“The Rivonia Trial Speech”

by Nelson Mandela

THE LITERARY WORK

A speech given by Nelson Mandela in his own defense on Aprii 20, 1964, in Pretoria, South Africa.

SYNOPSIS

Mandela defends the actions of the paramilitary group Umkhonto we Sizwe by describing African life under apartheid.

Events in History at the Time of the Speech

The Speech in Focus

For More Information

Born in the small village of Mvezo in South Africa’s Transkei region in 1918, Nelson Mandela grew up listening to the stories of his village elders, who spoke of the time before the white man arrived. Mandela’s father was a trusted adviser and a cousin to the paramount chief of Tembuland. According to Mandela himself, it was this strong sense of heritage that set him on the path of activism and revolution: “I hoped then [when listening to these stories] that life might offer me the opportunity to serve my people and make my own humble contribution to their freedom struggle” (Mandela, “Rivonia Trial Speech,” p. 163). Mandela attended law school at the Cape Province’s Fort Hare University College, where he was active in student politics. In 1944 Mandela joined the African National Congress’s Youth League, and in the next decade would emerge as a central figure of African nationalism in South Africa: he developed plans for ANC’s underground movement and eluded authorities during his own years underground. He was a key member of the ANC military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe and headed its early 1960s campaign of sabotage. The 1963 police raid on the group’s headquarters led to the Rivonia Trial, in which Mandela and eight other men were accused of a variety of offenses, and all but one were sentenced to life in prison. Despite warnings from his lawyers that he would weaken his own case, Mandela chose to open the defense with an oration from the docks, popularly known as “The Rivonia Trial Speech.” He preferred this public platform so that he could present, without interruption from the prosecution, the beliefs of the African nationalist movement.

Events in History at the Time of the Speech

Africans in South Africa

By the turn of the twentieth century, South Africa had become home to four large racial groups: whites (the British, who had ruled the Cape colony since 1806, and the Afrikaners—descendants mainly of seventeenth-century Dutch settlers); Africans (Bantu-speaking peoples such as the Xhosa, Tswana, Pedi, and Zulu); coloureds (racially mixed South Africans), and Asians (mostly from India). Throughout the nineteenth century the Afrikaners and British had waged “wars of dispossession” on the African peoples and had done so with increasing efficiency and technology, especially after the discoveries of diamonds in the Kimberley and gold in the Witswatersrand areas prompted a “massive influx of machinery and capital goods” into the country (McKinley, p. 2). Large numbers of Africans became wage workers for the newly formed mining companies, which led to the development of an increasingly rich white settler class and a dependent African labor class. Some African peoples, like the Pedi, quickly accommodated themselves to the new industries, and became very skillful at certain occupations at the mines. These people were soon joined by others, such as the Zulu and Sotho. Despite strong resistance, by the early twentieth century all the African societies had lost their political independence and were forced to live under white rule.

The Afrikaners and British were hardly friendly allies in the amassing of wealth and subjugation of Africans, however. Not only was a great deal of wealth at stake, but the Afrikaners were a fiercely independent and nationalistic group, deeply resentful of British domination. The South African War (Boer War) of 1899-1902, an eruption of this ill will, was essentially an attempt by the Afrikaners to preserve the independence of their settler states in the face of the British desire for complete dominance in South Africa. The British were victorious, and in 1910 the two groups joined to form the Union of South Africa. Although the Afrikaners were still subordinate to the British, together the two groups created a system of rule based on the oppression and segregation of Africans, Indians, and coloureds. Meanwhile, the Afrikaner nationalist movement grew, creating an entire ideology around the idea that the Afrikaners were a “chosen people” and that their destiny was to rule South Africa. This single-mindedness would eventually lead to the Afrikaner electoral victory in 1948, when South Africans voted the Nationalist Party into power under the campaign slogan apartheid—the system of racial segregation that legalized, in an increasingly intricate fashion, white supremacy.

The African National Congress

The African National Congress (ANC) was the first of several twentieth-century African organizations to address the dire situation of blacks in South Africa. After the Union of South Africa was formed, Africans were subjected to a barrage of repressive laws “designed to relegate [them] to a strictly subordinate role and to exploit [their] labour potential” (Meredith, In the Name of Apartheid, p. 35). The most severe of these laws were the 1913 Natives Land Act and the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act, which forced territorial segregation by race, and allotted only about 13 percent of the country to the Africans, who made up 70 percent of South Africa’s total population. Founded in 1912, the early ANC was conservative in nature, composed primarily of prominent, westernized Christian African men. The group’s first efforts focused on making pleas to both the South African and British governments for equal civil and political rights, but by the end of the decade, when it was clear that nothing was to come of these pleas, the ANC began to lose its momentum:

[T]he support of the chiefs ebbed away, membership stagnated and later declined, and Congress began a long struggle through a quarter of a century of political frustration and organizational weakness that at times all but overwhelmed it.

(Walshe in McKinley, p. 7)

During the following years, black political struggle seemed centered on the newly formed African worker’s unions that accompanied the rapid growth of South African industry after World War I. These workers staged strikes and protests with little support from the ANC, which distanced itself from the masses.

By the mid-1930s the ANC was extremely weak. Government legislation increasingly limited African rights over the years. Since the ANC posed relatively little threat to the government, its repressive measures were aimed mostly at the black labor movement, which became even more active before, during, and after World War II. As Mandela explains, “For thirty-seven years—that is, until 1949—[the ANC] adhered strictly to a constitutional struggle …. White government remained unmoved, and the rights of Africans became less instead of greater” (“Rivonia Trial Speech,” p. 165).

The 1940s saw an increase in militancy, however, in the African population at large. Increasing urbanization and industrialization led to greater overcrowding and poverty, and the housing shortage was acute. In 1943 a group of distinguished African leaders drew up a document called “African Claims,” demanding “freedom of the African people from all discriminatory laws whatsoever,” and presented it to the government (Meredith, In the Name of Apartheid, pp. 41-42). Two years later the document became formal ANC policy. Inspired by this shift in mood, the Congress Youth League (CYL) was created within the ANC in 1944 and became a group committed to a more militant type of nationalism. Members of this group, such as Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Robert Sobukwe, and Nelson Mandela, would make a lasting impact on South African life.

When the white National government came to power in 1948, the new era of apartheid began. The white Nationalists turned their full attention to securing white dominance by constructing “an apparatus of laws, regulations and bureaucracies” that would develop into “the most elaborate racial edifice the world had ever witnessed” (Meredith, In the Name of Apartheid, p. 54). Interracial marriages, as well as sexual acts between the races, were banned. Different racial groups were compelled by law to use separate restaurants, post offices, theaters, buses, and so on, or to use separate entrances and seats in public buildings. As residential areas for each racial group were demarcated, whole communities were uprooted to effect widespread racial separation. In the 1950s, when racist legislation was intensified by the new Minister of Native Affairs, the ANC became more strident. It was in this decade that “the young lions” like Mandela, Sisilu, Tambo, and Sobukwe came to the fore—all “educated men who were unwilling to wait, as their elders had done, for some indefinite future when white men should have experienced a change of heart” (Le May, p. 215).

At Mandela’s behest, the rejuvenated ANC shifted its policy, deciding to demonstrate peacefully, but unlawfully, against specific legislation, rather than protesting only through constitutional means. The “Defiance Campaign” was launched. Based on the principle of active resistance, plans for the campaign focused on illegal but nonviolent acts such as using facilities marked “for Europeans only,” or failing to carry the obligatory pass books that dictated where one was and was not allowed to travel. The protestors were instructed by the ANC to comply with the authorities, and so allowed themselves to be arrested without struggle. If the prisons became overrun with minor offenders, it was thought, the system would break down and be forced to change.

The campaign began on June 26, 1952, when a group wearing ANC armbands and shouting “Mayibuye Afrika,” or “Let Africa Return,” marched through an entrance into a train station that was designated for “Europeans only.” They were immediately arrested. Many similar acts followed, and in the process the ANC gained mass support. Members were optimistic about what the campaign could achieve, but the government responded only with police raids, the lifelong banning of 50 prominent antiapartheid leaders, and multiple arrests. Among those arrested, Mandela and Sisulu were found guilty of promoting communism but received suspended sentences. The government proceeded to increase security measures and its own power. The Public Safety Act of 1953 allowed the government to declare states of emergency whenever public order could not be maintained. As a result of these measures, the Defiance Campaign lost much of its momentum.

BANNED IN SOUTH AFRICA

The word ban had very specific meanings in South Africa, depending on whether the object of the banning was a person or a group. People who were banned could no longer publish, give speeches, or talk or meet with more than one person at a time. Sometimes they had to move to isolated, largely Afrikaner villages in the middle of the rural Orange Free State or elsewhere. Their mail was opened; their phones were tapped; they were constantly watched and harassed. They had to report to the police daily. Also their passports were confiscated and they could not travel anywhere without government permission. When an organization was banned, it lost its right to publish literature, stage a demonstration, have an office, or operate in any normal way. Mandela was banned, as was the African National Congress. This explains why there is a huge gap in photographs of Mandela; between the time he went into prison in 1964 and came out in 1990, it was illegal in South Africa to publish photographs of him. Likewise, it was illegal to publish information on the African National Congress.

Hoping to maintain the mass political fervor roused by the Defiance Campaign, the ANC began to work more closely with other antia-partheid groups. The ANC’s president, Chief Albert Lutuli, strongly supported turning the ANC into a multiracial movement, believing that help from nonwhites and liberals would hasten the demolishing of apartheid. The ANC’s goal, he later wrote, “is not that Congress shall rule South Africa, but that all Africans shall fully participate in ownership and government” (Lutuli in Meredith, In the Name of Apartheid, p. 66). In 1955 what came to be known as the Congress Alliance was therefore formed among different antiapartheid groups: primarily, the ANC, the South African Indian Conference, the National Union of the Organization of Coloured People, and the Congress of Democrats—a white organization with communist connections. The alliance produced a document titled the Freedom Charter, which called for the abolition of apartheid, universal suffrage, land redistribution, and other rights denied to blacks in South Africa. Once again, however, the government responded with a series of police raids and, a year later, accused 156 revolutionaries, including Mandela, of high treason. The defendants were released on bail, and in 1956 the long Treason Trial began; by 1959 only 30 of the accused, including Mandela, remained on trial. In 1961 all were acquitted.

Sharpeville

In 1959 part of the ANC broke away, and founded the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). The argument between the two groups centered mainly on the role of non-Africans in the ANC, as well as the widespread influence of communism within the Congress Alliance; unlike the ANC, with its goal of a nonracial, democratic society, the PAC “aimed at the complete replacement of White minority rule with African rule” (Ranuga, p. 5). In December 1959 PAC’s president, Robert Sobukwe, announced plans for a nonviolent protest to be held the following year, targeting the pass laws. On a set day Africans would leave their pass books at home, skip work, and arrive at police stations demanding to be arrested; the resulting prison overcrowding and shortage of workers, Sobukwe reasoned, would disrupt the economy while provoking more widespread protest. The protest was scheduled for March 21, a day that would, as it turned out, leave “an indelible stain on South Africa” (Meredith, In the Name of Apartheid, p. 80).

As planned, protestors gathered in front of police stations in Johannesburg, Evaton, and Vanderbijlpark, among other places. Sharpeville, a township 50 miles south of Johannesburg, had been until this point fairly immune from the disorder and unrest marking other African towns in the 1950s. On the morning of the protest PAC members walked the streets and actively implored workers to gather at the police station rather than go to work. By mid-morning several thousand Africans were participating in the protest in front of the police station at Sharpeville. By most accounts the mood of the crowd was relaxed. Police reinforcements were called, and by early afternoon 300 police stood facing a crowd of roughly 5,000 protestors. A small fight broke out near the police station gates. A policeman was knocked over in the scuffle and the crowd pressed forward to see. Though accounts differ, it seems that at this point, without warning and without acting on direct orders, the police opened fire on the crowd. They kept shooting, even as the protestors turned and fled. All in all, 69 Africans were killed, and another 186 wounded. Most had been shot in the back.

The events of March 21, 1960, later known as the Sharpeville Massacre, were followed by an enormous amount of protest both from Africans and from people abroad. Thousands of Africans demonstrated, which led to pass-book burnings and violence throughout the country. To many it seemed that a crucial turning point had been reached, that Africans had run out of patience and were now on the verge of liberation.

As G. H. L. Le May puts it, however, “Sharpeville was the turning point where nobody turned” (Le May, p. 221). On March 30 the government declared a state of emergency, essentially giving the police license to arrest and/or detain whomever they wished. Police began staging huge raids, and, in an increasingly brutal fashion, rounded up hundreds of African dissidents; by May more than 18,000 people had been arrested (Meredith, In the Name of Apartheid, p. 83). And on April 8 both the ANC and PAC were outlawed and forced to go underground.

Umkhonto we Sizwe

The government crackdown in response to Sharpeville stunned ANC members. After decades of nonviolent resistance, it was clear that conventional methods of protest were no longer effective—and apparently never had been. Mandela proposed the use of violence and sabotage to promote change, arguing that if the ANC did not act aggressively, more devastating violence would occur, given the Africans’ growing hatred of apartheid leaders. At a June 1961 secret ANC meeting, members agreed with Mandela’s strategy, and a separate military wing of the ANC called Umkhonto we Sizwe, or “The Spear of the Nation,” was formed. The ANC itself would remain dedicated to a policy of nonviolence, while Umkhonto was to be an elite paramilitary group, formally separate from the rest of the congress.

In December 1961 Umkhonto members set off a series of bombs near pass offices, courts, and other government buildings in cities like Johannesburg and Durban. An Umkhonto leaflet claimed responsibility for the bombings and clearly stated its goal of pressuring the government into shifting its policy:

We hope that we will bring the Government and its supporters to their senses before it is too late …. so that both Government and its policies can be changed before matters reach the desperate stage of civil war.

(Umkhonto leaflet in Harsch, p. 250)

Between December 1961 and July 1963, almost 200 separate sabotage operations took place all over South Africa. In response, the government passed the 1962 Sabotage Act, giving the minister of justice the power to ban all potential terrorists. The government’s most effective tool, however, was its massive intelligence operation, which easily infiltrated the loose membership of the ANC.

Still, it took police 19 months to bring down the Umkhonto we Sizwe, though the organization’s flaws were, in retrospect, numerous: “lack of bases, inadequate organization and discipline, logistical difficulties, insufficient international support, poor political motivation, [and] shortage of funds” (Davis, p. 19). Umkhonto headquarters was a farmhouse situated on 28 acres in Rivonia, an area north of Johannesburg. When police raided the Rivonia farm in July 1963, they not only arrested Walter Sisulu and eight other men at the house but also were able to gather a significant amount of intelligence information. Nelson Mandela, already serving a five-year term for a 1962 arrest, remained in prison until October, when he was returned to court to stand trial with his Umkhonto colleagues. The accused were charged under the Sabotage Act (which carried the death penalty) and the Suppression of Communism Act “with complicity in more than 200 acts of sabotage aimed at aiding guerrilla warfare and facilitating violent revolution and armed invasion of the country” (Meredith, Nelson Mandela, p. 253). Eight of the nine men, including Mandela, were given life sentences; the only man to be found innocent, Rusty Bernstein, was immediately surrounded by security police, taken back to jail, and charged with new offenses.

The Speech in Focus

Contents summary

After the state presented its case, Mandela opened the defense with a statement from the dock. Mandela’s speech lasted over four hours and had a powerful effect on the courtroom audience: “Standing in the dock, Mandela began reading his statement slowly and with calm deliberation, his voice carrying clearly across the courtroom. Gradually, as he spoke, the silence in the courtroom became more profound” (Meredith, Nelson Mandela, p. 264). His tone was self-controlled and analytic.

The speech is, in essence, a persuasive justification for the revolutionary actions of the Umkhonto we Sizwe in light of the long oppression of African peoples in South Africa. In the text of the speech, Mandela presents Umkhonto’s violent actions not as savage or undisciplined, but as a reasoned response to the decidedly unreasonable situation in which Africans find themselves in South Africa. The formation of Umkhonto by the ANC and its decision to use violence was, Mandela argues, a logical response—in fact, the only response—for a people suffering under the tyranny of white supremacy. Mandela explains his intention:

I did not plan [sabotage] in the spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people by the Whites.

(“Rivonia Trial Speech,” p. 163)

In his speech, Mandela acknowledges his central role in the ANC, as well as in forming Umkhonto and deciding upon its program of sabotage. He took this role, he says, because of his “own proudly felt African background” (“Rivonia Trial Speech,” p. 163). Having claimed responsibility, he turns to the specific and unavoidable reasons Umkhonto had to be formed: first, because violence against Africans has led them to a state of hostility that threatens uncontrolled civil war; and second, because countervi-olence was the only legitimate response left for Africans after “all lawful modes of expressing opposition … had been closed by legislation” (“Rivonia Trial Speech,” p. 164). With no acceptable choice but to take violent action, he and the other members of Umkhonto decided against terrorism, having come from the long ANC tradition of nonviolence and negotiation. Mandela then puts forth the ANC’s vision of a nonracial, equal, and democratic society, and gives a brief history of the ANC’s continually thwarted and ultimately ineffective campaigns of nonviolence against apartheid. When, 50 years after the formation of the ANC, the situation of Africans in South Africa is much more dire and restrictive—when something like the massacre at Sharpeville can happen—there is little choice but to turn to that which has been avoided for so long. It was, therefore, “only when all else had failed, when all the channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle, and to form Umkhonto we Sizwe” (“Rivonia Trial Speech,” p. 169).

Four possible forms of violence were considered, Mandela explains: sabotage, guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and open revolution. The group immediately chose to embark on a campaign of sabotage, this being the least violent and most hopeful course of action. Mandela describes the planning behind the campaign, as well as the group’s decision to plan for guerrilla warfare and subsequent military training should they become necessary. He explains how all whites in South Africa undergo compulsory military training, and that if war were inevitable—given the government’s own violence and unwillingness to acknowledge the rights of Africans—then it would be necessary for Africans to prepare themselves for this worst-case scenario.

Throughout the speech, Mandela makes clear that the actions and decisions of Umkhonto we Sizwe were all made after the most careful and rational reasoning—and that any form of violence or militarism was considered only in times of absolute necessity: “But it was precisely because the soil of South Africa is already drenched in the blood of innocent Africans that we felt it our duty to make preparations as a long-term undertaking to use force in order to defend ourselves against force” (“Rivonia Trial Speech,” p. 173).

Mandela also takes care to explain the differences between the ANC and Umkhonto (as the two were formally distinct), and to deny various acts that had been linked to Umkhonto. He then addresses charges that the aims of the ANC and the Communist Party are the same, explaining that the ideology of the ANC centers, and has always centered, on the creed of African nationalism rather than a desire for socialism: “Its chief goal was, and is, for the African people to win unity and full political rights” (“Rivonia Trial Speech,” p. 179). If the ANC and the Communist Party have worked together, he explains, it is because of a shared goal—the abolition of white supremacy—rather than a shared philosophy. In Mandela’s words, “theoretical differences amongst those fighting against oppression is a luxury we cannot afford at this stage”—something white South Africans may have a difficult time understanding (“Rivonia Trial Speech,” p. 181). Mandela ends his speech with a long and powerful indictment against white South Africa:

The Whites [in South Africa] enjoy what may well be the highest standard of living in the world, whilst Africans live in poverty and misery. Forty per cent of the Africans live in hopelessly overcrowded and, in some cases, drought-stricken Reserves, where soil erosion and the overworking of the soil make it impossible for them to live properly off the land. Thirty per cent are labourers, labour tenants, and squatters on White farms and work and live under conditions similar to those of the serfs of the Middle Ages. The other 30 per cent live in towns where they have developed economic and social habits which bring them closer in many respects to White standards. Yet most Africans, even in this group, are impoverished by low incomes and high cost of living.

(“Rivonia Trial Speech,” pp. 184-85)

He states his case bluntly: “The lack of human dignity experienced by Africans is the direct result of the policy of White supremacy. White supremacy implies Black inferiority” (“Rivonia Trial Speech,” p. 187). Africans, he says, want “to be paid a living wage. Africans want to perform work which they are capable of doing, and not work which the government declares them to be capable of” (“Rivonia Trial Speech,” p. 188). Africans want to be part of the general population, and not be relegated to ghettoes. African families want to live together, and not be separated because a man or woman cannot work where they live. Above all, Mandela says, “we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent” (“Rivonia Trial Speech,” p. 188). Mandela finished his speech without notes, facing the judge, his voice low:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

(“Rivonia Trial Speech,” p. 189)

Violence and the antiapartheid movement in South Africa

Throughout his speech Mandela emphasizes the ANC’s hesitation to adopt violence as a strategy with which to battle apartheid. The organization had been built on the policy of nonviolence, and for this reason would not undertake violence; at the same time, in the wake of Sharpeville it had become increasingly clear that passive resistance and protest through constitutional means were ineffective. Faced with the fact that a shift in strategy was necessary, the ANC compromised. While the ANC itself would retain its policy of nonviolence, it would neither condemn nor discipline members who chose to join Umkhonto and engage in “properly controlled violence,” which Mandela explains in this way: “I say ‘properly controlled violence’ because I made it clear that if I formed the organization I would at all times subject it to the political guidance of the ANC and would not undertake any different form of activity from that contemplated without the consent of the ANC” (“Rivonia Trial Speech,” p. 170). Thus, the Umkhonto, composed of ANC members and more or less approved by the ANC itself, remained officially separate from the ANC. As Mandela further explains:

The ANC remained a mass political body of Africans only carrying on the type of political work they had conducted prior to 1961. Umkhonto remained a small organization recruiting its members from different races and organizations and trying to achieve its own particular object. The fact that members of Umkhonto were recruited from the ANC … did not, in our view, change the nature of the ANC or give it a policy of violence.

(“Rivonia Trial Speech,” p. 176)

Days before the first Umkhonto bombing, the ANC’s president, Albert Lutuli, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of the ANC’s attempts to effect change through nonviolent protest. The fact that the ANC seemed to resist and abhor violence to such an extent, and yet felt driven to tacitly support it suggests a dichotomy reflected within the antiapartheid movement itself. Given the extremely difficult position of antiapartheid groups in a highly restrictive society like South Africa, such internal conflicts were not uncommon. The question of how to most effectively oppose such a monolithic system of oppression plagued many freedom fighters in South Africa, and the issue of violence became more and more central to the debate, and to the programs of the leading antiapartheid groups. The ANC’s apparently contradictory views toward violence, as well as the Umkhonto’s paradoxical idea of a “properly controlled” or “rational” violence in which no one would be harmed, are indicative of the movement’s almost impossible position.

The PAC and its own offshoot group, Poqo, took a different approach toward the problem. Poqo was somewhat equivalent to Umkhonto, but far more open to the use of extreme violence, as made clear by a December 1961 leaflet: “The white people shall suffer, the black people will rule. Freedom comes after bloodshed. Poqo has started” (Meredith, In the Name of Apartheid, p. 102). Its operations were arbitrary and undisciplined; its supporters killed African policeman and informers, as well as random whites. In 1963 the group’s plans for a large-scale African uprising and massacre of whites were thwarted when the leader of PAC, Potlake Leballo, announced these plans at a press conference; police raided PAC headquarters and began rounding up hundreds of PAC supporters. By mid-1963 Poqo had been crushed.

Another group, the African Resistance Movement, made up of radical whites, began its own campaign of sabotage, bombing railway stations and telephone kiosks in an attempt to “inconvenience and confuse, disrupt and destroy” (Meredith, In the Name of Apartheid, p. 102). By 1964 both this movement and the country’s other radical, predominantly white group, the Communist Party of South Africa, were wiped out. In each case the move to violence—a last resort for many

MANDELA’S ACTIVISM UP TO THE RIVONIA TRIAL

(Juckes, pp. 174-79)

groups—resulted in a heightening of government violence that left the revolutionaries brutally defeated. It would be another decade before the antiapartheid movement, in its various forms, would again gain prominence in South Africa.

Sources and literary context

Though realizing he would weaken his own case substantially, Nelson Mandela chose to deliver a speech from the docks rather than testify and face cross-examination in the witness box. Testimony could only be given in response to specific questions posed by attorneys, and Mandela did not want his defense limited to that format:

Our attorneys warned me that it would put me in a more precarious legal situation; anything I said in my statement regarding my own innocence would be discounted by the judge. But that was not our highest priority. We believed it was important to open the defense with a statement of our politics and ideals, which would establish the context for all that followed. I wanted very much to cross swords with [the prosecutor], but it was more important that I use the form to highlight our grievances.

(Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 315)

Mandela spent two weeks drafting his speech. A man who had been continually banned and/or imprisoned and unable to speak freely to the public, Mandela was now presented with a platform in which he could say whatever was necessary to rouse public sentiment against the state. Like others in South African history, Mandela was forced to use this forum if he wanted to speak out against injustice and be heard:

It is a procedure of utilizing the public record as autobiographical witness that has continued to be necessary in a country where opponents of the state have been “silenced” (that is, forbidden to be quoted) in any other form than in their own trial proceedings in an open court.

(Chapman, p. 92)

Impact

Although Mandela’s speech would not prevent him from being sentenced to life in prison in South Africa, his testimony had a huge impact internationally, sparking demonstrations in both Europe and the United States. Two days before the judge was to give his decision, the United Nations Security Council urged the South African government to grant amnesty “to the defendants and to all others who had been restricted or imprisoned for opposing apartheid” (Meredith, Nelson Mandela, p. 271). An all-night vigil was held at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Despite such pressure, it took Judge de Wet only three minutes to arrive at a guilty verdict for all the accused men but one.

The guilty verdicts and life sentences had little effect on white South Africa’s public opinion, but reaction abroad was impassioned: the London Times proclaimed that “the verdict of history will be that the ultimate guilty party is the government in power—and that already is the verdict of world opinion”; the New York Times wrote of how “to most of the world, these men are heroes and freedom fighters. The George Washingtons and Ben Franklins of South Africa” (Meredith, Nelson Mandela, p. 275).

Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison. In the mid-1980s the National Party began dismantling apartheid, which had become unworkable in the face of black opposition. All seven men found guilty at the Rivonia Trial were ultimately released from prison. Mandela, freed in 1990, was the last to be released. Three years later, he became a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and in 1994, after South Africa’s first multiracial election, was sworn in as the first president of a postapartheid South Africa.

—Carolyn Turgeon

For More Information

Chapman, Michael. Southern African Literatures. London: Longman, 1996.

Davis, Stephen M. Apartheid’s Rebels: Inside South Africa’s Hidden War. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987.

Harsch, Ernest. South Africa: White Rule, Black Revolt. New York: Monad Press, 1980.

Juckes, Tim J. Opposition in South Africa: The Leadership of Z. K. Matthews, Nelson Mandela, and Stephen Biko. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995.

Lazerson, Joshua L. Against the Tide: Whites in the Struggle Against Apartheid. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994.

Le May, G. H. L. The Afrikaners: An Historical Interpretation. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1995.

Mandela, Nelson. “The Rivonia Trial Speech.” In No Easy Walk to Freedom: Articles, Speeches, and Trial Addresses of Nelson Mandela. London: Heinemann, 1965.

_____. Long Walk to Freedom. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1994.

McKinley, Dale T. The ANC and the Liberation Struggle. London: Pluto Press, 1997.

Meredith, Martin. In the Name of Apartheid: South Africa in the Postwar Period. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988.

_____. Nelson Mandela: A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Ranuga, Thomas K. The New South Africa and the Socialist Vision: Positions and Perspectives Toward a Post-Apartheid Society. Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Humanities Press, 1996.