Women in Solitary. Shanthini Naidoo

was the state’s second witness, but once again Liebenberg was to be stymied. She had agreed to be a witness only in order to stop the beatings during her interrogation at the old Sanlam building in PE – which was to be the venue of Black Consciousness Movement leader Steve Biko’s murder years later – after which she was moved to Pretoria.

      On the morning of the trial Nondwe was interrupted during her exercises in her cell and was not even given time to dress for her court appearance – the first time in a year that her comrades, family and friends would see her. ‘I must have looked like I was coming out of a hole after all those months,’ she would say later. ‘I was feeling dizzy in the fresh air.’

      Despite the months in solitary confinement, and the prospect of further detention or worse, once she was put on the stand she refused to testify. ‘I do not wish to give evidence against my people,’ was all she said.26

      The prosecutor was admonished by the judge, Justice Simon Bekker, who threatened contempt of court charges, to no avail. ‘What kind of witnesses are these?’ he demanded of Liebenberg. But Liebenberg had no answers.

      Bekker declared, ‘I find the accused not guilty. You are dismissed.’27

      At these words cheers rang through the courthouse and reverberated to the supporters outside, who expressed their elation by shouting and singing. Freedom – at last! The elation would last for just a few minutes, however. With barely a moment to feel the sunlight on their pasty skin or to breathe the clean air, the accused were immediately re-detained under the Suppression of Communism Act for a further 90-day period and taken back to their solitary cells. No doubt reprisals for the state witnesses would come. There was some talk that after the Christmas recess, everybody would be discharged, but this did not happen. Each delay was an axe blow. Still, they carried on, fighting the detention with their stubborn refusal to give in.

      Relatives of fifteen of the 22 triallists tried to obtain court orders to restrain the security police from assaulting or torturing those they were holding for interrogation. An IDAF affidavit tried to argue that witnesses were compromised by their treatment and torture. A British student had fingers prodded in his eyes and was beaten into the submission of flimsy information, including that he had made copies of a document for one of the triallists.

      In fact, the security branch had a twofold aim. Apart from detaining the 22 away from the public, to silence them and the more than 100 activists who were arrested in the national crackdown, they aimed to break their spirit of resistance.

      Winnie Mandela was considered then the mother of the nation, after the arrest and imprisonment of the male leadership of the ANC. She was a force to be suppressed and silenced, kept away from the masses who edged closer to uprising.

      The 90-day detention without trial law was firmly in place. The General Law Amendment Act gave the justice minister the power to detain anyone under suspicion in solitary confinement without trial for 90 days, and thereafter for further periods of 90 days – again and again, according to a minister of the time, ‘until this side of eternity’. And they did.

      A report in London presented by the IDAF said: ‘As soon as the 22 accused realised that they had been freed of the charges against them, they began to smile and congratulate one another. Then a loudspeaker ordered the public to leave the courtroom. Police with rifles and submachine guns hustled away the small crowd of people gathered around, while other policemen escorted the 22 into a 5-ton police truck. Instead of being allowed to go free, they were all back where they had started – in prison, incommunicado, in solitary confinement for a further indefinite period, for further “interrogation” by the Security Police.’28

      Another report from the IDAF, in February 1970, appealed to the world to take notice:

      ‘Meanwhile, the imposition of apartheid has become progressively more inhuman, more vicious, more cruel, more intransigent, and literally more murderous. Surely the time has now been reached when the ‘bridge builders’ realise that this activity is valueless and serves only to endorse the policies of apartheid. White South Africans cannot claim, as the Germans under Hitler, that they do not know what is being done in their name. They know, and the overwhelming majority do not heed. And they will continue to close their eyes and to stop their ears so long as the rest of the world accepts them comfortably, so long as it trades with them, plays with them, holidays with them, so long as it too closes its eyes and stops its ears. Everything here is authenticated, and the accounts of torture are taken from sworn legal affidavits.’29

      Also in February 1970 an editorial in the New York Times head-lined ‘Again, South African Justice’ referred specifically to the Trial of 22:

      ‘In its treatment of 22 blacks charged with working for the banned African National Congress, South Africa seems determined to outdo even its own appalling record for “legal” cruelty and hypocrisy. The prosecution in Pretoria was having deep trouble making a case against the defendants so it abruptly dropped the charges …

      ‘The prosecution was obviously embarrassed by two things: One was the triviality of its own “evidence” against the defendants. The other was the persistence of Justice Simon Bekker, rare in South African courtrooms nowadays, in inquiring into the pretrial treatment of State witnesses, some of whom had also been detained for months under the provisions of the Terrorism Act … The prosecution’s strategy seems clear: It will simply hold the defendants under the Terrorism Act until more “evidence” can be obtained or concocted by the bestial methods that have become a hallmark of South African “justice”.’30

      The idea was for the 22 and others to be broken, for their resistance to cease. They would be arrested and rearrested seemingly at the whim of the security police – such flimsy things as love letters and postcards as evidence of terrorism.

      The group was interrogated to uncover high-level plots and plans against the government, fed the bare minimum and kept unhealthy, but alive. Sometimes not. The detainees’ spirits were low, yet the state feared them enough to keep them under its thumb.

      ‘The freezing loneliness made one wish for death,’ Joyce testified years later at the TRC hearings. ‘I keep harping on this, because I do not know if people realise what went on when the Boers wanted to kill peoples’ intellect.’

      The government of the time did not bank on the strength of their convictions.

      The trial, The State versus Ndou and 21 others of 1969, may not be as widely known as the landmark Rivonia Trial of 1963/4 which saw the leadership of the ANC imprisoned for nearly three decades. The names of the detainees are not as familiar as those of Nelson Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada and others and yet the Trial of 22 changed the course of South African history and the struggle for liberation in its own right. By the ‘state witnesses’ refusing to testify, the case collapsed.

      The detainees were eventually released in September 1970, and the slow machinery of the movement continued.