Description
By November of 1963, the white police state of South Africa had managed to capture nearly all of the underground leaders of the antiapartheid movement—including Nelson Mandela—and had put them on trial on charges that carried the death penalty. Among the arrested was Bob Hepple, a 29-year-old lawyer who would subsequently escape to the neighboring British Protectorate of Bechuanaland. In this memoir of these dramatic events, Hepple throws fresh light on the character of Mandela and other leaders and on the controversies surrounding the emergence of the South African Communist Party and its “secret” resolution in December 1960 to begin the armed freedom struggle. There is a firsthand account of Mandela’s period as the ""Black Pimpernel,"" his 1962 trial for incitement, and of the Rivonia raid in 1963. Hepple also gives a graphic account of the psychological effects of interrogation in solitary detention without trial, and of the difficult personal choices he had to make. The story is told against the background of the experiences of his childhood and youth in a racist society, experiences that led him—described by a pro-government newspaper as “a young man with a red tie”—to play a role as a student activist against racial segregation in the universities, an adviser and assistant to the virtually illegal multiracial trade unions, a lawyer defending political victims of the police state, and to a lifetime fighting for human rights.
