WE WERE TRULY BLESSED
The 12th day of June in the year 1964 was a turning point in South Africa’s history; a day on which the apartheid regime believed it was putting the final nail in the coffin of the liberation movement. Instead, its actions on that day made into living deities those it wished to be depicted as villainous criminals.
On that day, Transvaal Judge Quartus de Wet sentenced eight members of the Umkhonto weSizwe high command to life imprisonment for the crime of conspiracy, which he said was “in essence, one of high treason”. As history records, the men who became known as the Rivonia Trialists had been caught on a farm that they used as their headquarters in the Johannesburg suburb of the same name.
“I am by no means convinced that the motives of the accused were
