Denis Goldberg, anti-apartheid stalwart who spent 22 years in prison, dies at 87
Working alongside Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the African National Congress, Mr. Goldberg was part of a multiracial coalition dedicated to overthrowing apartheid, the segregated system that propped up white minority rule in South Africa for nearly half a century. He went on to become a kind of elder statesman for the movement, calling on the ANC — modern South Africa’s ruling party — to recommit itself to social justice and economic equality amid a wave of recent corruption allegations.
A first-generation South African, Mr. Goldberg had been immersed in left-wing politics from childhood and faced discrimination as a young man for his Jewish ancestry and his parents’ communist views.
“I understood that what was happening in South Africa with its racism was like the racism of Nazi Germany in Europe that we were supposed to be fighting against,” he told a 2019 interviewer with the University of Cape Town. “You have to be involved one way or another.”
Beginning in the early 1950s, he engaged in a campaign of nonviolent resistance, joining the underground South African Communist Party and the Congress of Democrats, a white anti-apartheid organization that partnered with groups including the ANC and the South African Indian Congress.
As a result of his efforts, he spent four months in prison in 1960 and was dismissed from his job at the state-owned railroad company. That same year, 69 demonstrators were gunned down by police in the township of Sharpeville — a massacre that spurred the creation of Umkhonto we Sizwe, or Spear of the Nation, an armed branch of the ANC that launched a wave of bombings and other attacks directed at government property, including railways and power lines.
Mr. Goldberg was an early member of “MK,” as the group became known, and applied his engineering expertise to the manufacture of homemade explosives before being arrested in a 1963 raid on the organization’s hideout, at a farm in the Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia. In the chaos following the police’s arrival, he tried to get rid of a notebook containing information on the production of hand grenades and other weapons.
“I rushed for the toilet to flush the stuff away and, bugger, there was a cop standing at the door,” Mr. Goldberg later told the Sunday Times, a South African newspaper. “You go to the toilet often enough, someone is eventually going to catch you with your pants down.”
Instead of receiving death sentences, Mandela and seven others — including Goldberg, the youngest and only white man convicted — were sentenced to life in prison.
Mr. Goldberg was granted visitors intermittently and during one brutal stretch went 14 years without seeing his wife. Amid pressure from the Israeli government, he was released in 1985 on the condition that he give up armed resistance — an offer that was declined by Mandela, who remained in prison another five years. (His release occurred amid negotiations that resulted in the country’s first open elections, which saw Mandela take office in 1994 as South Africa’s first black president.)
“I come from a generation who were prepared to put our lives on the line for freedom,” Mr. Goldberg told the University of Cape Town in 2019. “Freedom is more important than your own life. Nelson epitomized it. I in my own way did the same. I was happy to serve.”
They married in 1954, and while Mr. Goldberg was imprisoned in Pretoria she lived in exile in Britain, raising their children, David and Hilary Goldberg. She died in 2000, and two years later Mr. Goldberg married Edelgard Nkobi, a German journalist who died in 2006. His daughter died in 2002.
After his release, Mr. Goldberg worked as a spokesman for the ANC, oversaw South African charitable efforts and, in lieu of running for political office, advised a government minister for water affairs and forestry. He periodically made headlines for his criticisms of former president Jacob Zuma and other ANC leaders whom he accused of corruption and cronyism.
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