South African Trials

South Africa under apartheid provided all too many examples of both internment without trial and partisan show trials. The Terrorism Act allowed any police officer above the rank of lieutenant colonel to detain indefinitely anyone he had reason to believe is a terrorist or has information about terrorists.

With the collapse of apartheid we are learning more about the acts of terrorism conducted by the police under the ironically named Terrorism Act. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in 1995 to probe into the events that made South Africa a totalitarian system. In the next chapter we will examine both a partisan trial under South African apartheid laws and the efforts of the Commission to bring the truth to light and heal the society’s wounds.

If the Security Police, without being checked by the courts, may subject whomever they wish to an indefinite detention, why have a trial at all? South Africa, certainly, had a number of celebrated trials, such as the 1956–1961 Treason Trial when ninety-one were put on trial, the 1964 Rivonia Trial of Nelson Mandela and other African National Congress (ANC) leaders, or the 1976 trial of the SASO/BPC leaders.

It should be noted, before we make a careful inquiry into a given trial, that South Africa, perhaps because of its deep divisions within, has had a history of partisan trials. Until the party of the Afrikaners took over in 1948, Afrikaners were frequently the defendants. These trials have been looked back upon with nationalistic reverence, for they give evidence to the Afrikaners that they were a persecuted nation. In 1815 a frontiersman, Frederick Bezuidenhout, was summoned by the British authorities to answer charges of cruelty in his treatment of a Khoi servant. In the attempt to arrest him Bezuidenhout was killed while he resisted. The incident prompted a revolt against the British. After the revolt of frontiersmen was suppressed, a two-judge Special Commission banished thirty-two of the rebels from the Eastern Cape and sentenced six to be hanged at Slagter’s Nek.⁴¹ They are now Afrikaner martyrs.

After the Boer War at the turn of the century, the bitter-enders among the Afrikaners resented the decision of the South African government, led by former generals and Afrikaner moderates Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, to enter World War I on the side of the hated British. When the Afrikaner diehards’ revolt of 1914 was put down, most of the leaders received mild sentences. But a minor leader, Jopie Fourie, who had been in the South African defense force, was sentenced to death. In his address to the court Fourie recalled the Slagter’s Nek executions and foretold his own role as an Afrikaner martyr: “The little tree planted today and watered with my blood will grow and bring forth wonderful fruit for our people.”⁴²

During World War II former Olympic boxer and popular Afrikaner Robey Liebbrandt went to Germany for training, returned to South Africa in a German submarine, and attempted to organize the overthrow of the government.

The Afrikaner nationalists turned the tables in 1948. Since then most of the significant trials have been of African nationalists. Their trials now promise to take on the historic and symbolic significance that the Afrikaners’ trials had. It is to one of those trials that we now turn.