ON the day before judgment was delivered at the Rivonia sabotage trial, the South African government announced that it was to ask parliament for still tougher anti-subversion powers. It did this, oddly enough, while claiming to have smashed the forces of subversion. The minister of justice, Mr Balthazar Vorster, is now increasing the number of crimes that are treasonable, extending the possibility of imprisonment without trial and widening the scope of the death sentence for sabotage by applying it retrospectively to other crimes committed since 1950.
He has also announced that he intends to retain the provision that entitles a police officer to arrest and hold indefinitely for questioning in solitary confinement for 90-day periods anyone suspected of having been involved in subversion or knowing anything about subversion plans.
In future, people trained in sabotage or who look for training or who assist somebody else to be trained or who even try to obtain information about training in South Africa will be liable to a minimum sentence of five years' imprisonment and a maximum sentence of death. It is a wry thought that if these laws had been made retrospective to 1940, instead of to 1950, hundreds of the government's most fervent supporters, some in very high positions, would have been brought within their scope because of their membership of part-military organisations dedicated to subverting the Smuts government's battle against Hitler.
Pro-government reaction to the trial and its outcome has been a smug, "We told you so: the communists want our country, and we are justified in taking extraordinary and even undemocratic powers to ensure the security of the state." White public opinion was practically unanimous in welcoming what it considered to be a stern but just counter to violence and sabotage. Even those newspapers most sympathetic towards the Africans condemned the plans of the convicted.
Non-white opinion was divided. There are still non-whites who eschew violence under all circumstances and they felt as the whites did. Others, while condemning sabotage, sympathised with Mr Nelson Mandela and his colleagues because, they argued, these men, driven to despair, had no other way of expressing their convictions than by plotting revolution. A third element, the most vocal and under the circumstances the bravest, was represented by poster-carrying demonstrators outside the court on judgment day. "We are proud of our leaders," was the defiant claim of one group. "You will not serve these years as long as we live," said another, perhaps less realistically. It takes great courage to make this sort of open protest in South Africa today. Mr Alan Paton displayed it in his plea for clemency from the witness box before sentence was passed. His simple act of humanity led the public prosecutor—to try to "unmask this man"—presumably as a communist sympathiser, liberal in this case not being heinous enough.
South Africans who do not believe in apartheid, and who are convinced that violence and sabotage can achieve nothing good, are now wondering what effect the imprisonment of Mr Mandela and the other leaders will have on African politics. As the Rivonia trial made clear, violence has become the last resort of a leadership frustrated and harassed and without any legitimate political outlet. There is no leadership free to speak; the non-whites who hate violence feel helpless and hopeless. They look to political action of some kind to free them from the mass of repressive legislation but they remain voiceless.
The government is adamant: there will be political rights only in the "Bantu homelands" (13 per cent of the surface of the country, accommodating about 40 per cent of the African population). Those not in the homelands are "visitors" to the white man's South Africa and cannot expect political rights there. This philosophy has, under the stress of hostile world opinion and in a desperate desire to give apartheid a moral basis, now become the ideal of "separate freedoms": each population group is to have its own freedom. The two million Coloureds and Indians are to exercise their "freedom" in representative advisory councils that will, in time, be given jurisdiction in specific fields, such as social welfare and education. The eleven million Africans are to have their freedom in their homelands, such as the Transkei, which already functions with a measure of self-government. Unprovided with freedom are the six million or so of these Africans who work alongside the white man outside the homelands. The majority of them have some education and nearly all enjoy a far higher standard of living than the Africans in the reserves. They are largely detribalised, and it is from their ranks that men like Mr Sobukwe, Mr Mandela (whose wife, Winnie, is pictured above outside the courthouse) and Mr Sisulu come.
For these people the government has as yet no plan. It has established local councils with advisory functions in some areas. But this is so rudimentary it satisfies nobody; apartheid's fatal flaw is there for all to see. Evidence that the Nationalists see it too is provided by the fervour with which the idea of separate freedom is being propagated. As Johannesburg's Star pointed out last week, it would be a mistake to underestimate Nationalist idealism. For the young, according to the government, the vision of separate freedom has become irresistible. Even if this is exaggerated, continued the Star editorial, "it is surely sheer gain that the Nationalist party has committed itself to the principle of freedom for all. It is a long stride from, the days when Mr Strydom used to speak of maintaining the master-servant relationship." But the ideal will be unattainable unless the whole apartheid philosophy is radically rethought.
Robben Island
THE six Africans and the one Indian convicted in the Rivonia trial have been taken to Robben Island, a few miles off Cape Town. Mr Dennis Goldberg, the one European to be convicted, will serve his sentence in the Transvaal. Robben Island is sometimes referred to as the Alcatraz of South Africa; its first prisoner was a Hottentot interpreter who was lodged there in the seventeenth century to "keep him out of mischief." Five miles long and three miles wide, it is an effective prison, for no unauthorised vessel is allowed to approach it, and it is surrounded by the icy waters of the Benguela current.
At present close on 1,400 prisoners are incarcerated on Robben Island; 628 of them were sentenced under the Suppression of Communism Act and 284 for sabotage. The remainder are ordinary criminals. All are non-white. Mr Robert Sobukwe, the leader of the Pan-African Congress and a former university lecturer, is the island's best known prisoner. He has just started his second year of indefinite confinement, having already served a three year term of imprisonment on the mainland.
He was visited by a Red Cross representative last month and reported to be in good health and living in accommodation "comparable to that of a high ranking officer in wartime." There have been periodic complaints about the treatment of Robben Island prisoners but, according to the government, all these have been thoroughly investigated.
