“Freedom is more important than your own life. Nelson epitomised it.
I in my own way did the same. I was happy to serve.”Denis Goldberg to the University of Cape Town, 2019
Denis Goldberg, the close associate of Nelson Mandela and renowned anti-apartheid activist, has died.
Goldberg had been suffering from lung cancer and diabetes. He died on 29 April at his home in Hout Bay, in the suburbs of Cape Town, 18 days past his birthday. He was 87.
A statement from his family and the Denis Goldberg Legacy Foundation Trust said: “Denis Goldberg passed away just before midnight on Wednesday. His was a life well lived in the struggle for freedom in South Africa. We will miss him.”
Shaping history
The chief executive of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Sello Hatang, said: “He was a member of a generation of leadership which shaped the country’s history in profound ways.”
President Cyril Ramaphosa declared three days of national mourning for him, starting on 1 May.
The veteran South African anti-apartheid activist was a lifelong supporter and member of the now governing African National Congress. He became a member of the ANC’s secret armed wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), when it formed in 1961.
Goldberg, a railway engineer, put his knowledge of explosives at the group’s disposal to plan their raids. On 11 July 1963, however, apartheid police raided the MK hideout in the Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia and arrested the eight men on the premises. Although Mandela was already in jail on Robben Island, the same raid led to his eventual conviction and life sentence.
The court case which followed, known as the Rivonia Trial, ended in the conviction of the whole MK high command. The group also included Ahmed Kathrada, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba and Walter Sisulu.
A hundred and fifty anti-apartheid activists were prosecuted in the case leading up to the convictions. The group was targeted for its involvement with the ANC’s fight against apartheid – the legalised form of racism imposed on South Africa in 1948 by the white minority government.
“Violent revolution”
The men were accused of “campaigning to overthrow the government by means of violent revolution”. In 1964 Goldberg was jailed at the same time as seven others, including Mandela and Walter Sisulu. They had faced the death sentence but the judge shied away from decreeing the ultimate penalty in such a high-profile case. They were sentenced to life in prison for violating the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act. Goldberg got four life terms in prison.
In the apartheid years, most of the high-profile black prisoners convicted in South Africa were sent to Robben Island.
As the only white person to be found guilty in the Rivonia case, Goldberg was separated from the others. He spent 22 years in isolation in the whites-only wing of Pretoria Central Prison.
Released in 1985, he went into exile in England, where he joined his family and continued to campaign for the ANC, working for the party’s London office until liberation in 1994.
Communist roots
Born on 11 April 1933 in Cape Town, Cape Province (now the Western Cape) into a left-wing Jewish family that had emigrated to South Africa from the UK, Goldberg matriculated from the Observatory Boys’ School in Cape Town. His parents, both communists, were born in London, the children of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. His father ran a small bus company; his mother, a homemaker, was an anti-apartheid activist.
He was the first in his family to attend university, graduating from the University of Cape Town with a Bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 1955.
In 1957 he joined the banned South African Communist Party. And in 1961 he was recruited into MK, where his technical skills as an engineer were useful in devising weapons and deploying explosive materials.
Goldberg was first jailed for four months after his arrest during protests against the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. Police opened fire on a crowd of 7,000 anti-pass laws demonstrators, killing 69 people and wounding 180, during the protests in the then Transvaal region. Some were schoolchildren campaigning against regulations banning instruction in any language other than Afrikaans.
Life in prison . . . and beyond
On his release, Goldberg argued in favour of stepping up the fight against apartheid. It was at this point that he became an official in the newly formed MK.
He was apprehended in 1963 when police raided the meeting of leading activists at Liliesleaf Farm, a smallholding in Rivonia, to the north of Johannesburg. Of the three white men apprehended in the raid, he was the only one condemned to life in prison. Mandela was the last of the Rivonia group to be released, emerging from prison in February 1990.
On release in 1985, Goldberg went into exile in England, only returning to live in South Africa in 2002.
In later life, he was a spokesman for the African National Congress and represented it on the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid. He served as special advisor to Ronnie Kasrils, the then Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry, between 2002 and 2004.
He was awarded the Order of Luthuli, one of South Africa’s highest civil honours, for his lifelong dedication to working to improve the lives of South Africans.
Goldberg’s first wife, the physiotherapist Esme Bodenstein, died in 2000; their daughter, Hilary, died in 2002. His second wife, the journalist Edelgard Nkobi, died in 2006. He is survived by his son, David, and three grandchildren.
Eugene Selorm Owusu
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