By Stephen Williams

Rivonia's children

By Glenn Frankel

£20 Weidenfeld & Nicolson

ISBN 0-297-841 55-6

On 11 July 1963, a 14-man team of the South African special branch security police raided a remote property, known as Lillesleaf Farm, just north of Johannesburg. It was the culmination of an intensive search for those responsible for a campaign of political sabotage that had rocked South Africa. These acts of sabotage had ranged from cherry bombs left in post office boxes to the firebombing of the National Party's regional headquarters in Durban.

The special branch's political masters were convinced that they were facing a diabolical conspiracy of revolution, engineered by white communist fanatics who had brain-washed and manipulated a handful of black Africans to serve as cannon-fodder.

After weeks of fruitless searching, the police had little to show for their efforts until they picked up a group of Africans near the Botswana border. One of those arrested claimed that he had visited the headquarters of Umkhonto We Sizwe - the group responsible for the sabotage - and for his freedom and a large payment, he was willing to lead the police to its location.

Umkhonto high command

While the special branch were sceptical of this informer they nevertheless agreed to his terms. The informer led the police to Rietfontein Road claiming that he had spotted a sign reading 'Ivon' just before the turn-off for a large house. The police had been on this road at least twice before and were beginning to think the informer was stringing them along when they came across a weathered sign for the town of Rivonia but with the letters R and IA faded and almost illegible.

The police had found the house. The next day they raided the farm and captured 18 people, including most of the Umkhonto's high command and a huge trove of bomb-making components (but no firearms). There were also incriminating documents including a six page outline of a guerrilla campaign to spark a general uprising which was titled Operation Mayibuye (The Return).

This document called for military units totalling 7,000 men in four regional operational areas and listed huge amounts of weaponry and supplies required and the military targets to be attacked.

Among those captured in the police raid were Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki (father of Thabo Mbeki, the current South African President), Raymond Mhlaba, Ahmed Kathrada, Rusty Bernstein, Bob Hepple, Dennis Goldberg and Arthur and Hazel Goldreich, who arrived at the farm while the raid was in progress.

Eight farmworkers and servants were also arrested and detained for interrogation with one of their number escaping in the confusion. The trial that resulted from the raid became known as the Rivonia Trial.

Wide cast of personalities

Glenn Frankel chooses to focus on three families caught up in this watershed event. They are Ruth First, wife of Joe Slovo, who endured months of solitary confinement without charge before leaving South Africa (only to be assassinated in 1982 by South Africa's Bureau of State Security in Maputo, Mozambique, by means of a parcel bomb); Hilda and Rusty Bernstein, committed communists and activists and AnnMarie Wolpe, initially an innocent bystander but wife of the activist Harold Wolpe. She later risked her own freedom and the life of her sick infant in effecting a daring prison escape for her husband.

Through the stories of these three families, a wider cast of personalities and their contributions unfold, principally those of the white community, like the veteran Liberal MP Helen Suzman and the novelist Alan Paton, who for various reasons allied themselves to the cause of African liberation.

Two others of this group were lawyers, Jimmy Kantor - the apolitical, high-living brother of AnnMarie Wolpe who was targeted by the state after Harold Wolpe's escape from jail and was one of the 11 defendants at the Rivonia trial - and Bram Fischer, Afrikaner leader of the (banned) South African Communist Party. Fischer was the lead lawyer for the Rivonia defence team.

Bram Fischer's story was particularly moving. Throughout the trial his brilliant legal skills ran circles around the prosecution lead by Percy Yutar and it is perhaps thanks to him that the defendants all escaped the death penalty with life sentences.

Following the trial, Bram Fischer's life took a tragic turn He was at the wheel of a car that veered off the road to avoid a cow. The car plunged into a river and although Dram escaped, his wife Molly was drowned. It was a terrible blow and he attempted to come to terms with it by throwing himself into both legal work and political activities. Many of his close friends and colleagues considered that he had lost control and was behaving with a reckless self-destructive abandon.

Profound sacrifices

When the state finally charged him with membership of a banned political organisation, he fled underground and managed to elude capture for some 10 months. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1966. In 1971, his brother had to tell him of the death of his son Paul, This came as a cruel blow and he probably lost his will to live after.

In 1974 he succumbed to cancer and died without ever regaining his freedom.

While these are stories of the white participants of South Africa's liberation struggle, less important to the eventual victory than the heroes of the black leadership, the book's importance lies in revealing the contributions made by a small group of political activists who could have enjoyed the many privileges that their white skin bestowed on them in South Africa's perverse society, but instead made a moral choice to ally with a non-racist movement demanding change.

In common with their black African comrades, they shared, initially, an extraordinary naivety in their methods for countering apartheid. The profound sacrifices they were prepared to make in the face of an unyielding state's brutal repression were remarkable and it is probably thanks to their selfless contributions that the dream of a multiracial democratic society was kept alive during the long hard years of the freedom struggle.

Author Glenn Frankel, bureau chief for The Washington Post in South Africa in the 1980s, went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his international reporting. He is now editor of The Washington Post magazine.

Corsairville - The lost domain of the flying boat

By Graham Goster

£12.99 Viking

ISBN 0~670-86653-9

Inspired by the story of the flying boat Corsair, which had become lost and made a forced landing in Central Africa, author Graham Goster placed a small ad in a British daily paper asking for first-hand reminiscences of flying boat travel. The response was overwhelming; people wrote from every corner of the globe to describe travel on these amazing machines - half boat, half plane - that for a brief time criss-crossed the globe serving Britain's far-flung dominions.

There was an essential advantage to the flying boat in that it required no runways and Africa, with its long coastline, many rivers and huge lakes was ideally suited to flying boat operations. With the aid of a map showing Imperial Airways/BOAC (the forbearers of British Airways) routes, the reader can trace the various services from Europe to Africa, with take-off from Southampton waters either heading via Lisbon and Gibraltar down the west coast of Africa with stops at Bathurst (now Banjul, Gambia), Freetown, Sierra Leone, Takoradi, Accra, Lagos to Libreville; or via Marseille to Rome, Brindisi and Athens, crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Alexandria before heading southwards along the Nile to Port Bell on Lake Victoria Uganda, there to head east to Mombasa before again heading southwards hugging the coast of Africa via Dar es Salaam, Lindi, Mozambique Island, Beira, Maputu to Durban.

Other routes included a transatlantic route to Brazil via Lagos, services to India, the Far East and Australia - and during the war years even an east-west Africa connection between Juba via Kisangani, Mbandaka and Kinshasa to Libreville.

Not that flying boat travel was that fast, in fact in good weather it was a five-day journey from Britain to South Africa. One of the reasons for this was that flying boats had a limited fuel capacity and thirsty engines, not helped by the enormous volume of the machine, required for buoyancy but needing a lot of lift to take off from a water runway. They would touch down several times a day, and while passengers took morning coffee, lunch, tea and dinner at the overnight stops, the flying boats took on aviation fuel. But still it was faster, if more than twice as expensive than the alternative of passenger liners which needed a couple of weeks to cover the same journey. Even so, the commercial justification of the flying boats was the contracts won for the delivery of airmail. Imperial Airways struck a particularly good deal with the British government, securing a contract to deliver airmail that also involved the Admiralty providing and manning jetties and launches for passenger transfers and refuelling facilities.

The era of the flying boats really had reached its peak at the outbreak of World War II. Most of the old Empire flying boats were converted for military use, primarily on coastal patrol duty, but one even carried Winston Churchill across the Atlantic from the Bahamas to Britain.

Today, precious few of the machines have survived, although there are a few 50-year old Mallard and Goose class flying boats operating in the Caribbean and the wilds of Alaska. The author tracks these down and he travels the length of Africa to visit those places and people tied up with a long-lost age of aviation history.

Graham Coster may be an aviation enthusiast, but this book is as much a well-judged travel book as a plane-lover's miscellany. As he travels through Africa, either searching out those who remembered anything about the age of the flying boat or meeting with others who had responded to his small ad, his book unfolds history.

As to the Corsair, that story was pieced together from the handful of survivors of the group who had travelled out to the tiny settlement on the Dungu River in the northwest corner of the Democratic Republic of the Comgo to rescue the hapless flying boat. The Corsair was repaired not just once, but twice. It wasn't able to take off on its first attempt, crashed into the banks of the river and needed another massive effort to repair the hull, free it from the mud and dam the river to get the right water level.

The whole episode began with the Corsair, having completed about half the north-bound service from South Africa to Britain, becoming lost on the leg from Kisumu to Juba thanks to incorrectly installed direction finding equipment. With only 15 minutes of fuel remaining, the Corsair was hopelessly lost. Through the mist the crew spotted a straight stretch of water and the captain put the craft down. Although the landing was almost perfect, an extraordinary feat as the river was only just wider than the wing-span, the flying boat hit a submerged rock which breached her hull. In danger of sinking, the crew evacuated the 13 shaken but uninjured passengers. They were in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by desolate, flat, swamp bush.

Within five minutes a white man appeared on the scene. He was the resident Belgian Provincial Commissioner, Apperman, who had seen the flying boat come down, jumped in his car and rushed to the scene. He ferried the passengers and crew to his home and then arranged to get them to Juba where they caught the next north- bound flying boat, the Centurion, home to Britain.

Then began the task of rescuing the Corsair, stuck in the mud on the River Dungu. For this story, Graham Coster tracks down Hugh Gordon who led the salvage team, now aged 68 and living in retirement in England's west country. He tells the tale of how hundreds of Africans were employed to first carve a road through the bush to the craft, fell timber to create a ramp, man pumps to empty the hull and create a dam with timber and a jointing compound composed of anthill mud. The whole operation took 10 months and in that time a settlement grew on the banks of the Dungu, to be nick-named Corsairville and from which the book takes its title.

It is a truly extraordinary story, beautifully told, redolent of the colonial era of which the flying boat was part and parcel yet still as fascinating as any from aviation history.

The Life and Death of Lord Erroll - The truth behind the Happy Valley Murder

By Errol Trzebinski

£18.99 Fourth Estate

ISBN 1-85702-437-0

The well-known story of the murder of the Earl of Erroll in January 1941 and the subsequent sensational trial and acquittal of Delves Broughton for the deed, has spawned a number of books, a BBC television programme and the highly successful film of the early 1980's, James Fox's White Mischief.

Most know the story as a tale of the love affairs, wild parties and general excesses of a group of white settlers in the rolling Aberdare Hills north of Nairobi, Kenya. Now enter Errol Trzebinski, who lives in Mombasa and is something of an expert on the country and the era, with previous books that include studies of the Kenya pioneers and biographies of both Beryl Markham and Denys Finch-Hatton. Her unrivalled access to Lord Erroll's surviving friends and family gives her writing an authoritative tone, while her conclusions are as sensational as the crime she investigates.

In this minutely researched work, Errol Trzebinski reaches the conclusion that Lord Erroll's murder was no simple crime of passion. Erroll's connections to the British Fascist movement and the threat he posed to the British government and establishment all point to a plot that stretches from a dusty crossroads on the Ngong-Nairobi road, where Erroll met his end with a bullet in his brain, all the way to the heart of British power in Whitehall. It's a conspiracy story par excellence, which while not providing conclusive proof, is compelling enough to raise several interesting questions.

Copyright © IC Publications Limited 2001. All rights reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means or used for any business purpose without the written consent of the publisher. Whilst every effort has been made to ensure that the information contained herein is as accurate as possible, the publisher cannot accept responsibility for any consequences arising from its use.

Back to the top
Contents