O
ne would have thought that the vagaries of life would have knocked the stuffing out of Denis. That came close to happening after more than 20 years’ imprisonment. His parents had died, his wife Esme and children were in London, and she was too traumatised to visit him. The void had been filled by a friend, Hillary Kuny
Photo: Nelson Mandela Foundation
Cape Town (UCT) at the age of 16. By the time he graduated he was a member of the ANC-led liberation movement and the underground communist party. In the wake of the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 both he and his mother spent four months in detention for their political activism. I first met Denis in Durban early in 1961. To me, a relative newcomer, he was an experienced 28-yearold with an irresistible joy de vivre. I was five years his junior and had much to learn from him – the kind of fellow you’d like as a big brother. He had arrived in a battered bakkie ‘[pick-up truck], and was driving around the country keen to know the rural villages and way of life. In denim trousers and shirtsleeves rolled-up, he struck one as a man who could use his hands and was unafraid to get them dirty. At the time, unknown to one another, we had been recruited into the armed struggle. In retrospect I came to realise why Denis was driving around the less travelled roads of SA. Rather romantically, I came to see him as like a young Che Guevara on his motorcycle reconnaissance of Latin America. Guevara famously said that “revolution is an act of love”, a maxim illustrative of Denis Goldberg’s humanism.
STRUGGLE HEROES: Former Rivonia trialists Denis Goldberg and Nelson Mandela.
From the moment he landed in Israel he lambasted the government for their close ties with the Apartheid regime (now Hamburger), his sole visitor. They formed a close bond and she got to know him well, impressed by his cheerful resolve. But, by 1985 she began to discern a worrying change: “He laughed less, his shoulders were more hunched, and there was a creeping deadness in his eyes. On one of my visits he told me with something akin to despair in his voice that he had said goodbye to 48 comrades who had served their much lesser sentences. While he celebrated their release, the interminability of his sentence was brought into sharp focus.”
28 ColdType | Mid-May 2020 | www.coldtype.net
A lifeline appeared, in the unlikely guise of an Israeli nongovernment negotiator, who specialised in getting Jewish prisoners around the world released. The apartheid regime, keen to deepen ties with Israel, agreed to release Goldberg on condition he would not advocate violent struggle against South Africa. He would have to fly directly to Israel where his saviours hoped he would settle. There was much speculation about this but it emerged that Denis’s daughter Hillary, living on an Israeli kibbutz, had a hand in the rescue mission without, it seemed, the direct intervention of the Israeli government. There was never any basis to claims that he wished to live in Israel. He abhorred Zionism, and unreservedly supported the Palestinian cause. From the moment he landed in Israel he lambasted the government for their close ties with the Apartheid regime. He often explained, “Having lived through apartheid in SA, there’s
