After two weeks in the Fort, the prisoners were taken to the temporary courtroom which had been prepared for the trial. The old Drill Hall in the centre of Johannesburg was a forbidding military relic, with a corrugated-iron roof half-lined with hessian and a quaint gabled façade overlooking a parade ground. Mandela and the other prisoners were driven there in police vans escorted by troop-carriers; crowds of sympathisers were waiting for them outside the hall, and others inside watched them emerge into the improvised courtroom. Can Themba described the scene: ‘The accused came up in batches of twenty, some of them cheerful, some sullen, some frightened, some bewildered, some consumed in high wrath … When Nelson Mandela, attorney, came up he hunched his shoulders and seemed to glower with suppressed anger.’6
The magistrate was F.C.A. Wessel, an elegant, silver-haired Afrikaner from Bloemfontein. He began speaking, but it soon became clear that his words were inaudible without loudspeakers; the hearings were adjourned until the next day. When the prisoners returned they were put inside a huge wire cage built in the courtroom; the defence lawyers immediately objected, and the cage was eventually dismantled.
At last the chief prosecutor began reading the 18,000-word indictment. The charge of high treason was based on speeches and statements made by the accused over the previous four years, beginning in October 1952, when the Defiance Campaign was at its peak, and continuing through the Sophiatown protests, the Congress of the People and the Freedom Charter, which formed the main basis of the charge. The prosecution argued that the accused conspired to overthrow the government by violence and to replace it with a communist state; but they had to prove the violent intentions.
Mandela reflected how often treason had recurred throughout South Africa’s short history. In both world wars some Afrikaners had rebelled against war with Germany, taking up arms on the enemy’s side, and had been tried for treason. The Afrikaners in office had been reluctant to execute their own people, and when Dr Malan’s government came to power it had released all those convicted of treason during the Second World War, most notably the notorious Nazi Robey Leibbrandt. But Mandela knew that the Nationalists would be much harsher towards their black enemies. He did not think the government genuinely believed that the accused were guilty of treason: the Freedom Charter, after all, enunciated principles which were accepted throughout the civilised world. He thought the whole trial was a frame-up, and that the government merely intended to put the Congress leaders out of action for several years.7
He soon realised that the trial would be much more prolonged than he had expected. On the fourth day the 156 prisoners were released on bail of £25 for blacks, £250 for whites (‘Even treason was not colour-blind,’ Mandela commented), the money being guaranteed by supporters.8 The court adjourned until January 1957, and the accused were allowed to return to their homes. But it was clear that their lives would be disrupted for a long time to come.
The preliminary hearings, which began in January 1957, were intended only to establish whether there was a sufficient case to go for trial before the Supreme Court: but this process was to stretch over nine months and three million words, before any of the accused had even been examined or cross-examined. After the initial high drama of the arrests, the hearings soon settled down to an eerie combination of tedium, humour and menace. Day after day through the sweltering summer the ritual continued under the tin roof. Each morning Wessel, the courteous magistrate, would enter, lightly touching the corner of his desk as he passed, and the tousle-haired prosecutor Van Niekerk – Joe Slovo called him ‘Li’l Abner’ – would resume his indictment in a monotone.9 Most of the accused managed to maintain their sense of humour. When Kathrada passed a strip cartoon about Andy Capp – the cloth-capped male chauvinist in the London Daily Mirror – to one of the comrades he replied that he couldn’t see its relevance to Marxism-Leninism; Kathrada suggested it might help people to understand the lumpenproletariat.10
The trial soon dropped out of the headlines, and white Johannesburgers forgot about the supposed threat to their survival which was being examined in their midst. Watching it day after day, I had to keep reminding myself of the trial’s real significance as a succession of Afrikaner and black policemen revealed their incompetence and ignorance. The chief defence lawyer Vernon Berrangé, a former racing driver and fighter-pilot, was a sharp and theatrical questioner who shot down much of the evidence presented by barely literate detectives and spies. Writing from prison, Mandela recalled that he had been nick named ‘Isangoma’ (diviner) by the accused.11 Berrangé achieved his greatest coup when he cross-examined the state’s ‘expert witness’ on communism, Professor Murray, and quoted a passage which Murray condemned as ‘communism straight from the shoulder’. It turned out to have been written by Murray himself.
The farcical nature of much of the evidence concealed the trial’s real danger: ‘These proceedings are not as funny as they may seem,’ the magistrate warned the giggling suspects at one point.12 Mandela was worried by the frivolity of some of the young accused: when Lionel Morrison and others put up an umbrella to protect themselves from the leaking roof, he reproved them sternly.13 He was well aware of the high stakes, and knew that the humiliations of the police would only harden the government’s determination to put the ANC out of action.
Mandela took heart from a bus boycott in Alexandra, which began a week after the treason arrests – fourteen years after the boycott which had so impressed him when he had lived in Alexandra in 1943. Once again, black commuters walked twelve miles a day rather than pay an extra penny on the buses. The ANC, as Luthuli admitted, had no part in organising the boycott; it could only claim that it ‘helped create a climate of resistance in which such action could take place’.14 But the boycott threw up new local organisers outside the courtroom, including two ANC activists, Thomas Nkobi and Alfred Nzo, who later became prominent leaders. Eventually the government had to give way to the boycotters by passing a special bill requiring employers to subsidise the bus fare. It was the first Act of Parliament in the forty-seven years of the Union to have been passed as a result of African pressure, and it reminded Mandela that boycott could be a powerful instrument, but as a tactic, not a fixed strategy: ‘The boycott is in no way a matter of principle,’ he wrote in Liberation the next year, ‘but a tactical weapon.’15
Mandela kept a lower profile in the courtroom than Luthuli, Matthews or Sisulu: he never featured in the coverage of the left-wing paper New Age, the main chronicler of the trial.* His tall figure, immaculately dressed, carrying a briefcase and talking with slow deliberation, always seemed aloof from the rest. He still had some of the style of a proud chief who had been caught up with a slightly louche urban crowd. Mandela’s later biographer Mary Benson, who worked with him on the Treason Trial Defence Fund, saw him then as a rather slick young man, and ‘did not take him very seriously’.16 But the defence lawyers noticed that he had a quiet authority over his fellows, who often sought out his legal advice; and his own testimony would reveal how deeply he had considered his commitment to the cause.17
Z.K. Matthews, with his rigorous legal mind, listened to the trial with growing contempt: ‘These chaps seem to think