Treason Trials
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Treason Trials
The Treason Trial was a trial in Johannesburg in which 156 people, including Nelson Mandela, were arrested in a raid and accused of treason in South Africa in 1956. The main trial lasted until 1961, when all of the defendants were found not guilty. During the trials, Oliver Tambo left the country and was exiled. Whilst in other European and African countries, he started an organisation which helped bring publicity to the African National Congress's cause in South Africa. Some of the defendants were later convicted in the Rivonia Trial in 1964. Chief Luthuli has said of the Treason Trial:The treason trial must occupy a special place in South African history. That grim pre-dawn raid, deliberately calculated to strike terror into hesitant minds and impress upon the entire nation the determination of the governing clique to stifle all opposition, made one hundred and fifty-six of us, belonging to all the races of our land, into a group of accused facing one of the most serious cha ...
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Johannesburg
Johannesburg ( , , ; Zulu and xh, eGoli ), colloquially known as Jozi, Joburg, or "The City of Gold", is the largest city in South Africa, classified as a megacity, and is one of the 100 largest urban areas in the world. According to Demographia, the Johannesburg–Pretoria urban area (combined because of strong transport links that make commuting feasible) is the 26th-largest in the world in terms of population, with 14,167,000 inhabitants. It is the provincial capital and largest city of Gauteng, which is the wealthiest province in South Africa. Johannesburg is the seat of the Constitutional Court, the highest court in South Africa. Most of the major South African companies and banks have their head offices in Johannesburg. The city is located in the mineral-rich Witwatersrand range of hills and is the centre of large-scale gold and diamond trade. The city was established in 1886 following the discovery of gold on what had been a farm. Due to the extremely large gold de ...
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SACP
The South African Communist Party (SACP) is a communist party in South Africa. It was founded in 1921 as the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), tactically dissolved itself in 1950 in the face of being declared illegal by the governing National Party under the Suppression of Communism Act, 1950. The Communist Party was reconstituted underground and re-launched as the SACP in 1953, participating in the struggle to end the apartheid system. It is a member of the ruling Tripartite Alliance alongside the African National Congress and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and through this it influences the South African government. The party's Central Committee is the party's highest decision-making structure. History The Communist Party of South Africa was founded in 1921 by the joining together of the International Socialist League and others under the leadership of Willam H. Andrews. It first came to prominence during the Rand Revolt, a strike by white mine ...
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Ahmed Kathrada
Ahmed Mohamed Kathrada (21 August 1929 – 28 March 2017), sometimes known by the nickname "Kathy", was a South African politician and anti-apartheid activist. Kathrada's involvement in the anti-apartheid activities of the African National Congress (ANC) led him to his long-term imprisonment following the Rivonia Trial, in which he was held at Robben Island and Pollsmoor Prison. Following his release in 1990, he was elected to serve as a member of parliament, representing the ANC. He authored a book, ''No Bread for Mandela – Memoirs of Ahmed Kathrada, Prisoner No. 468/64''. Early life Ahmed Kathrada was born on 21 August 1929 in the small country town of Schweizer-Reneke in the Western Transvaal, Kathrada 2004, p. 373 the fourth of six children in a Gujarati Bohra family of South African Indian immigrant parents from Surat, Gujarat. Once in Johannesburg, he was influenced by leaders of the Transvaal Indian Congress such as Dr. Yusuf Dadoo, IC Meer, Moulvi and Yusuf Cachali ...
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Helen Joseph
Helen Beatrice Joseph (''née'' Fennell) (8 April 1905 – 25 December 1992) was a South African anti-apartheid activist. Born in Sussex, England, Helen graduated with a degree in English from the University of London in 1927 and then departed for India, where she taught for three years at Mahbubia School for girls in Hyderabad. In about 1930 she left India for England via South Africa. However, she settled in Durban, where she met and married a dentist, Billie Joseph, whom she later divorced. Early life Helen Joseph was born Helen Beatrice May Fennell in 1905 in Easebourne near Midhurst, West Sussex, England, the daughter of a government Customs and Excise officer, Samuel Fennell. Helen Joseph came from a middle-class white family. She grew up in a racially prejudiced household. In 1923 Helen attended the University of London to study English, graduating from King's College London in 1927. After teaching in India for three years, she intended to return home via South Africa. ...
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Alfred Hutchinson
Alfred Hutchinson (1924 in Hectorspruit, Transvaal Province, South Africa – 14 October 1972 in Nigeria) was a South African author, teacher and activist. Hutchinson went to Swedish missionary school, graduated from St Peter's College in Johannesburg and received his BA from the University of Fort Hare. He was classified as coloured by the apartheid government, but saw himself as an African and dismissed the coloureds' struggle to be seen as a distinct people. He worked as a teacher, but was a member of the ANC The African National Congress (ANC) is a social-democratic political party in South Africa. A liberation movement known for its opposition to apartheid, it has governed the country since 1994, when the first post-apartheid election installe ..., and was sacked and jailed for two weeks in 1952 for his struggle against apartheid. In 1956 he was charged with high treason, and fled to Britain via East Africa and Ghana. His autobiography ''Road to Ghana'' (1960) is ...
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Bertha Gxowa
Bertha Gxowa (née Mashaba November 26, 1934 - November 19, 2010) was an anti-apartheid and women's rights activist and trade unionist in South Africa. Biography Gxowa was born in Germiston. She first started working as an office assistant in the South African Clothing Workers' Union. Gxowa became involved in the African National Congress's (ANC) Youth League and the Women's League at a young age. She first signed up with ANC during the anti-Bantu education campaign. Gxowa took part in the Defiance Campaign in 1952. Gxowa was one of the founding members of the Federation of South African Women. She also was one of the organizers for the Women's March on the Union Building in 1956 which protested pass laws. Gxowa, along with Helen Joseph, traveled across South Africa to collect signatures on 20,000 petitions which were presented at the march. She was eventually accused of treason in 1956 in the Treason Trial and remained on trial until 1959. She was banned under the Suppressio ...
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Archie Gumede
Archibald Jacob Gumede (1914–1998) was a South African anti-apartheid activist, lawyer and politician. Gumede was born in Pietermaritzburg to Josiah Tshangana Gumede, an early African National Congress leader. Archie Gumede led the Natal delegates at the 1955 Congress of the People in Kliptown during which the Freedom Charter was written. He was later an attorney and practiced in Pietermaritzburg. He was a leader in the United Democratic Front, a broad based coalition of groups seeking to end apartheid. Following the end of apartheid in 1994, Gumede became a member of the National Assembly of South Africa The National Assembly is the directly elected house of the Parliament of South Africa, located in Cape Town, Western Cape. It consists of four hundred members who are elected every five years using a party-list proportional representation syste ... before dying in office in 1998.
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Ruth First
Heloise Ruth First (4 May 1925 – 17 August 1982) was a South African anti-apartheid activist and scholar. She was assassinated in Mozambique, where she was working in exile, by a parcel bomb built by South African police. Family and education Ruth First's Jewish parents, Julius First and Matilda Levetan, emigrated to South Africa from Latvia in 1906 and became founding members of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), the forerunner of the South African Communist Party (SACP). Ruth First was born in 1925 and brought up in Johannesburg. Like her parents, she joined the Communist Party, which was allied with the African National Congress in its struggle to overthrow the South African government. As a teenager, First attended Jeppe High School for Girls and then became the first person in her family to attend university. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1946. While she was at university, she found that "on a South African ...
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Yusuf Dadoo
Yusuf Mohamed Dadoo (5 September 1909 – 19 September 1983) was a South African Communist and an anti-apartheid activist. During his life, he was chair of both the South African Indian Congress and the South African Communist Party, as well as being a major proponent of co-operation between those organisations and the African National Congress. He was a leader of the Defiance Campaign and a defendant at the Treason Trial in 1956. His last days were spent in exile in London, where he is buried at Highgate Cemetery; a few metres away from the Tomb of Karl Marx. Early life Yusuf was born on 5 September 1909 in Krugersdorp, in the West Rand, near Johannesburg. His parents, Mohammed and Fatima Dadoo, were Gujarati Muslim immigrants from Surat in Western India. As a young child, he had the formative experience of being scolded by his mother for climbing a tree in his neighbourhood park, which was reserved for White people only. Aged ten, the Krugersdorp Municipality attem ...
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James Calata
James Arthur Calata (1895 – 1983) was a South African priest and politician. He was the Secretary-General of the African National Congress from 1936 to 1949. He was appointed a Canon (priest), canon of the Grahamstown Cathedral making him the first Black canon in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. Early life James Arthur Calata was born in Debe Nek, near King William's Town in the Eastern Cape on 22 July 1895. His father, James was an uneducated farmer and a Presbyterian. His mother Eliza, reached Standard 4, practiced as a midwife and was an Anglican. He was educated at St. Matthew's High School, Keiskammahoek, St Matthew's College in Keiskammahoek, from 1911 to 1914 and later worked as a teacher for a number of years. He married Miltha Mary Koboka in 1918, they went on to have three daughters. He was grandfather of Fort Calata who was also a politician. Career Calata became deacon in the Anglicanism, Anglican Church in 1921, ordained priest in 1926, and worked briefly ...
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Sonia Bunting
Sonia Bunting, OLS (9 December 1922 – 24 March 2001) was a South African journalist, and a political and anti-apartheid activist. After being charged with treason and imprisoned, being detained a second time, and barred from publishing, she and her husband went into exile in London, where she joined the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) and organised the World Campaign for the Release of South African Political Prisoners. When the African National Congress (ANC) ban was lifted in 1991, she returned to South Africa where she was involved in political activism until her death in 2001. She was posthumously honored by the government of South Africa with the Order of Luthuli in Silver in 2010. Early life Sonia Beryl Isaacman was born on 9 December 1922 in Johannesburg, South Africa to Dora and David Isaacman. Her parents were Jewish exiles, who had fled from Eastern Europe to escape anti-Semitic pogroms. After her matriculation from her secondary education, Isaacman enrolled at the Un ...
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Lionel Bernstein
Lionel "Rusty" Bernstein (20 March 1920 – 23 June 2002) was a Jewish South African anti-apartheid activist and political prisoner. He played a key role in political organizations such as the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the African National Congress (ANC). He helped form the Congress of Democrats to bolster white participation in the ANC, and he brought its allies together to establish a Congress of the People, working closely with Nelson Mandela. The anti-apartheid movement drew the ire of the South African government. They imposed severe restrictions on the movement, such as banning a publication Bernstein edited, banning a party he organized with, and detaining leaders including him for long periods of time. These actions culminated in him fleeing his home country after being detained following a police raid. To participate in the first post-apartheid elections in 1994, he returned to South Africa and resumed working for the ANC. Many institutions bestowed hon ...
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