1956 Treason Trial


The Treason Trial was a trial in Johannesburg in which 156 people, including Nelson Mandela, were arrested in a raid and accused of treason in South Africa in 1956.
The main trial lasted until 1961, when all of the defendants were found not guilty. During the trials, Oliver Tambo left the country and was exiled. Whilst in other European and African countries, he started an organisation which helped bring publicity to the African National Congress's cause in South Africa. Some of the defendants were later convicted in the Rivonia Trial in 1964.
Chief Luthuli has said of the Treason Trial:
The treason trial must occupy a special place in South African history. That grim pre-dawn raid, deliberately calculated to strike terror into hesitant minds and impress upon the entire nation the determination of the governing clique to stifle all opposition, made one hundred and fifty-six of us, belonging to all the races of our land, into a group of accused facing one of the most serious charges in any legal system.

Background

On 5 December 1956, the South African Police's Security Branch raided and arrested 140 people from around the country on the charge of treason as they enforced the Suppression of Communism Act. Those not based in Johannesburg were flown there in military aircraft and held in custody until a hearing on 19 December 1956. The raids were follow-ups to those conducted in 1955 and included search warrants to look for documents at 48 anti-government organisations.
On the 19 December 1956, 153 prisoners were driven to the Johannesburg Drill Hall for a preliminary hearing to examine the state's evidence. Magistrate Frederick Wessels was the presiding judge with J.C. van Niekerk as the state's public prosecutor. An attempt by the prosecutor to proceed with the case was interrupted three times as the noise of 5,000 Black South Africans, hoping to attend the case, surrounded the streets of the Drill Hall and sung Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika. The proceedings had to be halted. The
Labour Party in the UK accused the South African Government of intimidating and victimising those opposed to Apartheid, condemning the trial and called South Africa a police state.
Resuming on 20 December 1956, the hearing was interrupted again when the defence objected to their clients being behind a six-foot high wire fence. After an adjournment, it was agreed by the two sides to reduce it to a barrier four-foot tall. The prosecutor J.C. van Niekerk then presented an outline of his evidence stretching back to 1953 of the liberation movements activities but his evidence was soon interrupted when violence broke out outside the court. After police began moving back the crowd of around a 1,000 black protesters, a policeman was injured by a stone and they retaliated by firing into the crowd and surrounding cars and shops, injuring fourteen people. Deputy Police Commissioner Colonel Piet Grobler was able to get his men to stop shooting and order was restored.
The trial examination would continue on 21 December 1956 and the prosecutor presented his case as stating that the defendants were subversive, having attended the recent Congress of the People gathering at Kliptown where speeches had promoted Communism and the creation of the Freedom Charter, the need to seek help abroad and in other evidence, the need to raise money to buy firearms. With no charges yet presented to the individual detainees, bail was granted and the trial was then concluded until 9 January 1957. Rioting broke out at the end of the day's proceedings when police charge a group of 400 Black South African protesters.
On resumption of the preliminary hearing and an examination of the state's evidence on 9 January 1957, three more defendants were added to the charges bringing the number to 156 persons. The defence would argue that the Freedom Charter was not treasonous, that it did not call for violence and it argued for peace and racial harmony for the country.
The hearing was still ongoing during August 1957, the accused were spending six hours each day in court. With the hearing to last a few more months, the magistrate had more 6,200 pages of testimony and 10,000 exhibits to examine and decide whether to pass the sentences himself or let the Attorney General decide whether to proceed to a trial. The trial was taking so long, the male prisoners formed a choir.
On 17 December 1957, Attorney General W.J. McKenzie decided to drop charges against 61 and proceed to with the remaining 95 defendants on 13 January 1958. Albert Luthuli and 44 Black, six Whites, four Indian and six Coloured defendants were released.
The hearing resumed on 13 January 1958 with the prosecutor informing the court of the names of those 61 defendants who had been cleared of further charges.
The hearing concluded on 30 January 1958 with Magistrate F.C. Wessels finding that there was sufficient evidence for the defendants to be tried on charges of high treason. The defendants were asked to plead, with all pleading not guilty they were released on bail. Their defence lawyers asked for a jury trial, the alternative being a trial by two or three judges, with the former request being rejected by the state in treason trials.
The Treason Trial began in Pretoria on 1 August 1958 with 91 people on trial having been charged with high treason. The trial saw 57 blacks, 16 whites, 16 Indians and two Coloureds charged with attempting to overthrow the South African government between 1952 and 1956 with the intention to replace it with a communist system. The defence lawyers opened the trial by lodging an objection to two of the three trial judges. They called for Justice Joseph Ludorf to withdraw because of his involvement as a lawyer in other cases against some defendants while Justice Rans Rumpff should withdraw as he had asked for the former to be appointed as a judge on the treason trial. The case was then adjourned until the following Monday.
When the trial resumed on 12 August 1958, chief defence lawyer Israel Maisels continued to challenge the indictment referring to the masses of documentary evidence which he claimed was impossible to read in less than two years, and was an abuse of the court process and that the prosecution did not know what its case was about.
After the trial collapsed in October, it was decided in November 1958 to resume the trial on 19 January 1959 with a decision to drop 60 people from the indictment.
On 22 November 1958, 30 of the 91 were re-indicted with the charge now been narrowed down to a conspiracy to endanger and overthrow the state based on the 1955 Congress of the People gathering and the adoption of the Freedom Charter. The remaining 61 were to be indicted in April 1959.
The trial resumed on 19 January 1959 in Pretoria with the defence arguing for the trial to be moved back to Johannesburg, due to the hardship of travel for the defendants, a city where the majority of them lived. The case was postponed on the first day until after lunch as the bus carrying the defendants had broken down. The trial resumed on 2 February 1959, with the venue change request squashed and the defence lawyers continuing their argument against the new indictments.
With the resumption of the trial on 20 April 1959 of the other 61 defendants, it was ended when Judge R.L. Rumpff declared that the Crown's case could not accuse the defendants of conspiracy without saying how they entered into the conspiracy and that they would need to know in order to defend their case. The defendants could return home and the prosecution would have to decide whether to re-indict them.
On 29 March 1961, down to 28 defendants, the trial's verdict was released and they were all found not guilty of treason and discharged. Judge F.L.H. Rumpff concluded that the prosecution could not show that the ANC had become a communist organisation and therefore no treason could be proven nor that any act of violence was to be used to overthrow the state. The defendants were met outside the court by their relatives and saw the singing of Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika.

Defendants

In December 1956, many key members of the Congress Alliance were arrested and charged with treason, including almost the entire executive committee of the ANC, as well as the SACP, the SAIC, and the COD. 105 Africans, 21 Indians, 23 whites and 7 coloured leaders were arrested. Ten were women. Many arrestees, including Nelson Mandela, were detained in communal cells in Johannesburg Prison, known as the Fort, resulting in what Mandela described as "the largest and longest unbanned meeting of the Congress Alliance in years." However, white men, white women, and black people were all held in a separate parts of the jail.
Initially, 156 defendants were charged with high treason. The number of defendants was later reduced to 92. In November 1957, the prosecution reworded the indictment and proceeded a separate trial against 30 accused. Their trial commenced in August 1959. The remaining 61 accused were tried separately before the case against them was dismissed in mid 1960.
Treason trial defendants included:
Lawyers for the defence included:
Prosecutors included:
Judges included:
Witnesses included:
After the British Canon John Collins learnt about the trial, and the calls for the death penalty, he set up the Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa to pay all legal expenses and look after the families of those on trial. This was one of the first examples of foreign intervention against apartheid in South Africa and proved very successful with over £75,000 being raised towards defending those accused.
In 1957, the campaigner Mary Benson joined the Defence Fund as its secretary.

Significance of the trial

In many ways, the trial and prolonged periods in detention strengthened and solidified the relationships between members of the multi-racial Congress Alliance. Rusty Bernstein wrote:
Inter-racial trust and co-operation is a difficult plant to cultivate in the poisoned soil outside. It is somewhat easier in here where... the leaders of all ethnic factions of the movement are together and explore each other's doubts and reservations, and speak about them without constraint. Coexistance in the Drill Hall deepens and recreates their relationships.
The trial and resulting periods of detention also allowed ANC leaders to consult about the direction of their struggle and the possibility of armed struggle. Ironically, the court found that the ANC was nonviolent just as the ANC was starting to question the effectiveness of this strategy.
In court, the 156 defendants sat in alphabetical order, visibly displaying the multiracial nature of the anti-apartheid movement. While the defendants sat side by side in court, they were strictly segregated in jail. When the trialists took over their own defence during the State of Emergency, they eventually convinced prison authorities to let them meet to plan their defence and white female defendants, white male defendants and black women defendants were brought to the African men's prison. Yet the prison authorities still sought to physically separate these defendants by race and gender in their meeting space. Mandela describes the practical dilemma the proponents of apartheid faced:
The authorities erected an iron grille to separate Helen and Leon from us and a second partition to separate them from Lilian and Bertha ... Even a master architect would have had trouble designing such a structure.

Trial timeline