/ 5 July 2013

Apartheid thugs still haunt struggle veteran’s dreams

Apartheid Thugs Still Haunt Struggle Veteran's Dreams

Starting this weekend and continuing throughout next week, it can be guaranteed that the words "wish Nelson Mandela could be here" will often be said, thought and heard during the 50th anniversary commemoration of the police raid on July 11 1963 on Liliesleaf farm in Rivonia, Johannesburg.

The events in Johannesburg and Cape Town will come, as one of the participants, Sir Bob Hepple, said this week, "with the sad coincidence of Mandela being extremely ill. It probably just concentrates the mind …"

Hepple (79 next month) fled South Africa as a 29-year-old advocate after being arrested with five leaders of the underground ANC at Liliesleaf. He is back for the commemoration, which will include the launch of his book, Young Man with a Red Tie.

Subtitled A Memoir of Mandela and the Failed Revolution 1960-1963, it tells of his escape from South Africa on November 23 1963 in order to avoid being called as state witness to testify against comrades such as Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Denis Goldberg and Govan Mbeki.

Hepple saw Mandela in action for the first time when he "was a 19-year-old pro-ANC student activist at a rally in Sophiatown in 1953, where it seemed there would be a riot. Mandela jumped on the platform and got everybody singing and he quietened them down – and the police wanted to attack, basically, and he prevented that.

"He was cool, almost serene and could take a quick decision as how to fix a situation," Hepple told me in Johannesburg this week.

Secret meetings
Hepple started working very closely with Mandela when the latter went underground in 1961.

"I was asked to join a support team in Johannesburg that moved him around safe houses, took him to secret meetings and carried messages," Hepple writes in his memoir.

"Since a white man would arouse suspicion if seen with a black passenger, Mandela would don a cap and a white chauffeur's coat and drive my smart green Wolseley car, with me in the back. We were never stopped."

Hepple established himself as a top human rights and labour lawyer and legal academic in the United Kingdom.

In 1996, then-president Mandela was on a state visit to the UK and several expatriates, including Hepple, were invited to the high commissioner's residence to meet him.

"Mandela said: 'We made a historical compromise. Nobody ever won. We've agreed to live under a democratic Constitution and that's all that happened.' He had no illusions."

In his memoir, Hepple gives a graphic account of the psychological effects of interrogation in solitary confinement. He was detained for 90 days without trial in 1963.

"It was totally disorienting – the worst feature is you don't realise how much you lose control of your own decision-making and so on, because you're isolated, you're deprived of sleep. It puts you in an unreal state – and you only half realise what's going on and you would make decisions which aren't ones you would take in a normal course of events."

Bad things started to happen when detention without trial was intro­duced. "They just took the gloves off … They were remorseless, they got a new breed of security branch brutes", such as the notorious Brigadier Theunis "Rooi Rus" Swanepoel.

"I still have nightmares about the times in prison and the interrogation. I still have dreams about being chased by the police …

"The trouble is I don't remember the detail afterwards but they ­certainly are police and they are ­people like Rooi Rus Swanepoel and so on, and they're after me. I spend my dream trying to get away from them."