trial. It worked and overnight the accused transcended criminal charges to be seen as the freedom fighting Benjamin Franklins of Africa.



Mlangeni grew up in Soweto as a towering man of principle, who never backed down. When he was arrested in 1963, police tortured him brutally with electrodes and their fists. In a chance meeting in 2010, ironically in the colonial splendour of the Rand Club in downtown Johannesburg, Mlangeni &nbsp;puffed on a Consulate cigarette, with a group of friends,as he told me of this torture 50 years before. The police tortured him with electrodes and dished out arguably the worst beating inflicted on any of the Rivonia trialists. He said at one point the police were waterboarding him; that is, holding a bag over his head while they poured water through.



“I felt my lungs fill up, I was drowning, I was gone…then one of the police hit me hard in the stomach and all of the water spurted out of me and I was OK!”



All of us listening, over post lunch drinks, laughed including the late veteran photographer, Alf Kumalo, who once had his skull cracked in police cells. If you have suffered through politics or journalism, as Alf had in both, you tend to see the funny side of the ugliest of moments.



Everyone has and Andrew Mlangeni story including Sello Hatang the chief executive of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.



“He called me Murwa because I shared a first name with his son. He always made time for me, and always brought a smile to my face with his dry, self-deprecating sense of humour. When asked one day about his lifelong smoking habit, for instance, he responded: It has ruined my singing voice.’’ When asked on another occasion, late in life, if he was still playing golf, he said: ‘If not for my knee I would still be out on the tee,’” recalls Hatang.



It was fitting, in 2018, that Mlangeni was awarded the prestigious freedom of Johannesburg – the city where he was put in chains and incarcerated a lifetime ago. A precious gift of freedom to a man who knew how hard and painful it was to achieve. &nbsp;

Andrew Mlangeni

How a brutal torturer saved Andrew Mlangeni from death by drowning.

Andrew Mlangeni represented the views of the working class, a young lion, a man of integrity, and a person who advocated the political revolution for South Africa. He was active in the struggle against apartheid. The rights of especially the black majority were seriously curtailed and they did not have the right to vote and they were stripped of their citizenship, which led many of them fail to acquire basic education and better healthcare and now post democracy, black people started to have electricity and basic human rights. Our generation has a lot to do in continuing to transform South Africa, and above all, we must learn from this generation that was very smart to have a project preparation for South African democracy, a room for shared growth, inclusive growth and stakeholder capitalism.



Isithwalandwe Andrew Mlangeni was very discipline, very strong and tough. He was not defining a revolution through holding a political position but to serve where he was requested by the movement. He was a Rivonia Trialist, a trained silent revolutionary, with traits of Marketing the revolution and recruiting the right future legionaries. was active in the struggle against apartheid



Andrew Mlangeni had national purpose influence to others to accomplish the mission by providing purpose, direction, and motivation. He remained a humble leader. He believed in African Nationalism.



Apartheid was a policy of racial segregation and discrimination enforced by the white minority government in South Africa from 1948 until the early 1990s. South Africans were banned from interracial marriage and the government had complete authority to keep any areas for whites only. Thousands of homes in racially mixed areas were destroyed. Dennis Goldberg was one of the leaders who wanted to see a united South Africa and decided not to enjoy the benefits.



Apartheid was officially described as a crime against humanity by the United Nations General Assembly in 1966, its eradication is one of the major positive human rights stories of the 20th century.



South African youth must embrace transformative constitutionalism and at the heart of it, is a commitment to substantive reasoning, to examining the underlying principles that inform laws themselves and judicial reaction to those laws. Ethics, Practical wisdom and courage is required from all South Africans alive, to build a better future for generations to come.



Andrew Mlangeni, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, Denis Goldberg and others were sentenced to life in prison on charges of sabotage on June 12, 1964. He was released in 1989 after negotiations with the apartheid government started. Now we are talking because they were pacesetters and had wisdom to sacrifice for all of us to have a better future.



In 1999 Mlangeni was awarded the Order for Meritorious Service Class I: Gold. In 2016 he received the Freedom of the City of Johannesburg. In July 2018 he received the prestigious Freedom of the City of London, after being unable to travel to the United Kingdom when the honour was originally bestowed on him in 2016.



May His Soul Rest in Peace.



Miyelani Mkhabela

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Andrew Mlangeni, a working class young lion of Africa

On Mandela Day 2020, I am reminded of my late friend and Rivonia trialist Denis Goldberg who stood shoulder –to-shoulder with Nelson Mandela in the shadow of the death penalty back in 1964. Goldberg, who died on April 30, spent 22 years in prison for his part in the sabotage campaign against the apartheid regime was a warm man with a robust sense of humour. He was an engineer by trade and was given the job of making bombs that earned him the title of ‘Mr Technico’ among his comrades.



Goldberg spent his retirement years a spit from the crashing waves of Hout Bay near Cape Town. His home, with a balcony overlooking the sea and the mountain range that hems in the bay, was typical of the man.



Not for him the expensive, luxury, homes of Hout Bay; he built his own home amid the fishermans’ cottages on the less fashionable side of Hout Bay. Among the people, he once said to me. It was in this glorious setting high above the sparkling sea that Goldberg related many of the stories of the desperate days of the struggle and the dock at the Palace of Justice in Pretoria in 1964.



“Nelson loved a fight, we used to send him to wag his finger at them!” he said with his trademark smile.



Goldberg never forgot the first day of the trial in Pretoria when Mandela when prison officers shoved Mandela, shackled and in short trousers, next to him into the dock. Mandela was already serving a five year sentence for supporting strikes and leaving the country without a permit and was hauled from prison to face the death sentence.



“You were not supposed to humiliate a prisoner, before the judge, but they did,” Goldberg recalled. &nbsp;



“I stood next to him and had chocolate in my pocket. I nudged him and he looked down and nodded. I broke off a square of the chocolate and handed a bit to him. He wiped his hands over his face and the chocolate disappeared into his very, very thin cheek. Here we are, they are charging us with sabotage and here this little bit of chocolate melts away. He nodded again and I gave him some more; for me this was such a moment of humanity. You don’t get sweeteners in prison,” said Goldberg.



“But there he was standing there, his clothes were hanging off him because he had lost an awful lot of weight, demanding of the judge to look him in the eye.”



The two men survived the death penalty. More than 30 years later Goldberg asked Mandela why he thought they didn’t hang.



“Because I dared him too!” Mandela replied. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



Yet Goldberg believed at one stage Mandela may have felt – as the leader of the accused – that he may face yet get the noose. He recalled how Mandela would lecture Goldberg in the holding cells, under the court, near the end of the long trial.



“He used to say: ‘Denis when you teach people about Marxism don’t talk about Europe and slavery and feudalism – our people don’t understand that. You have to go back to our own country and own experience’ I said to him: ‘Nel, why are you telling me this?’ He says: ‘I just think you should know’ I know he was thinking he was going to be hanged.”



In the end no one was hanged. When the life sentence was handed down the accused, sitting with Mandela and Goldberg all looked at each other and laughed in relief.



“Nelson said in his book A Long Walk to Freedom that I said to my wife, from the dock, when asked about the verdict: ‘Life, life to live’ I wouldn’t use such literary English and it wasn’t my wife , she was in England, I said it to my mother. I said: ‘Life, life is wonderful’ and I can tell you more than 30 years later life is wonderful,” recalled Goldberg.”



On Mandela Day 2020, I am reminded of my late friend and Rivonia trialist Denis Goldberg who stood shoulder –to-shoulder with Nelson Mandela in the shadow of the death penalty back in 1964. Goldberg, who died on April 30, spent 22 years in prison for his part in the sabotage campaign against the apartheid regime was a warm man with a robust sense of humour. He was an engineer by trade and was given the job of making bombs that earned him the title of ‘Mr Technico’ among his comrades.



Goldberg spent his retirement years a spit from the crashing waves of Hout Bay near Cape Town. His home, with a balcony overlooking the sea and the mountain range that hems in the bay, was typical of the man.



Not for him the expensive, luxury, homes of Hout Bay; he built his own home amid the fishermans’ cottages on the less fashionable side of Hout Bay. Among the people, he once said to me. It was in this glorious setting high above the sparkling sea that Goldberg related many of the stories of the desperate days of the struggle and the dock at the Palace of Justice in Pretoria in 1964.



“Nelson loved a fight, we used to send him to wag his finger at them!” he said with his trademark smile.



Goldberg never forgot the first day of the trial in Pretoria when Mandela when prison officers shoved Mandela, shackled and in short trousers, next to him into the dock. Mandela was already serving a five year sentence for supporting strikes and leaving the country without a permit and was hauled from prison to face the death sentence.



“You were not supposed to humiliate a prisoner, before the judge, but they did,” Goldberg recalled. &nbsp;



“I stood next to him and had chocolate in my pocket. I nudged him and he looked down and nodded. I broke off a square of the chocolate and handed a bit to him. He wiped his hands over his face and the chocolate disappeared into his very, very thin cheek. Here we are, they are charging us with sabotage and here this little bit of chocolate melts away. He nodded again and I gave him some more; for me this was such a moment of humanity. You don’t get sweeteners in prison,” said Goldberg.



“But there he was standing there, his clothes were hanging off him because he had lost an awful lot of weight, demanding of the judge to look him in the eye.”



The two men survived the death penalty. More than 30 years later Goldberg asked Mandela why he thought they didn’t hang.



“Because I dared him too!” Mandela replied. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



Yet Goldberg believed at one stage Mandela may have felt – as the leader of the accused – that he may face yet get the noose. He recalled how Mandela would lecture Goldberg in the holding cells, under the court, near the end of the long trial.



“He used to say: ‘Denis when you teach people about Marxism don’t talk about Europe and slavery and feudalism – our people don’t understand that. You have to go back to our own country and own experience’ I said to him: ‘Nel, why are you telling me this?’ He says: ‘I just think you should know’ I know he was thinking he was going to be hanged.”



In the end no one was hanged. When the life sentence was handed down the accused, sitting with Mandela and Goldberg all looked at each other and laughed in relief.



“Nelson said in his book A Long Walk to Freedom that I said to my wife, from the dock, when asked about the verdict: ‘Life, life to live’ I wouldn’t use such literary English and it wasn’t my wife , she was in England, I said it to my mother. I said: ‘Life, life is wonderful’ and I can tell you more than 30 years later life is wonderful,” recalled Goldberg.”



“Was it worth it? Every single day. I wouldn’t change it except, I wouldn’t want to get caught if I were to it again!”

DSC_1387

MANDELA DAY 2020: How Mandela ate chocolate in the shadow of death: Goldberg on Madiba

Nelson Mandela once said that he may have been in prison for 27 years but he was not confined for one day because he could read and that lent his spirit freedom.



It appears that hunger for literacy may have condemned Mandela and his comrades to a life behind bars. On the eve of Mandela Day, July 18 which would have been his 102nd birthday, it is interesting to speculate that this joy of reading may have set in motion of chain of events that led to a life behind bars for his comrades in the underground.



One crisp winter afternoon on July 11 1963 police scooped up almost the entire leadership of the underground as they met in a small cottage the back of Liliesleaf farm, in Rivonia, Johannesburg, in a Trojan horse-style raid, with dogs and officers concealed in a pharmacy van. They arrested a ‘who’s who of the struggle: Govan Mbeki; Ray Mahlaba; Denis Goldberg; Walter Sisulu; Ahmed Kathrada; and Andrew Mlangeni.



“Ons het de jackpot!” said the triumphant arresting officer, as he telephoned the police station to inform his colleagues of the raid. In English, we have hit the jackpot. The police couldn’t believe their luck as they chained who they saw and desperadoes in a circle, on the Liliesleaf lawn,and allowed their dogs to snap at them.



“It is high treason chaps,” said Mbeki as the van was driven away. The captured laughed but they all knew the charges they were to face meant the death sentence. The armed struggle and bombings they had been running for many months had destroyed many key installations.



How the raid on Rivonia, which lent its name to the trial in which all were sentenced to life, came about has been argued over for years. Theories abound from informants, to nosey neighbours, to foreign spies.



There could be another theory connected to Mandela’s love of reading. Mbeki et al used to pretend to be farm workers at Liliesleaf, as part of their cover. They were so good at this that they used to sell the vegetables they grew to the nearby Rivonia police! So the police put food on the table through the hard work of revolutionaries, yet never twigged who grew it.



What could have given the Liliesleaf crew away was their love of reading. Being intellectual revolutionaries they all devoured daily newspapers that aroused suspicion. Surviving fellow farm workers recalled in interviews, in 2012, that they told people they worked with “black men with newspapers” – a rarity in 1960s South Africa.



Another incident, depicted in the painting by Kevin Krapf at the top of this article, involving Nelson Mandela reading a newspaper, heightened that suspicion.



 A nearby farmer  by the name of Ernest Vickers called in to see Arthur Goldreich, an activist who lived in the farm as a front for the underground. Vickers was shocked to see a black man sitting in the lounge with his feet up on the coffee table reading a newspaper. The man was lawyer Mandela who was pretending to be a domestic worker at the farm and was to become his country’s first democratically elected president.



Unbelievably, in this day and age, Vickers reported what he had seen to the Rivonia police, maybe as it was taking another delivery of vegetables.  Years later, Vickers was convinced that it was this report that led to the raid and life imprisonment. He was also worried about the repercussion there could be for his own family.



Maybe ?&nbsp; Maybe not. It could be forever lost in the mist of times that shroud the rich Mandela story. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

20200717_093810

“It is high treason chaps!”-  How the joy of reading could have put Nelson Mandela and his struggle comrades behind bars.

By Chris Bishop



It says a lot about the personality of the last survivor of the trial that saw Nelson Mandela face death that when he emerged from 27 years in prison he returned to the same tiny township home he had been arrested in on a cold, crisp, winter’s evening nearly three decades before. The bedroom where rough tough police pushed their way in, on June 24 1963, to arrest Andrew Mlangeni, who was in bed with his wife June Johanna, is now his book-filled study where he worked for years to improve the life of his &nbsp;people; there is an uplifting metaphor for hope in life if ever there was one. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



Not for Mlangeni the status symbol big empty multi-storey mansions of rich; he preferred to stay in the house be bought, in Dube in Soweto the Johannesburg township where he was born, close to his family and the people who supported his liberation politics. In his mid-eighties, a time when most people have retired, the member of Parliament Mlangeni opened up an office for his people in Dube.



“People can come here and we can help them,” he said of his new office in 2009. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



The widely respected Mlangeni joined the struggle in 1951 – the year he met Mandela for the first time at a train station in Soweto. He was always destined for the struggle and often used to talk of the influence future African National Congress leader OR Tambo had on him as he taught him science and mathematics at school. &nbsp;&nbsp;



There is no doubt Mlangeni was a tough as nails; he fought exploitation as a young factory worker and led a bus strike in Johannesburg in the late 1940s- the days when violence and coercion were the order of the day. He trained as a soldier in China, in the early 1960s and soon after his return to South Africa he was captured in the famous police raid on Liliesleaf farm in Rivonia-the suburb that lent the trial its name.



As I write this, on June 6 2020 the sun is going down over Soweto on Mlangeni’s 95th birthday – an day to celebrate an achievement in both perpetuity and politics. Where ever he is tonight, Mlangeni will be surrounded by his comrades and friends; quite right too for one who sacrificed so much for many. I was lucky to spend time with him in the making of the CNBC Africa documentary Liliesleaf – the Untold Story and his bluff, no nonsense, persona left an indelible mark on me. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



In the dark days of the underground struggle, in the early 1960s, Mlangeni suffered more than most at the hands of bullying police. In the cells at the old Johannesburg Fort – now the Constitutional Court &#8211; where the Rivonia trialists were hauled in chains after the raid, his jailers were ruthless in seeking, in vain, information.



&nbsp;In a chance meeting in 2010, ironically in the colonial splendour of the Rand Club in downtown Johannesburg, he puffed on a Consulate cigarette as he told me of how the police tortured him with electrodes and dished out arguably the worst beating inflicted on any of the Rivonia trialists. He said at one point the police were waterboarding him; that is, holding a bag over his head while they poured water through.



“I felt my lungs fill up, I was drowning, I was gone…then one of the police hit me hard in the stomach and all of the water spurted out of me and I was OK!”



All of us listening over post lunch drinks, including the late veteran photographer, Alf Kumalo, who once had his skull cracked in police cells, laughed. If you have suffered through politics or journalism, especially as Alf had, you tend to see the funny side of the ugliest of moments.



We even chuckled over the fact that no evidence was directed towards Mlangeni during the Rivonia trial – meaning he spent a lifetime in prison for doing nothing wrong. He pleaded guilty, on principle, to all the charges, shoulder-to-shoulder with his comrades, in the hope the hearing would put apartheid South Africa on trial. It did, the so called terrorists in the dock caught the imagination of the world’s press and transformed into the Benjamin Franklins of Africa.



This principle cost Mlangeni 27 years of his life. In the back of the police van leaving the Palace of Justice in Pretoria, on their way to Robben Island, the accused, including Mandela and Mlangeni, held up three fingers to the young advocate George Bizos who had helped them escape the death sentence.



“Three years George and we will be out!”



It turned out not to be so. A life sentence in apartheid days, meant life, as Robben Island &nbsp;prisoner, the late Ahmed Kathrada, once commented to me with a hint of irony.



It is a measure of the man that Mlangeni said of his feelings about the 1964 life sentence, nearly half a century on: “We felt happy and proud &nbsp;that although the propaganda outside from the government that we were murderers, terrorists and rapists, people now knew we were none of these things and people knew what we were fighting for. That feeling that they know we are not thieves, that we are fighting for freedom, that is what kept us going.” How much would people give to hear a leader speak that way in 2020?

Why 95-year-old struggle stalwart Andrew Mlangeni was “happy and proud” about a life sentence.

By Chris Bishop



I once asked Denis Goldberg what he thought of one of his high ranking former comrades taking R500, 000 in bribes from a crook.



“What a cheapskate!” came back the reply faster than a gunslinger’s bullet. I expected more pious reply, not with Denis.



“He has sold out his job, his country, his beliefs, his politics and his morals – for half a million bucks?”



Denis said it with that dead pan look on his face. Believe me, he was deadly serious and angry, but his expression dissolved into that famous smile of his that made you think we frail human beings all make mistakes.



That was Denis and his attitude in a nutshell – he was principled and far from enamoured, in later years, with all that was going in the government that he fought to put in power and was never afraid to say so; and yet, he never forgot that we are all human and vulnerable, something that fuelled his tireless charity work.



I first met Denis at his home near the crashing waves of Hout Bay, near Cape Town, the city where he was born and should have lived out his days as a comfortable engineer in the suburbs. Instead he spent years training revolutionaries in the art of warfare and making bombs.



&nbsp;We got to know each other during the making of a three-hour documentary Liliesleaf – the Untold Story for CNBC Africa on the Rivonia trial, in 1963, where he faced the death penalty with Nelson Mandela. We kept in touch down the years with lunch, a phone call and the odd laugh about the absurdity of politics.



I shall never forget the warm, human, story he told on that summer day back in 2009 about how he sneaked small squares of chocolate to a chained and emaciated Mandela, in short trousers, whom police had dragged from prison to face sabotage charges.



“You don’t get sweeteners in prison,” said Goldberg with a smile.



Alongside Mandela, on that day, were the leading lights of the liberation movement: Walter Sisulu; Govan Mbeki; Ray Mhlaba; Andrew Mlangeni and Ahmed Kathrada. Only Mlangeni, who will be 95 in June, survives. &nbsp;



The authorities hoped would put them away forever. They nearly succeeded and certainly set back the liberation of South Africa by decades by incarcerating the leaders of the movement for life.



“’There was Mandela standing in the dock defiantly and forcing the judge to look him in the eye,” Goldberg said as if the hearing were yesterday at the Palace of Justice in Pretoria.



For some reason, Denis and I got on like a house on fire. He reminded me of my grandfathers – a hard man ready to fight for what was right, yet humane and compassionate with it.



The tough side of him came out in that interview. He told how the special branch officers used to taunt him across the courtroom, as the evidence was presented, by running their forefingers across their throats with a grin of death.



“I had to think about how to respond and in the end I did this back…” says Denis giving it the middle finger. Anyone who can give the finger to their captors in the shadow of death is tough enough.



Then, when he was relating the harrowing tale of his fractured relationship with his daughter, Hilary came out the old soldier hide of granite.



It was a sorrowful tale. Denis’s daughter worshipped him from afar as a latter day Robin Hood in the 20 years he was in prison. When he was released in 1984 they were reunited in Israel. A few months later the two fell out. It started when Hilary filtered the pile of hate mail from his daily post.



“I told her, Hilary, Hilly, you are trying to control me like they did in prison,” he said.&nbsp;



It all blew up. An angry Hilary told her father he had never been around and was always away fighting the struggle, you could see the pain Denis’s face.



“It took five years and a lot of counselling, but we reconciled. Unfortunately shortly after that she died.”



By this time both the young cameraman and myself, I am not ashamed to say this, had cast off our professional masks and had tears rolling down our cheeks.



“What’s the matter with you guys?” shot back Goldberg in mock outrage.



“I thought journalists were supposed to tough. I don’t know, the journalists of today!”



Then we all laughed, once again Denis had made people feel they would see the sun tomorrow.



His humour was legendary, as was his compassion. He once told me that he was handed three life sentences but was given a bulk discount and only served one. On the other side of the coin, he told me of the horror of lying in his cell listening to condemned men screaming as warders dragged them to the gallows. It was pure Denis that he learned the guitar so he could play a heartfelt musical tribute to the condemned.



Only Denis could have led the laughter in court when he and his comrades slipped the noose.



“Life and life is wonderful,” he called out when someone asked the verdict of the dock.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Amid all the laughter, sound and fury of the life of Denis Goldberg there is one cool winter’s afternoon that I will always remember him by. It was at Liliesleaf , in 2013, at the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the raid on Rivonia that led him to spending 20 years in prison.



It was a draining day for an 80-year-old. There were journalists asking questions and taking pictures everywhere. Denis was patient and explained his story to those too young and green to know, but as the day wore on I could see he was getting tired. It was a Rivonia reunion with lawyers Joel Joffe, who became an insurance tycoon in Britain, and George Bizos, still fighting the good fight, there to reminisce with the men they saved from the noose.



On top of that, Denis had to settle a 50-year-old grudge with the late Bob Hepple, a former comrade who was up to his neck in the sabotage trial. He had negotiated his way out of police cells with a decision to turn state witness that led to him skipping the country to a knighthood and a comfortable life as a professor at Cambridge University.



“At the time, I told him you do this and people will cross the street to avoid you,” Denis told me.



To rub salt in the wound, Hepple sent Denis, insensitively,&nbsp; a Christmas card in prison in his first year of incarceration. Fifty years later Denis shook hands with Hepple and buried the grudge with good humour.



My abiding memory of Denis came later on that day as the sunlight dimmed along with his fading energy.&nbsp; A young schoolgirl, in uniform, who must have been about 13, approached him as he was heading for the car to take him to the hotel.



“Excuse me Mr Goldberg I am doing my school project on the Rivonia trial can I talk to you?” she says. Even I thought an exhausted Denis he was going to decline politely, but he sat down and smiled.



More than an hour later I saw Denis sitting at the table telling patiently his story to the school girl making copious notes. Maybe she will fight for freedom one day too.



I smiled and walked away. That was Denis and I was proud to have known him.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

Farewell one of the last survivors of Mandela’s band of brothers: Denis Goldberg – the gentle lion of the struggle.

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Nic Wolpe, CEO of the Liliesleaf Trust joins CNBC Africa for more on the life of ANC struggle stalwart Denis Goldberg who died just before midnight aged 87.

Liliesleaf Trust CEO on the life of ANC struggle stalwart Denis Goldberg

By Chris Bishop



One of the last of the band of brothers who stood in the dock with Nelson Mandela, in the shadow of noose, has died aged 87 after a life of trying to help others.



Denis Goldberg was one of the accused in the Rivonia trail where Mandela and his comrades faced charges of sabotage that carried the death penalty. Andrew Mlangeni, who will be 95 in June, is the sole survivor of those accused who were sentenced to life in 1964.



Goldberg trained as an engineer and could have made a comfortable living for himself, but was sickened to his guts by the apartheid regime in South Africa. In the wake of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 he joined the military wing of the African National Congress &#8211; Mhkonto Wesizwe where he trained recruits and because he was an engineer everyone assumed he could make bombs.



In the police raid on Liliesleaf farm in Rivonia, in Johannesburg, in 1963, detectives caught Goldberg reading a book at the end of a day trying to procure hand grenades for the sabotage campaign. The raid also collared the leading lights of the underground movement: Walter Sisulu; Ahmed Kathrada; Mlangeni and Govan Mbeki. It led to the famous trial in which Mandela and his comrades spent the best part of 27 years on Robben Island.



Goldberg was separated from his comrades, because he was white, and sent to a whites-only prison in Pretoria where he served 20 years in the same cell. The separation from those he had fought the struggle with hurt Goldberg deeply.



In 1984, Goldberg was released from prison and flew to Israel to be reunited with his wife Esme and daughter Hilary. He went to London to work for the ANC in exile.



In his retirement, Goldberg returned to the city of his birth &#8211; Cape Town. He built his own home among the fishing cottages of Hout Bay. He was energetic in retirement and spent the remainder of his days working for peace and the betterment of others.



Goldberg spent most of his life working for a political movement. Anyone who knew him will tell you he was his own man. When politics and the ruling party took a dismal turn in South Africa he was never afraid to speak out against the ill-advised actions of many of his former comrades.

One of the last of Mandela’s band of brothers is gone – freedom fighter Denis Goldberg  passes away.

At a time when new President Cyril Ramaphosa is trying to restore faith and credibility to the South African government &#8211; another strong link with the far off days of pride, struggle and sacrifice, more than half a century ago, has passed into history.
In many ways Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who has died aged 81, reflected both sides of the struggle for liberation in South Africa: on the one side its stoic pride in resisting the dark forces of apartheid; on the other, the grim and often far from noble struggle on the streets of the townships against the last, vicious, kicks of the security forces.
There are two images -of Madikizela-Mandela making the clenched fist black power salute &#8211;  that sum up her defiant support of the struggle and her husband Nelson Mandela.
The first was taken on the steps of the Palace of Justice, in Pretoria, in 1963, at the so-called Rivonia Trial as he faced the death penalty on charges of sabotage. Madikizela-Mandela, fresh-faced and determined, held the salute in the face of police who had tried to intimidate her and even attempted to stop her wearing her traditional dress to court.
Fast forward to February 1990 when Madikizela-Mandela again made the same clenched fist salute as she walked hand-in-hand with her freed husband into cheering crowds outside Victor Verster Prison, near Cape Town.
That joyous day also saw the beginning of the end for the couple&#8217;s marriage that began back in 1958 and ended in 1996. Mandela emerged from 27 years in prison as a pragmatic negotiator determined to heal his broken nation; Madikizela-Mandela remained a flinty, feisty, hard-liner and these differences mixed with domestic issues, ushered the couple towards divorce.
Few could blame Madikizela-Mandela for her tough stance in politics. She was dragged through the mill by the apartheid authorities and spent more than 18-months in solitary confinement where she was forced to lie naked on a cold concrete floor. Police hammered on doors and searched her home, like clockwork, she was tortured by special branch thugs and her children were taken from her. When she was freed, the authorities banished her to Brandfort, a small town in the Free State, where she suffered years of isolation and intimidation, including the fire bombing of her home.
Madikizela-Mandela&#8217;s image was undoubtedly tarnished by violence linked to  her bodyguards from the infamous Mandela United Football Club. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission &#8211; the hearings that tried to heal post-apartheid South Africa &#8211; found Madikizela-Mandela to have been linked to violence in the grimy days of the township struggle.
Yet Madikizela-Mandela threw many of her latter years into causes that cemented her nickname : Mother of the Nation. She shrugged off criticism for failing to attend Parliament and being slow in paying rent to remain defiant until the end.
Madikizela-Mandela died in Milpark Hospital in Johannesburg, the very hospital where her former husband fought for his life in a health scare in 2011, in the early hours of April 2. She leaves two daughters: Zindziswa and Zenani.

End of an era as #WinnieMandela – Mother of the Nation – dies aged 81

One of the lawyers who saved Nelson Mandela from the rope and became a millionaire English lord died in his country home of Liddington, in Wiltshire, on June 18, aged 85.
Joel Joffe, the former chairman of Oxfam, was one of three surviving lawyers from the so called Rivonia Trial that ended in 1964 in life imprisonment for Mandela and his comrades on 221 charges of sabotage. He is survived by Johannesburg Human Rights Lawyers George Bizos and Denis Kuny.
I had the pleasure of meeting him at a 50th anniversary reunion of the raid on Liliesleaf, in Rivonia Johannesburg, the hideout where police arrested most of the accused in 1963.
I was struck by how he carried his wealth and title lightly – you wouldn’t have blinked if you saw him shopping in a Johannesburg supermarket. He was made Baron Joffe of Liddington, in 2000, by Labour premier Tony Blair; I asked about his title.
“Ag, just call me Joel,” says he.
At the time the trial began in 1963, Joffe, who wanted out of apartheid South Africa, was packing for Australia. Bram Fischer, who led the defence, asked him to be the instructing attorney.
“He slept on a mattress on the floor with his wife; his furniture had gone to Australia. He was persuaded to stay .They lived on as little as possible so the defence fund could go as far as possible…What Joel showed is that courage takes many different forms, here was a lawyer who wanted out of apartheid and yet stayed to uphold the principles of justice for people who had no hope of surviving, at a time when no other lawyer would take it on. That is courage,” says accused number three Denis Goldberg, aged 84, who lives in semi-retirement in Hout Bay, near Cape Town.
The trial, that lasted nearly a year, cost 29,000 pounds, at 1964 prices, but the defence team chose not to take a penny.
At the climax of the trial, Mandela spoke these words that went down in history: “It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
It was Bizos who added the words “if needs be” into the speech to try to stay the death penalty and Mandela wasn’t amused.
“I read my speech and there seems to be an error, he said. It is my sentence and I want it back!” chuckled Joffe.
On a more sombre note, Joffe recalled the handwritten note by Mandela, now in a museum, in which he wrote his last words, should he hang.
“This handwritten note said ‘I apologise for nothing, I was fighting for justice and there’s no sacrifice I am not prepared to make in the cause of justice’ that was Mandela, faced with hanging, no fear,” smiled Joffe on that warm spring evening back in 2013. He left the country of his birth in 1965 for England where he founded the life assurance Allied Dunbar, in 1970, with seed capital from Hambros Bank. It made him a multi-millionaire, yet he spent much of his time and money helping the poor. He was a little downbeat about the country of his birth when I asked him about it in 2013.
“In South Africa today sadly the majority of the population is living in poverty and unemployment and one believes there is much more that government could do about that and then these problems with corruption, incompetence and inefficiency would disappear.” he says.
Words that ring even truer today.

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Rivonia trial

Remembering George Bizos: A pillar of SA’s democracy

How a brutal torturer saved Andrew Mlangeni from death by drowning.

Andrew Mlangeni, a working class young lion of Africa

MANDELA DAY 2020: How Mandela ate chocolate in the shadow of death: Goldberg on Madiba

“It is high treason chaps!”- How the joy of reading could have put Nelson Mandela and his struggle comrades behind bars.

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Farewell one of the last survivors of Mandela’s band of brothers: Denis Goldberg – the gentle lion of the struggle.

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One of the last of Mandela’s band of brothers is gone – freedom fighter Denis Goldberg passes away.

End of an era as #WinnieMandela – Mother of the Nation – dies aged 81

Joel Joffe: Rivonia Trial lawyer, a man you could bet your life on

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