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The leader of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, Nelson Mandela, was on this day in June 1964 jailed for life for sabotage.
Seven other defendants, including the former secretary-general of the banned African National Congress (ANC), Walter Sisulu, were also given life prison sentences.
Crowds gathered silently outside the court building in Pretoria’s Church Square waiting for the verdict to be handed down, while hundreds of police patrolled the area.
The Rivonia trial, named after the suburb of Johannesburg where several of the defendants were arrested, began eight months earlier, with Mandela, 46, and his co-defendants proudly confessing their guilt to plotting to destroy the South African state by sabotage.
As members of the ANC, the main African nationalist movement, they had campaigned for an end to the oppression of black South Africans.
But the movement was banned in 1960 following the Sharpeville massacre and campaigners decided they had no choice but to resort to violent means.
Mandela, a lawyer by training, told the court earlier: “I do not deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the whites.”
His co-accused included Sisulu, Dennis Goldberg, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Elias Mosoaledi, Andrew Mlangeni, all ANC officials, and Ahmed Kathrada, the former leader of the South African Indian Congress.
Lawyer for the defendants, Harold Hansen QC, said: “These accused represent the struggle of their people for equal rights. Their views represent the struggle of the African people for the attainment of equal rights for all races in this country.”
