Avoiding Martyrdom

To some South Africans it seemed that world opinion had finally taken effect on their nation's stubborn racist masters. Eight men accused of membership in the revolutionary Umkonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) group had been convicted of sabotage, a crime that carries the death penalty. But last week the eight--six black, one white and an Indian--were sentenced to life imprisonment. Another white defendant was acquitted but immediately rearrested on other charges.

Black leaders elsewhere in Africa denounced the life sentences as inhuman, but the fact remains that the outcome could have been worse. The defendants, while pleading their "moral" innocence, admitted a great many of the charges; nine other South Africans, tried in a similar case last year, had been sentenced to death. But this time the government evidently decided that death sentences would have created super-martyrs who, from the grave, could have rallied South Africa's often dis jointed blacks and coloreds as well as many white liberals.

Bombs for Christmas. Foremost among the convicted Spearmen were Nelson Mandela, 45, the "Black Pimpernel," who led South Africa's Special Branch cops a merry chase before his capture two years ago, and Walter Sisulu, 52, bearded official of the banned African National Congress. For more than nine months, a stream of 186 witnesses passed through Pretoria's red brick Palace of Justice, documenting in 2,550,000 words of testimony the government's charges that Umkonto had planned a systematic, 18-month campaign of sabotage aimed at undermining apartheid.

When cops descended eleven months ago on Umkonto's "headquarters," an isolated farm at Rivonia north of Johannesburg, they found 106 maps of selected sabotage targets--among them police and power stations, post offices, homes of African officials. One prosecution witness who claimed to be an Umkonto defector said he had blown up power-line pylons in Natal and government offices in Durban, sent bombs wrapped as Christmas presents to government officials (none apparently exploded). Wary of its world image, Umkonto was careful to order its saboteurs not to kill, in fact forbade them even to carry arms.

Operation Comeback. State Prosecutor Percy Yutar, working from a captured 19-page document titled "Operation Comeback," charged that the defendants had mapped detailed plans for a Communist-backed "war of liberation" modeled on guerrilla campaigns in China, Cuba and Algeria, to be followed by an air and sea invasion of African shock troops trained in closely guarded camps near Dar es Salaam, Addis Ababa, Cairo and Algiers. He also tried to prove that Umkonto was the "military arm" of the supposedly nonviolent African National Congress.

Though the defense readily admitted that Umkonto had accepted Communist as well as other outside aid and did not deny the charges of sabotage, Mandela and Sisulu adamantly insisted that Umkonto had no tie-in with the A.N.C. They argued that the Spear had been honed only when black South Africans concluded that peaceful means of achieving equality had failed. "The whites chose to turn South Africa into an armed camp," said Sisulu. "I do not see how I could have done otherwise than I did. It is inevitable that in any civil war fought in this country, victory will go to the oppressed."

Black, Not Red. Umkonto Leader Mandela, once a celebrated Johannesburg boxer, admitted planning sabotage but insisted that he acted as a black, not a Red. His inspiration, he argued, had come not from Moscow or Peking but from the Zulu and Xhosa chieftains who fought long and skillfully against the technologically superior Boers a century ago. "This," he said in a dramatic peroration from the dock, "is the struggle of the African people, inspired by their own suffering and experience. It is a struggle for the right to live. I have cherished the ideal of a demo cratic and free society, in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunity. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But, if needs be, my Lord, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

Now he will have to live for it in jail. After the sentencing, a crowd held in check by police dogs and armed cops gathered outside the Palace of Justice to watch the prisoners being led away. Two Black Marias purred through the square, then accelerated swiftly toward Pretoria Central Jail. From there, the black and "colored" prisoners would be ferried to Robben Island, a former leper colony off the Cape of Good Hope, while the white man would stay in a white prison. As the trucks pulled away, white, black and brown arms flashed briefly behind the bars in the clench-fisted salute of the African National Congress. From the crowd came a ragged cry: "Amandla nga Weto [Strength is ours]."

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