27 years - Robben Island

The Rivonia trial speech

The Rivonia trial, which lasted from 1963-4, is historically important because it marked the South African government’s suppression of the ANC. When the trial ended, white minority rule in South Africa seemed invincible. The charges included 221 acts of sabotage, ranging from guerrilla warfare to communist activity and accepting money from African sympathisers in Liberia, Nigeria, Algeria, Ethiopia and Tunisia, with the aim of overthrowing the apartheid regime. Mandela’s speech before sentencing became famous for the political ideals, moral fortitude and personal resilience that he himself came to represent. It confirmed his personal significance as the backbone of the freedom struggle in its darkest days. His rhetoric – the ringing repetition of what ‘Africans want’ – articulates reasonable, constructive demands: a living wage, variation of work, freedom not to live in government designated zones, ownership of land. He addresses issues of sexual inequality and racial oppression, depicting black domestic workers as having to hide in their rooms “like little children”, deprived of the dignity of normal family life. He analyses the consequences of state oppression: the ‘ghettoes’ that hide the poor, the effects of poverty caused by material deprivation and lack of welfare, ‘the breakdown of family life’ and its ‘secondary effects’. Children are not educated at school because they have no parents at home to send them, and if they do, the whole family is working to keep themselves alive. He calls for a ‘stake in society’ for all South Africans and highlights the injustice of being ruled by a government in which the majority has no say. The dangerous effect of this, he states, is a ‘breakdown of standards’, erupting in township violence, illegitimacy, social friction and deepening inequality.

Addressing the state in this speech, Mandela refers to the brutality of the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. “Death sentences cannot cure the festering score”, he says. He also addresses white fears of revenge in the event of a democratic future. He promises equality not militancy should the ANC come to power, racial harmony and moral renewal rather than domination and vengeance. The rhetoric escalates to a deeply human uniting of racially oppressed South Africans. The repeated, objective call for what “Africans want” culminates in his identifying himself with his people: ‘We want … political justice’, meaning nothing less than ‘the right to live’. With this emotive climax, Mandela declares himself spokesperson for his people and country. Walters’s bust of Mandela captures this connection with the land and its people. Surrounded by the concrete modernist buildings of London’s South Bank, its warm, rugged texture refuses to blend in quietly. Nelson Mandela became a figurehead for all struggles for democracy and social justice. The bust is therefore appropriately situated in the cosmopolitan cultural environment of the South Bank.

rivonia-trial-quote.jpg.3

(Source of picture: doppelgänger.wordpress.com)

The African National Congress

Confirm copying

Restore backup