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.

Walking back in time: Feet First for Khoisan Revivalists

I missed the first part of the shoot. Cameraman extraordinaire Peter Rudden was sent video of a group of people engaged in a two-week protest walk from Hankey in the Eastern Cape to the Cape Town Castle to raise the profile of South Africa’s indigenous people. He rushed out there while I was wrapping up other work. After two days of filming skin-clad Khoisan Revivalists and others walking along the dusty highways and byways of the Cape, he returned home and gave me visuals and two interviews. The rest I had to find to build a coherent story. It took some weeks to finish.

There definitely is a story here about the consciousness carried by people who are descended from and identify with South Africa’s First Nations, nominally called the Khoi and the San, the Griquas and the Namas. But the story is complex and fragmented, largely drip-fed into popular consciousness on an ad-hoc basis. An article here, a write-up there, a protest march, camping out in front of the Union Buildings - the story has yet to develop a unified narrative to assist in its telling. So there is a great deal of frustration among the activists, and a distrust of the media. Yet they will need more coverage to make an impact in contemporary times. Pressure groups have begun to raise their voices in public spaces to stress the importance of the lost languages and leaders of the earliest people in South Africa. The response by government has been sluggish and resulted in slow-moving draft legislation. This article about a public hearing on the law they have drafted gives a taste of the conflicts that it has triggered. https://www.customcontested.co.za/khoi-san-leaders-challenge-premise-tklb-public-hearings-demand-land/

By far the most coherent story comes from the Griqua people thanks to the fact that so much of their history was recorded. The delegations which took the issue of Griqua status in post-apartheid South Africa to the United Nations had to present a case for their collective identity. They were able to harness their history to tell the story of the people and their plight. One of the most clear descriptions of the effects of colonialism came from the Chair of the Khoi-san Council, Cecil Le Fleur, a descendant of Griqua leaders. He quit his job as a teacher to fight for his people. Twenty years later, he is still an activist. He described the situation of his people as he saw it.

“In the case of the South African so-called Coloured and Khoi Khoi communities, the master plan of the colonial regime at that time was to alienate these people from their sense of belonging and from their identity, which includes their language and traditions. And they drove the dispossessed from the land, they drove them into locations, and stripped them of their self esteem. So slowly, but surely, they transformed them psychologically into people who stopped dreaming because there was nothing to dream about. Because they know that they were captured, they could not move away. They have no rights outside, they, they are just thought of as Hotnot or Bushman.”

Unlike Mr Le Fleur, who was able to hold a book about his ancestors in his hands, the other activists I met in the making of this documentary had only a vague sense of how their ancestry was intertwined in the landscape of South African history. Many had not grown up in a culturally indigenous setting and were learning what are described as traditional customs and ancient dialects as adults. There seems to be no higher authority to prove the authenticity of rituals. They are carried to some extent by their emotions, their politics and their lifestyle choices. They are people who want answers to their post-apartheid identity within the communities from which they came and in which they operate. They would have been labelled Coloured under apartheid - who are they now? And what makes them who they are?

This is a question that animates a Canadian, who left Cape Town as a child with her family. Classified Coloured under apartheid, they had emigrated to be treated as equals in another country. Gillian Von Langsdorff works with First Nation Peoples in Canada but felt a need to reach homewards. After a DNA ancestry test, confirming her Khoisan roots, among other nationalities, she decided to embark on the Indigenous People’s Liberation Walk. The experience, now done two years in a row, has informed her ongoing research.

“I noticed that there was an identity resilience within this larger group of Coloured South Africans, which includes mixed race people, indigenous nationalities, and what is considered all others who could not easily fit into the black or white binary,” she said.

The question of post-apartheid identity is fraught and political. Apartheid’s obsession with classifying people according to perceived race has inflicted deep wounds. Yet the soothing nature of the walking which dominates this insert, the beauty of the environment, and the commitment of those involved assists in reaching backwards and forwards in time to create a sense of hope for the people who embarked on this journey. I certainly developed in my understanding of the call to revive a neglected culture to restore, for some, a sense of self.

Here is the link to the programme broadcast in June 2019:https://f.io/42Pi7E5w

The Griqua Church to celebrate its long-standing traditions in July. Griqua culture has embraced aspects of colonialism which its church reflects. The plant in the left-hand corner of the pamphlet is the Kenniedood succulent plant, meaning the Plant that Shall Not Die. It was chosen as an emblem for the Griqua people to represent resilience in the face of adversity.

Filming a ritual at Cape Town Castle with Bradley Van Sitters, rapper turned Khoisan Revivalist. Bradley was also, controversially, the first Khoisan Praise Singer for Parliament at the 2019 State of the Nation Address after the national elections this year.

Storytellers and scientists collaborate to save the African Kelp Forest

This story is about a group of remarkable people who have committed to saving the seabed and its diversity for posterity, specifically the Kelp Forest off Simonstown on the Cape Peninsula. The organisation that led me to this story was the The Sea Change Trust. (www.seachangeproject.com)

Its website presents its case for conservation through the most beautiful images of the secret underwater world in the Kelp Forest near Simonstown on the Cape Peninsula. Having spent a few days with the team, and interviewed their co-founder, veteran film-maker Craig Foster, I was absorbed both by the skin-tingling experience of  snorkelling, without a wetsuit, in the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean as well as the importance of learning the value of bio-diversity through observing and witnessing sea-life. Craig’s commitment to dive every day, and to track the marine life on the coast is infectious. His desire to share this passion should alert more people to the need for drastic conservation practices on our oft neglected coastal doorstep.

Already, the Sea Change Trust has started to build relationships with scientists who are working on mapping the sea bed for the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) in order to preserve the special spaces under the sea. Craig has taught a group how to snorkel and is teaching them to track marine life underwater, creating even greater excitement around their conservation goals. Loyiso Dunga, Luther Adams and Sizo Sibandla work with the indefatigable Dr Kerry Sink, the SANBI scientist evaluating the diversity of South Africa’s sea-bed by mapping its topography.  It is partly the fruits of this research that prompted the South African Government to extend its protection of the sea-bed within its waters to over 5 per cent. Twenty marine coastal areas were gazetted for conservation in May this year (2019). It is an admirable advance.

Both Dr Sink and Craig Foster, a film-maker, are harnessing the impact of beautiful images to campaign for conservation. And in this regard, they have a treasure chest to work with. Out filming inside the kelp forest has yielded the most beautiful results. Add drone shots, cutaways, sweeping sea vistas and powerful interviews, and we have an extraordinary insert.

After broadcast early in June, you can watch it here by pressing this link:https://f.io/bZMBiCR_

Craig Foster, the Sea Change Team and SANBI scientists preparing to dive into the Kelp Forest near Simonstown, Cape Town March 2019

Producing a story about songs and singing - The Stellenbosch University Choir

I heard about the University of Stellenbosch choir on my first date with a man who would eventually become my husband. He had sung bass in the choir as a student, and remained passionate about the experience, not only the music, but also the impact it had on his personal development.  I grew up in the choir, he would say. At the time, I was impressed but perhaps a little sceptical too. Later we both went to a lunch-hour concert at the Endlersaal at the Conserve in Stellenbosch and I was awed and to an extent shaken by the beauty of the singing. I never forgot it.

So years later when I had an opportunity to produce an insert on the choir for CNN, I leapt at the chance. Through a five day shoot that seemed to stretch over ten days, I had a view of the elements of the experience that my date had been trying to explain to me all those years before. I interviewed the inspirational musical director, Andre van der Merwe, the choir’s extraordinarily capable manager Ulrike Vorndran and four of the 112  choir members. I heard from them what it was like to grow up in the choir, and how it had changed their lives.

 A university choir is in a state of constant renewal, as some students graduate and first-years sign up.  About five hundred students audition in the October of a year and in the first term of the following year, the selected group of about 120 start practicing in earnest together, twice a week.  Once the music is mastered there are concerts and competitions and sometimes overseas tours. The competitions have yielded extraordinary results for them. As of August 2018, the University of Stellenbosch Choir is  positioned number one in the Interkultur World Rankings. They have tables of trophies and cups from previous years competitions. This year, they won all their categories at the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod in Wales. At the World Choir Games in Riga, they won the highest score ever to be awarded to a choir.

 Andre has many theories as to why the choir has such success. He believes that the cultural diversity of the choir, with the range of musical backgrounds represented in the 112 voices, helps to create a unique and compelling sound. He is also a perfectionist. We watched him in action at a rehearsal. He does not indulge sloppy singing or lapses of concentration.  He insists that his choir be fully present, and is endlessly peppering them with a rollicking commentary of motivational thoughts and responses. He coaxes and nudges and scolds and laments on stage, forcing them to focus and respond until he gets the sound and execution he wants.

 Andre also  manages to develop a relationship with each member of the choir. He has to know the sound of their voice and their name, and the rest follows from there. Having experienced disappointment as young man himself, he has a special feeling for people their age. Andre was a gifted concert pianist with a scholarship to study in the United States of America. But he tragically fell from a stage and broke his thumb; his dream was shattered but he had to pick himself up and define himself in new careers.

 So between the music instruction and the logistics of concerts and rehearsals, Andre doles out a great deal of home-spun wisdom to the young people who gather at his feet to rehearse twice weekly.  One of his life’s lessons is for the students simply to be themselves.

 “Be respectful, but be yourself. Drop the mask. Connect with your soul. Be who you really are,” he says.  “I don't think one can underestimate the role of an activity where people are allowed to live out their creativity, to express themselves, to learn about true discipline. In my country especially it’s amazing to work with people from other cultures and to realize that I'm not losing myself when I do that. I'm becoming stronger because I learn so much. I learn about humanity.”

 It has resonance. The four young people I interviewed for CNN’s Inside Africa insert all viewed him as a mentor and an educator. Next years’ choir chairman, Alex Menu, is a bass. Orphaned as a teenager, he had to fight very hard to get to university where he is a fourth year medical student. He says that he has learnt to express himself through the choir, as well as to listen.

 “A lot of times people think that choir is just singing, but most of the time choir is about listening. You really have to tune with other people, listen to the people next to you, listen to the choir as a whole, and also in between the lines when you’re silent, just really listen to what’s happening around you,” he said.

A university campus in South Africa is not an easy place. Students battle with financial burdens, racial tension, politics, socialising and curating their own lifestyles. There is also the intensity of an academic degree - the pressure to pass in an environment where there is the freedom to fail. The choir members I spoke to placed value on the relationships they developed within the choir, as uniquely supportive and sharing. For them, the choir is a safe space to find the freedom to express themselves. And somehow they communicate that vulnerability and certainty all at once in the most beautiful music on stage. A standing ovation is inevitable.

These are the updated links to the CNN Inside Africa piece on the Stellenbosch University Choir:

https://app.frame.io/presentations/b6880f9b-e596-4b6e-8a98-a8d164f83cd0

https://app.frame.io/presentations/38926936-f0d6-4b5b-8b5d-3cc0da30bea5

https://app.frame.io/presentations/b2079204-0e46-44ed-b21d-485f71b47b15

Apologies for the break in linkage earlier - it ought to be fixed by now. Should the links not work please contact me on medmunds@icon.co.za