The prosecutor asked Govan why, if he admitted many of the actions in the four counts against him, he did not simply plead guilty to the four counts? ‘First,’ Govan said, ‘I felt I should come and explain under oath some of the reasons that led me to join these organisations. There was a sense of moral duty attached to it. Secondly, for the simple reason that to plead guilty would to my mind indicate a sense of moral guilt. I do not accept there is moral guilt attached to my answers.’62
Mandela makes no mention in this volume of Mbeki’s testimony, or his views, on Operation Mayibuye. But in his unpublished autobiography, he has much more to say on this subject. Here Mandela writes: ‘Govan Mbeki, a member of the High Command … when he was banned in 1962 argued that the document had been approved not only by the High Command but also by the ANC. He insisted that it now formed the basis for all the activities of MK and felt that it would be wrong to argue that it was still under consideration when we were arrested.’63 Later Mandela noted that Mbeki and Joe Slovo had drafted Operation Mayibuye.64
In contrast, Walter Sisulu ‘admitted that the document was drawn up by the High Command [of MK] and approved in principle by the Working Committee of the ANC but he challenged the statement that it had the approval of the ANC’. All of the other accused agreed with Sisulu. Mandela (who had been in prison at the time of these events, and so could not attest to the facts either way) emphasises in the unpublished autobiography that ‘to claim that the document had been formally adopted by the ANC simply because it was approved in principle by the Working Committee at the time of only 4 persons – Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, J.B. Marks and Dan Tloome – was contrary to the whole procedure we had adopted even as an illegal organisation’. The upshot, according to Mandela’s account here, was that ‘Accordingly we decided to contest the State allegation that the document was a blueprint of our plans and Walter Sisulu and all the other accused were now to put forward this line’.65
It appears that Mbeki did just that. According to Frankel, Mbeki was a co-author of the plan, which ‘used some of the data and concepts Arthur Goldreich had gathered during his secret trips to the East Bloc’.66 Several other sources confirm Mbeki’s support for the plan, though not his authorship. Rusty Bernstein, who was directly involved in the debates over the document, makes it clear that Mbeki was a wholehearted proponent of Operation Mayibuye.67 Anthony Sampson, Mandela’s authorised biographer, describes Mbeki as one of its three ‘main proponents in the MK high command’.68 Bob Hepple, who after his arrest was freed by the state with the expectation that he would testify against the others – but fled the country instead – was new to these meetings, having joined the secretariat of the Communist Party Central Committee in April, 1963, just three months before the Rivonia arrests. But he attended one meeting a week before the Rivonia arrests, at which he reports that Mbeki was an ‘enthusiastic’ supporter of the plan.69 Similarly, Denis Goldberg writes that Mbeki, Mhlaba and Wilton Mkwayi had all ‘insisted’ that Operation Mayibuye ‘had been agreed upon’.70
Mbeki, however, acknowledged neither authorship nor support for Operation Mayibuye in court. In his testimony he appeared to attribute authorship to Arthur Goldreich – one of the men who had escaped from prison and fled the country. Asked whether this document had become the basis for action, Mbeki repeatedly explained that it had not, and indeed could not have, attained this status. He declared:
My attitude was in the first place that I hardly knew about the subject of guerrilla warfare, but I felt that since we had plans for mass action underway, rather than think of bringing forward new plans, new ideas which would divert the attention of the movement, we should suspend even the discussion of this Plan which Mr Goldreich was bringing forward until this campaign … until we are through with the campaign.71
Mbeki elaborated on a history of deliberations that clearly does not fit with Mandela’s description of Mbeki’s actual view. Mandela’s biographer writes that Mbeki ‘was undeniably at the heart of the conspiracy, but did not defend Operation Mayibuye in court, and gave nothing away that was not already in evidence’.72 He agreed with a question put to him by Fischer, ‘that what was clearly understood [as of May 1963] was that no recommendation could possibly be put before the National Liberation movement until some plans had been concretely presented and decided upon’. To that end, a logistics committee was established, with Goldreich chairing it, to investigate the feasibility of Operation Mayibuye, including costs and time required. At the beginning of July 1963, Goldreich presented a report at a meeting of the High Command of MK, but ‘the National High Command said that the report was very inaccurate, and that the National High Command could not go only by that report to arrive at a decision on Operation Mayibuye’. Goldreich’s revised report was to have been discussed on 11 July, the day of the Rivonia arrests. Mbeki concurred with Fischer that the plan ‘was never reported upon in any detail, and it was in fact never presented even to the [ANC National] Secretariat’. And, putting the matter more generally, Mbeki declared, ‘I don’t think at the time there would have been any justification for the leadership of the African National Congress to change over to guerrilla warfare.’ Goldreich, Mbeki said, ‘did not convince. It is incorrect to say so, that he convinced either M.K. or the A.N.C.’73
Walter Sisulu backed up Mbeki’s version in his testimony. He emphasised that there was a division of views among those who evaluated Operation Mayibuye; underlined the long lead time required for a change of policy such as this; repeatedly pointed to the lack of sufficient detail from Operation Mayibuye’s advocates to support a decision to go forward; gave no indication that Mbeki might have been a drafter of the report; and testified:
Mr. Mbeki argued that he could not, he was a new man, he could not make up his mind one way or another [about Operation Mayibuye], but he, however, felt that a plan of this nature must be laid with our political activities, and that it should not cloud the issue which the African National Congress considered to be the main issue in 1963, namely the anti-pass campaign, and the strike which was being contemplated.74
Raymond Mhlaba also confirmed Mbeki’s account, testifying that Mbeki ‘was not in favour of it [Operation Mayibuye]. He found certain difficulties confronting the implementation of the introduction of guerrilla warfare in the country.’75
All of this is in stark contrast with Rusty Bernstein’s statement of the approach the accused took to the trial: ‘We decide that we will not say anything about anyone still in the country. We will name no names. We will set out as clearly as we can the strategy and aims of the movement. We will make no denial of any true facts, and no apologies.’76 But it is in accord with the rather different account of the approach of the accused that Mandela gives, not in his published autobiography, but in the unpublished version:
We defended ourselves on the basis of what the enemy knew, on what was unknown to the enemy and on the basis of the political situation in the country as we assessed it. We readily admitted what was known by the enemy to be true but we refused to give away any information we considered dangerous to our case or that might implicate others.77
What Mandela says here is that the accused were prepared to conceal damaging information if the state – ‘the enemy’ – did not already possess it. The state knew a lot about Operation Mayibuye, but it had no testimony from inside these high-level meetings, and so the accused took advantage of this gap in the case against them, putting forward the line that they considered most helpful to their cause. (How they coordinated their testimony isn’t clear, since they knew they were under surveillance. Denis Goldberg thinks that they must simply have pursued a shared sense of self-preservation,78 but it is possible that Goldberg had less opportunity to consult his comrades than did the African members of the accused – who were, naturally, separately confined by race.)
All of this placed the lawyers for the accused, or at least Fischer personally, in a particularly acute ethical dilemma. If anything, the issues they confronted here were more acute than those involving the establishment of the defence team. Did