The Contraception Question - are Sphenoid Wing Meningiomas a shocking side-effect of the Depo-Provera injection?

This week, Carte Blanche, South Africa’s foremost investigative TV show, will broadcast an insert I researched and produced on the possible link between a popular contraceptive, Depo-Provera, and the development of Sphenoid Wing Meningiomas, a specific type of brain tumour, in women.

Erin Bates interviewing Wasela Ross with DOP Eaton de Jongh filming the conversation

The twenty-minute insert is presented by Carte Blanche presenter Erin Bates, and will be shown on Carte Blanche’s You Tube channel for twenty-four hours, starting at 19h00 SAST on Thursday the 3rd of April. Carte Blanche is doing this special broadcast because of the significance of the evidence presented, and the questions it poses about the risks associated with a contraceptive drug that for over thirty years has been universally accepted as safe. In South Africa alone, 3.6 million women use Depo-Provera for contraception. It is estimated that 74 million women use it worldwide.

Here is an interview I did about it on Cape Talk today.

The story starts with an interview with a leading ENT surgeon in Cape Town, Professor Darlene Lubbe, who has pioneered innovative endoscopic surgery to treat brain tumours. This is specifically useful for work on Sphenoid Wing Meningiomas which develop behind the eye in the skull.  However, Prof Lubbe is concerned at how long the waiting list is for this type of surgery and how anecdotally, she is observing that most of her patients are women and many of them  are long-term users of the high-dose contraceptive injection Depo-Provera. What makes the question all the more urgent is the fact that surgery for this type of brain tumour takes between six to eight hours and requires highly-skilled surgeons in a resource-starved health ecosystem.

Prof Lubbe is not the only person asking questions about Depo-Provera. Already international studies are establishing a link between the use of synthetic hormones and brain tumours, and have raised questions specifically about Depo-Provera, which is widely provided in developing countries. These medical studies are building a frightening picture which has impact in countries with well-resourced legal systems.  In countries like the United States, Australia and Switzerland, lawyers are preparing court actions against the maker of Depo-Provera on behalf of women with meningiomas.  

With this background, the story moves to the personal stories of South African women who have been diagnosed with these invasive non-cancerous tumours. Their symptoms are horrible – blurry vision, protruding eyes, dizziness, nausea, exhaustion, intense headaches and a sense of not feeling themselves. Most of these women have to give up work, they must limit their parenting and worst of all have become patients in their own homes. After surgery, many of these symptoms persist, along with others which make life very difficult. For example, one woman I spoke to felt nauseous every time she smelt or tasted food. Another woman suffered from epilepsy and she and her whole family were constantly on alert in case she had seizures. Their lives – in early middle-age– have been profoundly compromised, they live in pain and discomfort, and this is a devastating loss.  

Making this programme pre-occupies me. Observing the suffering and heartbreak of these women, as they tell me their personal stories, is deeply disturbing. This seems like the first chapter of a much longer investigation that needs to happen in South Africa. We are one of the few developing countries which have the infrastructure to do a scientific investigation to establish with more accuracy the link between Depo-Provera and Sphenoid Wing Meningiomas and international experts are calling for us to do such a study. Unfortunately at this point, decision-makers are not listening. The Department of Health has yet to respond to my multiple attempts for not only an interview, but also answers to written questions.

If this silence continues, the conversation around Depo-Provera will be described only in the media and the courts. Richard Spoor Attorneys in Johannesburg is preparing a class action in South Africa, although it in the very early stages. Anybody wanting to get in touch with the relevant lawyers at Richard Spoor, can email pfarelo@rsinc.co.za.

Please email me at marion@carteblanche.co.za if you want to be in touch. I want to know about  women on Depo-Provera who might be experiencing the symptoms of meningiomas, I want to know how clients are handled in government clinics, and specifically the length of time women are kept on Depo-Provera. (According to the safety packaging, it should not be longer than two years.) I also want to know about diagnosis and surgery, and what options are available to women who have a diagnosis of a meningioma, specifically far away from functioning medical centres.  I am hoping that the Premiere broadcast on Carte Blanche’s You Tube channel will serve a double function of getting information to people, specifically women on Depo-Provera, and creating a channel of communication back to the media, for people who have their own story to tell.

I sent questions to the makers of Depo-Provera, Pfizer. This was their response:

Patient safety is our top priority. We conduct rigorous and continuous monitoring of all our medicines, including assessments of reported adverse events, in collaboration with health authorities around the globe. Depo-Provera has been approved in more than 60 countries over the last 30 years and has been a safe and effective treatment option for millions of patients during that time. 

CUTTING, CREATING, SEWING AND STITCHING AN AFRICAN NARRATIVE

A few months ago, I went clothes shopping on a rare day out. Despite complaining that there were huge holes in my wardrobe, I was unable to find anything that worked for me, within my budget, in all the many shops at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town. I wriggled in and out of various items in the confined spaces of many changing rooms, but came away with only a pair of designer socks – sparkly, silver socks on a sale.

The disconnect between what I want to wear, what I have hanging in my cupboard to wear and what might be out there to buy to wear is frustrating. My forays into the world of fashion as a consumer are disheartening. The collapse of the rand hasn’t helped, as a I am magnetically drawn to Italian designs which seem to understand my shape, but not my pocket.

Matching - on my way to Johannesburg to film an African Fashion Story

However, in contrast, going through the back door into the behind-the-scenes world of African fashion as a journalist and producer has been hugely exciting. Admittedly, I am not really a follower of haute couture, but I have found myself reading fashion journalism over the last decades with increased interest because of what clothes say about people.

So I seized the opportunity to produce a piece featuring the South African design duo behind the Amen label, Brad Muttit and Abiah Mahlase, whom I had met in passing through a different story. And through them I came into contact with Dr Precious Moloi-Motsepe, the founder of African Fashion International, and the story unfolded like a flower.

There were many elements of Brad and Abiah’s approach I liked – they have generous and loving personalities; they were extremely accommodating, making themselves available throughout a tight shoot, despite their own looming deadline of the runway at AFI’s Fashion Week. But most of all I liked their sense of story-telling, and how they using the African street experience as a way to riff on trends and style. And through the lens of story-telling, their story was told.

Amen filming a fashion film for their runway collection “Salon”, October 2021

 Thanks to African Fashion International, cameraman Thomas Pretorius and I got to spend an evening filming backstage at a fashion show. Thomas captured some wonderful images. One of the best was a series of slow-motion shots of long silky dresses being steam-cleaned on the fly:  lowlight, steam, hands gentling unfurling long shimmering, undulating lines of cloth.

As the clock ticked down to showtime, the energy ramped up and sizzled like electricity. The build-up to the catwalk show was lengthy and increasingly charged. The actual show was swift and over in a few blinks of a mobile phone. DOP Thomas waited in the wings as the Amen models lined up to walk out. And then he ran out to the front to turn his lens on Brad and Abiah as they followed their collection to take an exultant bow before the applauding audience.  It was a sprint finish to a fashion marathon.

DOP Thomas filming the Amen models before they walk the cat walk at the AFI Fashion Week 2021

Each of the creatives in the piece draw on story-telling in different ways. Brad and Abiah are inspired by what they witness in the day-to-day bustle of the city in which they live, Jozi. They used a Braamfontein Hair Salon as the set for a small fashion film that ran as a backdrop when models walked their collection which they named Salon. Fast-track designer, Shamyra Moodley, mines her extended family to find jewels of inspiration. She sews memories and sensibilities into sustainable outfits – with Persian carpet pockets, deconstructed neck tie skirts, and a shocking pink suit cut out of a grandmother’s sari.

Shamyra Moodley fixing a hair accessory to a model moments before showtime at AFI Fashion Week in Johannesburg

Jewellery-maker Sifiso Khumalo wants to tell the story of the person who might wear the pieces he creates – something about them that he intuits as he did in the pair of earrings featured in the story. The earrings, called Ripple Effect, hold a human experience meshed into fine platinum and precious stones. Each designer demonstrates a heightened degree of emotional intelligence as they conceptualise and implement their designs which connect them to individual experiences and the African communities around them.

SIfiso Khumalo working with focus on a fine ring which the camera can see in beautiful detail.

Here is the link to the CNN International Inside Africa story which was so much fun to produce: http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2021/12/03/johannesburg-south-africa-fashion-designers-haute-couture-jewelry-sustainability-spc.cnn.html

THE YOUNG ARTISTS OF CAPE TOWN OPERA

The first aria I heard sung by South African soprano Vuvu Mpofu was during a 2016 production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen at Cape Town’s Artscape Theatre, a sprawling theatre campus, partly in the shadow of Table Mountain.  

Playing Micaela, a lovelorn maiden, she sang an aria called Je dis que rien ne me epouvante which translated from French means I say that nothing frightens me.  I was producing a profile piece on Vuvu, but had not yet heard her sing on stage in performance.  We had spent the day doing interviews, and filming backstage as she warmed up and prepared for her role.  

As I watched her performance from the wings and listened to her soaring, shimmering voice, I remember that time seemed to stand still. Her costume was simple, her face and gestures expressive and her voice pleading and rising, communicating deep emotion. Her character was seeking her troubled lover in the woods, under the moonlight, and she was wrestling with fear, not only of the lonely dark place where she stood but also her fear of the fierce rival to her love, the outrageously badly-behaved Carmen.

Vuvu’s own story is equally remarkable and has demanded of her a great deal of courage and determination. She has travelled to far off places and faced off rivals in singing competitions. She was born in the Eastern Cape, a rural South African province, and discovered opera as a teenager, her first encounter being a recording of La Traviata by Verdi. After school she found her way to Cape Town with her suitcases, and after an audition, won a scholarship to the University of Cape Town’s School of Music. It was only here that she started her formal musical education, which meant learning notation as well as European languages like German, Italian and French. She then took her first professional step on to the stage with the Cape Town Opera Company as one of their Young Artists.  

In 2016, we spent about a  day and a half with her just before she was to go to Europe after winning awards in significant competitions. Her exact destiny could not be forecast, although things were looking good and she was optimistic about her career.   This year, five years later, we came into contact again, during the production of a longer piece on the Cape Town Opera Company. Now she was the star, the lead role, the Prima Donna, in another of Georges Bizet’s production, The Pearl Fishers.

Vuvu Mpofu as the priestess Leila on the opening night of The Pearl Fishers, a 2021 Cape Town Opera Company production, at the Artscape Theatre in Cape Town. Bass-baritone Thesele Kemane sings the role of the priest Nourabad. Title photograph and photograph above: Cape Town Opera Company

Vuvu had flown to Cape Town with her new baby for this performance and was to head out immediately after the production of The Pearl Fishers to set up a base for herself in Switzerland. Her diary is booked up with singing engagements for not just months but a few years to come, and she has her own agent and website page. I found her at this meeting more confident, but still grounded in reality, with a quirky laugh and that same gentle, generous demeanour.

Soprano Vuvu Mpofu in a meditation on the window sill at The Alphen Hotel in Constantia, after an interview about her career as an international opera star

Vuvu’s success is attributable to more than her natural talent. It is also thanks to her hard work, composure, her lively sense of fun and her courage to take on the world.  Her success and that of other Young Artists is also attributable to the Cape Town Opera Company which has nourished opera and mentored opera singers against the odds. The 21-year-old company has made it its business to find and groom young talent, and then cheer as these gifted singers spread their wings. Opera stars who have travelled this route include Pretty Yende, Golda Schultz and Levy Sekgapane. Nurtured on the southern-most tip of Africa, through one of the continent’s very few opera companies, they have graced the world’s most applauded stages in significant roles.

Here is a link to the piece I produced and directed which explores this company’s role as the only opera company in South Africa, at a time when creative and performing arts companies are under extraordinary pressure financially, a situation made worse by the COVID pandemic.

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2021/07/27/south-africa-cape-town-opera-spc.cnn.html

You can also go directly to capetownopera.co.za.

If you want to find out more about Vuvu, you can do what I have been doing this morning: browse You Tube and watch her sing.  Particularly wonderful is her performance of Estrano, Estrano…Sempre libera from Verdi’s La Traviata, the very first opera which stopped her in her tracks. It’s from the 2015 Operalia Competition in which she won third prize.

Voila the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T5hBFNWWgk

In an interesting twist for the production of this piece, a tighter pandemic lockdown forced the postponement of the last two nights of The Pearl Fishers, which meant Vuvu had to leave Cape Town for other engagements, and her understudy had to step into her shoes, at the last moment. The understudy was Capetonian Brittany Smith, another extraordinary voice and personality with a powerful stage presence and expressive range. She is one of four in Cape Town Opera’s current Young Artist Programme, and her star quality has been noted.

Make-up for soprano Brittany Smith before she takes the stage as Leila in The Pearl Fishers, an opera by Georges Bizet, in the 2021 production by the Cape Town Opera Company

THE PANDEMIC THAT SHIFTED US INTO A DEEPER DIGITAL EMBRACE

As the year slides into mid-November, it feels that 2020 has almost run its course. I spent some of the annus horribilis updating existing CNN International Inside Africa inserts I produced in previous years to show how South Africans were dealing with the restrictions triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The experience of revisiting places and people I had got to know in happier times, and hearing their lockdown stories, was uplifting and humbling.

Joanna Dobinson jumping her bike for joy at being let out on to the G-Spot Trail after lockdown kept athletes in Stellenbosch inside, limited to indoor trainers

The lockdown hit hard, particularly in the arts, entertainment, tourism and sporting sectors; the financial taps ran dry and people were facing the stark reality of the collapse of their professional infrastructures. This anxiety about the future of many jobs and institutions, as well as livelihoods,  remains as we edge towards Christmas. Our initial lockdown in South Africa in April, May, June and July were severe, with access to beaches denied, and bans on the sale of cigarettes and alcohol. Initially outdoor exercise was prohibited and then allowed only for a few hours a day. Luckily, we have passed to happier, more relaxed times as we now linger in Level One and are legally allowed sundowners.

Safer Roads 4 All campaign got permission to do a safe driving demonstration during Lockdown, with DJ Ready D, Anwar Daniels and the team streaming the event on Facebook and other platforms. DJ Ready D worked the internet to keep up his connections wtih his car crazy and hip hop community, while raising money for food parcels.

In most instances we budgeted for a single day shoot to update each insert, and then asked people we had previously interviewed to film their own Covid visuals and send them on to us.  Some found posing in front of their mobile phones and talking directly to an imaginary producer easy; for others it was a real challenge and took some time and effort. (We had one interview done entirely in slow motion!) We supplemented the shoots with Webex interviews, which I learnt how to do by trial and error. Once you know how, it seems easy…. but in the beginning it felt like a scary new digital world.  And in all these ventures, I was horribly dependent on the stability of the internet and our far from trustworthy electricity supply to complete my tasks.

Test driving online interviews with my family to get familiar with the controls….and pick up tips from the tech-generation

If one thing unites us through the pandemic, globally, it is the shift to digital portals to find connection, meaning and employment. I salute those who have embraced this new way of interacting, particularly when done with very few resources and limited access to data, as is the case in much of Africa.

Interviewing Nolu Maha of the Masidlale Project, the outreach programme of the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra. During Lockdown children had to take lessons online and there was a scramble to find money for data to make this possible.

To see some programmes already broadcast on CNN International, please click the links and enjoy a 2020 retrospective on the COVID-19 lockdown in South Africa.  These programmes have been part of my personal and professional journey this year and I reflect on them with gratitude - thank you to the people who helped make them possible, and thank you to those same people for giving me hope through their resilience and determination.

 The Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra strikes a digital note….

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2020/10/26/south-africa-cape-town-philharmonic-orchestra-pandemic-spc.cnn

Back on their bikes…. the moment after lockdown stopped them in their tracks, local cyclists got back in their saddles to reclaim their trails and races

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2020/11/27/cape-epic-south-africa-pandemic-mountain-biking-race-spc.cnn.html

 DJ Ready D and the petrolheads of Cape Town stream their smoke and slide….

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2020/11/06/cape-town-capestance-covid-19-pandemic-dj-ready-d-spc.cnn

 Spier Wine Estate digs deep into fertile ground to sustain its community during Covid…

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2020/09/25/cape-town-south-africa-spier-wine-farm-pandemic-spc.cnn.html

Megan McCarthy at home in a vegetable patch on Spier Wine Estate - during the extreme lockdowns Spier provided food parcels, including fresh vegetables and seedlings, to the local community

Remembering Denis Goldberg, and the life he lived to the full.

Remembering Denis Goldberg, and the life he lived to the full.

By Marion Edmunds

Director of Sentenced with Mandela, the Denis Goldberg Story, 2011

May 2020

I first met Denis Goldberg when I was a parliamentary reporter. It was a Friday afternoon and the corridors of power were quiet. An emissary from the Department of Water Affairs and Sanitation rounded up the few journalists still at work, to attend an impromptu press conference about water-borne disease. The then minister, former uMkhonto we Sizwe operative, Ronnie Kasrils, introduced his special adviser, Denis Goldberg, as an “old comrade” with many insights, a trained engineer who was best to talk on the issue. Denis’ chief message was that South Africans should be encouraged to wash their hands, regularly, in order to combat disease. At the time, I callously shrugged my shoulders, guessing the item wouldn’t make the evening news bulletin and wondering what more the special advisor might have to say. With hindsight, in this time of Coronavirus, his words have a prophetic wisdom.  

I found that out much later when embarking on a documentary, Sentenced with Mandela, The Denis Goldberg Story, that Ronnie Kasril’s special adviser had a great deal more to say. He generously agreed to be the subject of a biographical film, on the condition that I film in parallel with a German documentary-maker, to whom he had already made a commitment. Denis was scrupulous in that way, and did not abandon a promise, although it complicated the filming for him. To be the subject of two camera crews simultaneously, in your seventies, is a feat of endurance.

 But then Denis had endured so much already by the time I got to know him properly, not least a prison sentence extending beyond two decades. That price he paid for his idealism and political action in his prime cost him the best years of family life and brought him huge pain. And he tolerated the suffering with an unbowed sense of optimism, with good humour, and great practicality.

 His life is a series of distinct chapters, playing out in contrasting locations. It starts with Denis as a tousle-haired, cheeky looking boy in the Cape Town working-class suburb of Observatory, son of Jewish immigrants who schooled him ideologically in communism.  He remembered his parents feeding workers on the picket-line and demonstrating deep sympathy to the poor and downtrodden of all races. He also remembered being chased with a knife by a butcher with Nazi-sympathies, who would shout at him as he walked to school: I am going to get you Jew-Boy! Denis kindly took me and the camera crew back to Observatory to drive past the landmarks of his childhood, trawling his private spaces for memories.

 Then as a young adult, he became involved in the Modern Youth Society, young people defying the racist conventions and laws of the South Africa of that time, to meet across the colour-bar and talk about politics and how to build a better, equal, non-racist world.  I located jerky old footage of these young people, playing games, singing songs and marching together in a display of socialist solidarity and idealism.  During this time, he met Esme Bodenstein, whom he married, and who paid a huge price as the exiled wife of a jailed communist revolutionary, a single mother to two children, living across the sea from the apartheid prison which held Denis for 22 years. An old film which I was lucky to be able to use in our documentary reflected her disillusionment with the life she ended up living in London when she had to fall very much on her resources and make the best of it, including taking in lodgers to supplement the household income.  

 For Denis had become deeply involved in the revolution and he gave it his all.  He joined the South African Communist Party, he organised protests against the apartheid government, and he signed up to the ANC’s armed wing, umKhonto we Sizwe. He helped to organize its first training camp in the rural area of Mamre in the Western Cape. Yes, we went there too with him, and walked around the empty field where they had drilled the new recruits to the revolution.  As he conjured up memories, with veterans whom he had brought with him for the film shoot, he invoked the laughter of youth, and the jokes that had been shared, as much as the seriousness of the task at hand. He taught the cadres how to make bombs and sabotage cars and print pamphlets among other things. He spoke a great deal about a gifted young township leader called Looksmart Solwandle Ngudle, who was arrested, shortly after the Rivonia arrests.  (Looksmart was one of the first South African political prisoners to die under interrogation by apartheid police and was found dead in his cell in Pretoria, the tragic news conveyed to Denis in his. I would not have known about Looksmart, if it had not been for Denis, so eager to share the story of his life with other participants in the Liberation Struggle.)

 As a university-trained engineer, Denis was a font of wisdom about explosives and possible targets – electric pylons, railway lines and underground cables for example.  He went to Johannesburg on a top secret mission for MK and had the misfortune of being at Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, just outside Johannesburg, when the police swooped down on the hideaway to arrest the ANC’s National High Command, with accompanying incriminating evidence.   Denis’ mission had been to research what was needed in the way of explosives and hardware to start a revolution and he arrived at Lilliesleaf, fatefully, with his notebook.

 “I was to investigate the manufacture of weapons and the explosives we’d need: hand-grenades, landmines, detonators, remote detonators and so on,” he told me in the laconic, quiet voice of an accomplished raconteur.   “You have to make some notes. And unfortunately I was captured with the notes in my pocket.”

 So Denis found himself with Nelson Mandela and seven other accused, one of only two white men, before an unflinching apartheid-era judge, Mr Quartus de Wet, facing a possible death sentence for sabotage. This became a politically defining trial for apartheid South Africa. Sharing the dock were the ANC’s heavyweights: Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, Rusty Bernstein, Raymond Mhlaba, Elias Motsoaledi and Andrew Mlangeni. Denis was on the wrong side of the law, but he was in good political company. According to Joel Joffe, the lead defence attorney, Denis was persistently upbeat despite the difficulty of the situation and the cruelty of the police, who did not spare him their anti-semitism and rough interrogation techniques.  His ebullience reached the point where the legal team feared he might jeopardise his position under cross-examination.  He made rude signs to the policemen with his middle finger, and seemed always to be enjoying himself, cracking jokes, smiling and chatting.  But when his day on the stand came, the defence team were relieved. Denis performed well under pressure. And one of his great utterances came at the end of the trial, when Judge de Wet handed down a sentence of life imprisonment rather than death by hanging. They had escaped the noose, and Denis shouted out when his mother called for the judgement: “Life! It’s life for living!” It was a moment of supreme defiance, as he was then taken away to spend the next two decades and more behind the cold, grey walls of Pretoria Central Prison.  It was June 1964 and Denis was only 31 years old.

Denis in the dock of Pretoria’s Palace of Justice, remembering the Rivonia Trial in which he had faced the death sentence. He was sentenced to life imprisonment along with Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders.

So, another chapter started. Denis was separated from his co-accused who were dispatched to Robben Island and as a convicted white revolutionary, restricted to the political wing of this Pretoria Central Prison.  There he became something of a leader to a small dislocated community of white prisoners who came and went over the years. Denis retained his sense of conscience and his great compassion.  He had planned to escape from the prison with three others who hatched an elaborate plot, but at the last moment, turned down that chance on the grounds that he was too old and may jeopardise their flight.  They slipped out of the prison by making wooden keys, and he stayed on, becoming one of the seniors. He nursed with care and compassion the ailing Bram Fischer, who had represented him and others at the Rivonia Trial. Sapped by cancer, the once powerful defence lawyer declined painfully in prison and Denis carried him practically and emotionally to the end.  Denis lifted spirits with his jokes and home-spun wisdom.  He organized and advised. He campaigned for political prisoners to get newspapers. He painted the lines of the baseball court within the prison, where the prisoners played for recreation. “I painted those,” he chortled to the camera proudly when we went back to this place of containment, many years back, a smile on his face, despite the closing in of memories.  

Denis reflecting on his long prison sentence on a visit back to Pretoria Central Prison with a camera crew

Of all the moments I was privileged to share with Denis, his visit back to Pretoria Central Prison was one of the most moving. While touring the prison, he turned to one of the warders, and said spontaneously:

 “Look after the people here, I know they’re difficult, I know prisoners are not easy, but it’s so awful for them.” Denis had been shaken by the warder’s confession that she might not be able to survive imprisonment herself.

“We have to treat people like people,” he continued. “Before it was only punishment, I didn’t spend twenty-two years here in prison to have the same kind of prison for people in the future. If you couldn’t survive one day, you’re doing something wrong.”

The other extraordinary moment was on Robben Island. For the sake of the German documentary-maker and myself, Denis organized a trip to Robben Island with fellow Rivonia Trial accused Ahmed Kathrada. Denis had carried with him a sensitivity about his release in 1985 after 22 years in jail in Pretoria. It had been offered by the apartheid government on the condition he denounced the armed struggle against apartheid, and the offer was engineered in peculiar circumstances. Denis eventually signed the document as a passport out, possibly realizing that his resilience in jail was waning.  But on quitting South Africa, he denounced his undertaking at a press conference with the ANC in exile in Lusaka.  But some within the ANC and the SACP never forgave him: integrating into exile society in London was emotionally and politically difficult for him. He didn’t expand on this part of his life in the interviews we did, but many of his friends alluded to the irony that his release from Pretoria Central had been a very challenging part of the prison experience.

A photo of Denis re-united with his family after 22 years in jail, filmed with his private letters in the documentary, Sentenced with Mandela, 2011

 On Robben Island, in Nelson Mandela’s cell, Ahmed Kathrada gently told Denis that he and the other Rivonia trialists on the Island had completely understood why, in 1985, he had to quit prison when he did, and that they had held no grudge, only sympathy.  

 “You know people feel that Robben Island was the worst, it was not,” said Kathy turning to Denis. “We were together, the white comrades were just a handful. We were thirty of us here and then we had hundreds and hundreds in the cells there, so again one of things you wanted in prison is companionship, the more the better. Denis and them didn’t have that.”

 A great heaviness seemed to leave Denis at that point, and although we stopped recording the interview, as time in Mandela’s cell is always limited, it felt as if it were the right moment with which to end the documentary. In a sense, it was the end of documenting that very long chapter.

 But Denis had more chapters since prison, some spent in London, some in Germany and many in Cape Town, where he was based in his simple but beautiful Hout Bay home, adorned with interesting art.  He never lost his faith in life, in the creative arts, in relationships, in the power of people to bring about change and in the ANC, the organization in which he invested so much, which had given him a creed to live by,  and in whose service he had personally paid such a high price for a new society. He involved himself in uplifting the community around him, channeled money to good causes through his foundation. To encourage others to do the same, he was always available to speak and gave interviews, explaining his perspectives through simple parables drawn from his own life.  He stood up against ANC abuses with other veterans, he gave advice and direction to the youth.  

 Once the documentary was completed, I felt sufficiently comfortable to visit him with my small children, but after that we lost touch. However, a tango-dancing friend of mine reported a sighting relatively recently at her tango club. Denis was there in his wheelchair to accompany his partner who loved to step out. What a fitting way to end such a turbulent, purposeful and varied life, living life fully and sensually to the very last dance.

 © Marion Edmunds May 2020

Sentenced with Mandela is the story of anti-apartheid activist Denis Goldberg, the only white revolutionary to be convicted at the Rivonia Trial.