South Africa: Avoiding Martyrdom

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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.