Back to the Beginning

Nearly two years had passed since the police rounded them up--a mixed bag of 91 teachers, lawyers, doctors, labor leaders and even housewives whose crime it had been to oppose South Africa's racial apartheid. Charged with high treason and conspiracy to overthrow the government by revolution, they had all lost their jobs, been sustained almost entirely by a defense fund raised by sympathizers at home and abroad. Last week in Johannesburg, as South Africa tensely watched and waited, the absurdity of the charges against them finally became apparent to all.

For two months their brilliant defense counsel, Israel Maisels, Q.C., had hammered away at the Crown's inability to prove that on any particular occasion any of the defendants had preached revolution. At one point he seized a batch of documents that the Crown had introduced as evidence, waved them in the air crying: "Here, my lords, we have a Russian recipe book, an Indian school magazine, a letter saying a check has been lost, another that it has been found. There are 10,000 of these documents and it would be impossible for anybody to read them all," yet when any individual asked what the charge against him was, he was referred to the entire body of evidence. Ordered to produce more specific evidence, the Crown narrowed its case to a simple charge of conspiracy. Last week, under Maisels' fire, the Crown withdrew the indictment entirely.

That night some of the defendants, black and white together, gathered at a house for a little celebration. Policemen raided the place, acting under a South African law that forbids serving liquor to nonwhites. Meanwhile, the government announced that because the defendants had not yet, during the long preliminary hearings, pleaded either guilty or not guilty, a new indictment would be filed. The 91 defendants were right back where they were nine months ago.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.